Author’s Notes: Judgment has always been the one episode that I’ve remembered even when I had forgotten others over the years. To me, it was a pivotal episode of the show because of the events, what happened and what was said. After watching it again, I could hear the plot bunnies hopping and the muses musing, but the plot to do this particular episode justice eluded me. In truth, finding the plot for this tag proved to be a befuddling venture. I had pages of the story written, dialogue spoken, action mapped out – and none of it flowed or connected. That’s when I realized this tag couldn’t work if the action picked up at the end of the episode. Too much happened, too much would have to be explained and flashed-back on and that meant the story wouldn’t flow. This tag had to start before the episode and carry on throughout the action, detailing events and dialogue that would be used for the ‘official’ tag at the end of the story. I hope I did justice to this episode. Big thanks to Kazthom for reading this over and suggesting a lot of great ideas.

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Episode 16 - Judgment

Jon and Jennifer crash land in the desert. Jon is wounded and forced to stay behind while Jennifer seeks help at a remote water station. Refugees recognize her as the Dread Youth who destroyed their home, Sand Town, and they place her on trial while danger approaches from another direction..

~*~*~*~*~

Oasis: Before Dawn

Sitting at his makeshift desk, Randall opened a sketchbook filled with drawing after drawing of moments from his life. Pictures he had drawn of his parents, hoeing rows in the hard dirt, planting seeds, small crops growing in a hidden field, helping with the harvest, biomechs, Dread Youth soldiers, transports, his home settlement burning… he moved past those pictures and found a blank sheet of paper mid-way through the sketch book. He held the pencil loosely in his fingers as he stared at the page, looking for inspiration. He’d had the dream again the night before – his home burning, he and his uncle hiding in the shadows, the death and destruction of Sand Town. Her. Then without another thought, he began to draw the face that he would never forget. How could he? It haunted his dreams and floated through his nightmares. In truth, he didn’t want to forget her. She was the one who had destroyed his home, murdered his family and changed his life for all time. If he forgot her, then he was afraid he’d forget everything that had come before.

He loosened his grip on the pencil as he drew her delicate jaw line. The hair… it was tucked up under her soldier’s cap. The collar was buttoned tightly at her throat. All this was incidental. It was her eyes that he would never forget but always eluded him. She looked like so many other Dread Youth soldiers – gray eyes, blonde hair, crisp uniform, military posture – yet there was something about her eyes that he remembered but could never understand. Yes, she smiled, almost, with the overunit who had been with her at Sand Town. Yes, she gave the order to cleanse the town, and it seemed as if there was no thought involved. She shouted out the order to cleanse the town without thinking. However, there was something different about her eyes. He remembered her giving the order, but the look in her eyes…

He tried time and again to draw her eyes but there was something not quite cold about them. Oh, what was the point? One Dread Youth soldier looked like the other. That’s the way Dread grew them – identical, but this one, as angry and vengeful as he was, Randall couldn’t understand why he couldn’t draw this youth leader’s eyes to look cold and dead. The overunit had dead eyes. Uncaring eyes. Unflinching eyes. The overunit’s eyes had been easy to draw. That youth leader though…

Randall drew the nose and the ears. He drew the mouth and then concentrated on the eyes again. He couldn’t understand. The eyes he kept drawing looked sad, shocked and emotional. He hated the woman, so why couldn’t he sketch her correctly? Why couldn’t he draw her as the killer he knew her to be? Why did his drawings always depict her as someone who was shaken, stunned and on the verge of tears?

“Randall?” his uncle’s voice called him from the main room. “Breakfast.”

“Coming, Uncle Gaelen,” he called back.

He focused on the eyes again. He had to try again to draw them correctly. He made a small stroke at the brow, another at the iris…

“Ah, it’s useless,” he muttered.

A shadow appeared in his room. He turned and saw his uncle standing in the doorway to his bedroom. “Randall, maybe you shouldn’t keep drawing those soldiers. It doesn’t help. It won’t bring the others back.”

“I know,” Randall muttered lowly as he studied the drawing. “I don’t want to forget her. Uncle Gaelen, you saw her that night. That’s her, right? Am I drawing her right? Did she look like that?”

Gaelen took the drawing and studied the face that Randall effectively and habitually drew. How many times had he given a drawing to his uncle for his opinion? Glancing at the stack of sketchbooks beside his desk, he realized there were a lot. Those books were full of drawings he had made of that one woman. He drew her more than any other from that night. He watched Gaelen look over the drawing, saw the nod of his uncle’s head as he stared at each curve, at each line. “Yes, it seems very much like I remember her, son, but you have to consider that you and I only saw her for a brief moment that night years ago. Our memories may have faded over the years. Besides, many of the Dread Youth are similar – no one knows how Dread created an army like that. They don’t look enough alike to be clones, but to look that similar? It’s a mystery.”

“I don’t understand why I can’t get her eyes right,” Randall complained.

“It’s possible that two faces have merged in our memories. It’s possible that the eyes you’re drawing belong to someone else other than the youth leader’s. Consider how sad it would be for this girl if her eyes truly reflected the kind of hurt and sadness that you’ve sketched in her portraits over the years.”

“Sad?” Randall had no idea what his uncle meant. “Why?”

“To witness what happened that night and have it hurt that much, to not have done anything to stop it… still, no drawing can ever truly depict the real person. Not even your artistic skills would find it simple to capture the essence of the soul with just paper and pencil.”

Randall had heard that before. His uncle didn’t mind him drawing when he wasn’t working, but he was also a practical critic. Gaelen always encouraged his drawing because he believed the world needed art once the wars were over, but he told Randall what he liked about the art and what he didn’t. He was honest when he critiqued his drawings. He once said that a truthful opinion was better than anything else so as not to give false encouragement. When Gaelen praised his work, Randall knew that it was the truth and that his uncle liked his efforts. “I can’t draw her eyes other than the way I keep drawing them. I can see them in my mind, but I can’t put them on the paper.”

Gaelen studied the drawing again and then handed it back to Randall. “Perhaps you are drawing her correctly just as you saw her that night, but you don’t want to remember her that way. You’ve given her very human eyes, not those lifeless robot eyes most of those soldiers have. It’s not impossible for her to have not lost all her humanity. Perhaps there was something still human in her and you saw it? Perhaps that’s why your drawings always depict her having gentle eyes?”

Randall folded up the paper and placed it in his handmade desk. “No, she was Dread Youth. She’s a killer. That’s all they are. They’ve all got guilty blood on their hands.”

Gaelen placed a hand on Randall’s shoulder. “If only life were as clear cut as that. Unfortunately, there is more to any story than what we think we know. However, that is a discussion for another time. Breakfast is ready. Then you have to help Clegg gather wood. With winter almost here, we’ll need to store up as much wood as we possibly can. Plus, a storm is coming. It should get here sometime tomorrow. Best to get as much done in the good weather as you can.”

Volcania

Dread sat on his throne, fuming at the recent reports. Top secret files had once again been accessed. Secretly tracing exactly which files had been accessed, the source code and the location of the terminal used were proving tedious and unsuccessful. He sent loyal soldiers to track down the leak, but very little information had been reported back.

“Overunit Grieg reporting, my lord,” the voice sounded over the speakers.

Finally. Dread leaned forward toward the communications console. “What have you learned, Overunit?”

“The information was placed into the web via an access port in an abandoned computer lab near Memphis. Our investigation has confirmed that the data was downloaded to a server through a biomech soldier’s processors some weeks ago. The biomech in question was listed as destroyed after a battle with resistance forces at Nashville within days after the file was downloaded so we cannot confirm the report. The file was retrieved at an untraceable location by an individual calling himself Circuit, and according to the records on the computers, the information was saved on a portable data disk. No further information has been found at this location.”

The overunit’s voice sounded somewhat apologetic but steady. There was something else he wasn’t telling Dread.

“That is all?” Dread asked.

“No, my lord. I have no tangible information. I have only supposition and conjecture.”

Ah, the plight of the Dread Youth. They were taught to be logical and rational, not to guess. “What is the nature of your conjectures?” Dread asked him.

“What little information we have recorded on this individual named Circuit indicates that he has personal ties to people in the northwestern region of the country. Possibly along the border of Canada. We are unable to trace the location he accessed the information from, but if he has friends or family in the Northwest, it is possible he is working from that area or has retreated to that area.”

Ah. The supposition that he would take the data tape there without proof – that was an unaccustomed type of thought process for any Dread Youth.

“The information will be recorded. You have done well, Overunit Grieg,” Dread falsely praised him. “Report back to base.”

“Understood. Overunit Grieg out.”

Dread thought for a moment. Time and again, information had been gathered from top secret servers within Volcania, transferred to servers or computers all over the continent and ultimately ended up in the Resistance’s hands. Worse than that, too many times, it was Power who had the data. Dread couldn’t find the leak. He had no idea how or why it was happening.

On a whim, Dread brought up information on this “Circuit.” In mere moments, he had birth date, real name, schooling before the wars – he was from Arizona and went to college in California. He was now believed to be an information courier for some of the web-handlers in places like Tech City and web-capable settlements.

Dread replayed part of Grieg’s report. “What little information we have recorded on this individual named Circuit indicates that he has personal ties to people in the northwestern region of the country.”

Northwest? Arizona and California weren’t in the northwest…

Wait -- Dread realized that the leaks could be coming from places higher up than he would have ever suspected. It had been some time since anyone in his army had reason to go to the southwest… In fact, when was the last time any report of resistance activity had been reported there? Things had been rather uneventful in that area.

Perhaps it was time for a flyby.

Dread contacted his biodread. “Soaron?”

“Yes, my lord?” his mechanical voice called back.

“Are you aware of the information that has been stolen?”

“It concerns Project New Order, my lord,” was the answer.

“Go toward the southwest. Find any resistance forces there. It is possible that someone from the Power Team may be in that region. Locate that data tape, destroy anyone who opposes you and return that information to me.”

“Understood, my lord. With so few settlements in the area, it should not take long to search.”

Dread then turned back toward the computer and brought up any and all information he could find on Overunit Grieg, his academic accomplishments, his military background, his off-duty activities… strange, he went to Tech City every few weeks…

Power Base

“You’re getting sneakier, Hawk. Suggesting that they go ahead on this mission while we fix the jump ship and take care of the other missions on schedule today,” Scout observed happily as he adjusted the controls on the sky bike. “You know Jennifer knew exactly what was wrong with the jump ship before they left.”

Hawk grinned and nodded his head. “Of course, she did. She knows this vehicle inside and out. We just didn’t have enough time to repair it before they had to leave. It only took me a couple of hours to find out which connections had to be readjusted and realigned. Jennifer would have known exactly which wire and which lead was loose by listening to the engines.” Hawk patted the side of the jump ship. “Poor girl’s been taking a beating at Soaron’s hands too much lately.”

“I still don’t like it,” Tank observed as he refueled the jump ship. “We don’t know who this contact is or how they got this information about New Order. It’s not like the captain to trust someone he’s never met and take this kind of risk.”

Scout tossed a screwdriver back into the toolbox. “Things are getting worse for the Resistance lately. The captain has to take more chances than before. But Tank’s right, Hawk. The captain doesn’t know whoever it was that contacted him.”

Hawk wasn’t happy about that fact either. “The message came on the same encrypted transmission frequency that sent us information before.”

That got Scout’s attention. “What kind of information?”

“That there was a file in the web that we could access at Tech City. That people were receiving flyers that there was a safe place out there somewhere only people were being mass-digitized. That Dread was preparing to destroy towns so he could get rid of all the books – whoever’s sending us this information has been right on the money every time. Jon’s willing to take the risk. It may be that there’s only a data disk at the site and no one to give it to him if whoever our informant is wants to remain anonymous.”

Tank helped Scout put the sky bike back on board the ship. “They had to go somewhere out west to get that information. No matter where the rendezvous point is, the resistance groups in that area are few and far between.”

“So are Dread’s forces,” Hawk added. “He doesn’t have any permanent facilities and doesn’t put biomechs out there to gather dust.”

“If they get in trouble –” Scout began to say.

Hawk raised up his hand to forestall any objections. “Dread’s been quiet for the last couple of weeks. His forces aren’t active in that area. The trip should be relatively easy so they wouldn’t need the jump ship; no expected problems, so maybe they don’t have to be in a hurry…”

“Aha!” Scout laughed out loud. “And I’ll bet you suggested they take their time and go out on one sky bike and leave the other three for us. One sky bike, much cozier. Very Machiavellian of you.”

“Machiavelli had very little to do with it,” Hawk cautioned him. “It’s more like circumstance stepped in. Look, there was something wrong with the ship and it needed repairing. Jon did have to be the one to go out and get the information since they insisted that Jon be the one to go. The three of us have to keep that meeting with Cipher later today, and we’ll be using the sky bikes to get there because we can’t maneuver the ship through the mountain gorge Cipher’s set up camp in. It makes sense that Jon and Jennifer would take one sky bike. And you’re right,” Hawk grinned in a very knowing way, “it’s cozier.”

“Sly one,” Tank whispered as he helped Scout lift the sky bike back into the jump ship. “And you think this will help their relationship?”

Hawk shook his head. “You never know, but let’s just say it might get one of them thinking. Sky bikes mean close proximity between pilot and passenger. And just to let the two of you know, it was Jon’s idea to go on one bike. Not mine.”

Both Tank and Scout stopped moving and stared at Hawk.

Hawk shrugged. “Hey, I’m just saying…”

Above The Desert

Jonathan Power loved flying on a sky bike.

There was a sense of personal freedom he felt when flying a bike; much more so than when he flew the XT jet or the few times he flew the jump ship. Maybe if he had been born in a different time, he could have been a fighter pilot. Air Force or Navy pilot perhaps? He never told anyone, but he always wished he could redesign his own suit so he could fly like Hawk, but suits were designed to adapt to the physical and genetic capabilities of the wearer. Just because Jon loved to fly didn’t mean that his primary job was to fly. He took what enjoyment he could out of flying sky bikes instead. It was a fair trade-off.

At least, that’s what he kept telling himself.

True, Jon loved flying on a sky bike, but the flight he was on at the moment was special. He was content to be the co-pilot on this particular mission. Watching Jennifer’s natural ability to pilot any aircraft in action never ceased to amaze him. Her movements were effortless, almost undetectable, as if she were born to do it. What amused him most was how much she preferred to fly the jump ship rather than the XT or one of the bikes. Jon was certain it was because the jump ship was hers in a way that nothing else was. It wasn’t just her responsibility or a home-away-from-home or a transport. It was her ship. She was on a first-name basis with every wire, circuit and connection on board. Maybe there really was a connection between them. Maybe it wasn’t their imagination that the ship flew twice as well for her than it did for anyone else. Maybe that ship felt like Jennifer was her pilot and everyone else on the team just got to fly her on occasion.

Jon chuckled. Sure, Jennifer might talk to the jump ship and make jokes about it being alive just to amuse Hawk, but there he was, giving sentience to it. What would Hawk say about that?

Hearing what Hawk would have to say about the fact that they had to change rendezvous points further to the southwest for the mission during mid-flight wasn’t something Jon was looking forward to. They had tried raising the base on the radio, but there was interference from the storm front currently growing between them and the base. Changing destinations and not being able to report it wasn’t going to make his friend very happy. It was a good idea to always know where team members were at any given time. Then again, given Hawk’s expression when Jon suggested he and Jennifer take one sky bike instead of two, maybe their going to another rendezvous site and taking a longer time to get home wouldn’t be a big surprise to him.

When they arrived at the rendezvous point, no one was there. It was merely a dried out river bed with some ruins of once-fine homes along what used to be the shoreline. It was too exposed a position, so Jon had them both keep their suits powered on. While they waited for the contact to arrive, he and Jennifer talked. Not about anything important at first, but eventually, their conversations became more personal, more to the point.

“So Cragen hit a grand slam, winning the World Series in the fourth game with a score of 22 to 15. It was the first time the Colorado Classics ever won the World Series. After that, they spent the next fifteen years either winning the pennant or going to the Series. Cragen ended that season hitting 615, and that’s nothing to –”

“Wait a minute,” Jennifer said with a broad grin, “you mean to tell me that you know the batting average of a baseball player that lived 80 years ago?”

“Absolutely. I love baseball. Great game. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a baseball player when I grew up,” he explained happily. “I could hit, but I really loved to pitch. I played catcher and first base a few times when I was in school. Pitching though, I was really good at that.”

“You sound like you had fun.”

“Yeah. We did. Mitch could hit homeruns every time he was at bat, and there wasn’t a single hit Katie couldn’t catch. No matter what position she played, she made more outs than any of the rest of us. Back when we were kids, we’d go on picnics and Dad and Matt were the team captains and would choose up sides. Mom loved to play first base. Joanna like being the shortstop. We’d get some of the other kids in the neighborhood involved. Some of the parents would play too. It was fun.”

Jennifer got a strange look on her face. “How long has it been since you played baseball?”

Jon thought for a moment. “I think the last time we played… well, it was the school break before Mitch and Katie were killed. I guess I was almost 15. After that, everything changed.”

Fifteen. That was when he lost his father, when Hawk lost his family, when the entire world became infested with Dread’s robots. “What about you? What kinds of games did you play when you were a kid?”

“We didn’t play games in the Dread Youth,” she told him. “We had physical competitions, but nothing that you could call really competing. If you didn’t pass, you were removed and not heard from again. I made sure I was good at those.” Her voice sounded rather sad.

“Did you ever get to do anything just for the fun of it?” he wanted to know.

“Flight training was fun,” she said, but Jon smiled and shook his head. “Okay, those were lessons. I know. I was still top of my class. That’s one of the reasons I was assigned to aerial defense with a recon unit. I was told I was being given that assignment before I got…” She got a sad look on her face. “But no, we didn’t have games. I guess when you were playing baseball that last time, I was in some kind of science class or military training exercise or flight school.”

She was talking somewhat freely about her childhood. Jon knew it was one of those rare times she wanted to talk, so he’d be more than happy to listen, but military training exercises? She never spoke of those before. She and Hawk would talk for hours about how they learned to be pilots, the training regimen, the way the skills were developed, but she had been somewhat scarce on explaining other types of schooling. “What did you do on the military training exercises?”

“We would be taken to a cordoned off area near Volcania, dropped off on our own and given certain instructions that had to be carried out. This field… it would take days to cross so dozens of us would be released in diverse locations with various assignments and we’d never see another soldier out there. There were all types of natural surroundings – trees, boulders, some dried up streams, things like that. We would have to set up a working camp, find food and water, some of it was basic survival training. We had to learn how to forage for edible food in case we were ever lost in the wastelands, but the food in the area had been planted there. Other times, we’d have war games between two or more soldiers. Failure was not an option. It wasn’t representative of what was really out here. Nothing there was like it was out here.”

She stopped there. Jon didn’t push the subject. “But no fun games, huh?”

Jennifer chuckled. “No, no fun games. Scout was the one who taught me my first game.”

Scout? That meant it would have been seemingly ordinary to them, but something quite extraordinary to her. Scout taught her a lot of what they took for granted when she first joined them. “What was it?”

“It was a game just to pass the time. You take a deck of cards and throw them one by one into a hat. The one who tosses the most cards in the hat wins. I’d never thought about doing something like that when there’s nothing to do,” she smiled at the memory. “But to be honest, chess is more fun.”

She was getting even better at chess than before. Her tactical mind could see ten moves before she made even one. She had a way of adapting that skill into her life, not just her chess game. The way she had outmaneuvered him when she talked him into sneaking into Med Lab One… despite the outcome, it was more proof that she could tactically outmaneuver just about anyone.

They talked for a long time while they waited, but no contact arrived. Jon was about to declare the mission a bust when they heard a mechanical beeping coming from a pile of rocks. What they found was a recording device on a timer with a single message and a data disk recorded via an encrypted frequency. The timer had finally gone off and started beeping to get their attention. The message itself was simple: “This is the latest information on Project New Order. It’s been encrypted, and only your computer can decrypt it.” The voice was synthesized to hide the identity of the speaker.

“Someone knows that Mentor can decrypt it?” Jon asked her, worried about security.

“It’s that added safety protocol the programmers in Tech City created, remember?” Jennifer explained.

Right. He remembered that briefing all too well. “I think I got a headache when the technical details started getting explained.”

Jennifer laughed. “It’s a way to keep Dread from trying to mimic any Resistance transmission. Dread can’t breach any of our frequencies with his own equipment because ours are not quite as technologically advanced.”

“That’s like the programs on the jump ship,” Jon realized. “You have buffer programs that let the newer ones and the older ones talk to each other.”

“In a way,” she agreed. “If Dread uses Resistance equipment, he doesn’t have the codes to access the correct systems to encrypt or decrypt the message. If he intercepts messages from one of the groups, he can’t decrypt it with his own equipment. It’s basically another level of an identification program so the sender and the receiver know which ones are legitimate and which ones aren’t.”

Ingenious. “When did the programmer come up with the idea to create the encryption?” Jon wondered.

“Not too long after Andy Jackson got into our base. Some of our hackers at the Passages were worried that Dread would try to hack into Resistance computer systems the same way Jackson got past ours, so they worked with some programmers at Tech City to create the encryption codes. It took them a while to work out the problems because every group out here uses different coding systems. You know when the data disk that Cipher found sent out security information in a compressed file through a single one-second blast that a nearby observation drone picked up? That could have been stopped if Cipher had some type of detection program on the computer that read encryptions or the lack of encryptions. It would have prevented the file from being read or sent without authentication. Also, since Dread’s using a new coding method with his observation drones and frequencies now, the Resistance is countering it by encoding our messages in a way that can’t be duplicated.”

Jon shook his head and smiled. “Incredible. How well is it working?”

“It’s worked pretty well so far,” she told him. “Someone would have to have intensive knowledge of a lot of systems to get around it, and Dread doesn’t have that.”

Not that he couldn’t get it, Jon thought to himself. One turncoat, one person willing to take a bribe, one person threatened and Dread would be able to get the information he needed to hear and plant messages. Still, it was another impediment to stop Dread in his tracks, and they would use it as long as they could. He took the data disk and put it in his pocket. Things were looking up for the Resistance if Dread could be kept in the dark about their activities. That was something to ponder later. They climbed back on board the sky bike and flew off.

Back to the real world.

For a while, it was just the two of them on a leisurely flight with no problems and lots of conversation. It’d been a long time since they’d just talked about nothing in particular. In truth, it had been fun, and to be honest, it had been a long time since Jon had fun. He needed to find a way to schedule more down time for all of them. They needed to have fun, to let loose, to put the war behind them for even a few hours. Sometimes, it was easy to forget that there was a life outside of being a soldier.

Take flying a sky bike. On any other day, it was something very ordinary for them, but this time, he was realizing how different this flight was. They’d flown on the same sky bike before, but with his feelings for her so markedly changed, the experience of their being together took on an entirely new life and meaning.

Unfortunately, all good things had to come to an end. They had to try to reach the base. The others needed to know that they had the disk and everything was fine, but that would mean the fun would have to come to a screeching halt.

Ah, well, no use putting it off any longer.

He tapped Jennifer on the shoulder. “Are we able to contact the base from here?”

Jennifer checked the radio. “That electrical storm is still causing some interference, and it’s heading this way. There are more transmitters where we are now, so it could help boost the signal… still, I doubt if we’ll get a clear signal through to them.”

“Maybe it’ll be good enough to report in?”

“Hawk is not going to be happy that we haven’t called in sooner,” she pointed out.

No, he wouldn’t be happy, but given the look on Hawk’s face when they left after Jon suggested they only take the one bike, maybe he wouldn’t be too upset. Besides, it wasn’t as if they hadn’t tried. They couldn’t get past the interference earlier, that’s all.

Jennifer tried to raise the base again and zeroed in on the correct frequency. “It might be choppy, but I think I’ve got them.”

“Hawk?” Jon said loudly over the roar of the sky bike’s engine.

Hawk’s voice broke through the static. “Jon. About time. How’d it go?”

Not Far Away

Soaron flew rapidly over the locations of suspected resistance groups when he picked up a transmission to the south of him. An analysis indicated it was a coded message of a familiar encryption… it bore the mark of Power’s encryption algorithm. He couldn’t decrypt the message, but he could pinpoint the source of transmission.

“My lord,” Soaron quickly called back to his master.

“Yes, Soaron?”

“Sensors have picked up a transmission coming from one of Power’s team.”

There was a pause. “It might be Power himself who has the data tape that was stolen from me. Soaron, intercept and contain if possible. Destroy if necessary.”

“At once, my lord!” Soaron sped away toward the coordinates the transmission originated.

Skybike

Jon spoke loudly. “We got the disk. The rendezvous point was changed and no one was there. Just the disk. I’m still wondering about how secure this information is. Are you picking up anything on communications?”

There was a pause. Then, “Negative. Everything’s quiet. If Dread heard anything, we don’t know about it. Your transmission’s not clear.”

“There’s an electrical storm stretching from Utah to New Mexico that’s causing the interference,” Jon explained.

“It’s heading our way,” Jennifer added. “We might have to land if we can’t get around it and wait for it to pass.”

“Your way?” Hawk’s voice sounded confused. “That means the storm would be moving westward, right? Storms moving in that direction are pretty rare. They usually go from west to east.”

Jon chuckled. “Hawk always did love studying the weather,” he said.

“He’s a pilot,” Jennifer reminded him. “Got to know what the weather’s doing if you’re going to fly through it.”

“Did you two get away clean?”

Jennifer leaned toward the transmitter. “Let’s hope so. How’s the jump ship?”

They could hear the laughter over the speaker. “Everything’s fixed. Look, I know when you two left I was hoping it was just a bad case of bugs and the jump ship wanted some downtime –”

“It was a loose connection on one of the fuel leads, wasn’t it?”

Again, laughter in the background.

“Yes, you were absolutely right. But on that last tune up when we checked out every circuit and gear and connection, that bolt was on tight. I can’t figure out how it worked its way loose.”

“I believe it,” Jennifer said as adjusted the sky bike’s speed to counter the turbulence. She said to Jon and not over the radio, “We keep running into Soaron. There may be a weak spot in the shield that transmits blast waves into the engine chassis instead of dispelling them. The vibrations are shaking the connections loose. I’ve got to recheck those shields when we get back. Maybe one of the emitters is faulty.”

Jon wasn’t certain, but he wondered if whatever was wrong with the ship had been caused by fights with Soaron or if Hawk had done something. Lately, he was growing more certain that Hawk was up to something. There were times when Hawk would ‘arrange’ for him and Jennifer to go on missions or to be alone to talk. He’d seen Hawk in his peripheral vision a few times as he walked away from them when they were playing chess. If Hawk was up to something, he had to know he was taking his life in his hands if he did anything to the jump ship.

Jon smiled and shook his head in amusement. “Everything’s working now, Hawk?”

“Ship shape and Bristol fashion,” Hawk explained, his voice cutting in and out of the static. “There’s no more vibration during deceleration.”

“What about Cipher?” Jon asked him.

“We’re on our way now, Captain,” Scout interrupted quickly. “We’re going to be out of contact for a few hours because Cipher asked us to go comm-quiet on approach. How are you two doing?”

“We’re en route. If luck’s with us, we should be back in a couple of hours, but that storm may delay us until tomorrow. We’ll contact Mentor if anything’s wrong.”

“Roger that,” Hawk responded.

“Hawk, if this data –”

A burst of static screamed through the speaker.

“We’ve lost him, Captain,” Jennifer said. “I don’t know if it was the storm but whatever the interference is, it’s just got worse and – we’ve got something on approach.”

Jon whirled around in the seat. He couldn’t see anything visually. “What direc---”

BAM!

The sky bike lurched to port as the blast hit just beside them. Jon craned his neck to see what was coming – “It’s Soaron! Evasive maneuvers!”

Jennifer dove down, then turned sharply in the opposite direction.

“Steady,” Jon called out as he pulled out his blaster and aimed at the biodread. He pulled the trigger and hit Soaron squarely in the wing, but it didn’t slow him down.

“Surrender, organics!” Soaron shouted out to them.

“Not a chance,” Jennifer muttered as she pulled the bike around sharply, dodging underneath Soaron and then flipping back around only to find Soaron had repeated her maneuver.

“Blasted biobird has learned some new tricks,” she muttered.

They could hear Soaron’s voice mumble something. He was reporting to Dread. “Dread knows Soaron’s spotted us,” he told Jennifer.

Jon fired again, the blaster not having any effect.  “Let’s see if this works,” he muttered as he pulled out the mini-launcher and fired a grenade directly into Soaron’s power center. Sparks flew out from the robot’s armor and joints, overpowering his flight controls and disrupting his systems.

“Got him!” Jon yelled.

Soaron yelled in defiance and fired back one last shot, shooting off the port side landing pad of the sky bike.

“We’re hit!” he yelled needlessly. “Pull up! Pull up!”

He could see Jennifer hanging on to the bike’s controls as she tried to regain altitude. Without the landing gear, they were off balance. There was no way to keep up speed and altitude. They’d lost their ballast. Balance control was gone. The engines would spin them down to the ground. The only thing Jennifer could hope to do is keep their descent slow enough so it wouldn’t kill them when they hit.

“No good. Hang on, Captain. We’re going down!”

Jon saw the ground come speeding up toward them and grabbed Jennifer around the waist in anticipation of the crash. Jennifer pulled back with all her strength, Jon helped as best he could, but they were going to hit hard. Without the landing gear to balance the stabilizers, the bike couldn’t stay in flight. They were going down.

“Can’t level off,” he heard Jennifer mutter. “No control. Panel’s jammed -- no way to ditch the other landing pad.”

The ground got closer… closer… faster…

They hit!

Jon felt himself being tossed and tumbled head over feet and slammed into the hard dirt. He felt the sizzle and snap of his suit powering down as it absorbed the impact, protecting him. The last thought that crossed his mind before he fell unconscious was he didn’t know where Jennifer was.

Volcania, Dread’s throne room

Dread waited. There was no sound, no locator signal, nothing to indicate Soaron had caught Power – or one of his crew. It had been long enough for him to intercept and capture whichever one of Power’s team was in the area, hadn’t it?

“Soaron? Respond,” he ordered.

He was answered with only silence and intermittent static.

Overunit’s voice answered him. “Unit Soaron incapacitated. Regeneration time 6.3 hours.”

Incapacitated? Regeneration? Once again, his mighty warlord had been bested by a mere organic? This was intolerable.

Angry, Dread’s words to Overmind sounded like an order. “Compute last position. Dispatch Blastarr. I want that data tape and Captain Power.”

Power or whichever one of his team that was in the area. If Dread caught even one of that team, the others would come, and then he could capture Power. He would destroy them, one by one.

He would not be denied his victory.

Power Base

“Database journal 47-11 Mark 3. Scout recording. Pilot and the captain have obtained an important data tape concerning Project New Order. They were reporting in when suddenly the transmission stopped.”

Scout shut off his recorder. That storm in-between them must have blocked the signal, so Scout wasn’t worried. Not much, anyway. They were on their way home, all indications hinted that Dread’s forces were other places, there was nothing to worry about, right? Besides, the captain and Jennifer could use a little time alone if Hawk’s matchmaking efforts were meant to have any effect. They didn’t always need to have the rest of the team around.

Scout picked up the rest of his gear and headed toward the launch bay to get his sky bike. He hoped the captain and Jennifer had fun because the rest of them would be working. They had a long ride to Cipher’s new location, and waiting around the base wasn’t going to make the distance any shorter.

Oasis

With a considerable amount of effort, Randall said, “Good breakfast, Uncle Gaelen.”

Gaelen chuckled. “Nice try, Randall. You and I both know that the bread was burnt.”

“And the oatmeal was a little soggy and much better than anything I could have cooked,” Randall joked. “It’s okay, Uncle Gaelen. I’ll cook supper tonight.”

“Well, I never said I was much of a hand in the kitchen. You don’t remember your aunt, but she was an excellent cook. She usually ran me out of the kitchen. Something about not wanting her good utensils destroyed by someone who didn’t know the difference between a spatula and serving fork. What she could do with vegetables was astounding. And you know me –”

“You’re not a big fan of vegetables,” Randall finished for him.

“No,” he laughed at the memory. “What I wouldn’t give for a Big Mac or a Whopper…”

Gaelen occasionally made mention of things that had once existed but were gone now. “What are those?”

“Hamburgers,” Gaelen told him. “Something I hope you get to try someday when this war is over with. Now, enough about my lack of skills when it comes to making breakfast,” he said laughing. “You go on out and help Clegg with the firewood. I’m going to help Arvin repair his roof before those rains get here, so what if we have a late lunch? Invite Clegg. By then, he’ll be hungry too.”

Crash Site

The first thing Jennifer was aware of was a dull pounding behind her eyes.

Then she felt the small rocks digging into her back.

Then the hard ground underneath her.

Every muscle was screaming, and the pounding in her head was getting louder. She grabbed her head, trying to drown out the pounding but it echoed in her ears. What had happened? They were flying on the skybike, right? Right. Why? Heading home? Then…  Soaron attacked! He blew off the port side landing gear. She couldn’t keep the bike in the air –

Jon!

She forced her eyes open and squinted against the inrush of bright light. Carefully, painfully, she looked around her. Her suit was gone – it would have absorbed the crash, and with that kind of impact, it would have overloaded the circuits and the suit would have shut down.

Jon… where was he? She slowly twisted around -- he was lying beside her, his suit powered down as well – only he wasn’t moving.

“Jon?” She half-crawled/half-pulled herself over to him. “You all right?” Please be all right! She reached out and touched his chest – his heart was beating strong and steady.

Jon moaned. “Jon?” Jennifer grabbed the front of his shirt and helped him sit up. “Jon? Say you’re all right.”

“Ow,” he muttered. He opened his eyes, looked around, looked at her, glanced at the sky bike just a few yards away, then her again… “Not one of your better landings,” he quipped with a half-smile.

Oh, he was wanting to make jokes? One of her vehicles was damaged, they had crashed in the middle of nowhere and he was trying to make her smile? Well, two could play at that game. “Well, excuse me, co-pilot. Who was supposed to be watching out for biodreads?”

“Uh… he came at us from an unexpected angle and didn’t show up radar?” Jon grinned as he sidestepped the answer.

“Keep telling yourself that,” she answered. “Besides, you know the old saying. Any landing you can walk away from…”

“Yeah – ow!” Jon winced as he tried to move his leg.

Jon wasn’t one to say ow twice under normal circumstances. She glanced down at his leg and saw the bloody material. She mentally kicked herself. She should have checked him for injuries right away. Maybe she hit her head harder than she thought. She pulled out her crysblade and quickly sliced through his pants leg. His leg was a mess. “I take it back. You’re not walking anywhere with that.”

Great. Another problem. She did a quick assessment of their situation. Their transportation was out of commission. From the looks of the wires sticking out of the radio, it was gone too. Their suits were low on power. Soaron was in the area regenerating. The team was away from the base, and Jon couldn’t walk. They were in trouble.

Jon pushed himself up a little bit, tried to find a more comfortable sitting position. “All right. Given our last position, we should be about twenty miles from the New Mexico border. There’s a water station northeast of here. An oasis. They’ve helped resistance people before. You get there –”

“I’m not going to leave you here,” she immediately argued. How hard had he hit his head? “We don’t know when Soaron could be back, we’ve got no survival gear… I’ve got some reserve power in my suit. I’m going to carry you.” There was no choice. She couldn’t leave him there alone. It was too dangerous.

“There’s not enough power in either of our suits, and you’d never make it,” he reasoned. “That information is too important. You have to get that tape to Mentor.”

Jennifer’s mind began culling through other scenarios, other strategies and tactics. There had to be a way for them both to get out of there. “Well, if –”

“Jennifer,” Jon’s voice took on his we don’t have a choice tone, “that’s an order.”

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Jon knew exactly how much trouble they were in and how limited their choices were. In fact, their choices were almost nonexistent. He could see his own fears, concerns and worries reflected in Jennifer’s eyes. She was trying to figure out ways to get them out of there safely just as he was, but practicality had to take precedence. The information had to get to Mentor no matter what happened to them, and Jennifer was the only one who could still walk.

Still, the idea of sending her off to some town he’d never been to in some general direction with Soaron out there, her suit low on power with little to no defenses…

There was no choice, and the decision was ripping him apart inside. Him staying, her leaving – it could be suicide for both of them.

He glanced back at the rocky dune behind him. “There’s some cover here with those rocks. It’s high ground so I can see if anything is coming. It’s a good place to hole up. Help me get back there.”

He saw the look in her eyes. He knew that look. She had come to the same decision he had. They had to get the information safely away, and she was the only one who could do it. They knew what had to be done, and he could see that realization in the way she held herself. She scooted over behind him, hooked her arms under his and began to pull him back toward the rocks.

“Trust you to pull rank,” she muttered.

Jon chuckled. “Got to do it sometime,” he joked.

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Once Jennifer had him safely tucked up against the rocks, she limped the few yards back over to the sky bike. Her right leg was sore. She must have landed wrong. Her head had a dull ache from being knocked unconscious. All in all, a trek through the desert wouldn’t be what a doctor would prescribe given her condition, but it didn’t matter. She had to reach that water station. There was no choice. Jon was hurt. She’d crawl there if she had to.

Her first view of the radio was correct. It was too badly damaged, and there was no way to jury-rig it to send a message. The transmitter circuits were destroyed. The mini-launcher was gone. That brought up another concern. She checked her blaster. There was a crack in the casing. That meant a leak. It had maybe a few shots left in it. “How’s your blaster?” she called back to him.

She saw him check his firearm. “Barrel’s bent. It’s useless.”

So she had the only working firearm with enough power for maybe five shots if they were lucky. That wasn’t good. She searched through the saddlebags. They were torn up pretty badly from the blast. What few rations that were in there were gone.  They must have fallen out during their fall and could have been blown anywhere in a twenty mile radius. She found the first aid kit stuck in a fold of the saddlebag and then removed the leather strapping that lashed the bag to the bike. She glanced back at Jon who was watching her intently. Undoubtedly, he was worried about supplies as well? “The saddlebags are ripped open. The supplies are gone. So’s the water,” she told him.

Jon closed his eyes. Their luck was getting worse. Neither one of them would have water, and there was no telling how long they were going to be in the desert.

She limped back to him, took her crysblade and expertly cut away the bloody material of his pants leg. His leg needed a real doctor, not a medic. He might not have to have surgery, but there was no way a few stitches were going to fix the damage. She bandaged the wound and carefully splinted the limb. It should be okay, and he wouldn’t lose any mobility in his leg if she could get help to him soon, but time wasn’t their friend.

“That’s all I can do with what we’ve got,” she told him. “You need to keep your leg as still as possible, and try to keep the dirt from getting under the bandages.”

“All right,” Jon told her as he handed her the disk. “I’ll manage. You get going. Keep an eye open. We don’t know where Soaron fell.”

“Okay,” she said as she placed the disk in her pocket. “You keep my blaster. Just in case,” she said as she handed him her sidearm.

Jon shook his head. “You need it. You’d be defenseless out there.”

She placed her blaster by his side. “I’ve still got power in my suit, plus I’m mobile and you’re not. It could make a difference.”

She looked at him for what might have been the last time. Staying behind, walking into the desert, either way, it was dangerous.

“I’ll be back soon,” she told him. He nodded, halfway smiled. Then, without thinking, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, much to the surprise of them both. She stood, maneuvered down the rise and hurried off toward the northeast, moving as quickly as her limping leg would allow her.

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Jon kept an eye on her as she walked away.

He watched her climb down the rocks, sliding half of the way, until she was finally at the base of the cliff and walking off into the distance. Step by step, he watched her until she was out of sight.

He looked up in the gray sky. No sound of a shrieking biodread, no sun beating down despite the arid atmosphere making the air uncomfortable. The area was remarkably free of biodreads for the moment, so she should be okay, right?

“I’ll be back soon,” she had said, then she kissed him on the cheek.

She’d never done that before. She’d never done anything that boldly emotional before. There had been the occasional hug on special occasions like celebrations in the Passages, but a spontaneous kiss like that? Not just spontaneous, but the type of kiss that connected two people. Not for the first time, Jon wondered what he should do or if he should do anything. He wanted that connection with her. The more time passed, the stronger that need grew, but with the war and the team and the danger that always lurked nearby, it wasn’t practical to give in to wants and needs that weren’t focused on more military matters.

Who was he trying to kid? That excuse didn’t work anymore.

He was tired of letting the war run his life.

And she had kissed him on the cheek.

More and more, Jennifer was changing, and Jon found that very intriguing.

Jon knew his feelings about her had changed. Did that kiss mean that her feelings about him had changed? That she had different feelings for him? That she wanted that same kind of connection?

Maybe they could talk…

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

One step…

Two steps…

Walking worked out the soreness in her leg. Maybe it was just how she landed and not a pulled muscle? As long as the soreness was going away, she wasn’t going to question it.

Another step…

There was one immutable rule about hiking long distances – it was very easy to get off course. She saw a mountain peak directly northeast of the crash site and kept it directly in front of her line of sight. The mountain could have been a dozen miles away, it could have been one hundred – it was impossible to tell. The desert was the birthplace of mirages and wrongly estimated distances. That, she knew all too well. She’d seen the desert plenty of times, especially when… no, she wasn’t going to think about that. She had to stay focused. As long as she could keep up a steady pace, she could walk maybe two miles in one hour over the terrain if it was flat, but it wasn’t. There were small hills, valleys, ravines she had to walk around. It took her at least one hour to hike one mile.

And she had no idea how far she had to walk.

Something about the area seemed familiar to her. It felt like déjà vu. A rock formation here, a ravine there, something about this place was striking a familiar chord with her.

She couldn’t figure out why it was familiar.

One step…

Two steps…

She had to keep count of the miles as she walked them off so she could send help back to Jon.

Jon…

She had kissed him.

She had kissed him!

What was she thinking?

Easy. She hadn’t been.

She had been feeling.

She’d kissed him. What was going through her mind? What did Jon think about her behavior? She didn’t even know how he felt about her. If there was one thing she knew after living for years outside Volcania, a kiss was not something simple by definition. There was too much involved in the simple action. Some kisses were casual. There was the goodbye kiss, the hello kiss, the congratulatory kiss, the good luck kiss. Some were serious, like those between lovers or spouses. What could she call the kiss she gave him? Inappropriate?

Human relationships and behaviors still confused her at times. The first time she saw a kiss was when the team had taken her to one of Greta’s clinics after they first found her. Other patients had family there who were very happy about their recovery or successful surgery. She saw a man kiss a woman after she had given birth. Later, she found out that the two were husband and wife – two terms she had never heard before. She saw a woman kiss a man when his knee surgery was completed. She saw a couple hug and kiss when they were told that their child would be fine after suffering a rare fever.

She hadn’t asked about the behavior. She didn’t know enough about the strangers around her to ask. She didn’t know who to trust or who to talk to. All she knew was that she was in some alien world where people smiled. Water came from their eyes – that was her first experience with tears. And laughter! That was the oddest sound to her ears! All this strange behavior all around her, and they must have thought she was the one behaving oddly. Well, her behavior would have seemed strange to them. How many of them had ever sat down and talked with a Dread Youth before? They had no idea what a Dread Youth truly believed, how they were trained or why what they took for granted seemed strange to her. She had no idea then that she was riding on a wave of good luck.

Luck was one of those aspects that people took for granted. Strange things happened, both good and bad, without an apparent reason, and it was chalked up to this mysterious force known as ‘luck.’ A Dread Youth was taught logic and rationality as the proper thinking processes. The concept of chance wasn’t known. It took Scout and Hawk teaching her how to play poker to understand that sometimes, things happen. Someone could draw to an inside straight without having a single clue what the card they were about to draw was. That was chance and luck if the card was the one needed. Sure, someone could argue statistics and probabilities, but when looking at the overall game, it was, as Hawk called it, a crapshoot sometimes. There were times when chance events occurred simultaneously for whatever reason and were considered “luck,” either good or bad. Over the years, she knew she had been lucky to have been found by the Power Team. That team wasn’t like the others she’d worked with. Would Cipher’s team have helped her? Included her? Wanted to know about her? She didn’t think so. No, the guys were special. It took her a while to realize how special, but once she did, she never took the fact that it was Jon’s team that found her for granted.

She also knew she had been lucky to meet up with the team when she did. All that time alone, all that time trying to hide from the clickers, she was exhausted and sick. She was so close to the end of her rope, so close to giving up, but they didn’t let her. She was a stranger to them, but they took a chance on her. They got her help, and they took her in. They didn’t judge her. If she had met anyone else…

No, not going there. It’s like the cliché Hawk liked to say when things worked right – never look a gift horse in the mouth.

But she had kissed Jon. That wasn’t chance or luck; it was deliberate. Did that change everything? Did that change their relationship or would he think it was just a goodbye kiss?

Was he uncomfortable with the fact that she had kissed him?

Was she?

One step…

Two steps…

She stopped for a moment to catch her breath. There were several cacti around. She took out her crysblade – some of Jon’s blood was on the blade. She closed her eyes for a moment. He was hurt, bleeding and his leg wasn’t going to get any better without medical attention. She could only take a brief break from her walk. She couldn’t waste time, and Jon couldn’t afford her to waste a single moment. She wiped the blade on her pants to clean it off, then she cut off the top of a rounded cactus, dug out some of the pulp and squeezed the liquid into her mouth. The action brought back some of her lessons in survival when she was a Dread Youth. Water was a necessity and had to be found quickly. Cactus water was acidic and could have detrimental effects on the body, but the lack of water would prove to be worse. She just needed enough to keep her going.

Food was the second necessity but a person could go some days without food. That was a small mercy. There were no animals running around, no wild root vegetables, nothing edible in sight. Survival training in the Dread Youth always had food available even if the soldiers had to find it for themselves. Their training never included desert settings though. Maybe Dread only wanted them to think that they were prepared to survive if they were on their own? Maybe it gave them a feeling of superiority of some kind? Of accomplishment? With Dread, there was no way to know what he was thinking. She didn’t dwell on those times. They weren’t pleasant memories. She focused on her mission instead, blocked out the bad memories and concentrated on reaching the water station.

She double-checked her bearings. The mountaintop to the northeast was still directly in front of her. She was still on track. She felt the sweat drip down her back and soak into her shirt. It was November. Should it be this warm even in the desert? In Colorado, she couldn’t go outside the base without wearing a jacket. The desert was hot even though what sunlight there was filtered down through pollution and gray clouds. At night, it’d be cold. She knew that from experience too. She took another handful of the cactus pulp and squeezed down the back of her shirt to try to cool off a little. It helped, but not much. She took another glance at the mountain, and she saw snow on the mountaintop. It would be cold up there.

Cold on the mountain…

Desert down below…

Rock formations…

Ravines…

She looked behind her – saw where she had come from -- no, it couldn’t be. She did know this area. She knew these rock formations and the ravines she was walking around. She’d been there before. She’d seen them from a distance through binoculars from a staging area. She’d seen them in satellite reproductions. She saw them through a forested view.

And the water station – a water station in that region of the southwest… what was the name of that water camp that a small group of nomads had established years ago? Oasis? It was a station now? Before, it hadn’t even been considered a settlement. It was too small. It was more of a semi-permanent camp that no one paid any attention to because only about five people were camped there. It had been miles away and not even a consideration when she…

No, she wasn’t going to think of that. She had to get there; she had to get help to Jon before Soaron regenerated and came after him… them… again. Maybe if luck was with them, she could find Oasis or some sort of civilization and get a transport to get Jon.

But what was she going to say to him when she saw him again? She had kissed him! Worse than that, the reasons behind why she knew the area… Jon didn’t know all of it. She hadn’t told him everything. If she ever told him the rest of the story, he’d understand, wouldn’t he?

There were so many thoughts running through her mind…

Maybe they could talk…

Oasis

So, lunch was going to be late. That didn’t bother Randall. He loved his Uncle Gaelen, he was a great guy, he’d do anything for him, but the man couldn’t cook. Even after years of attempts, Gaelen’s best trick in the kitchen was burning water. Randall couldn’t complain -- he wasn’t much better when it came to the culinary arts. The last time he tried to make bread… well, the rodents that lived in the desert liked what he threw out.

Clegg, however, had a cast iron stomach. Randall envied him that. He could eat anything.

Clegg could also work for hours chopping wood. He’d already chopped a full cord by the time Randall had arrived that morning. With the winters becoming more vicious, colder and windier every year, they always needed more firewood to get through the season. It was a very warm November 3^rd, but that didn’t mean anything. When winter came in, it came in like a lion – or so Uncle Gaelen said. It wasn’t long before the December storms hit. They were almost as bad as the January storms. They had to be able to stay warm, so for hours, Randall hauled armload after armload of wood and stacked them against the wall. The wood would be their first defense against the cold. According to Arvin, the weather wasn’t always like that. Years ago, the desert was warm during the day all year long and only got cold at night. Randall occasionally wondered why the desert had changed so much or maybe it was just another one of those things that existed before Dread came to power? Like Big Macs and Whoppers that the older folks liked to talk about?

“Randall!”

Randall turned at the sound of his name. He glanced around – there, near the main hall was his uncle motioning him back. That meant their late lunch was ready.

Oh, well, maybe lunch would be more filling than breakfast?

He walked back to the chopping block as Clegg finished off another chop and tapped him on the shoulder. “Uncle Gaelen just yelled. Food’s ready.”

“And not a moment too soon,” Clegg said good-naturedly as he let the wood drop on the ground. They picked up the few pieces scattered around. “My breakfast wore off a long time ago.”

“Mine too,” Randall laughed.

“Let me guess. Gaelen cooked?”

“He tried. It was a valiant effort,” he joked.

“He’s still a better cook than either one of us.” Clegg hefted the ax and admired it appreciatively. “You know, when I was a boy, my parents were carnies.”

“What’s that?” Randall asked.

“People who travelled around with carnivals, putting on acts. Something you’ve never seen. Carnivals are like magic. Ferris wheels, cotton candy, feats of strength and skill, fortunetellers, acrobats, tightrope walkers… my father had a knife-throwing act. When I was about five, he started throwing axes. You should have seen it. He could hit the center of an Ace of Spades from fifteen paces with an ax this size.”

Clegg, too. Whenever the older ones started talking about the ‘good ole’ days’ before Dread, Randall felt like he was listening to fairy tales. They used words he’d never heard of and talked about items he couldn’t even dream about. “That’s good?”

“It’s excellent. And he taught me. There’s a trick to being able to swing an ax all day without getting sore muscles. I’ll teach you how to do it.”

“Can you hit a clicker with that ax?”

Clegg smiled and handed Randall the ax. “Here. Take that. The blade needs sharpening.”

Clegg placed one hand on Randall’s shoulder as they walked away when Randall heard a weak, “Excuse me. I need your help.”

Randall turned and saw a woman, older than him, standing there. She was dusty, sweaty, wearing a UTO uniform. Even Randall had heard of the United Transport Organization. She was one of their pilots? Whoever she was, she was exhausted – she must have walked a long way. She needed water. She looked worried, scared. Something was wrong. Randall was about to turn to call for the water bucket when something else grabbed his attention.

He saw her eyes.

Gray eyes.

Emotion-filled eyes.

It was those eyes.

The eyes he could never draw right.

It was her!

“You! It’s you!” he yelled as he hefted the ax in both hands and ran toward her. He swung the ax at her. Looking surprised, she sidestepped, he missed, almost fell down from the momentum. He got to his feet and again, and he swung at her head. The woman dodged the blow, sidestepped and stood ready to counteract. Randall swung the ax at her again – she blocked the blow and slammed her fist on the side of the head, knocking him down.

“Randall!” Clegg grabbed him, held his arms down, grabbed the ax from him but didn’t let go. “What’s the matter with you, boy? Can’t you see this woman’s hurt? She needs help! What are you doing?”

Randall ignored the people charging out of the settlement to see what the disturbance was. He could only feel the fury and hate that he felt. “She’s the one! She’s the one who burned Sand Town! Kill her! Kill her!”

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Sand Town…

In that moment, Jennifer saw what occurred all those years ago as if the events had just happened.

“Is this your first time in an organic settlement or your first cleansing?” Overunit Wilson asked Jennifer as she flew the ship toward their target settlement of Sand Town.

“My first cleansing, Overunit,” Jennifer responded respectfully. Something was going on, she just couldn’t figure out what it was. Did someone suspect that she was questioning everything she knew? Before they embarked on the assignment, she had been told that she had been specifically selected for the mission, along with the team she had been assigned to.

Sitting more comfortably in the co-pilot’s seat, the overunit responded with a smug, “Once we find the radio in Sand Town, we will teach the animals not to oppose us. It will be a glorious day for the Machine.”

Glorious day. It took all of Jennifer’s willpower to not respond to that. Not long before, about the same time she saw Youth Leader Colville transferred only it wasn’t her personality existing in the biomech, she heard the prisoner they had captured confess that the radio was in Sand Town. That was their target. They’d tortured a man for a radio. Why would a radio be such a threatening problem that torture had been used to determine its location?

She had so many questions, but she didn’t know who she could trust. Overunit Wilson was a true believer with no doubts at all. Jennifer knew she couldn’t speak to her. “Yes, Overunit. A glorious day.”

There was a slight pause, then the overunit continued her version of small talk. “I understand you are up for promotion to overunit yourself, Youth Leader Chase.”

Jennifer had only received notification of her promotion a mere hour before deployment. The overunit already knew? “Yes, Overunit. My orders were approved just prior to this mission.”

Overunit Wilson smiled and nodded her head. “It is an honor to serve the Machine, to see this world through its transition to the new world Lord Dread will bring forth. Your name has been brought to the personal attention of Overmind and Lord Dread. You’ve proven that your abilities would be better serve the Machine as an overunit. I’m sure you are also aware that along with the distinction of being the youngest youth leader ever appointed, you will now be the youngest overunit?”

The youngest? Did that really mean anything anymore? “I had not considered that fact, Overunit,” Jennifer confessed. Then, forcing herself to speak with fake gratitude, she said, “I am honored that my performance serving the Machine has found favor with Lord Dread.”

“Is it my understanding that you wish to continue as a pilot?”

Jennifer knew she had to tread carefully. She spoke the answer in words pleasing to a true believer. “If it is the will of the Machine. However, if I am given a choice, I would like to continue being a pilot. I believe my flying skills would allow me to better serve the Empire than other assigned positions.”

The overunit considered this. “Well spoken, Youth Leader Chase. Your devotion to the Machine and to Lord Dread will not go unrewarded. I, myself, have submitted a recommendation that you be placed as an overunit in command of your own squadron in the Aerial Defense Command and Recon Unit. It was approved. I hope you find that satisfactory.”

Just a few days before, that news would have made Jennifer proud to be a Dread Youth. That day… “I was not aware that any Dread Youth was in the Recon Unit. I understood that only biomech pilots and drone ships currently staffed the Defense Command.”

“Only biomech pilots and drones are allowed in the Recon Unit,” the overunit agreed. “You are to be congratulated for such distinction, Youth Leader.”

They planned to make her an overunit, transfer her to a biomech body and allow her to lead a recon unit? The overunit knew she was scheduled to be transferred? Immediately, Jennifer answered as a ‘loyal’ Dread Youth would. “I will endeavor to prove myself worthy of such consideration, Overunit.”

“I have no doubt you will, Youth Leader Chase. Should the Sand Town mission prove successful, your promotion to overunit will be immediate upon return to Volcania. However, the promotion ceremony will take place at the time other youth leaders receive theirs. Lord Dread himself wishes to honor your particular ascendancy through the ranks at that ceremony to show others what a true Dread Youth soldier is.”

Jennifer didn’t know what to say. She was being singled out by Dread himself? She was being made a token? A figurehead for Dread to use to illustrate his lies? And the ceremony? She knew – she was to be transferred and paraded around in front of the rest of the Corps. “I don’t believe the word ‘honored’ is sufficient for such recognition by Lord Dread,” she told the overunit. “I don’t know what word could express such acknowledgement.”

The overunit sat back and watched the terrain passing by the viewport. “I understand. Such singular attention must be overwhelming. The other members of your team are being likewise considered for similar but specific assignments; however, none are in line for a military promotion. Conduct yourself well at Sand Town, the promotion to overunit is yours immediately with the transfer to be conducted in a few days. Otherwise, the promotion must wait. This is no blemish on your record, Youth Leader. It is merely a… an internal political matter among your superiors.”

Jennifer had no idea what she was talking about, and she didn’t really care. Now, she knew for a fact that she was to be one of the individuals transferred into a metal body after this mission. Politics or not, given her doubts, if she didn’t find a way to escape, someone would figure out that she wasn’t a devout believer anymore. That would mean execution or digitization, not freedom.

And she did not want to be put into a metalloid body, not after finding out what happened to Colville, not ever.

She just had to bide her time for the moment… but if she did get her promotion to overunit, that could open up avenues she didn’t have as a youth leader… but time would not be on her side after she returned from Sand Town…

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Nighttime.

Southwest.

It should have been a simple assignment. Find the radio and punish the ‘animals’ for opposing Dread as ordered – but why was having a radio considered such treasonous opposition? One thing was certain; the people in Sand Town weren’t animals. They were people trying to survive in a harsh world, trying to keep their families alive. This wasn’t the first time Jennifer had seen individuals outside of Volcania, but it was the first time she looked closely.

All the litanies she had ever learned echoed through her mind. All the litanies – they were designed to condition a Dread Youth soldier to murder innocent people? No, Dread didn’t consider them innocent. Anyone who opposed the Machine was considered the enemy and had to be cleansed.

Cleansed – she had never considered what that word meant. The overunit kept saying that the opposers had to be cleansed and punished. The litanies taught that they had to be cleansed. Jennifer had no idea what form that punishment ‘cleansing’ would take.

Jennifer found the radio hidden away in one of the houses the overunit directed her to search. She packed it up quickly and handed it to her cadet assistant with orders to destroy it. The sooner it was removed, the sooner the soldiers could leave. Now, the rule was to burn a few homes as a reminder of what would happen to people who opposed Dread.

“Youth Leader Chase?” her assistant returned quickly. “Overunit Wilson is requesting you report personally with an update.”

The overunit. Jennifer had to report or … the alternative was unthinkable. She couldn’t behave as if anything was wrong, as if everything she was seeing was horrifying her.

She looked around the small house one last time. Except for some homemade furniture – beds, chairs, table, kitchen utensils – it was fairly empty. There was no sign that whoever lived there had been there for hours. “Cadet, make certain this house is destroyed,” she ordered, every fiber in her being fighting against the decision. There was no choice for her. She had to say those things. She had to behave as any other youth leader loyal to Dread or she would be cut down as a traitor where she stood.

Immediately, she marched out of the house and into the main quad of the settlement. There, Overunit Wilson waited with the lead biomech and another cadet.

“Youth Leader Chase, report.”

“We have located the radio and are proceeding as planned.”

Overunit Wilson smiled, but it was a sanctimonious sort of smile. Why? They had cleansed the town by finding the radio and informing the organics that any further opposition to Dread would be punished… what was going on?

An explosion burst to the right of her as a building was utterly destroyed by a missile. Dead bodies lay everywhere. Biomechs gunned down innocent people trying to escape. They had the radio! Why were they doing this?

A biomech had a young woman by the arm, dragging her toward a group of other men and women who were guarded by other biomechs. “This one will be a good worker,” the robot said. “Give them to the commanders for disposition.”

Disposition? Did that mean something other than what she thought? What kinds of workers would these people be?

A commander on the overunit’s personal staff walked toward the overunit. “Too many old ones,” she heard him mutter. “Not enough of them are physically fit for the slave mines.”

Slave mines? What were they talking about? There were no slave mines.

Then again… so many lies… there were slave mines?

“They can fill other positions,” the overunit suggested.

Jennifer saw people moving in the shadows. Two biomechs were heading in their direction. She had to help them. If she could help just a few escape…

Quickly, spontaneously, Jennifer approached the biomechs.

“Report.”

Both biomechs stopped and turned toward her. Jennifer could see the escapees taking advantage of the situation and running toward the next building, still hidden by the dark.

“Prisoners are being gathered, Youth Leader. All houses in the fourth quadrant have been destroyed. We are proceeding to the third quadrant to effect maximum destruction.”

Jennifer nodded. There was nothing else she could do.

The screams shook the air. One by one, the biomechs were capturing people, killing others, destroying even more with guns and missiles. She heard a strange noise amidst the screams. She tried to ignore it. She returned to her position by the overunit, but the noise continued. She excused herself on the pretense of checking a building for other people hiding inside. She walked steadily in the direction of the noise – behind one of the houses, Soaron was there. When had he arrived? Biomechs dragged resisting prisoners toward the biodread.

“More to digitize?” Soaron taunted them as he pointed his digitizing beam at the scared settlers and they disappeared into his storage cells.

Jennifer turned from the carnage. What could she do? How could she stop this? The killing, the enslaving – everywhere, people were crying and screaming as they ran from the invaders. Everything she had ever known had come under question the last few days. Now, her entire perception was shattered unalterably. THIS was what the slogans meant. THIS was what wearing the uniform meant. There was no new world order. There was no world in transition. It was machines slaughtering humans.

And she was helpless to stop it!

One yell, one protest, and she’d be dead. If she tried to help anyone else escape, they’d all be cut down by the biomechs. She had been especially chosen for the mission to Sand Town for some reason she wasn’t sure about yet. She was being scrutinized more closely by the overunit than she ever had been before. One mistake, one misstep…

“Youth Leader Chase, come with me,” Overunit Wilson marched by. She didn’t look back to see if Jennifer followed. It was expected, so Jennifer did what she was told. Over twenty years of conditioning to obey orders from superior officers was too well ingrained in her. It was habit, reflex. She was walking before she consciously thought about putting one foot in front of the other.

More biomechs dragged prisoners past her position. Some were lined up nearby and were placed under heavy guard. Others were taken toward Soaron’s position to be digitized. There were so many lying dead on the ground…

“Please, let me go!” the woman cried, grabbing at the biomech’s fingers to pry it off her arm.

“Silence, organic,” the robot ordered.

The other biomech dropped a grown man at the feet of the woman. “This one looks healthy. He’ll last in the slave mines a while.”

The overunit led Jennifer to a group of prisoners forced to face one of the main buildings. From the reports Jennifer had heard, perhaps one hundred organics were taking refuge there – it was called a church. She didn’t know what type of building that was, but at the moment, they seemed to consider it a sanctuary offering protection of some sort.

“You have been gathered to witness the punishment of those who oppose the will of the Machine,” the overunit said over the noise of the fighting. “This is the shelter of those who oppose the way. Youth Leader, what do we do with those who oppose the way?”

Completely by habit, just as she had answered the same question unthinking thousands of times in the classroom, Jennifer responded to the slogan with the only prescribed answer allowed by the Dread Youth. “Cleanse them.”

Smugly, the overunit yelled into her microphone. “Cleanse them! Judgment has been rendered. The accused have been found. Let them be cleansed now and for all time. Fire!”

The biomechs launched the missile into the church, destroying it in a brilliant blast that lit up the night sky. The prisoners around the quad cried, moaned, wailed in mourning for their lost friends and family.

Jennifer watched the fire burn. It was gone. Everything she had ever believed, everything she had ever thought – gone up in smoke as surely as if her convictions had been in that building. All the lies had ripped her raw and left her empty. Youth Leader Chase was gone, and she didn’t know what was left. She didn’t know if anything was left.

“You’ve done well today, Youth Leader Chase,” Overunit Wilson praised her. “Your promotion to overunit is now assured.”

She was brought back to reality by the boy’s shouts to the townspeople.

“She’s the one who burned Sand Town! Kill her! Kill her! They burned my family!”

The man holding the boy, keeping him from attacking her added, “I lost my family in Sand Town, too.”

“Enough!” Another man entered the melee. “Is this how we treat human life in Oasis?”

“She’s not human, Arvin!” Randall protested. “She’s a murderer!”

“Enough!” Arvin yelled. “Clegg, what’s going on here?

Clegg cleared his throat and nodded toward Jennifer. “Randall says she was responsible for Sand Town.”

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Arvin thought for a moment. He looked carefully at Jennifer, but he didn’t see a monster capable of destroying countless human lives standing there. He knew monsters all too well. He had seen them, trained them and watched them work. He knew the demons that existed in the human race better than most, saw the ones designed by more heinous minds, and this woman wasn’t like anyone from his experience. Regardless, most of Oasis was made up of Sand Town refugees. He needed to take control of the situation before there was a riot and a lynching. “ Sand Town was destroyed by the Dread Youth, biomechs and Soaron years ago. Randall was just a boy. He could be mistaken.” Arvin glanced around at the crowd. “Gaelen? Do you recognize her?”

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Gaelen approached her, staring at her. He seemed familiar, but Jennifer couldn’t place him. She wouldn’t remember what someone who was in Sand Town looked like, could she? It was so many years ago, at night, the smoke from the fires choked the air --

“You were there that night, weren’t you, Gaelen?” Arvin asked.

“Yes, Arvin. I was there,” Gaelen confirmed. “And so was she.”

“Kill her!” someone from the crowd yelled.

Jennifer had to act fast or Jon was lost. “Please, I’m not a spy. I promise you, I’m not a spy. I’m a resistance fighter for Captain Power’s team.”

“Captain Power?” Arvin said aloud. “Hmmmm…. yes, I know about him. We’ve heard of him, especially of late. Resistance group in the Midwest…”

Jennifer pushed her luck. “He’s injured very badly. I need your help. Can you please send someone to help him? Please?”

Arvin had an interesting look on his face that Jennifer couldn’t place. If they thought she was Dread Youth, they could just kill her. That would mean Jon’s death and the loss of the data tape. It could also mean the loss of everyone at Oasis if Soaron came looking for the data tape.

“Don’t listen to her!” Randall called out again. “She’s lying. Dread has never changed, neither has his soldiers! Kill her! Kill her!”

“Enough!” Arvin yelled again. “No more talk of killing. We’re not like Dread. We’re human beings. Precious few of us left, Randall. You claim that this woman was at Sand Town and that she killed people there. If this woman is guilty of something, we’ll deal with it like human beings according to our laws. We’ll hold a tribunal. Gaelen, you’re Randall’s guardian. Do you agree?”

Gaelen couldn’t look at Jennifer. Why? “Yes, that’s fair.”

Arvin approached Jennifer. “We’ll gather now in the main hall for a trial if you agree to this and accept our judgment?”

“Why are you asking her?” Randall wanted to know.

Arvin had the cryptic look on his face again. “For other reasons you wouldn’t understand, Randall.” He turned back to Jennifer. “What say you?”

Without hesitation, Jennifer said, “If you’ll send someone to help Captain Power. He’s five miles directly southwest of here. I couldn’t get here by a direct path. I had to walk across what might have been a dry lake bed, and I had to go around three chasms. He’s in a direct southwestern line from that mountain,” she pointed to a mountain on the other side of Oasis. “He’s on a rise overlooking the area. Please, he’s hurt. Send help… I’ll do what you say.”

That seemed to satisfy Arvin. “Martin, Jack, take your crawler. See what you can find out there. If you go by road, you should be there in about a half hour. Take a first aid kit with you as well.”

“I can’t believe this,” Randall muttered.

“Randall,” Arvin reprimanded gently. “We don’t leave wounded people stranded in the desert.” Then, looking back at Jennifer and said in a low voice, “I think there’s more to you than meets the eye. You’re wearing a UTO uniform, which means you’ve flown with them. Those are some of the bravest people in the war since they act as guards for transports and haul just about everything on convoys. You’re on Captain Power’s team… I have heard a great deal about him and the people he works with.”

Jennifer didn’t understand. “He’s the one who sent me here because you’ve helped resistance groups before. But the captain’s been fighting Dread for fifteen years. I thought everyone had heard of him.”

Arvin smiled in an odd way again. “In more ways than you can imagine.”

He placed a hand on her shoulder and led her into the settlement.

Volcania

“Overmind, what is Soaron’s status?” Dread asked.

Within moments, Overmind’s voice answered, “Regeneration time has been extended due to the harsh climate. Blastarr will rendezvous with Soaron within the hour.”

They were losing time. That was unacceptable.

“We must increase our patrols in the area,” Dread concluded. “We should maintain a presence there.”

“Agreed. However, the organic population is sparse. We need only a few patrols. The Recon Unit would suffice. We should not diminish the number of ground troops in more populated areas.”

“Perhaps.” Dread didn’t like the idea that there were no biomechs in the area to give any assistance to one of his warlords.

A thought crossed Dread’s mind… Overunit Grieg’s information held that the organic Circuit came from the northwest while Dread’s sources indicate that he was from the southwest. There were few of Dread’s forces in that area… that would be an ideal location for spies and hackers to hide. Maybe part of the reason Dread couldn’t track the source of the information leak was because there was no one looking in certain areas such as the southwest?

He would have to investigate that thought further.

Crash Site

It had been hours. Jon had kept a tight watch on his chrono the entire time. He was worried about Jennifer. Was she still walking? Had she found Oasis? Had she found water? Was she safe? He’d sent her off in a general direction to a town he had never been to and had no idea of its exact location. A direction wasn’t a location. Just heading northeast didn’t mean anything in the desert.

There was no choice. The information was too important.

Right, keep telling yourself that, Jon. Maybe it’ll make you feel better.

He wiped the sweat off his forehead. The desert was hot during the day, even in the early part of wintertime. If it had been a month later, the winter storms would have started and cooled everything down. His meager shade didn’t keep the heat away, and Jennifer was out in the open, walking in a direction that just might take her deeper into the desert…

He glanced again in the direction she had gone. Directly before him in the distance was a mountain with a brilliant snowcap. He could imagine it being rather cold on that mountaintop… strange, but the sight looked familiar to him. Had he seen that mountain before? Or did one mountain look like any other? He didn’t recall being this far to the southwest recently. Maybe years ago? That was entirely possible. They used to perform recons out this far once, but the lack of humans establishing numerous settlements along with the lack of resources made recons in the area less effective. Their time and resources could be better served in areas that could sustain a population.

Then again, since the area wasn’t populated, Dread didn’t keep many troops there. That meant Jennifer could move around more safely than in other places. Jon glanced down at the blaster. The power reading was less than it had been. He picked up the weapon and inspected the power cell. “Great,” he muttered to himself. “The hairline crack’s expanded.” The cell was losing its charge faster due to casing damage. The blaster wouldn’t have done Jennifer any good had she taken it with her and she ran into trouble.

It also meant they were both weaponless in the desert with who-knows-what out there.

The heat was becoming overbearing. “Not the greatest rest stop I’ve been to,” he muttered. He had to remember to start packing games on the bikes when they went out from now on. Even a book would be a good way to pass the time.

Speaking of books, the ones he and Mentor were making for Jennifer were getting closer to being finished. She’d be surprised; at least, he hoped she would be. He hoped they’d be alive so he could give her the books. It’d been difficult keeping the books a secret from the others as well. Jon wanted to be the one to give them to her as a present, but more than that, he wanted them to be a personal gift. There was one story in particular he thought she might like that he was trying to find the text for – A Little Princess. It had been one of his mother’s favorites, but he’d never read it himself. His mom would say that she had to pull the book out every few years and re-read it. Maybe Jennifer would feel the same way? He hoped so.

He looked at his chrono again. Another ten minutes had passed. There was no sound, no shriek from Soaron screaming from the sky, no sound of anything but the desert wind and his own breathing.

He was getting so thirsty. There was a cactus on the ridge with him, but it was the only one. If he cut into it too soon, he could use up all the water before any help came. But it was the desert… he knew he’d waited as long as he could. He was wounded, he was hot, he needed water. He inched his way over to the cactus, pulled out his knife and cut off the top. “Sorry, but I need a drink,” he said to the cactus, needing to hear the sound of his own voice again. He pulled out some of the pulp, squeezed the liquid into his mouth, and let it dribble on his forehead.

It helped, but the one thought that kept going through his mind was whether or not Jennifer had found water or cactus on the way to the water station.

He wondered if she had reached the water station and was safe.

She had to be.

Soaron’s Crash Site

Power Systems: Online

Systems Check: In Process

Regeneration Time: 6.2 hours initial regeneration, 2.3 hours additional due to climate

Communications: Offline

Soaron checked his systems again. The regeneration was taking too long. He had knocked Power and his teammate out of the sky; he had to go find them before any desert creatures carried off the bodies. He had no way to contact his lord. He couldn’t report in that Power was down.

All he could do was wait and regenerate.

Proximity Alert. Blastarr approaching, his sensors reported.

Soaron looked over, saw the bothersome land-locked warlord coming toward him, and groaned. He hated that inferior robot. Blastarr had human minds in his processing core. Blastarr was a being that was considered to be far less than the perfect Machine by Overmind. In fact, every pure machine entity may have considered him a lesser mechanical being. He was like some of those biomechs with human minds – weaker, less mechanical, inferior. Soaron was a perfect example of the Machine. He was elegance in flight, faultless in logic, a being untarnished by the lesser creatures. Lord Dread considered Blastarr the next step in merging the human and the mechanical? Overmind was correct – the sooner the world was rid of such inferiority, the sooner the world of the Machine could exist.

Until that glorious day happened, Soaron would follow Overmind’s orders to work with Blastarr and obey Lord Dread’s orders without question. It was his programming; he would not disobey.

“So the mighty air lord is struck once more,” Blastarr taunted him as he came closer.

Soaron may have to work with Blastarr, but he didn’t have to put up with his insolence. “Beware your tongue, ground crawler, or when my regeneration is complete –”

Blastarr reached down, grabbed Soaron’s leg and ripped it off. He casually tossed it over his shoulder amidst Soaron’s screams of pain.

“Where is the organic Power?” Blastarr demanded.

If there was one thing Soaron could do, it was best Blastarr in a battle of one-ups-manship. “You are too late!” he taunted him. “I already destroyed him plus his companion.”

“Unconfirmed!” Blastarr argued. He grabbed Soaron by the throat and yanked him up off the ground.

Soaron tried to grab Blastarr’s hand, but his power was not up to 100%. He didn’t have the strength to fight back or pull away.

“State their last known position!” Blastarr demanded.

The slow-witted ground crawler wanted the credit of destroying Power for himself? “Never!”

“Never?” Blastarr shook Soaron violently, knocking his regeneration systems into stand-by. “Never? State Power’s last know position!”

Soaron refused to answer. Blastarr tightened his grip around the warlord’s throat.

Soaron stubbornly remained silent, then an audio file implanted in his system by Overmind played in his processor. “Work with Blastarr even if it means demeaning yourself for now. Soon, anything remotely associated with the organics including Blastarr and the biomechs with human minds will no longer trouble us.”

“Speak!” Blastarr ordered.

Obeying Overmind’s standing orders, Soaron mumbled, “Coordinates nine-two-seven.”

Blastarr ceased shaking him and dropped him back onto the desert floor. “A wise decision, scrapheap,” he said as he sped off in the general direction of the crash.

Power Systems: Online

Systems Check: In Process

Regeneration Time: 6.2 hours initial regeneration, 2.3 hours additional due to system going off-line, .2 hours additional time possible due to damage caused by biodread

Communications: Online

Communications were online? He beamed a secure beam toward Volcania, on a secure frequency only he and Overmind shared.

“Speak, Unit Soaron,” Overmind’s voice sounded in his internal communications system.

“Blastarr arrived at my location, and I gave him the location of the crash site where Power went down as per standing orders. He is moving towards that site now.”

There was a pause, then, “Well done, Soaron. Follow your primary programming when dealing with Blastarr. Allow him his victories for now. When your regeneration mode is complete, follow Blastarr, determine Power’s condition, and regain the data tape. Digitization is not an option if Power’s armored suit is intact. If Power is alive, leave him for Blastarr to destroy. If he fails, then his failure will work against him and not us. If he succeeds, then Power’s destruction will aid all efforts.”

“What of Power’s companion?” Soaron asked.

Another pause. “The companion is of no concern. It is merely another organic of no influence. Power is a danger to the Machine Empire and his destruction must take precedence over any of his team. Are you in any danger at your location?”

“No, my lord. All is silent.”

“Follow Blastarr as quickly as you can. I will tell Dread that your communication abilities are still regenerating.”

“As you will, my lord,” Soaron answered. He glanced over at his ripped off leg. With an angry sigh, he started dragging himself toward the limb so he could reattach it and let the wound regenerate.

Oasis

How long had it been? Jennifer checked her chrono. Ten minutes maybe? Fifteen since the crawler headed out for Jon’s location? Was he still all right? Had he found shade against the heat? Did he find access to water? Had Soaron regenerated and found him?

She shook her head slightly and forced her attention on what was happening. She was being put on trial for what she did years ago at Sand Town, and she agreed to comply with their judgment if they went after Jon. She did it willingly and would do it again not only if it meant Jon would be reached in time, but also because she had been there that day. She would never deny her part in what happened. The survivors had every right to demand satisfaction.

She was scared.

People died at Sand Town, and she had given the order. She had to pay.

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Arvin hammered the gavel on the table. “Silence, everyone,” he said. He glanced at the woman sitting at the end of the table. She hadn’t given them any trouble. She went where they led her, sat where they told her and even thanked them when they gave her water before going into the main hall. She’d walked a long way. Maybe Captain Power was five miles away as the crow flies, but she had walked further since she had to walk around ravines, boulders and other natural impediments that obstructed her path. Arvin mentally kicked himself for not immediately offering her water. What kind of a person was he to not getting water to her when he saw she was hurt?

In all his years working with the government before the wars began and in all the years he’d lived in the wastelands afterwards, he’d never seen a Dread Youth willingly risk their life for another person, not even for another one of Dread’s soldiers. Yes, she was a Dread Youth – she had all the telltale physical markers he had studied -- but how could anyone believe that this person who willingly put herself in their hands could possibly have ordered the deaths of dozens? Hundreds?

He knew from the moment he saw her and looked into her eyes that she was not any ordinary fighter. When he learned she was not only with the UTO but also a resistance fighter on Captain Power’s team, he knew she was something much more than a mere soldier. He’d heard rumors and been told story after story of Power’s team from visiting resistance fighters and passing nomadic groups. Some of them seemed far-fetched given what Arvin knew of human psychology, but now, to see her there at Oasis, he was beginning to doubt his previous assessment of the rumors. If a few particular stories circulating in certain circles about the members of the team were true …No, she was no typical Dread Youth if indeed she had been. She wore the Power Team armor and fought other Dread soldiers and biomechs. Those stories circulating about who made up the Power Team, what they did, what they risked – maybe there was hope for humanity after all.

No, he would not mention the stories. The tales had been told to him in confidence; he would not repeat them at the tribunal under any circumstances. Not everyone had his security clearance with the resistance groups.

But – rumors weren’t facts, but if the rumors were true, how could he convince the rest of the townsfolk that there was more going on with this young woman than what they may be thinking?

He would let time and circumstances dictate his actions. It was all he could do.

Randall sat in a chair before the long table, some of the other Sand Town survivors gathered in the gallery. All had a vested interest, but Arvin could tell that there were others who would have gladly shot the woman down without a second thought.

This could get very bad, very fast.

“Miss,” Arvin turned his attention back to her, “would you please state your name for the court?”

“Corporal Jennifer Chase. I’m the pilot for the Power Team,” she said.

“She’s lying!” Randall yelled, a murmur of agreement sounding behind him.

Arvin hit the gavel on the table again. “One more outburst, anything that disrupts these proceedings, and I will clear this room except for the person testifying.” He looked sternly at everyone in the building. Even Randall looked away from him. “She is Corporal Jennifer Chase, the pilot for the Power Team, a resistance group who has successfully fought Dread for some years. That is how it will be recorded in the transcript. All right, Randall,” Arvin tried again. “Tell us your story. Exactly as you remember it.”

Randall cleared his throat, and said in a rather tremulous voice, “Um, it was summer. I remember because it was hot, and we worked in the fields at night. Uncle Gaelen had gone out the week before with a group of hunters to find game but had been captured by Dread’s robots. The others barely escaped with their lives to come back and tell us what happened. Otherwise, he’d have been in the fields with us, working that night. I was putting in a row of corn and suddenly there was Uncle Gaelen walking out of the dark. I was surprised to see him because they said he had been taken away to a slave mine and no one escapes those. Uncle Gaelen said he had to see my father right away to warn him.”

“Warn him?” Arvin asked. “About what?”

“He didn’t tell me. So we started back to Sand Town. When we got to my house, Dread’s soldiers were there. We ran into another building to hide from them. Then she,” he pointed at Jennifer, “marched up to the overunit, pointed to my house and said something to the overunit. They were smiling. Smiling as if it was some kind of joke! And then…”

Arvin waited, but Randall didn’t continue. “Did you hear what they said?” he asked the boy.

Randall thought for a moment, then looked at Jennifer. “She said that they had located the radio and were proceeding as planned.”

“A radio?” Arvin asked. “Dread’s troops were looking for a radio?”

Randall nodded. “My father was the one who hid the radio. It’s how he talked to other settlements.”

Arvin was beginning to get a better picture of what happened in Sand Town. “Who knew the radio was there?”

Randall thought for a moment. “A lot of people, I think. I did. Uncle Gaelen did. I don’t know who else.”

Gaelen, Randall and Randall’s father… only those three knew the radio was there? Was that possible? Could others have known? He addressed the others in the gallery. “Was it common knowledge at the time that a radio was hidden in Sand Town?”

Spectators shook their heads. It was as Arvin thought. Only three people in Sand Town knew that a radio was there.

“Dread knew,” Randall protested.

Yes, Dread knew there was a radio, but he didn’t know where it was hidden. Arvin dreaded where his thoughts were going. “Do you know what the radio was used for?”

Randall frowned. “To talk to other settlements all over the region. Listen for news. My father talked to some lady who wanted to set up a radio network so people could communicate with each other and share news and hear about the war against Dread.”

“A lady?” Arvin mused. “Hmmm, there’s one lady prevalent on the radio frequencies these days… short range though,” he mumbled. Arvin had to tread carefully. “Randall, do you know why they were specifically looking for the radio? Do you know what a radio represented to Dread?”

Randall shook his head. “It’s a machine that he doesn’t control?”

There was a murmur and a slight laughter at his comment. Arvin looked at his gavel, then at Chase, and then at Randall. “No. Radios were and still are the main source of communications that allow a concentrated, coordinated resistance against Dread. In the past, when someone orchestrated a coup, one of the first things they did was capture all communications capabilities so no resistance group could talk to another, know what’s happening or allow them to make plans to fight back. Some years ago, there was an effort to get radios to as many settlements as possible to try to create a more organized resistance. Dread started to go after them with a powerful will. No matter what your father’s purpose was for having a radio, it must have meant only one thing to Dread.” Arvin let that information sink into Randall’s perception. “Did your father tell anyone he spoke with on the radio that he was from Sand Town?”

Randall shook his head, almost violently. “He was scared to. He didn’t know if someone else was listening. He said he didn’t want to lead any of Dread’s troops back to Sand Town. Doesn’t matter, though. They came anyway and found the radio.” His voice took on a rather annoyed edge.

Arvin altered his line of questioning. “How long did your father have the radio?”

“A couple of years, I think. I’m not sure. Doesn’t matter. The Dreadheads found it.”

“And then they proceeded as planned,” Arvin muttered. “Randall, do you know what the Dread Youth code of punishment is for finding a radio in a settlement where people are believed to be in opposition to Dread?”

Randall shook his head. “No,” he answered impatiently.

“Just before the Sand Town massacre, there was a procedure that the Dread Youth followed precisely. The radio was confiscated and the building was burned to the ground as a punishment to anyone that hides one. Some were taken prisoner. That is what overunits typically order in such situations.”

Randall looked confused. “And?”

Arvin cleared his throat. “Then, that year, things changed. Dread changed his tactics when attacking towns. He destroyed many settlements during that time. Sand Town would have been no different, but that year, the fact that a radio was there would have made it a primary target in Dread’s mind.” A radio. That would have explained the thoroughness of the overunit when destroying the town. “When you heard the words ‘proceeding as planned,’ what was happening at your house?”

“It was being burned!” Randall almost shouted.

“And that was where the radio was hidden, so they were following the older procedure,” Arvin said lowly, mostly to himself but he knew everyone heard. “Where was your father?” Arvin asked.

“Hiding in the underground room under our house,” he muttered.

Arvin looked over at Jennifer and saw her close her eyes sympathetically, a frown furrowing her brow. He saw a tear form in her eyes. He’d been right about her. There was more to her than anyone knew.

“How well hidden was this underground room?”

“Very well hidden,” Randall said. “It had to be. It’s where we would hide whenever biomechs came around so they couldn’t find us. It had always been safe before.”

A thought crossed Arvin’s mind. “Why wasn’t the radio hidden in the underground room?”

“There was no reception down there, but it doesn’t matter! They burned my family! She burned them!”

Arvin hit the gavel on the table again. Maybe if Arvin kept too much emotion from being shown or the truth wouldn’t come out. He’d had a sneaking suspicion of what brought the Sand Town population to his small settlement years ago, but now to have them confirmed… “That’s all, Randall.”

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

The boy’s father had been under the house, and Jennifer had ordered it burned as per procedure. She followed procedure as she’d been ordered to do, as it was dictated she do. She found the radio, and gave the order to have the house burned. She had condemned a man to a horrific death, and she didn’t know. She wouldn’t have fired the house if she had known that he’d been in there! Everything she saw in the house made her think that no one had been there for hours!

The thought kept running through her head. She had, by her own order, killed a man even though she didn’t know he had been in the house. She could never make up for that.

Back at Jon’s site

Jon could have sworn that his chrono hadn’t changed.

Maybe because less than two minutes had passed since the last time he looked at it?

Had Jennifer reached Oasis? Was she safe? Was she all right? Was she hurt, lying in the middle of the desert knowing no help was coming…

His thoughts were interrupted by a mechanical sound. It wasn’t Soaron. A tram of some kind perhaps? He dragged himself over to the edge of the ridge and kept his head down, out of sight. He waited, the sound came closer, then, a crawler came into view.  A crawler! That meant Jennifer had reached the water station! She was all right! She had to be. Oh, that crawler brought back some memories… His dad had taught Jon to drive in a crawler. They weren’t quick, but they were sturdy and handled all sorts of terrain. Given the world they lived in, that was more important than learning how to joyride in an automobile. Although all those pictures he saw of Ferraris and Lamborghinis and a particular DeLorean --

“Surrender!”

Jon’s head jerked toward the noise. Blastarr! What was he doing there?

The biodread didn’t wait. He fired into the crawler, knocking the occupants to the ground. He couldn’t help! He was too far away. The blaster’s power had drained. There was nothing he could do to stop the biodread. The crawler kept rolling until it slammed into another rocky cliff wall. One of the men jumped back into the driver’s seat and grabbed the gun, trying to aim at Blastarr.

“This is Jack! Come in! Come in, this is Jack! Machines are here! There are Machines coming your way! This is –”

Blastarr fired again, shooting the man out of the cab and onto the ground. Neither man moved.

From a distance, Jon could hear a voice over the radio. “Can you read me, Jack? Jack, come in. Over. Oasis to Jack. Come in. Can you hear me?”

Jon craned his neck to get a better look at Blastarr. The biodread barely acknowledged the two men he’d gunned down. “Blastarr to Lord Dread. Two organics terminated. Transmission detected. Source vector eight-zero-six. Power’s original location was nine-two-seven.”

Jon could just make out Dread’s response. “It has been hours since Soaron shot down Power. He may have moved. Lock on and track source of newest transmission. It could be Power. I will send backup.”

Blastarr was being ordered to go to Jennifer’s position!

“No need,” Blastarr said arrogantly as he sped away.

Jon waited mere moments before Blastarr was out of sight. He dragged himself upright. He had to get down to that crawler and head back the way the crawler came. Blastarr would undoubtedly make a beeline for his target, but he’d have to traverse untraveled ground and avoid all sorts of pitfalls. It would slow him down. If Jon could follow the crawler’s path back before any winds blew away the tram tracks, he might be able to beat Blastarr there or at the very least, get there right after him.

He dragged himself away from the outcropping and carefully began to slide down the side of the rise. He kept himself from free-falling by using his hands to crawl down certain areas. Once he reached the bottom, he forced himself to stand. His leg was hurting badly. He practically hopped over to the crawler and hauled himself into the driver’s seat.

Jon cursed under his breath. With his right leg in a splint, he couldn’t use it to control the foot controls of the crawler. This particular vehicle had dual foot controls for each process, and he couldn’t use both feet. Driving one-footed wasn’t going to work. He looked inside the back of the crawler and found a metal rod – that would work! He sat down as best he could, pressed his left foot on the clutch and with his right hand, pressed the metal rod on the accelerator. He would be lucky if this contraption could run twenty miles per hour, maybe thirty, but there was no way he was going to let Jennifer face off with Blastarr alone, not with only reserve power in her suit.

He took a last glance at the bodies of the men who had driven out there. He’d tell the people at the water station – Oasis -- where to find them, but he didn’t have the time or the strength to try to manhandle them into the crawler. Blastarr was on the prowl, and he had to get to Oasis as fast as he could.

Volcania

No Need? Dread hoped Blastarr had not underestimated Power’s resources. Even after a crash, Jonathan Power could prove resourceful. In any case, there would be more organics for Blastarr to deal with at the coordinates. One could have the information they sought.

“You seem tense, Dread,” Overmind’s voice spoke lowly. “Soaron’s communication capabilities will be restored soon.”

“Yes. Blastarr has located the source of the local transmission. Power went down in that area. It is logical to believe he will seek help from a nearby settlement.”

There was a pause, then Overmind suggested, “Perhaps Blastarr should wait for Soaron. Two biodreads would –”

“No, there is no time,” Dread argued. “Power must be found. Soaron may join Blastarr once his regeneration is complete.”

Again, Overmind paused. “Logical. What of your investigation into Overunit Grieg?”

Did nothing escape Overmind’s attention? Sometimes, Dread wished for privacy. “He unknowingly gave me disinformation,” Dread complained.

“According to his transmission, his information was incomplete.”

“True,” Dread had to admit. Grieg could only guess at what information he found, but the information had been in error. Had someone placed it there on purpose to mislead them? “We must determine the source of the information leaks. It must be coming from inside Volcania given that no trace can be found on any outside server into our databanks. This organic, Circuit, has ties to the southwest where we have very little influence at the moment. There may be a connection.”

“Do you suspect Overunit Grieg?”

“No,” Dread informed him. “He is a loyal soldier and has proven his loyalty many times. He reported the information he had and determined a plausible theory from the information. It doesn’t matter. I have other concerns. Many of our ranking soldiers do not think as independently as I would like. There needs to be a change in their training. And certain ones, Grieg included, spend too much time in places like Tech City. It may be detrimental to their concentration processes. Perhaps we should curtail their time there.”

“Do you think that wise? We have discovered vital information from our sources at places like Tech City even though there is a risk of our classified information being mentioned to the enemy by soldiers who do not think as independently as we like,” Overmind surmised. “Some overunits have learned of Resistance tactical plans and reported them to us by visiting such areas friendly to the organics. If you suddenly remove individuals commonly known to frequent such locations, would that not alert the Resistance? That could alter their tactical habits should such a bold move occur.”

Dread hadn’t thought of that, but Overmind was correct. Any change in routine would be extremely noticeable – not only by the Resistance but also by anyone who may not be quite as loyal to Dread as they pretend.

“You are correct, Overmind. As always. We will bide our time and keep searching for the source of the information leak. Perhaps the truth will reveal itself in some unknown manner.”

Oasis

Again, Arvin quieted everyone in the main hall by hitting the gavel on the table. Gaelen sat in front of him, his eyes not looking at anyone but only occasionally glancing at Corporal Chase.

“Gaelen,” Arvin said quietly, “Do you confirm your nephew’s story? Is this the woman you both saw that night?”

Gaelen looked at her again. He paused, as if assessing her. “Yes, she was there.”

“Is she the one responsible?”

Gaelen shrugged. “Who can say? An overunit was in charge that night, and this one was no overunit. Of that, I’m certain. I’d met too many overunits when I was captured. One look in this one’s eyes, and you could see she wasn’t heartless. She was a child spouting slogans. I heard the younger ones learning them when I was captured. The older ones would say the first part, the younger ones would answer in unison. They’re conditioned to say those words without thinking or wondering what they’re about. That look in her eyes, she couldn’t have known what was going to happen. No one could have. To judge her now, in these times, who knows?”

Arvin listened carefully. He had been right. More and more, he was convinced that the corporal was not the typical Dread Youth variety. “You were captured and heard things while you were their prisoner. To your knowledge, was it the radio that brought the Dread soldiers to Sand Town or was there another reason?”

Gaelen looked down. “Mostly, they wanted the radio. They said that’s all they wanted. After I was captured, I heard them say things about settlements uniting and using radios to coordinate their actions or alert other settlements about surprise attacks. They didn’t want that to happen. That’s all they said they wanted. They didn’t care about small settlements or the people there. They just wanted the radio.”

Arvin’s suspicions were confirmed moment by moment with each sentence of the testimony. For years, he’d suspected that something particular happened during those days leading up to the Sand Town massacre, and now he had few doubts. He’d let events unfold on their own, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t find out more.

“Were you taken directly to a slave mine after you were captured?”

Arvin shrugged. “No. I was questioned. They were going to send me to the slave mines, but they changed their minds.”

Arvin saw Corporal Chase frown at that comment. Something Gaelen said seemed wrong to her?

Another confirmation of suspicions in Arvin’s mind.

“Why did they change their minds?” Arvin asked, thinking that might be the problem.

“They were overunits. Their reasons are their own…” Gaelen’s voice trailed off.

Arvin glanced at Jennifer again. No, that wasn’t what made the lady frown. “I thought you had escaped from them,” Arvin reminded him.

Gaelen looked at Arvin, a sudden fear and shame reflecting in his eyes. “I did, in a way,” Gaelen admitted.

Arvin tried a different tact. “You knew the Machines were coming to Sand Town?”

“I knew,” was the answer.

“Do you know how they found out about the radio? According to Randall’s testimony, your brother didn’t mention that he was in Sand Town when he spoke to others and only a very few knew where the radio was. Tracking radio locations wasn’t easy since they used antiquated technology.” He didn’t say that Randall’s testimony stated that only he, Gaelen and his father knew of the radio.

Gaelen sat there, staring at Arvin. “I’m sure they have their ways.”

“What does it matter?” Randall asked. “He got away and came home to us. Isn’t that what’s important?”

“Everything about that night is important,” Arvin said calmly. Suddenly, Arvin realized that the entire truth wouldn’t be told that day. There was more to the story than even he had realized. Perhaps the truth would come from another source.

He turned to the defendant. “Jennifer Chase, you’ve heard what’s been said. What do you say in your defense?”

Arvin suspected he knew what she would say first, but he wondered if she knew what she would say first.

Soaron’s Regeneration Site

“Soaron,” Overmind’s voice sounded in Soaron’s audio sensors.

“Yes, my lord?”

“Follow Blastarr as soon as possible. Do whatever is necessary to claim the data before him and bring it to me. This information was taken by means we cannot discover, and we must find the source. I do not trust Lord Dread in this matter. He seems somewhat distracted by recent problems.”

Ah, Overmind wished to best Dread in some way and find the thief before Dread did. “Understood, my lord. My regeneration should reach a sufficient percentage in an hour for me to sustain flight. I will follow the moment I am able.”

“Well done, my son,” Overmind praised.

Soaron looked at his mending limbs. He’d already be there if Blastarr hadn’t ripped off his leg. How he looked forward to ripping off Blastarr’s leg…

Oasis: Main Hall

What could she say? How could she explain?

Jennifer just opened her mouth and let the words come out. In a choked voice full of emotion, she said, “It’s true. I was in the Dread Youth. And I was in Sand Town.”

“You see? She admits it!” Randall yelled.

Arvin used the gavel again against the table. “Silence! This is a human being. She’ll have her say before we judge her!”

“She’s Dread Youth!” Randall tried again. “They’re all killers! They should all be executed.”

“Then we would be no better than them,” Arvin argued.

“They’re all the same!” Randall shouted. He stood, but Gaelen grabbed him by the arm. “Randall, they’re not all the same! She’s not what you think! She’s the one who saved our lives that night!”

Silence fell on the main hall.

Arvin stood. “Gaelen? Is there something you’d like to add to your testimony?”

Gaelen released a stunned Randall. “That night, when we sneaked out of the building we were hiding in, we stayed in the shadows and tried to keep still until there were no biomechs around. Then, we worked our way to the edge of the settlement. We had no choice but to run. We reached the edge of the settlement, and there was one more building we had to run to before we could get far enough into the shadows to escape into the desert. I turned, and there were two biomechs heading in our direction. They would see us when we moved, and then this woman looked directly at us. I remember because of her eyes. They weren’t killer eyes. I saw them in the firelight as clearly as I’m seeing them now. She called out to the biomechs and kept them talking. I looked back one last time before we ran out of sight, and she was still watching after us. If she hadn’t stopped those biomechs, we’d be dead or prisoners or digitized. If that overunit had found out… she risked a lot to save us that night, Randall. I didn’t realize how much… what they do to those young people in the Dread Youth until I was captured… I saw some when I was interrogated… I wasn’t as brave as she was…”

He’d been interrogated? Things started to make a perverse sense to Jennifer at that moment, and she knew what she had to do – what she had to say.

But Gaelen and Randall were the two running away that night? She hadn’t been expecting that.

Gaelen couldn’t go on. Randall sat down and stared at his uncle then at Corporal Chase. Maybe some of Randall’s anger would yield to logic, but he was a boy. That was doubtful. Jennifer didn’t expect him to ever forgive her. She didn’t have the right to ask.

“Randall,” Gaelen sat down next to his nephew, “you have to understand what a Dread Youth is and how they’re treated before you can understand what truly happened that night at Sand Town. Let her speak.”

“Corporal Chase?” Arvin nodded towards her. “What do you have to say for yourself? Before that, I would ask you to tell us about the Dread Youth as well as what happened at Sand Town.”

What could she say? How could she explain?

“I was taken to be in the Dread Youth, almost before I can remember. Dread took children of all ages to train for his own personal army. He stole them, killed parents to get them, had those loyal to the Machine hand their children over to him. I don’t know my own history, just the lies I’ve been told and what I think I remember.” She looked at the people gathered in the room. How could she tell them of what was ripped away from her? Of what Dread took away from all of them to create his army of emotionless human robots?

“From the moment we were taken, no matter our age, we were trained. From the moment we woke in the morning until we went to bed, our time was regimented. There was no deviation. Every day was the exact same thing. We were taught the slogans and the litanies. We were taught practical sciences and maths, electronics, engineering and computers, but no history or literature or philosophy. That would have taught us to think independently, and Dread couldn’t have that. His power had to be absolute, and that meant no one was allowed to question him. There were those who did, and they disappeared. I think some were digitized. Others may have been sent to the slave mines, only we didn’t know the mines existed then. I have no doubt others were executed. There could be no dissension against the Machine. We were to follow our orders without question or face deadly consequences, but the idea that anyone wouldn’t follow orders without question was unthinkable. It wasn’t done. We did as we were told because we didn’t know we could do anything else.”

She looked out at the group. She saw the looks on their faces – they didn’t know anything about the Dread Youth. It was like her early days with the team when she started telling them. They had been shocked and horrified. She saw the look in some of the faces in the gallery. They’d heard rumors, but they had never known there was truth behind them. “I grew up in Volcania. I didn’t know life was supposed to be different. I didn’t know there were supposed to be lakes and forests and blue skies or… even something as simple as blue butterflies. Everything I’d ever known was gray and metal. I thought everyone lived like I did. I spent my childhood in classrooms and training sessions. I spent my youth in leadership classes because I had been selected to be in the leadership from a young age. Our lives were mapped out for us; our behaviors were dictated to us.”

She paused for a moment, not knowing what to say next.

“Throughout our lives, we were always told that those who lived in the wastelands were animals, that those who opposed Lord Dread had to be punished and cleansed, but never how. The litanies would state that over and over again. As a child, I took what was told to me as the truth. I didn’t know to question what I was told. I didn’t know I was supposed to. Complete obedience to the Machine was expected or you were removed and never seen again. That was a terrifying thought to us.” She could feel the tears threatening to fall. She had to hold it together just a little longer. “It means we had disappointed the Machine and that we were condemned in some way for our defiance.”

There was so much more, but she only had moments to try to get them to understand why her behavior that night, although unforgiveable to her, was partly the result of years of conditioning. “There’s something you have to understand. That was all I knew. I never had a family.” She couldn’t stop the tears. “The Dread Youth was my family. It was my whole world. There was nothing else. I never knew about having parents or friends. No feelings or love. I knew nothing about being human. I served the Machine, and I was so proud to be Youth Leader Chase. And I knew all my lessons and I knew my destiny as part of the New Order, but there’s something else you have to understand.” Then, she had to make them understand. They had to know the truth. She felt the tears running down her face, and she didn’t stop them. “That night everything that I knew -- it fell apart into the lie that it is. I wanted to shout out. I wanted to stop them. If I could have told you that I didn’t know... I didn’t realize what was going to happen. We didn’t know that people were killed and entire towns were torched! They never told us that. But that night I did, I saw the true meaning of the slogans and the uniform that I was wearing.” No, the whole truth was hidden under lies and slogans and litanies. For days before Sand Town, she saw her whole world fall apart into the false charade Dread had built. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her voice. “When I realized it was all a lie, that my life was a lie, that I had hurt others but I didn’t know that it was going to happen, I escaped.”

“Wait,” Arvin held up a hand. “You broke through the conditioning?”

“Conditioning?” Randall asked.

“They’re brainwashed and conditioned from childhood,” Arvin explained. “Like machines, they’re programmed what to think and what to say, and given the source of the conditioning technique, breaking it should be impossible.”

Jennifer nodded her head. “I saw things happen in the few days before Sand Town that made me question everything I’d been taught, but I kept thinking that maybe I was wrong. Maybe what I had seen and heard was a misunderstanding. Then I was sent to Sand Town for some reason I didn’t understand. There were other things going on that I didn’t know about. Then I saw what they did there. I saw them destroy everything. I couldn’t stop what happened. I wanted to; I wanted to shoot down all the biomechs. I wanted to stop them, but there was nothing I could do. They would have shot me down and kept on destroying the town. I found out what their plans were for me, and when we returned to Volcania, I was able to escape.”

Arvin sat back and folded his hands together. “A youth leader… escaping Volcania without being noticed, getting past the security protocols, avoiding the patrols, knowing they’d think you were a traitor if you were caught – it must have been difficult.”

Again, Jennifer nodded. “An opportunity presented itself for me to escape. I did, and I didn’t look back. I never once thought of going back. I’d rather have died in the wastelands than ever go back."

Arvin leaned forward. “And a Dread Youth couldn’t have asked for help from anyone in any town…” he mused aloud. “You were alone, weren’t you? Some type of self-imposed penance?”

“I couldn’t stop what happened at Sand Town, no matter how much I wanted to. I didn’t deserve anyone’s forgiveness or help. I didn’t have the right to ask. I’d done something too horrible to ever be forgiven for. I went off on my own, and I was ready to accept whatever punishment was coming to me. I started a journey,” she said, but that wasn’t quite the right word. No, it wasn’t a journey. She didn’t know what to call it. “It later led me to Captain Power, and he has taught me what it is to be human. Things that I never knew. Things I had no idea of. If I could go back and change that night, I would, but I can’t and I try every day of my life to make up for it.”

Randall stood up quickly, knocking his chair over in the process. “So your bad childhood is supposed to excuse you for murdering my parents? Don’t you see what she’s doing? She’s trying to trick us with her words and her lies!”

“Randall!” Gaelen moved in-between Randall and Jennifer. “Please, stop. You don’t understand what’s been said here today. No, her childhood does not excuse her for what she did at Sand Town, but she didn’t know what was going to happen. She’s not the one who brought the Machines there. She was just another tool that they used. And this girl’s blood can’t bring back the dead! Please! Stop!”

Please! Stop!

She knew. Gaelen just confirmed what Jennifer thought. She had heard that word stated that way once before. That day, when she followed Colville to see what would happen to her, she had heard the man in the Room being interrogated. She looked in the window and saw a sight she had seen before – an interrogation. The prisoner was fastened with a headpiece, his eyes covered as his body was tortured, as pain signals were delivered into his brain by the device.

“Please, please…”

“Speak, animal,” the overunit commanded. “Tell us the information and we will be lenient.”

“Stop, please stop,” the prisoner begged again.

Jennifer watched, listened.

“Please, I’ll tell you! The radio’s in Sand Town. Please, stop…”

“Where is Sand Town?”

The prisoner forced himself not to answer.

“No matter. Very good, organic,” the overunit praised him. “For your confession, you will be released. The Machine is forgiving to those who do not oppose it.”

Jennifer ducked down so no one inside the room could see her watching outside. She heard the overunit and a medical technician talking. “Implant a homing device in this organic. We’ll follow him to this Sand Town. Lord Dread has assigned a special team to deal with them.”

“Special, Overunit?”

“Lord Dread has important plans for this particular group but they must be tested,” the overunit answered.

Tested. Why? What was the test? From what Arvin had intimated, the radio meant something more to Dread than Jennifer had ever realized at the time. Why was that time those years ago so important? There had been organized resistances to Dread for years. What had changed the playing field that year?

“Randall, just please, stop. Other things happened that brought about the destruction of Sand Town. This woman isn’t the one who led them there.”

Arvin leaned forward. “Gaelen, is it your testimony that she is not to blame?”

Gaelen faced the tribunal. “Does she share the responsibility? There are many who do, that overunit, those biomechs, even Dread himself. All of them. Is she guilty for what happened?” Gaelen shook his head. “No. She didn’t send them to Sand Town, and she risked her life for two strangers she saw running into the night. If only I had been that brave.”

Arvin banged the gavel on the table and waited for silence. “People, you’ve heard the testimony –”

“Arvin!” a man rushed into the main hall. “Jack and Martin are dead. Their remote biosensors flatlined. Jack called in that machines are on their way. Sensors show it’s a biodread warlord!”

Warlord? Soaron!

Jennifer hurried to the man. “Did they find Captain Power?”

The man shrugged. “I don’t know. Jack didn’t say before he was cut off. That must be when he was killed.”

Jennifer saw these townsfolk through a soldier’s eyes. None of them were soldiers. They wouldn’t stand a chance against Soaron.

Arvin didn’t waste any time. “All non-combatants evacuate at once. Get to the ruins. Everyone else prepare to defend Oasis.”

“Wait!” Randall protested as everyone filed out of the main hall. “What about her? The tribunal isn’t over yet. We’ve got to pass sentence. Don’t you know that she’s the one who brought the Machines here? She’s guilty.”

“You still believe that, Randall?” Arvin asked him. “Someone who had no idea that the Machines were evil, who risked her life to help you and Gaelen escape Sand Town, who was willing to submit herself to a trial by strangers and agree to our decision to save the life of another? Do you honestly think she’s guilty of murder? Is that the way you view her actions at Sand Town?”

“She said she did those things,” Randall said again.

“That she did, but nothing happened the way it usually happened at Sand Town. The rules were changed, people weren’t told,” Arvin stated as he handed Gaelen his gun. “It’s your judgment, Gaelen. You know what really happened, how it happened, so you determine what happens to her.”

Gaelen took the gun but held it down by his side.

“Do it, Uncle,” Randall almost begged.

Gaelen just shook his head. “Randall, stop. Please, just stop.”

Jennifer knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt. “It was you, wasn’t it? That day, in the Room?”

Gaelen slightly nodded his head. “You knew, didn’t you? You didn’t say anything about it.”

“There was nothing you could have done other than what you did to stay alive,” she told him. “And saying anything about it – what good would it do now?”

“It could have spared you a trial.”

Jennifer shook her head. “No, it wouldn’t. I was there, and I did things I will never forgive myself for. I have to pay for what I’ve done.”

Randall was confused by their words. “Uncle Gaelen, what is it?”

Jennifer didn’t think she should be privy to that conversation. “Look, I can help. I know how to fight biodreads. Let me.”

Without hesitation, Gaelen nodded and Jennifer ran out. She had to stop Soaron before he hurt anyone.

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

“Uncle Gaelen, you can’t let her get away. She’s got to pay for what she did.”

“No, Randall,” Gaelen said. “She’s not the guilty one. I am.” He forced his nephew to face him. “She knows the full story, but she didn’t say anything during the trial because she was prepared to take full responsibility and let me keep my secret.” Gaelen took a deep breath. “I had been captured by the soldiers and taken to Volcania. I was tortured until I told them that the radio was in Sand Town. Randall, your father was trying to determine the state of the Resistance against Dread and if we could join in any way. That must have been what Dread knew only he didn’t know where the radio was. They let me go, but they tracked me. They knew I’d go right back home and try to hide the radio in a safer place.”

“They followed you?” Randall asked, not believing that Gaelen could have betrayed them.

“I didn’t know then, but I know now. I found the tracking device the next day and destroyed it. I didn’t want them tracking us further.”

“She –”

“She didn’t know, Randall,” Gaelen told him again. “While I was in Volcania, I found out about the Dread Youth, who they were, how they were trained. Yes, she was there that night, but she behaved as she had been conditioned to do. The fact that she broke through that conditioning and helped the two of us to escape – you have no idea the miracle that is. She has punished herself for what she did, and she was willing to take the blame and let us punish her for what I did. That overunit? She ordered the destruction of our town and enjoyed what she did. She should be executed, but Jennifer Chase is not one of them. She didn’t know what was going to happen that night. To kill her now – you would have innocent blood on your hands because she is not the one who brought the Machines to Sand Town. I was.”

Desert Road

Jon pressed down harder on the accelerator. There was no way he could get to Oasis before Blastarr. He didn’t know how well defended Oasis was, but he knew Jennifer would fight Blastarr with whatever power she had left in her suit, and he knew there wasn’t much. He had to get to Oasis fast. The idea of Jennifer fighting Blastarr by herself scared him.

He checked the distance he’d already traveled – Jennifer had walked at least that far? There was no food, no flowing water, few cactuses to get water from… did she make it Oasis safely?

She had to. The crawler had arrived. She had to have reached Oasis in one piece.

Jon kept telling himself that.

She had made it there, but what condition was she in? She’d been knocked unconscious when the bike crashed. All that walking, exposed to the dim sun, Blastarr possibly already at Oasis…

He performed an action he had only heard of in a movie once – he put the pedal to the metal and let the engine roar!

Oasis

Jennifer ran outside – directly into Blastarr’s sights!

She dove behind a ruined wall. “Blastarr?” she muttered. “Where did he come from?” She was not expecting that biodread to be in the area. It also meant if Soaron finished regenerating any time soon, he’d join Blastarr and there was no way Oasis would survive.

Without another thought, Jennifer rushed out, placed her fist on the actibadge and shouted, “Power on.” Immediately, her armor was in place and she was ready to take on a biodread.

“Power level: 10% of maximum and dropping. Possible systems disruption. Recharge immediately,” the suit’s computer warned her.

Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen. “Well, it’ll have to do,” she said to herself as she charged out into the middle of the settlement.

She joined the main defensive line as they fired their blasters at Blastarr, having absolutely no effect against the enraged biodread. Blastarr shot his weapon in a straight line across the front line of defenders, destroying walls, busting doors, forcing everyone to jump away to avoid the shots. Jennifer tucked and rolled and maneuvered behind a stone wall. She rushed out again and tossed her throwing stars directly at his power plate. She forced him to focus on her and chase her down, leaving the townsfolk alone. She took off, ran as quickly as she could away from the main buildings, giving the others a clear shot at Blastarr. She stopped, threw more stars at him. The biodread solidified his shield, blocked every star that Jennifer threw at him.

“AARRGGHH!” the biodread screamed as he advanced on another man near her, a man with a grenade launcher. Without remorse, the robot shot him down and kept on toward Jennifer.

“Blast it!” she muttered.

She dove for the grenade launcher and pointed it directly at Blastarr. One quick, unaimed shot – it hit him too high on the chest. He returned fire, shot Jennifer directly in the mid-section. The force of the blast threw her back into some debris. She blacked out, hearing the sound of the computer warn, “Total system failure.”

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Jennifer was down!

She wasn’t moving.

Blastarr advanced menacingly, the ground shaking as he stalked towards her. Jon slammed on the brakes, stood as best he could, and grabbed the mounted gun in the crawler --

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Jennifer came to and saw Blastarr stomping towards her.

“One of Power’s team,” Blastarr said smugly. “Where is your captain, and where is the data tape you stole from my lord?”

Jennifer just shook her head. Ever muscle she had was screaming at her. “You’ve got to have a short circuit if you think I’m going to tell you anything.”

“Speak or die!” Blastarr ordered, pointing his primary weapon at her.

Gaelen ran out of the main hall. “No!” he shouted as he fired Arvin’s weapon repeatedly at Blastarr.

“Insolent,” the biodread mumbled as he almost absent-mindedly shot Gaelen down in the street. Jennifer watched in horror as Randall ran out of the main hall and hurried to Gaelen’s side. He was trying to protect his uncle’s body…

Blastarr turned back to Jennifer, his gun aimed point blank at her. “Give me that data tape!”

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Jon pointed the mounted gun directly at Blastarr and fired full force!

The blast hit the biodread square in the middle, knocking him over.

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

“Pilot!”

Jennifer could see Jon standing in the crawler, one hand securely on the gun, the other waving at her with a thumbs-up.

Blastarr hauled himself up again, growling in anger.

“Oh, Blastarr is in for it now,” she muttered. She forced herself to stand, ignoring her sore stomach muscles, and grabbed up the grenade launcher. She had a clear shot at his power plate and fired at it. Again and again, she hit the center of the biodread knocking him down. The light in his power plates went out, putting the robot into regeneration mode. What did it take to destroy that robot? Even the explosion at Haven had no effect. Jennifer dropped the grenade launcher, every muscle she had telling her they’d had enough, thank you, will you please rest now? She looked over at Jon. He was smiling proudly at her.

They’d made it out alive, but not everyone in Oasis did.

Jennifer hurried as best she could over to Gaelen. Randall sat there, crying over his uncle’s body. Jennifer checked Gaelen’s pulse, knowing that there would be no heartbeat.

Randall looked at her, tears in his eyes. “He was the one who told them about the radio. They tortured him, and he told them. They lied when they said all they wanted was the radio. He said you knew, but you didn’t say that he was the one who brought the Machines to Sand Town in the tribunal. Why?”

Jennifer shrugged. “What good would it have done? He was tortured, Randall. Dread’s interrogators know how to hurt people in ways you’ve never dreamed of before. They don’t give prisoners a choice. It’s only a matter of time before people answer them.”

Randall frowned. “But you were taking the blame for what Uncle Gaelen did and what that overunit did. The tribunal would have stopped if you had told us that it was him.”

“No, it wouldn’t have, Randall. I’m guilty of a lot of things. I did them, and I’ve confessed to them all. The only defense I have is that before Sand Town, I didn’t know what I was doing was wrong. I’d give my life to undo what happened at Sand Town if it could bring everyone back, but I can’t. Now I try to make up for all the wrong I did. I’ve lived with my own guilt every day since then, and so has your uncle. They had other reasons for attacking Sand Town, but I don’t know what they were. Gaelen didn’t know they set him up and followed him. It wasn’t his fault. I wasn’t going to rub salt in a wound.”

Maybe Randall understood, maybe he didn’t, but he did say, “Uncle Gaelen told me the truth because he didn’t want me to have your innocent blood on my hands.”

“I’m not innocent,” Jennifer told him.

“You’re innocent of what I thought you did.”

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Jon used the metal rod as a crutch and limped over to where Jennifer was kneeling by a fallen man. She was all right. He could tell she was hurting – being knocked out twice and knocked down by Blastarr as well as taking a very long walk through the desert didn’t help any. Still, if he had any doubts, that smile she had on her face when she saw him with the crawler dispelled them.

She had survived Blastarr. How many times had she survived nearly impossible odds?

He reached her, placed a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him. He could see how tired she was. It’d been a rough day. “You okay?”

She smiled and nodded. “Yeah.”

“What do we do now?” a man approached them.

Jennifer stood. Jon could hear her groan. She wasn’t hurt more than she was letting on again, was she? That was an old behavior he didn’t want to see repeated. “Captain, this is Arvin. He’s in charge here.”

The two men shook hands, but Arvin looked anything but welcoming. “Arvin.”

“You’ll have to leave,” Jennifer told him. “Dread will send others. I was expecting Soaron to be the one attacking, not Blastarr. He’s still out there and may be here soon. The captain and I can help you, but you’ll have to gather your people quickly.”

Arvin looked around at the town. “I knew it was too good to be true. We were only safe here for a little while.” Then, he turned back to Jennifer. “Look, about the tribunal, I didn’t know that Gaelen was the one who betrayed Sand Town, but you didn’t say that it was him. I always knew there was more to the story, but I guessed his involvement when I heard what was said. Then when I learned about the radio, I knew why Sand Town was targeted. After everything, you still fought to save us. I don’t –”

“Let’s just say it’s a debt been paid,” Jennifer said quickly.

Arvin nodded, then motioned for a few of the men to help with Gaelen’s body. In a loud voice, he said, “Everyone! Pack up quickly. We have to leave before more machines show up.”

As everyone around them bustled toward their homes to gather their things, Jon tapped Jennifer on the shoulder. “Tribunal? What was going on here?”

Abandoned Oasis: Some Time Later

“Lord Overmind, I am approaching the coordinates now,” Soaron reported to Overmind as he flew quickly toward the town.

“What reports do we have of the settlement?” Overmind asked.

“All sensors indicate no human activity.”

There was silence, then “Either Blastarr has removed all organics and has the data tape, or he has failed, the people have fled and the data tape as well. What news of Power?”

“None, my lord.” The town was immediately in front of him. Soaron slowed his flight and prepared to land.

“Report what you discover as soon as it is safe to do so.”

“Confirmed, my lord.” Knowing Blastarr, that ground crawler probably destroyed any chance they had of capturing Power. His capabilities were certainly lacking compared to the fully mechanical machines.

A quick fly-by showed that there was no one in the town. Not a single person. However, in the center of the quad was a fallen Blastarr. Soaron was going to enjoy this.

He landed mere feet away from his mechanical nemesis.

“Soaron,” Blastarr said disgustingly.

“So good to see you again, scrapheap,” Soaron taunted him.

Suddenly, he wondered how long it would take Blastarr to regenerate if he were to rip the ground-crawler’s leg off…

Ruins

The ruins were only a resting spot, allowing the townspeople to bury Gaelen and decide which direction they wanted to go. Even with all the help Jon and Jennifer had tried to give them, the Oasis group was intensely independent. Still, they weren’t going to turn down free advice or warnings that Resistance fighters could give them. It was decided – they would stay at the ruins until morning, retrieve Jack and Martin’s bodies for burial and then strike out to the west for a town about twenty miles away called Parmen, another water station capable of absorbing Oasis’ population.

Jon had tried to contact the Power Base on the Oasis radio, but it had a limited range. They were too far away to reach Mentor, and the rest of the team was probably still on their own mission. Plus, that storm had slowed but was still heading in their direction. It was causing a lot of electrical interference. There was no way to contact Mentor from the ruins. He and Jennifer would have to get back to the sky bike and try to repair that radio to contact the base, but the sky bike was miles away. That was going to be a hard walk for the two of them even with the townspeople giving them a lift back close to the crash site. Despite everyone’s appreciation at their fighting Blastarr and stopping him, despite the friendliness they had been shown after the fact, it was still after the fact.

“Tribunal? What was going on here?”

Jennifer had told him, but he could tell it wasn’t the whole story. It was a less than detailed version, but he could read between the lines.

They had put Jennifer on trial for Sand Town, and they had no idea what had happened to her in those days leading up to the destruction. They didn’t know everything she witnessed, how all the lies had begun to line up and then absolutely fell apart into the deceptions that they were. It was Sand Town that brought her to her humanity, that showed her the truth and gave her the courage to risk everything to escape. Jon wanted to get her away from them. He couldn’t show his feelings – not then. He couldn’t let the people in Oasis think that there was any anger or animosity, not since they were depending on them to get them closer to their crash site. He knew that they were just like all the others -- they were just trying to survive and they wanted to get even with anyone they thought responsible for their lot in life. He’d seen that time and again, but all Jon could really think about was that these people had Jennifer’s life in their hands and that she willingly agreed to undergo a tribunal just to get help to him. Despite everything she had told them, it wasn’t until after she risked her life for them that anyone really believed she was telling the truth. How could they not have looked into her eyes and seen the regret? How could they not understand the life-threatening courage it took to escape the Dread Youth? Did they think that walking out of Volcania was as easy as a moonlight stroll?

Yes, the people were being polite and nice and giving. They had given them some food and water and tended to their wounds before they left Oasis, but Jon had this gut feeling that he just wanted to get as much distance between the townspeople and Jennifer as he possibly could.

He looked down at his leg. A medic had redressed the wound and re-splinted it, commenting on the good job Jennifer had done securing the leg in the first place. Jon had agreed. Jennifer knew how to be a medic. It had been part of her Dread Youth training, but he didn’t mention that. He didn’t think that the townspeople would be willing to grasp the irony that a group created to help destroy the human race actually had the knowledge and expertise to help them, even after Jennifer’s testimony.

He didn’t say anything untoward. He schooled his features and remained stoic. He stood beside Jennifer at Gaelen’s funeral and refused to leave her side. He let that be his statement of his opinion of her.

One by one, the townsfolk paid their respects to Gaelen. None of them knew that he had been the one to betray Sand Town. Jennifer asked Arvin and Randall to keep it quiet if no one else picked up on the verbal clues brought out in the tribunal. It wouldn’t help anyone and could only stir up bad feelings. Once again, Jon’s opinion of her raised up a few notches. She’d take the brunt of the responsibility of what happened so Gaelen could rest in relative peace and be remembered with honor.

Clegg stood beside Randall and placed his hand on his shoulder. “If there’s anything you need…”

“Thanks, Clegg,” Randall answered as his friend walked away.

Randall glanced at Jennifer. Again, Jon wondered how Randall had recognized her after all those years. He’d been the first to accuse her of killing everyone at Sand Town. “I just want to say I’m sorry,” he said quickly. I really didn’t know all the facts.”

“None of us did,” Jennifer told him. “And we both have things to be sorry for, Randall. We’re going to bury them here, all right?”

Jon knew she wouldn’t. She would carry Sand Town with her the rest of her life, but something else had happened there that he didn’t know about. Hopefully, she would tell Jon.

Later that night

They set up the temporary camp that night at the ruins. The wounded needed some rest; morning was only a few hours away, so there was no point going on any further. The plan was to leave before dawn, to try to get as much distance between the settlers and the biodreads as possible. With any luck, Dread would have already called them back or they needed to recharge their power cells after both had been beaten that day.

Jon sat on a flat boulder near the back of the ruins, away from everyone and watched the goings-on. Everyone had treated him like some sort of celebrity after they knocked down Blastarr, but he was noticing some reticence on their part when it came to Jennifer. They seemed to be apologetically polite – if that was the correct term. No one knew how to act around her. She’d risked her life to save them when they were ready to execute her -- that was a concept they didn’t know how to relate to. Watching her repair some of their weapons, recalibrating them and realigning the sights, acting as if she didn’t hold a grudge… Well, Jon did. He understood the settlers’ point of view, he did, but this was Jennifer they had endangered.

He had a grudge.

“May I join you?”

Jon looked up to see Arvin standing there. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk with the man who led the tribunal, but Arvin was the leader of the group currently “hosting” their visit. So, he’d be polite. Jennifer was doing that, so could he. She always set a good example.

He pointed to the boulder next to him. “Please.”

Arvin sat down, took a breath and looked over the townspeople.

“I’m sorry you had to leave your settlement,” Jon told him.

“So am I. So many lost,” he muttered. “But it was only a matter of time before Dread found us. We’ve been helping out resistance groups when we could for some years now. I’m sure he wouldn’t appreciate that. It would have been worse if you two hadn’t been there.” Arvin chuckled. “I’ve never seen anything like what your corporal did. Fight a biodread? I didn’t think that was possible. All they ever do is destroy. To see anyone or anything stand up to one… it’s remarkable.”

Jon had to agree. “It’s what we do. She’s had some experience fighting Blastarr in the past, and she won’t stand by and watch innocent people get hurt if she can stop it. She cares.”

“Ah, I see. Now that makes sense,” Arvin commented.

“What makes sense?”

Arvin leaned back a little to try to get more comfortable on the boulder. “Everything she’s done since I met her this afternoon. She took the blame that was actually Gaelen’s, fought to save people who put her on trial but what first impressed me was that she readily agreed to a tribunal and would abide by our decision if we’d get help to you. Her one concern was getting to you. Even when we knew the Machines were coming, the first question she asked was if they’d found you. You must be very important to her.”

Jon let the words echo through his mind. You must be very important to her. Maybe, just maybe, what he felt for her was reciprocated? “We’re teammates. She knows how important a team is. Any of us would do the same for each other.”

Arvin nodded, then he crossed his arms. “Perhaps, but that’s not what I saw. I have to admit, if she hadn’t confessed she was in the Dread Youth, I wouldn’t have ever guessed it. Everything about her personality is completely opposite to everything I’ve witnessed about them. Dread Youth don’t cry. Dread Youth don’t care. Dread Youth do not abide anything we say or do.”

No, they didn’t. “To say she’s diametrically opposed to the Dread Youth is an understatement,” Jon explained. “There’s nothing in her personality or belief system that is remotely Dread Youth. They may have raised her and trained her, but she’s not one of them. She was forced to wear the uniform, that’s all. She’s truly one of the best people I know.”

Arvin reached into his pocket and pulled out a pipe. He didn’t light it; he just balanced it in his hands. “It sounds like she’s just as important to you as you are to her.”

Jon’s brow furrowed. “Well, yes. We’re friends. Have been for –”

“Son, you might be able to fool each other, but you’re not fooling anyone else. And I’ve been around a little too long to be fooled. Even when I was working Intel with the government before Taggart became Dread, I saw a lot of people come and go through his ranks. That one is not like any I’ve ever seen before. She’s not like the other Dread Youth anymore. She’s human again. She risks being executed by complete strangers just to get help to you, and you forced yourself to physically do things you shouldn’t have done to get to her. I saw the look in your eyes when she got up after being knocked down by that biodread. You didn’t know if she was dead or alive once that armor of hers disappeared. Anyone who looks at you two can see it. I’m guessing you two don’t?”

Jon was speechless. He didn’t think he was the type of person to wear his heart on his sleeve… how many others were seeing what he was feeling? First Jessica Morgan, then Andy Jackson, now Arvin?

“Ah, I’m right, aren’t I?” Arvin asked with a self-satisfied grin. “Son, I’m going to give you some advice. You can take it or leave it. Before things got really bad, some of the government number crunchers figured out how long it would take until Dread got his total human annihilation and his metal world. The average view was about twenty years, and it’s already been fifteen. There are precious few of us humans left. We’re on the eve of our own destruction, and our time might be shorter than we think. Don’t leave things unsaid and chances untaken. It’s what we don’t do that we regret more than the things we do.”

Jon unknowingly smiled in response. In an unguarded way, he said, “I know, you’re right, but there’s too much we have to do. And with a war on –”

“There’s always going to be something going on, and there’s always something you have to do,” Arvin countered. “Drought, flood, sickness, earthquakes, tornadoes, wars, biodreads, even ornery old fools in a town who don’t listen when someone tells the truth and threatens everything you have. Don’t let life stop you from having a life.”

Jon couldn’t argue with that advice, but he did change the subject. “How long were all of you at Oasis?”

“Some years,” he answered. “But no settlement is permanent thanks to Dread. There’s no telling when he’ll attack a settlement, but we can set up shop somewhere else. Other resistance groups will find us just like they have before. I guess we were just a water station for about three years before Sand Town happened. Then the survivors showed up – Sand Town was just on the other side of the mountain, did you know that?”

The other side of the mountain? “Uh, no, I didn’t know it was that close,” Jon told him.

Arvin nodded. “It took days to travel by foot, but the survivors made it to us despite traveling in the summer. A lot of them were farmers so it seemed like a good time to set up a proper settlement and grow crops. We’ve been fairly safe –”

“Until now,” Jon finished. “I need to apologize for that. It was my fault. I didn’t take into consideration that Dread would send Blastarr after we shot down Soaron or that Blastarr was even in the area. We needed to get to help, but it cost you your town.” He didn’t say that he thought Jennifer would be safe once she reached Oasis when the opposite turned out to be the truth. Jon could have sent her to her death.

“Don’t apologize. We’ve had some protection up until now from some interesting sources, but we knew it wouldn’t last. Besides, your corporal saved a lot of lives.” He got quiet for a moment, but then he observed the obvious. “She’s the one who broke through the conditioning. I never believed it was possible, no matter the rumors.”

“Rumors?”

“A year or so back, there was a rumor circulating that a Dread Youth raised in the Corps broke training and had been working with a major resistance group, namely yours, against Dread for some time, but I honestly didn’t think it was possible. A member of the Corps actually on a major resistance team? The conditioning was designed so that couldn’t happen.”

Something Arvin said seemed to register with Jon. “You know about the conditioning?”

Arvin nodded. “Get them when they’re young, teach them one way and keep them away from any contradictory influences like literature, history – the social sciences. Nothing that would require them to think that they should look closer at what’s around them, nothing that taught them to think independently of what they were told. Reward complete obedience. Destroy any that hinted of having a rebellious nature. Allow no personal emotion except devotion for the System. Make the System a religion and tie their entire existence to its teachings. Make them believe they are the ones who bring about a great new world.”

“That sounds like I imagined it to be,” Jon agreed.

“It’s an old form of mental and emotional conditioning used by various dictators over the centuries. Now Dread, he was smart. He found some supposedly infallible conditioning methods, cobbled them together, varied them a bit, found out how to build the perfect soldier. What’s remarkable is that not only did your corporal do something she wasn’t trained to do, but she did something she was specifically trained not to do. She saw, she reasoned and she thought for herself. How she did that, I can’t begin to explain.”

“How do you know so much about it?” Jon asked him.

Arvin took a deep breath. “I was a trained psychologist. Worked for the government for a while. I was with the Behavioral Analysis Unit for the FBI for a year or two. Worked in a joint research operation with the CIA and a few other letters of the now antiquated government alphabet soup. When the wars started, before the Metal Wars began, they wanted a lot of us to find new ways to motivate and train soldiers as well as break the will of prisoners during interrogation. Some of us would be sent into other countries to try to train young recruits to work against their own governments. They wanted us to turn them into double agents or sleeper agents, turn their loyalties.” Arvin looked at Jon. “No one ever resisted our interrogation techniques and no one ever broke through our conditioning. Taggart technically stole our research during one of his laboratory takeovers maybe eight or nine years before the Metal Wars actually started. His company bought out the ownership of our lab and got access to all our information. Used it as part of the system he designed to train his Dread Youth only we didn’t know it then. He hunted us down and tried to kill us since we were the ones who might be able to unravel the conditioning. We went into hiding. I ended up out here. It wasn’t until the first Dread Youth got into the battles that I saw the telltale signs of my own processes in them. In short, Captain, I’m one of the people whose processes, procedures and research invented the techniques that allowed interrogators to get the information they’d need to destroy a place like Sand Town and helped create the Dread Youth like your corporal.” He nodded his head toward Jennifer. “In a way, I helped make her into what she became, but she alone became the woman she is today. How she broke through that conditioning, I honestly can’t tell you, but I’d love to know. Absolutely every bit of research and evidence and proof said it was foolproof.”

She saw the truth for herself. Wouldn’t that have been enough for anyone? Jon thought for a moment – others had seen far worse things than Jennifer had yet remained loyal to Dread, but maybe they needed to see events in a certain sequence to break through the conditioning? Hadn’t they all gone through the same conditioning? Jon had never wondered that before. Could there be different types of training for the Dread Youth? That was an investigation for another time. “She’s one of a kind,” Jon agreed.

“So I’m right,” Arvin noticed. “She is important to you. That’s good. We need more of that in the world.”

Jon almost protested but then Arvin handed him a small recorder. “You probably already know most of what she testified to, but I think you should know exactly what was said. This is a recording of the tribunal. You may not know this, but the year Sand Town was destroyed was the year Dread ramped up his attacks on settlements. Sand Town was the first that he changed his usual cleansing procedure on. If you remember the way things were then, resistance groups were independent. There was no working together. Then, there were some rogue resistance groups getting radios to settlements to set up a means of communication and organization with the towns. They were trying to recruit help from people who weren’t even fighting Dread directly. It’s odd to think it was like that since just about every town these days has radios. Anyway, Dread found out about them and ran some attacks specifically targeting the radios. He wanted to stop the communication. Something else happened, I don’t know what, but Dread made some big moves that year.”

The memory did seem to come to the fore. There was no unity among the groups, then eventually, radios were showing up all over. Jon thought that people were relearning old technology. He never thought that some of the resistance groups were supplying them. But big moves? What had happened that triggered the change in Dread’s tactics?

“Don’t be surprised if you didn’t know,” Arvin explained. “There’s a lot going on in the military that only a few know about.” He pointed to the recorder. “As far as what you know, if you had any doubts about what she feels about you, maybe you’ll find some answers on here. You might find answers to questions you didn’t even know you had.” Arvin stood and walked off, leaving Jon to consider what he told him.

Their trip to the southwest had certainly proven to be enlightening. Resistance groups working surreptitiously and keeping their actions secret from other groups, stolen processes and procedures… Jon had never once thought exactly how Dread trained the Dread Youth. He’d never considered the various methods that Dread utilized to control every aspect of their lives. Lyman Taggart was not a psychologist. He was an engineer, a programmer, a designer – but to control the minds of thousands? He had started training people before he joined with Overmind, before he made his takeover move. Taggart must have utilized the research of who-knows-how-many scientists to create his human army. How many others had their research stolen? If they could find out the research, could they fight it? Could they free Dread Youth if they could counteract the methods Dread used?

How many people would actually admit to being the founders of the research that helped create the Dread Youth?

Jon thought the somewhat paternal advice was similar to what his own father would have told him. He placed the disk in his pocket and patted it. He would listen to it later.

Wait… did Arvin say that the refugees from Sand Town had come to Oasis in the summer?

Power Base

“What a day!” Hawk stretched as he walked into the control room. “I had no idea this mission would take this long! Next time, we take the jump ship.”

Scout followed him in. “Next time, don’t say there’s something wrong with the jump ship just so Jennifer and the captain can take one sky bike. Lie.”

“Lie about her jump ship? Jennifer would know. Speaking of those two…” Hawk powered up Mentor. “Mentor, any word from Pilot or the captain?”

“None, Major,” the computer image told him. “However, the storm front is still creating a great deal of interference.”

“They haven’t reported in at all?” Tank asked.

“Not since this morning when we lost contact,” Mentor explained. “I am currently receiving an incoming transmission from the town of Bentley. They’re requesting help moving some medical supplies to the nearby clinic.”

“Think they’re okay?” Scout asked Hawk. “Should we go after them?”

“Bentley’s medical supplies include penicillin,” Hawk told him, “and the clinic’s been waiting on it for about a month… no, they should be okay. I hope. Mentor, keep trying to raise them.”

Hawk didn’t say he was worried, he didn’t have to. What he also didn’t say is that he didn’t even know where they were.

Ruins

Jennifer walked over to Jon, holding two mugs of steaming liquid. “No food, they’re not unpacking any of the stores, but they did heat up some broth.”

As she handed him one, Jon noticed the dark circles under her eyes. He could hear the fatigue in her voice. The cuts, the bruises, the way she walked that hinted at sore muscles -- after everything she’d gone through that day, he was surprised she was still on her feet. She had to be hurt and exhausted. An hour in the regenerator would do them both some good.

He took the mug and moved over, giving her room to sit beside him. “Hey, why don’t you try getting some sleep? We’ve got a few hours before we head out and a long way to go tomorrow… well, later today.”

She shook her head. “No, if I fall asleep, I think I’ll sleep more than a few hours. I’ll wait until we get back to base.”

She sat down and took a sip from her mug. “Blastarr may have regenerated by now,” she said.

“Soaron too,” Jon agreed. “They may be coming after these people unless Dread recalled them.”

“I wasn’t expecting Blastarr,” she told him as she stretched her neck a bit, trying to work out the soreness. “I didn’t know he was in the area.”

He placed his hand on her neck and felt the knotted up muscles. He pressed down on a few pressure points to help ease the tension and the aches. She tensed up slightly and then relaxed as a particular muscle group loosened up. Jon was happy to see that she didn’t pull away from him. “He showed up just as the crawler reached my position. He killed the two men, heard the radio transmission and got Oasis’ location. He headed off in that direction. I didn’t know if I’d get there in time.”

Jennifer was quiet for a moment, then, “How did they avoid Dread’s troops all this time?”

Jon hadn’t given it any thought, but something Arvin said seemed to explain it. “They weren’t a settlement until after the Sand Town people got there. That was when they started growing crops and setting down roots. It seems that Dread doesn’t keep much of a military presence in this area or Blastarr and Soaron would have had biomechs to back them up. It’d be easy to miss a water station in the middle of the desert if no one knew to look for it. Besides, no settlement is permanent these days. Arvin did mention something about having some new type of protection, but I don’t know what he meant. Maybe he meant the desert.”

He looked at her. She could barely keep her eyes open. “Okay, pulling rank again. Get some sleep.”

She didn’t argue. He guessed she was already half-asleep as it was. She leaned her head against the boulder they were sitting against and didn’t move. Jon took the mug from her hands and placed it on the ground. A few hours sleep would do her a world of good.

The rest of the camp was settling down as well. Some were still awake, standing guard. A few of the younger ones and older ones were getting a few hours sleep. He was still angry about what had happened. He’d sent Jennifer to a place he thought she’d be safe, and they were just as dangerous as the biodreads or the desert and could have killed her. How could they –

The recorder.

Jon pulled it out of his pocket. Maybe if he listened to the tribunal, he wouldn’t be so angry with these individuals for doing what they did?

He looked around. Jennifer was sound asleep. Everyone around him was too. He pulled an earpiece out of the supply pouch on his belt and placed it in the recorder. He listened to the story of Sand Town, to the information that he didn’t know about before.

“Um, it was summer. I remember because it was hot and we worked in the fields at night…”

Even Randall testified that Sand Town had happened in the summer. How was that possible? They had found Jennifer in January. She couldn’t have survived in the wastelands that long with no survival gear.

“Randall, do you know what the Dread Youth code of punishment is for finding a radio in a settlement where people are believed to be in opposition to Dread?”

“The radio was confiscated and the building was burned to the ground as a punishment to anyone that hides one ….”

Knowing Dread, that would be how he would do it. Make a punishment through a surgical strike to put fear in the hearts of everyone else.

“Where was your father?”

“Hiding in the underground room under our house.”

He’d been hiding in the house? Jon closed his eyes. That was a horrible new burden Jennifer was carrying. She had to order the burning of a house because it was expected, but she didn’t know that someone was inside. Even on that day, she wouldn’t have ordered the house to be burned if she knew someone was in there. She would have followed procedure and captured him. She couldn’t have known about any of it until the tribunal.

“One look in this one’s eyes, and you could see she wasn’t heartless. She was a child spouting slogans.”

Her eyes. Even Gaelen could see the true person through Jennifer’s eyes. No, she wasn’t heartless. Jennifer had a heart bigger than anyone Jon had ever met. She wanted to help everyone. She wanted to help Dread Youth, help them see the truth behind Dread’s lies.

Learning that she had risked her life to waylay those two biomechs so two people could escape – and those two turned out to be Randall and Gaelen? Arvin was right. She not only did what she hadn’t been trained to do but exactly what she had been trained not to do.

Then, he listened to Jennifer’s emotionally fraught testimony. She held nothing back. She told them everything, even things she had never told him or the rest of the team. She stripped all pretense away from her words and let them see her anguish and remorse, how much she wanted to make up for what she had done, how she would give her life to undo what happened that night. She didn’t go into all the details about the training of a Dread Youth. There wouldn’t have been time.

“I’d rather have died in the wastelands than ever go back.”

When she had gone into Med Lab One to get the vaccine, when she was held at gunpoint by Cadet Erin, she had told the cadet to kill her because she wasn’t going back. There had been more behind it than what would happen to her if she had been taken back as a prisoner.

“I started a journey. And it later led me to Captain Power, and he has taught me what it is to be human. Things that I never knew.”

Human. When the team met Jennifer, she gave that one word so much more meaning. They honestly had no idea what Dread had done to the Dread Youth. They didn’t understand where the loyal fervor came from or why they thought Machines were superior. At one point, they thought the soldiers were just misguided and well-trained. They had no idea that they were being brainwashed and conditioned and stripped of their humanity. She was the one who taught them so much. Everything new that she experienced was like seeing it for the first time themselves. Showing them every skill and talent she possessed almost humbled them given the near machine-like perfection with which she performed any task. It was the realization that Dread was trying to create flesh-and-blood emotionless robots that were completely obedient to him that truly surprised them.

Self-doubt was not a personality aspect ever seen in a Dread Youth, but when they found her, she seemed so uncertain of herself but so certain she wasn’t worth helping. They took her to one of Greta Royston’s hospitals after they rescued her from the biomechs, and when she woke up, she had no doubt she’d be taken to a prison camp. Her understanding of life outside Volcania was as much lies as everything else Dread had told her. The Resistance didn’t have established POW camps for captured Dread Youth. There were the few facilities that housed the few caught in a battle, but they barely had enough resources to feed themselves. There wasn’t enough to feed prisoners. Dread had told them so many lies about the survivors in the wastelands. He’d called them animals. They were the ones who opposed the will of the Machine.

When they had that first conversation with Jennifer in the hospital, so much more had been learned than Jon had ever known…

No guards were posted on the patient. There was no need. She wouldn’t have had the strength or endurance to even get off the cot she was lying on, let alone pose any kind of threat. Jon had seen Dread Youth soldiers in battle, but never like this. This woman, this Jennifer Chase, was a complete enigma. How old was she? Twenty perhaps? A little older? Trying to determine the age of any Dread Youth soldier was a guessing game at best. They ‘looked’ older than they actually were given their uniforms and posture.

According to Greta Royston, Chase’s medical history showed she was previously in excellent condition. Her current medical condition was the result of exposure, lack of food and water, blaster fire and exhaustion, but Greta couldn’t determine the amount of time she’d been in the wastelands. Excellent condition – for the first time, Jon considered the state of Dread’s medical facilities. At Greta’s, there was medical personnel, crude medical equipment, less than completely sanitary conditions – the field hospital had to be very different from the well-stocked medical units the Machine Empire had for its human soldiers. Dread would have the best medical care for his soldiers until… well, until. There were no older human soldiers in the Corps. Perhaps the oldest Jon had ever seen was about his own age. Calling it the Youth Corps… why hadn’t Jon ever given the term any thought? What happened to the soldiers as they got older?

Greta Royston stood next to the Power Team and said in a low voice, “Fever’s down, wound’s healing. She’s going to make it. I don’t know how and I wouldn’t have given her any odds when you brought her in. She’s definitely a fighter. Now the next problem is yours to solve.”

“What problem’s that?” Hawk asked.

“What to do with her now. A captured Dread Youth soldier is one thing, but she is a runaway youth leader. Youth leaders don’t run away. No Dread Youth does. They would have been hunting her the minute she was reported missing. We don’t have a long term place to keep her here, so you guys get to decide where to put her once she’s better.”

Jon looked back and saw Chase’s eyes blinking. She was waking up. “Let’s see what she has to say,” he suggested.

Greta nodded and walked away to give them a little privacy.

Jon sat down on the cot next to Chase. “Hello, I don’t know if you remember us. I’m Captain Jonathan Power. We found you out in the wastelands.”

It was her eyes that Jon couldn’t look away from. In all the years he’d fought the Dread Youth soldiers, he’d never before seen confusion or regret reflected in their eyes. Chase may have worn the uniform, but she wasn’t Dread Youth. At least, Jon hoped she wasn’t. If not, then the chance he took bringing her to Greta’s could backfire. He might have risked innocent people.

“I remember.” Her voice was dry and cracked. A medic gave her a cup of water with instructions to sip it slowly. “Where am I?”

“A clinic,” Hawk answered. “You were hurt pretty bad. Shot. You almost didn’t make it.”

She was silent, confused. “Why?” she asked.

“Why were you shot?” Scout asked her. “We were hoping you could tell us. Our conversation when we found you wasn’t all that long.”

“No,” she corrected, coughing. “Why did you bring me here if I was hurt so badly?”

“Because chivalry’s not dead,” Scout explained with a grin. “It may be in a coma, but…”

Jon noticed the confused look on her face. The word ‘chivalry’ wasn’t one she knew? Then again, why would she? He quickly realized this was going to be a confusing conversation, but for this one questions, he had an answer. “We’re not like the Dread Youth. We don’t leave our wounded behind. Human life is precious and needs to be preserved.”

The concept of saving a seriously wounded soldier was completely new to her. Jon could see that fact in her eyes. Dread Youth left the critically wounded and their dead behind. Only those who could be salvaged were reclaimed from the battlefield.

“You said your name was Jennifer Chase?” Jon prompted her.

She nodded her head. “Youth Leader Jennifer Chase.”

Okay, that was progress. “Where were you stationed?”

Jennifer coughed, holding her ribs as she did so. “I hadn’t received my orders to my next duty station, but I was going to lead a team with the Aerial Command. The Recon Unit.”

“A pilot!” Hawk said with an enthusiastic grin. “Well, Jennifer Chase, it’s always a pleasure to meet another pilot. Precious few of us left.”

Maybe their friendly attitude seemed too off-putting? She seemed to shrink in front of Jon’s eyes. Okay, that tactic wasn’t going to work. Maybe a more direct approach? “Hawk,” he cautioned. Then, to Jennifer, “You were pretty far away from any kind of settlement when we found you. There’s not one for dozens of miles. How’d you get there?”

Jennifer didn’t answer at first, then she said, “I escaped during a mission.” She said ‘escaped,’ not ‘ran away.’ That was an interesting term for her to use. “I found out everything was a lie, and I had to run or…”

Tank said in a low voice, “Dread wouldn’t tolerate any doubt in his ranks once one of his soldiers, especially one of the leaders, learned the truth.”

That was true enough. Dread’s web of lies only worked if truth and logic weren’t thrown into the mix. If this former youth leader had seen the lies for what they were… if she had broken through the rumored youth training…

“Jennifer, would you be willing to answer some questions about Dread?” Jon hoped she would. There was something about her that indicated she wasn’t like the others. No, she was special.

Jon could see her breath catch in her throat. “Please, no interrogators. I’ll tell you whatever –”

“Whoa, whoa,” Hawk held up a placating hand. “No interrogators. Dread has those, not us.”

Again, Jon saw the confusion in her eyes. Obviously, she’d been taught that the Resistance had interrogators.

“There are no interrogators at the prison camps?” she asked.

“There aren’t any prison camps,” Jon corrected quickly. She thought she was their prisoner? Was she thinking she had to bargain for her life? “You’re not our prisoner,” he assured her, hoping that she believed him. “But you are our responsibility. The doctor here patched you up, but she’s short staffed and has few beds. Once you’re ambulatory, we’ll move you to someplace safe.”

At the word ‘safe,’ Jon saw the confused look in her eyes again. Someone wanted to keep her safe for whatever reason – it was another foreign concept to her. What had Jon gotten himself into here?

“I don’t understand.” She tried to sit up a little more but the pain stopped her.

Scout reached out and touched her arm to get her attention. “You said it yourself. You were a youth leader and you escaped. They have to be hunting you.”

Then, in a completely unexpected twist, Jennifer told them something less honorable people would use to relinquish all responsibility. “No one’s looking for me anymore. You should have left me where you found me. If they ever found out anyone here helped me, you’ll be targets, and I’m not worth anyone being killed over.”

A Dread Youth worried about others’ lives? That was something new. “Don’t worry, folks out here are pretty good at taking care of themselves. They’ve had to be.”

Jennifer shook her head. “Captain, I don’t know why you helped me or brought me here, I don’t understand why you’d want to keep me safe. I’ve done some unforgiveable things. I was at Sand Town, and I don’t have an excuse. I deserve to be left out there to die. It’d be a fitting punishment.”

“No, from what we’ve seen, you don’t deserve any of that,” Jon said. Self-worth and renewed self-esteem were two things Jon wanted to give to her. One look in her eyes… she was a young woman who had seen unexpected truths and had no understanding of them. If he were to guess, something very earth-shattering had happened to her, and it wasn’t just at Sand Town. He instinctively knew that he would have to prove to her that they could be trusted. He couldn’t push it, but maybe they could give each other a chance to learn to trust each other.

That was when Jon knew that there was so much more to Jennifer than anyone knew. He taught her what it was to be human? She was the one who showed him how precious humanity was and exactly what it was.

Things she never knew? No, it was Jennifer who taught Jon things he’d forgotten. Showing her how to care for others reconnected him to his own feelings. Watching her reclaim her humanity, learning what they took for granted, showed Jon what they were fighting for – it wasn’t just humans. It was humanity itself.

Then, one day, unknowingly, Jennifer had claimed Jon’s heart. He didn’t even know when it happened. There was something Shakespearean about it – a former youth leader and a resistance leader… but Jon knew what he felt might not be returned. Jennifer’s feelings might be nothing more than gratitude and a strong friendship, but he didn’t think so anymore. Now, hearing her testimony, seeing the look in her eyes, the inflection in her voice, remembering that kiss, he knew. It was more, but did that change anything? Regardless of what Arvin said, taking the chance and saying the words could change their relationship irrevocably – hopefully for the good.

He leaned back against the boulder and glanced over at her. She was sound asleep, her head turned to the side. He scooted closer to her, and she shifted a bit, leaning against him more than the boulder. No matter what she endured, she rolled with the punches as Hawk would say. He’d never seen anyone with the resilience she possessed. She’d come such a long way since the day they found her, and all of it by sheer will power to overcome the lies that made up her life. But Jon and the others had an insight that others didn’t – they knew the real Jennifer Chase. They knew her strength came from the understanding and conviction that she was human, and humans fought the Machines.

Fought the Machines -- the timing of the mission suddenly hit him – if Blastarr had been a few minutes later, would the tribunal have found in Randall’s favor? What would the townspeople have done to her? Would they have found her guilty? Would she have been unable to stand between the townsfolk and Blastarr? Would there have not been any after the fact? The image of what might have happened if Blastarr had been delayed just a few minutes… What if he had never known the simple warm feeling of her leaning against him, deeply asleep after an exhausting day?

Deserted Dread Base:Northern New Mexico

The two biodreads had no choice but to return to the nearest working facility to recharge their power cells. The regeneration took too great a toll on their internal systems. The abandoned power plant had just enough left in its systems for them to drain off and repower their own cells.

“You failed again, ground crawler,” Soaron taunted him as they stomped through the deserted base. “You let Power and his people get away again!”

“You were the one who failed to destroy them when you knocked them out of the sky, scrapheap,” Blastarr retorted. “You had them in your sights and you were the one who was shot down.”

Soaron stomped even louder. “Lord Dread will not be satisfied with this outcome.”

“I am not, Soaron.” Dread’s hologram appeared before them. “Power has once again escaped, and he has the data tape concerning Project New Order.”

Blastarr bowed his head. “He does, my lord. We do not have his current location or that of his companion.”

“Nor do you have the location of the data tape! The information on that tape could prove deadly to the Machine Empire! Redouble your efforts. Find Power. Find the companion. Find that information.” Dread’s hologram disappeared.

Blastarr stomped off in one direction, Soaron in the other.

“Lord Overmind?” Soaron sent the secure transmission to the computer.

“I have heard,” Overmind explained. “Do as Dread says. Find Power and the other organic if you can. The information they have will harm Dread’s Empire, not the Machine Empire. Once Dread is defeated, the humans deleted and Blastarr destroyed, the Dread Empire will be gone, but the Machine Empire will rule.”

“All hail the Machine,” Soaron saluted as he stepped outside the base and flew off.

Power Base: Near Dawn

Scout sat at the control panel, waiting for someone, anyone to contact them. No contact from either Jon or Jennifer? That wasn’t like them. Somehow, they would have found a way to let their friends know they were all right.

“Anything?” Hawk asked again for the umpteenth time as he hurried back into the control room.

“Nothing,” Scout tried repeatedly to trace the original signal the captain sent when reporting in the last time. “They were transmitting and then we lost the signal. We thought it was the storm they told us about, but now I’m not so certain. They’re not answering now.”

“Can we figure out their coordinates?”

Tank readjusted the telemetry indicator. “The transmission didn’t last long enough to lock on their exact location. All we have is the direction. They contacted us from the southwest.”

Southwest. He already knew that. Hawk racked his brains – what was in the southwest? Who was there? Who had Jon and Jennifer met? Who gave them the data tape? Hawk couldn’t think of a single contact of theirs who was currently in that region of the country. He should have asked Jon more questions before he left.

Hawk pressed a button on the console. “Mentor?”

Mentor’s image appeared above them. “Yes, Major Masterson?”

“Can you replay the transmission that Jon received about the meet?”

“Of course, Major.” There was a pause, and then Mentor looked rather confused. “I regret to say that it isn’t a verbally communicated transmission. It was a focused data stream sent to the buffer over a computer link.”

“Wait,” Scout interrupted. “We’re independent. We don’t have a link to any computer system.”

“No, we don’t,” Mentor agreed. “However, all resistance groups are currently utilizing the new modified encryption techniques to prevent Dread from accessing our communications or disguising his own transmissions as one initiated by a resistance group. All communications transmitted are encrypted, and every resistance group uses various programs to encrypt the transmissions.”

“Oh, yeah,” Hawk mumbled. “That was one of the most confusing briefings I’ve ever been to.”

Scout and Tank both laughed. Scout cleared his throat. “Jennifer and I are working on a secondary program for Mentor, but it’s still in the works. Mentor, explain how the current encryption system works.”

“In order to know exactly which program is necessary to decrypt the transmission, my system initiates a signal compatibility program the moment a communication is received. The first line of the encryption informs the SCP the method I must use to receive a clear and secure transmission. In this case, the message to the captain was encoded with the first line of the encryption of the message sent to us from Tech City some months ago.”

That name got Hawk’s attention. “Mindsinger contacted Jon?” He wasn’t sure he liked that.

“I cannot determine the individual who initiated contact. There is no voice print to analyze.”

Hawk definitely didn’t like that. Jon hadn’t said anything about the communication not being sent personally. “What did the data stream say?”

Mentor read the file. “It contains coordinates for a location in the west. The signature of the file indicates that it was encrypted by Mindsinger’s program. However, there is no evidence that the file was originally sent from Tech City. It would be a logical assumption.”

So it was possible that someone from Tech City was sending information to them, but why meet in the west? Tech City was east of their location.

“Why don’t we use those coordinates to go after them?” Scout asked.

“When Jon checked in, he said they had to go to a new rendezvous point. There’s no telling where they were, and no way to trace them.” Hawk looked at his watch. Sunup was mere minutes away. Maybe once the sun came up, Jon would contact them.

On The Desert Road

The crawler kept up a good pace. Clegg expertly drove it over the terrain, avoiding rocks, dips, and bumps. Jennifer sat beside him, holding a gun, watching for anything that looked like a biodread if they were still in the area. After everything that had happened, she wasn’t talking very much to anyone. Then again, perhaps Clegg didn’t know what to say to make small talk. Jon sat in the back of the crawler, stretching his leg out as Randall kept watch out of the back of the crawler. Clegg could only take them to the base of the rise where the sky bike had crashed, then he needed to pick up the bodies of Jack and Martin and get the crawler back to the Oasis refugees to help transport the wounded on to Penham.

Randall sat opposite him, watching the ground go by as the crawler lumbered along. He was very quiet, still in mourning the loss of his uncle. Jon had already given Randall his condolences. He knew what it was like to lose not just a close family member, but the last one he had. Like Jon, Randall had close friends who would look out for him and help him, so he wasn’t alone.

They sat quietly for a time, but Jon’s curiosity was getting the best of him. “Randall, can I ask you a question?”

Randall nodded. “Sure.”

“How did you remember Jennifer after all these years?” he asked in a low voice. He didn’t want for Jennifer to hear – he didn’t want to upset her.

Randall pulled a picture out of his pocket and unfolded it. There was a remarkable likeness of Jennifer drawn on it, only it was Youth Leader Chase, not Jennifer depicted on the page. Jon took the paper and looked at it carefully. “This is very good. The way you drew her eyes – they look just like her.”

“Really?” Randall asked as he looked at the picture again. “I always thought I never could get the eyes right. I could only make them look…”

Jon finished his explanation. “Like they’re human and not the empty, emotionless eyes of a Dread Youth. I know -- I’ve seen too many eyes like that myself.”

“That was the problem,” Randall confessed. “I never could draw them the way I knew they had to be.”

“But you did draw them the way they are,” Jon countered quickly. “Actually, when I first met her, it was her eyes that showed me that she wasn’t like the others. You could see right into her soul, and I could see she was hurting.”

Randall grew quiet again. Finally, he had to ask, “Was growing up in the Dread Youth really as bad as she said?”

Jon shook his head. “No, it’s far worse than what she told you. She gave you a few facts, but the details of how Dread Youth are raised are hard for any of us to comprehend. She’s told us some of it, but not all. Dread takes their humanity, their sense of self, everything that makes them individuals.”

Randall frowned. “Is it really all lies? That’s what she said.”

Jon nodded. “Dread lies. He uses rhetoric to hide the truth, and litanies to train his troops. When she went to Sand Town, she really didn’t know what would happen. And when she got there, there was nothing she could do to stop what happened to the town. If she did anything other than what was procedure, that overunit probably was under standing orders to deal with any soldier who disobeyed, and they don’t think twice about shooting someone down. It’s hard to explain how saving you and your uncle that night put her in more danger than you can imagine, but she’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

Randall was quiet for a while, then he said in a low voice, “She didn’t know my father was hiding under the house.”

“No,” Jon explained. “I know her. She’d have tried to save him if she’d known, just like she saved you and your uncle. Even if it cost her her life.” He handed the drawing back to Randall.

“No, you keep it,” Randall said. “I don’t think I’ll need to draw her anymore.”

Jon smiled, folded up the paper and put it in his pocket.

The crawler jerked to a halt. “Okay, folks, here’s where you get off,” Clegg called out.

Jon scooted to the back of the crawler, Randall and Clegg helped haul him out. “Thanks for bringing us this far,” he said. “We appreciate it.”

Clegg waved a dismissing hand. “After everything that happened, we still owe you.” He handed Jennifer a large leather bag. “You said your radio was damaged when you crashed. Here are some repair parts we had laying around. Some of them may help. There are some items in there that may help you shore up your landing gear, at least enough to let you fly out of the area.”

Jennifer took the pouch with a grin and hoisted it over her shoulder. “Thank you,” she told him as she handed him back his gun.

Clegg patted Randall on the shoulder and crawled back into the driver’s seat. Randall turned to Jennifer, looking more apologetic. “I sorry I tried to hit you with the ax.”

Jennifer placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry I had to deck you.”

“I missed a lot, didn’t I?” Jon asked jokingly.

“Randall,” Clegg called. “We need to get Jack and Martin, take them back to the ruins. They’re on the other side of this rise.”

Randall climbed into the passenger’s seat. With a goodbye wave, they were gone. For the first time since early the previous morning, Jon felt relieved. He’d never been around a group of ‘nice’ people he wanted to be as far away from as he did the Oasis refugees. Yes, it was because of what they put Jennifer through, but he couldn’t say they weren’t hospitable after the fact, but he wanted a lot of distance between them. He knew he’d feel better and sleep easier.

“What do you think? Having to go around the base and then up an incline… two mile walk?” he asked.

“About that,” she said as they started off in the direction of the path that would lead them to the sky bike. Jennifer walked slow enough to accommodate Jon’s limping on his makeshift crutches. “This is the gentler slope or so Clegg said. We should be able to climb it to the top pretty easily. The first thing we need to do is get the radio repaired. Hawk is going to be worried about us. I just hope we can cut through the interference of that storm. It’ll be here in a few hours.”

The storm. Jon glanced up at the advancing clouds. That storm was going to be… what had Hawk called them? A gully washer?

“Then I’ll remove the starboard landing arm. It’ll make the bike easier to fly if I can get it going again. At least I’ll be able to balance it. We may have to fly slow and low to the ground, maybe make hops but it should get us back home.”

She was becoming all business. Jon knew when she behaved like that, there was more to the story. “Jennifer?”

She turned toward him, not slowing her pace.

“If you want to talk, I’ll listen.”

Jennifer stopped. She glanced around, then she looked at the snow-capped mountain that had been her guide through the desert. “I know you heard the testimony I gave at the tribunal, and you’ve never asked about anything else that happened around the time I escaped.”

“I thought that when you wanted us to know the rest of it, you’d tell us,” he explained. “I know a lot of it’s been hard to talk about.”

Jennifer nodded, her eyes very much on the mountain. “There’s something I want to show you on that mountain. It’s a safe place. We can wait out the storm there.”

Power Base: Three Hours Later

The three men sat stunned around the main control console. They’d just heard news that could have been far worse.

“Are we hearing right? They put her on trial for Sand Town?” Tank asked Hawk, completely disbelieving the report.

“I think so,” Hawk confirmed quickly. “It was hard to hear through the static. If Mentor’s cleaned up version of Jon’s transmission is right, the people at Oasis only agreed to go after him if Jennifer went with the townsfolk quietly and abided by their decision at a tribunal for her actions at Sand Town.” Hawk spoke into the communicator. “We’ll come get you.”

“You’d never make it in time. The storm’s practically on top of us. Jennifer knows a place for us to wait out the storm. It shouldn’t last too long and we’ll head out as soon as it’s passed.”

“What about Soaron and Blastarr? Are they still in the area?”

“There’s no way to know. Blastarr took some pretty bad hits in Oasis. Once he’s regenerated, they may head back to Volcania. We should be okay for now. We’ll check in as soon as we can.”

“Should be okay?” Hawk asked. He didn’t like the way Jon said that phrase.

“More happened at Sand Town than we knew, and Jennifer found out a few things herself. Something else has hit her pretty hard, I think. I don’t know what it is yet.”

Hawk knew Jon was the only one who could find out if Jennifer was ready to talk. “Okay. Contact us again as soon as you can. Mentor says the storm is showing signs of weakening, so it should be enough for you to get through to us.”

“Roger that. Power out.”

“Major Masterson?” Mentor looked down at Hawk from his perch on top of the console. “Neither Captain Power nor Corporal Chase were dressed for the winter conditions in the mountainous region of the area they’re in. Temperatures have already dropped drastically and the storm will reduce them further.”

“They’ll be okay, Mentor.” They’d have to be.

Scout paced around the control room, slamming his fist in his hand. “They didn’t have any right to do that. Sand Town wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know that everything Dread told them was a bunch a lies until then. How could they put her on trial for that?”

Hawk looked up at Mentor who was patiently listening to the conversation. “She’s the one who gave the order to have the town cleansed. I think Jon said a boy named Randall and his uncle remembered her.”

“She just repeated a litany,” Tank argued. “They were conditioned to do that from childhood.”

Hawk was so angry with the townsfolk, he couldn’t think clearly. Instead, he changed the subject. “The bike’s damaged, so they’ve got to do some repair work before they can fly a long distance. They should be able to make some short hops. I don’t like it. Blastarr and Soaron may still in that area.”

“Should we go get them?” Tank asked.

Hawk shook his head. “Jon said not to. Anyway, we can’t. We just got an emergency request from the Passages. We’ve got to get there. Mentor, keep this frequency open at all times. Jon may try to get through again. Until they get to a fully functioning radio, they’re out there without us and I don’t like it.”

“Of course, Major,” Mentor agreed.

Above The Desert

That storm was almost on top of them. Jon could feel it was going to be more than just a typical storm. It was going to be ripping, thunderous and violent. He could feel it in the air and see it as the dark clouds lit up with lightning.

Jon saw the dark thunderclouds just ahead of them, curving around the mountains. He felt the high winds rocking the bike. The weather front was massive and stretched across the horizon. It was still moving slowly towards them. No wonder Jennifer wanted to wait it out someplace safe. There would be no way for the crippled sky bike to fly around it, over it or through it – not if they wanted to reach the base in one piece. They were limping home slowly as it was, both literally and figuratively. Jon’s leg would need real medical care, not just a quick patch job and the sky bike would have to undergo a complete overhaul and rebuild. It was taking every bit of skill Jennifer had to keep the sky bike balanced without any landing arms.

There was a far worse storm brewing in the woman sitting before him as well. He could sense Jennifer’s turmoil as she focused her attention on piloting the sky bike. She was still being extraordinarily quiet, and it wasn’t just because of sheer concentration. It was because of what happened in Oasis. Something else, maybe another memory, was ripping away at her.

To tell the truth, he wasn’t feeling very talkative either. Jon didn’t know what to say. Too much had happened on the mission, and the thoughts were still running through his head. Small talk on the walk back to the sky bike hadn’t gone over very well either. Of all the people who could call Jennifer ‘friend,’ Jon was the one person who should have been able to talk to her no matter the circumstances. He was still in the dark to the whatever-it-was connected with Sand Town that was bothering Jennifer.

Sand Town. Once again, it had come back to haunt them, but this time, it wasn’t merely the name of a place or the place of a horrible memory. Real people who had survived and escaped stood face to face with someone who had no idea what would happen. As much as she had told the team, as much as she had confessed, there were small details that Jon had never known about. Then again, Jennifer hadn’t known about them either. The details came from witnesses who survived Sand Town. Their stories came from entirely different perspectives.

Jennifer flew toward the mountain. Again, Jon thought that there was something familiar about the place, something he couldn’t quite remember.

He leaned over so she could hear him. “Will the bike stay in the air long enough for us to get there?”

“Not at this altitude with all this wind,” she said. “I’m taking her lower to the ground.” Fighting the flailing sky bike, she flew low over the mountainous region.  She slowed the bike down and carefully maneuvered it until they’d reached the far side of the mountain. Beyond that was another mountain and another after that. She found the site she was looking for, slowed the bike down and landed it as carefully as she could beside a wall of rock. After powering it down, she said, “Wait here. Let me make sure everything’s okay before we move the bike in closer.”

“In closer where?” Jon asked.

Jennifer pointed to a particular section of rock nearby. There was a dark area. Jon thought it was shadows. “It’s a cave entrance,” she told him.

Jon realized that this was going to be one of those times when Jennifer wasn’t going to do a lot of talking all at once until she was ready.  She had a story to tell, and the cave was part of it.

Cave

Jon stayed by the bike as Jennifer scouted out the cave. He couldn’t see the beam from her flashlight any longer. He waited; he listened in case there was something else in that cave other than her. Not that he could do very much with one blaster with a bent barrel and another blaster that now had leaked out the last of its power from the power cell. Looking out over the ground below, he could see for miles. Maybe over a hundred miles. They were on the other side of the mountain from Oasis. Sand Town would have been somewhere down below them. Jon couldn’t see any signs of a settlement. Then again, he didn’t know where Sand Town’s exact location was. He remembered hearing about the town being destroyed when it happened, but it was just the name of another town in a long list of settlements destroyed that year. Town razings by Dread were routine news that year.

The first time he heard Jennifer mention Sand Town, he hadn’t given it another thought other than she had been there. Perception was a razor-sharp knife – but it all depended on which end of the knife you were holding. To Jon, Sand Town was one of the many towns destroyed by Dread, lives ended, prisoners taken, buildings burned and no one in the Resistance able to help them in time – he hadn’t known that some of those attacks were because Dread was looking to destroy the radios and squelch the plans to form a more organized resistance. One by one, the settlement names became a blur. But to Jennifer, Sand Town wasn’t just another destroyed town. It wasn’t just a blurred name in a long list of names. She had been there, stood in the midst of the explosions and the fires and the chaos, heard the screaming and witnessed lives being shattered. It had been burned into her memory, branded into her very being.

And Jon? After so many years of fighting, hearing that the Dread soldiers had destroyed another town was nothing out of the ordinary. As much as he hated to say it, it had become commonplace.

He glanced around. It was November. The air was cold. The wind from the coming storm was getting stronger. There was snow on the ground, blowing around, and there was a feeling to the air that more could fall. Trees lined the surrounding ridge they were standing on, hiding paths that led over the mountain. The site was somewhat secluded, somewhat secure. The opening in the rock wall was practically invisible no matter what angle it was approached from. How did Jennifer know about a cave?

“It’s okay,” he heard her voice as she came out of the cave opening. “We can put the bike under the overhang.” She pointed above them. Jon hadn’t noticed that there was a low rock protruding from the rock wall just to the side of the cave entrance.

Together, they were able to move the bike under the overhang. It wasn’t easy maneuvering the vehicle while leaning on a crutch. Then Jon followed her inside the cave, the flashlight lighting their way. He counted his steps – seven limping steps past the entrance, then a slight turn to the right, five more limps and they walked into a larger area. Jennifer shone the light around. The cave was an odd shape, definitely not round, rugged and ragged but without very many stalagmites and stalactites. Someone could camp out in the cave and have enough room on the floor to stretch out and sleep. Jon could stand straight without his head hitting the roof, barely. “Cozy,” he said.

“Not yet, but it will be,” she said, her voice rather flat and emotionless.

Jennifer dusted away some dirt on the floor to uncover what looked like a metal plate buried there. She dug along the top of the plate until she had moved just enough dirt to get hold of the round metal loops that allowed her lift it. She hefted it up and pulled a metal container out of the dirt. Jon recognized the markings and the numbers etched on the side. It was an old army survival kit carried by soldiers on the battlefield before the turn of the century.

“I haven’t seen one of those outside of a military museum since I was a kid,” he said as he sat down next to her as she tried to get the rusty lock to open.

Jennifer looked away from the lock momentarily and glanced at him. “I found this at a small campsite after a biomech attack. There had been maybe three people there judging from what I found. I scavenged what little was left. The biomechs had destroyed just about everything, but this had been tossed away I guess. I found it behind a tree stump.” She tried to open it, but the lock was jammed.

“Need help?” he asked, trying to be useful.

Jennifer finally broke through the lock and opened the lid. “No, I got it.” Inside were items Jon had never seen used outside of an historical documentary -- a wind-up lantern and a wind-up heater. They were antiques by their standards, but fifty years earlier, there wasn’t a soldier who would take the field without wind-up machinery. Hawk’s father, an Air Force colonel who loved to tell a young Jon Power all sorts of war stories, always called them ‘jack in the boxes only without the jacks.’ You wind the crank for a full minute to charge the internal generator, and the machine would operate for half an hour. For a brief moment, Jon wondered if the Machine Empire would have considered such items contraband. They certainly weren’t part of the officially sanctioned equipment requisitioned for each Dread Youth soldier. They were old when the Metal Wars were in the headlines, and given Dread’s tendency to keep history and historical items away from the Dread Youth, the wind-up machinery might never have been mentioned.

And how did she know that box was there?

“Do they work?” he asked her.

She checked the handle on the small lantern and then began to wind it. After a minute, they had more light in the cave. It pushed back the darkness. She shut off her own flashlight to save power. “The lantern does, but the heater has a broken spring. I might be able to patch it. It’ll take a while though, and it’s going to get very cold in here if I can’t get this working. It always did before.”

Before?

She was focusing on doing something, anything, any type of work. It was the old behavior coming back. Maybe Jon could get her to talk about what was bothering her if he just started talking?

“They’re pretty resilient items. Hawk’s father used them when he was in the service. He said he had this one wind-up flashlight from the time he was at the Academy until he retired. Called it his good luck charm and he never went anywhere without it even when it quit working. When I was a kid, Dad took me to a military museum and they had them on display. I think the museum was maybe an hour away from Chicago. I think it was the Great Lakes Museum? I’ve never seen anyone actually use one before.”

“I had no idea what they were,” she explained as she tried to get the wind-up heater working. “I started inspecting them, wound up the flashlight and saw what it did. It was pretty simple after that.” She opened the outer casing of the heater and tried to adjust the spring. “I always called them portable power sources. Imagine if we had something like this to power our suits when they shut down.”

“That would solve a lot of our problems,” Jon said, mentally kicking himself about not thinking of it before. Emergency power recharge, even if it wasn’t much, could make a difference in a fight! It was definitely something he had to look into.

He saw the look of concentration on her face, saw her glance toward the entrance when the first rumbles of thunder from the storm reached them. Jon could actually feel the walls in the cave vibrate from the sound.

“The spring’s rusted through,” she told him. “We’ll have to have a campfire. It will help a little.”

Jon was about to point out that the wood outside would be wet from all the snow until he saw Jennifer reach behind another jagged rock and pick up several pieces of firewood and kindling. “There’s enough hidden here to last a couple of days,” she told him. “I don’t think we’ll be here that long.”

Okay, she knew an almost invisible cave was there, she knew firewood was there and she had buried wind-up survival gear in the dirt…

Jon leaned against the wall. He didn’t know what to say, he didn’t know what she wanted to say, so he said the first thing that came into his head. “I’m guessing there’s a story behind this cave?”

Jennifer stacked the firewood in a circle of rocks Jon had failed to notice when they entered. There was what looked like old ash lying in the middle of it. Old ash? Burnt ash? Jennifer placed the kindling underneath the firewood, and luckily for them, matches were part of their own personal survival gear and she had a small fire built in no time. She stared at the flames for a few moments, then Jon reached over, took her hand and pulled her back where he was. “There’s a lot more to the story, isn’t there?”

She nodded. She reached behind more rocks and pulled a folded up jacket out of the dirt. She unfolded it to reveal an old shirt and a pair of pants. She shook the dirt out from them, and Jon noticed that the jacket was big enough to fit Tank. What was more startling was she reached inside the pocket of the jacket and pulled out a leather strap and a youth leader cap. The strap was the insignia that indicated her rank as a youth leader. Come to think of it, she wasn’t wearing either one when they found her. She glanced up at the ceiling and made a circular motion with her hand. “This was my home for a while,” she told him. “I hid here after I escaped from the Dread Youth.”

He’d almost guessed that much. “Hey,” he placed his hand under her chin and tilted her head to look at him. “I’ll listen. Anything you want to tell me, I’ll listen.”

She took a deep breath. “I’ve told you a lot, but not everything. I know Arvin gave you a recording of the tribunal, I saw him hand it to you, but …” Jennifer grew very quiet, as if lost in thought.

“Jennifer?”

“You know how I had a lot happen to me in a short amount of time just before Sand Town? That’s how I broke through the conditioning?”

Jon nodded.

“Before any of that happened, I was no different than any other Dread Youth. I wanted to be an overunit. Me. Can you believe it? Being an overunit was much more than just being the one in charge. Only those who were considered the most loyal to the Machine could be promoted that high. Some overunits were special. They got to speak to Dread in person. They could actually go into his throne room specifically. These few were allowed into the Overmind’s throne room. Their names were brought to him for special attention. They had unlimited privileges and could go outside Volcania without reporting to anyone. Being an overunit meant having a freedom that no other soldier could ever enjoy.”

Jon thought for a second. What could he say to that? “Being an overunit is like catching the brass ring?”

“Or winning the blue ribbon or the kewpie doll,” she said, amused at the terms she’d heard the others use from time to time. “As an overunit, I would have been able to do things I couldn’t do as a youth leader. Do you remember when I told you that all movement is monitored in Volcania?”

Jon remembered that conversation – “After Sand Town, I knew I had to leave, but escaping the Dread Youth wasn’t easy. It probably still isn’t. All movement is monitored. Everyone is accounted for before and after a mission. I knew that if I could get away, I didn’t know which way to go or what I was going to do. I just knew I had to leave no matter what happened to me afterwards.”

She had explained that to him when Dread used the boy they called Mitch as a virus carrier. “I remember.”

“Even though overunits are monitored, they had the security clearance to go just about anywhere in the Empire.”

“You couldn’t do that as a youth leader,” Jon observed. He was still confused. “Jennifer –”

“I got the promotion to overunit,” she whispered. “I was told before we went to Sand Town that I was getting it. I was the youngest person to be awarded the rank of overunit. You have no idea how much of a distinction that gave me. At Sand Town, Overunit Wilson told me that I would not only be getting my promotion, but she confirmed that I was to be transferred into a metalloid body and be given my own command in the Aerial Defense and Recon Unit. That particular group is a machine only group. The timing for it depended on my performance. She said it had nothing to do with me, that it was something political. I don’t know what she meant.”

Jon didn’t know what to say. She had never mentioned that she had reached the rank of overunit. She had never said she was anything other than a youth leader. “What happened?” he finally asked.

“I performed as expected at Sand Town. If I didn’t, I’d have been shot down or worse.”

“Digitized,” Jon added.

“That’s worse,” Jennifer explained. “If I’d known about Randall’s father…but I didn’t know until yesterday…” her voice trailed off.

Jon didn’t want her thinking along those lines. “You couldn’t have known.”

Jennifer sniffed and wiped at her eyes. “Sand Town was their idea of a success, my performance was impeccable, and I was awarded my promotion to overunit. The official ceremony was going to be a little later, after I was transferred, so I knew my time was short. If I was going to do anything, I had to do it fast.”

Jon thought about everything. She was revealing much more than she ever had before. “You were an overunit in that small amount of time between Sand Town and when you escaped?”

She nodded her head. “The day I got back to Volcania after I got my new rank, I made use of it. I used the privacy protocols that only overunits have to access the geographical database so I’d know which paths to take to escape. That was when I found the Youth historical registries as well.”

The geographical database and the Youth historical registries when she learned her given name wasn’t Jennifer Chase. Jon had so many questions, but he was scared about asking her too many of them. “Did they know you had accessed it?”

She shook her head. “Privacy protocols. An overunit is above reproach or suspicion because we’ve proven we’re loyal to Dread.”

Jon turned toward her a little, being careful of his leg. “I’ve never asked exactly how you escaped.”

“On the next mission,” she told him. He knew that much, but now, he was about to learn the rest of it. “We left Volcania and flew to Kansas. I found out later that it was Dodge City. Mentor enjoyed telling me about the historical significance of that town,” she almost chuckled as she remembered. “It was to be another cleansing because someone there had a radio. I used the security protocols to open a frequency on a communicator that their radio could pick up. All the settlers heard was the conversation between the other overunits about the upcoming attack. When we got there, they were waiting for us.”

“Wait…” Jon thought for a moment. “We were called to Dodge City. The mayor told us that they’d picked up a transmission. It was you who warned them. You helped save hundreds.”

“It was the only thing I could do without suspicion. You know, that was the first time I ever saw all of you in action,” she confided in him. “By the time you arrived, most of the town had been evacuated but their defenses held. The overunits ordered missiles to be fired. After a close blast, I pretended I’d been hit along with two of the other townspeople. Once I was down, I would be overlooked for the rest of the battle. They started to burn the town, and the fires were getting closer, and when no one was around or could see me, I dragged a dead woman’s body over to the two that were there and switched boots with her. I also left my primary ident tag around her wrist. The fires were so hot… if the soldiers analyzed the ashes, they would find the ident tag and the remnants of Youth issued boots. They’d think it was me, and I would be listed as killed in action.”

Boots? Jon tried to remember what boots she was wearing when they first met. Her clothes were torn and tattered, and he’d never paid any attention to her boots. Still, boots aside, there were other things he was curious about. “You were wearing a youth leader uniform when we found you,” he began.

“There hadn’t been a reason for me to be issued an overunit uniform since I was supposed to be transferred in a very short amount of time. I did get called Overunit Chase for that little while. That title made my skin crawl, and just days earlier, that would have been the greatest honor I could think of.” She got quiet for a moment. “I only wanted to be an overunit after Sand Town so I could escape. It was the only way I could think of to get out of there quickly before they transferred me because no one would be look at what I researched in the computers.”

What a difference a few days made, Jon mused. Going from a loyal soldier who earned the rank to someone who needed the rank to get as far from the soldiers as possible. Tactically, it was a brilliant plan and the only option open to her at the time.

What did surprise him was that she’d been at Dodge City. “We didn’t find any living bodies when we scouted for survivors,” he told her.

“You wouldn’t have. I was gone by then.”

“But if we had found you then,” he mumbled, “we could have helped you –”

“No,” she shook her head. “I wouldn’t have let anyone help me then. I wasn’t ready to allow anyone to help me. I believed I deserved whatever happened to me.”

“How did you get out of Dodge?”

Jennifer almost smiled at the reference. “I found clothes scattered on the ground. I grabbed these,” she held up the jacket, shirt and pants, “put them on and ran with the rest of the people escaping. No one paid me any attention because everyone was running for their lives and I didn’t look any different from anyone else. I eventually got away from the others and ran in another direction. I knew there was a small abandoned guard outpost about twenty miles from Dodge. There weren’t any biomechs on guard duty there anymore. It wasn’t monitored. I got there the morning of the next day. I found a few things. A gun, old stores of food packs that would have been there for human soldiers previously assigned there, some other survival gear – it wasn’t much of anything, but it was more than I had.”

The gun. She had used that gun to fight off biomechs when they found her. She’d shot it until it was empty. An overunit would have not been issued a gun on a cleansing. They would have relied on the biomechs for protection. She had traveled that entire distance unarmed?

“I packed up what I could. There was a barely working transport stored there that I commandeered as well. I drove out of there and didn’t look back. I didn’t care what happened to me.”

“Where were you going?” he asked.

“I had checked the geographic databases for areas around Dodge City before we went there. Passable roads, water sources, things I’d need to find to survive. Without even thinking about it, I found myself taking a very long trip back to Sand Town. I couldn’t tell you why.”

Jon started thinking about the geography of the area. Food and water would have been difficult to find. Shelter? Speaking of shelter, “And when you got here, you found this cave,” he surmised.

“All by accident,” she told him. “The transport got me within fifty miles of here, I think. It could have been one hundred miles. It broke down on me and I couldn’t repair it, so I packed up everything I could carry and just walked. I didn’t pay attention to the distance. Then, one day, I saw this mountain. I knew exactly where I was and decided this is where I was supposed to go. I was on the eastern side of the mountain, and started to walk up one path I found until I got over here. I could stand anywhere on this side, look through my binoculars and see the ruins of Sand Town in the distance. I can’t tell you why I had to go back to Sand Town or why I couldn’t go down there once I got here. I still don’t understand it. I was looking for a place to camp when I saw birds flying into an opening in the rock wall, and I thought maybe there was a nest up here. I also thought that if there were animals, maybe there was a water source nearby. I climbed up, and found the entrance to this cave.”

“And here you stayed for months,” Jon said, suddenly gaining new insight into Jennifer. “The attack on Sand Town was in the summer, and we found you in January. On the other side of this mountain.” That was why the area looked so familiar. This was where they first met Jennifer. Another question he had suddenly had an answer. “That’s how you found Oasis. You knew where the water station was in relation to the mountain.”

Jennifer nodded. “We had to know the area that was attacked in case any soldier got separated from the group. Only it wasn’t a station then. It was just a small water post with a few people there. It wasn’t of any concern to the overunits.”

Jon mentally kicked himself again. Months. She’d been there in that cave alone for months. Like Arvin said, she forced herself into a self-imposed penance. Every day, she would force herself to remember what she had done by seeing the ruins of the town. More questions came to his mind. How had she survived? He looked around the cave again. He noticed a small trickle of water coming from the ceiling – if she had something to catch it in, she would have had some to drink. Food? Was there enough food growing in the woods to sustain someone? And it had been wintertime. Food would have been scarce, but how had she kept warm in a cave? A campfire would give off only so much heat and too much smoke in the cave. Did the wind-up heater keep her warm enough all that time?

“How did you survive here?” he asked.

“Some of the survival training I had in the Dread Youth came in handy. “ She pointed toward the trickle Jon had already spotted. “I had some water, but it wasn’t much. A lot of the time, I melted snow. I had wood to make a fire. There were some root vegetables growing wild further down the mountain. I knew that people who lived in the wastelands hunted animals.  I tried that a few times with very limited success. In case you forgot, I needed to gain a lot of weight when you first met me.”

That she had. She looked starved and exhausted. Greta’s diagnosis had mentioned that she was malnourished, but she was alive. He glanced back at the wind-up lantern that was starting to dim. He grabbed it and cranked the handle. “You found this equipment on your way here?”

She nodded.

“Lucky for us they were still here after all this time,” he said.

“When I’d leave here to look for food and water, I’d hide everything in case biomechs found the cave. At least then, they wouldn’t find my gear.”

“Did they come here a lot?”

“Not at first,” she told him. “They’d search the valley. Eventually, they started searching the mountains. I think they were looking for settlements or they were trying to purge this entire area of humans. I don’t know. A few times, I’d be in here and I’d hear them right outside. I swore they were so close, they could hear my heart beating.”

“And that day we found you, on the other side of the mountain –”

“They caught me out looking for food. It had snowed for a few days. What little stores I’d had were depleted. I’d gone a while without any food, so I had set up a few traps to try to catch birds or a rabbit. Can you believe it? One of Dread’s soldiers was able to rig up a crude trap to catch a wild animal. No one would have believed that. I thought I heard one get sprung, and I went outside to see if I’d caught anything. It was just down the path, so I didn’t even put on the jacket. That’s when I heard them coming towards me. I ran in the opposite direction of the cave. I didn’t want them finding it. I guess you could say it was my base. I ran on one of the smaller paths to the other side, and they outflanked me. If Hawk hadn’t flown in when he did and took out the ones coming up behind me, I would’ve been dead.”

Jon’s memory went back to that moment when they first met.

“Why do you think you don’t deserve any help?” he asked, noting that she would be unconscious in minutes from the blood loss where she had been shot.

She took a deep breath – Jon could tell that it hurt her. It was possible she had injured her ribs. “I’ve done some unforgiveable things,” she said. “You should have let the biomechs have me. It would have been a fitting punishment.”

Punishment? “What do you mean?”

When Jennifer looked at Jon again, there were tears in her eyes. A Dread Youth that could cry? Was that possible? “I was at Sand Town,” she told him.

Sand Town. She didn’t have to explain that, but Sand Town was attacked weeks earlier.

Only now, he knew it wasn’t weeks. It had been months earlier. Jon hadn’t realized how much time had passed. It had only seemed like weeks since he heard the name of the town.

“There’s no way we’d ever let the biomechs get you if we could help it,” he told her.

“I know that now,” she said with a slight smile. “Then, I thought it was what I deserved.”

“You didn’t deserve it,” he contradicted.

“I gave the order to cleanse the town,” she reminded him.

That, Jon knew how to respond to. “Let me ask you this – did you walk up to the lead biomech and tell it to cleanse the town?”

Jennifer furrowed her forehead in confusion. “What?”

“From Gaelen’s testimony, the overunit asked a question, and you responded. Your response was a slogan you’d repeated thousands of times before, right?”

Jennifer shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. I said the words, judgment was rendered and people died.”

Jon reached out and gently took her shoulder. “The overunit asked you a question that you were conditioned to answer a certain way. That’s what you did.” Once, long ago, she had told them the litanies. She could recite them without thinking about them. The words just fell out of her mouth. Once, Scout had asked about a particular part of one of the sayings, and Jennifer had to mentally say the entire litany before reaching that part. Litanies were so routine that the details were lost in the monotony. One comment triggered an automatic response, an unthinking answer. It was absolutely Pavlovian. How many other times had such an occurrence happened? How many just like what happened to Jennifer at Sand Town?

“I spouted a slogan, just like Gaelen said. I wish that was all it had been.”

Jon didn’t kid himself. He knew exactly what she was saying. The litanies were said unthinkingly by the Dread Youth, but to outsiders? They were something very specific, very detailed and very dangerous. Jennifer understood that in a way that Jon couldn’t appreciate. He hadn’t walked the same path she had. All he could do was be a bystander to parts of her life. Still, what happened would have happened no matter what Jennifer did. “I’m sure Gaelen must have always wished that he hadn’t told them about the radio or gone directly back to Sand Town after they released him,” Jon pointed out. “What happened at Sand Town wasn’t one person’s fault. They were going to destroy that town no matter what you said, but you stayed alive by saying what you did, and I am very glad you’re alive. I like you here with me… us… your choice wouldn’t have changed the outcome of what happened at Sand Town, but by making the choice you did, you stayed alive and you have saved thousands of others. Look at the people in Dodge City. They survived because you were able to warn them, not to mention all the people in all the towns we’ve helped since you’ve joined us.” How could he explain? He knew the guilt that racked her. She had given the order. That fact alone kept her awake at night. Now to know more of what happened? That would haunt her the rest of her days. How could he – “There’s something I’ve found out after all these years of fighting Dread. Sometimes, the right thing isn’t always the right choice or the one that we think we can live with. Sometimes, in war, we have to do the wrong thing because it’s what’s best in the long run. I wish it weren’t the case, but it is and I don’t think that’ll ever change.”

Jennifer couldn’t stop the smile. “That doesn’t really change things.”

Jon agreed. “No. What happened, happened. But I agree with Gaelen. You don’t bear the guilt of what happened at Sand Town. Its destruction was a foregone conclusion before you even went on the mission. Nothing you said or did would have made a difference about that, but you did save lives that day when you helped Gaelen and Randall escape. There may have been others that sneaked out in those few moments you bought for those two. You risked a lot do that. I don’t think anyone there could understand how brave that one action was.” He paused for a moment, then said, “I do think you do a formidable job when you impersonate an overunit though.”

That was a quick change of conversation. “Why is that?”

“Remember when I was captured and the youth leader was questioning me in that Room? You dressed as an overunit and marched in there giving orders? You were very impressive. All the times I’ve seen you impersonate Dread Youth, that was a masterful acting job.”

“Would you believe I patterned that particular overunit impersonation on Overunit Wilson, my superior at Sand Town?”

“I did not know that,” he mused. If that was what her superior was like, it was no wonder she stayed locked in her act as a loyal youth leader that night. “And it doesn’t matter if you were an overunit those last few days or a youth leader or a cadet – you did what you had to do, and you’re alive today because of it. It was the right choice, and I don’t want you to doubt that.”

Jennifer did smile a rather sad smile. “Maybe one day, I’ll believe that.”

“Maybe one day, you will. I know I already do.”

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

The cold November wind howled outside the cave, and the cold seeped in. The thunder rumbled around them, and the sound of rain hitting the rock facing outside echoed into the cave. The small campfire helped warm up the small area, and the smoke went out the entrance and through small fissures in the cave ceiling. Jon was amazed at the setup. He was a firm believer that people made their own luck, that one’s actions would come back to them, but Luck or Fate must have smiled on Jennifer to give her the cave to survive in for those months. Shelter, water, a means of warmth – it had been there for her, and she had survived alone in the wilderness.

Although there was warmth, it wasn’t warm in the cave. Sitting beside him, Jennifer cupped her hands and blew into them, trying to warm her fingers. It had been so hot in the desert, and now it was so cold on the mountain. The irony and the extremes on this mission was one for the record books. He watched as she tossed another log on the fire and crossed her arms in an effort to stay warm.

Jon knew that he could be a gentleman or he could be the captain or he could be a friend. Feeling the goose bumps starting to form on his own skin, he knew that being a gentleman and a friend was much more important. He set aside military protocol. He reached out and rubbed his hands along her upper arms. “It’s cold,” he said to make conversation. “And you’re shivering.” A stray thought crossed his mind. Was it only the cold that was making her shiver?  Could it be because of proximity? Because he was touching her?

“It’s November,” she answered him as she blew on her fingers again. “When I was here before, it just seemed like it was always cold even when I had a fire and the heater going. I couldn’t get warm.”

That was then, he thought. This was now. He could see she was shivering more than he was. “Well, we’re not going to freeze today,” he told her with a slight laugh in his voice. “Come here.” He placed his arms around Jennifer’s shoulders and pulled her close to him. She seemed a bit tense at first, as if she didn’t know how to react to the behavior. He could have kicked himself. She had been raised in an emotionless world. Even after living outside Volcania all those years, sometimes certain actions confused her. “Chivalry’s not dead,” he told her quickly.

Dread Youth didn’t touch. They were taught to keep their distance from others. The first time anyone on the team had hugged her, she seemed unsure about what it was and why she was being hugged. Over time, overt forms of physical contact seemed to be far less surprising. Jon would even see a smile as she returned a hug. An arm around the shoulders to share warmth? Not something she’d ever done before, but he knew she understood that chivalry wasn’t dead when she relaxed against him. She grabbed the oversized jacket and put it around the front of them. Together, they’d stay warm enough even if they couldn’t really stay warm until the storm was over and they could try to fly out of there. Sitting next to her, having an arm around her – it was an incredible feeling. He forced the smile he felt inside to not show on his face. He didn’t want to overstep any bounds if he didn’t know if new boundaries were being built between them – or maybe being torn down.

What he did notice is that her shivering seemed to decrease as she tucked herself a little closer to him.

Perhaps it was the flickering firelight or maybe it was the dim lantern light, but he could make out strange shapes and shadows on the walls made from the jagged rocks situated around the edges of the cave. It was like the times he used to go camping as a boy. He and Mitch would try to see scary shapes in the shadows the campfire made. They’d make up scary stories, trying to out-scare each other until Hawk or his dad would stick their heads out of their tents telling them to go to sleep. He enjoyed those times out of doors.

The lighting in the cave reminded him of those times. The lantern put out enough light to see by, but it was still fairly dark. Even the firelight didn’t help much. “Was it always this dark?”

She nodded. “I never knew how terrifying the dark was until I was here.”

Terrifying? “What do you mean?”

“In Volcania, there were always lights. Even in the darkest places, there were computers and machinery with indicator lights… there wasn’t anywhere there that was dark. Even our personal quarters had a dim work light glowing at all times. When I was traveling here in that transport, there was a light inside it that never shut off, even when I stopped to sleep. But, here, there were no lights. Whatever towns or settlements were down in the valley, they were miles away. You couldn’t see any light from them through the fog that settled every night.” She took a shuddering breath. “I never knew what total darkness was. I never had any idea that it could be so terrifying. I would hear every noise outside. There were so many I couldn’t identify. Now, I know they’re the noises certain animals make, but then? I don’t think I slept a full hour for weeks after I got here.”

Darkness. Jon used to love the dark when he was a boy, but Jennifer hadn’t been scared of the dark – she had been terrified of what was in the dark. Alone, in a cave, in the dark, hunted… did Jennifer have nightmares about that time?

Jon didn’t want her to stop talking, but he sensed that this was a subject she was finished with. Instead, he tried a different tact. “It was colder outside when we found you that January. Did the wind-up heater keep the cave warm?”

“Warm but not warm enough. I usually wore all the clothes when I was here to keep warm. That morning, I was trying to find ways to hide some handmade weapons in the jacket, and I hadn’t put on the rest of the clothes when I thought I heard the trap catch something.”

That was why she was only wearing the youth leader uniform when they’d met. Odd, but those little details that seemed unimportant to her were of profound interest to Jon. Learning about every moment she’d spent there, every ordeal, every revelation that filled her life during that time became very important to Jon. He didn’t want to push her though. She’d tell him when she was ready or when she thought the topic was relevant.

Still, that didn’t mean he couldn’t coax a few bits of general information from her. She didn’t seem to mind when he asked general questions.

“How did you keep from getting bored at night or when it was storming?” he asked, knowing that long stretches of time with nothing to do preyed on Jennifer’s patience.

“I had my little mysteries to think about,” she told him. She pointed up toward the walls and the ceiling. “What do you see?”

Jon looked around the cave; really looked at it for the first time. There were old carvings in the walls and ceilings. He could make out some of them. Dates going back at least two hundred years, countless nicknames, simple markings to denote the fact that someone had been there once upon a time.

“I didn’t know what they were for so I would imagine all kinds of scenarios why someone would carve pictures in stone,” she explained. She glanced at Jon’s look of surprise at her words. “I know, imagining anything wasn’t something the caretakers taught us in the Dread Youth, but it seems that once I broke through the conditioning, all sorts of ideas started to come to mind. I found myself being curious about anything and everything. Like this. I didn’t know why anyone would carve their names in stone. No one would know who they were or why they were here. Someone would just wonder about the people who carved the names.”

Forgotten people. No, no one would know who the carvers were, but they would know that someone passed through the cave. A living breathing person with hopes and dreams and the desire to be remembered had left a small bit of themselves in a cave so someone in the future could gaze and ponder.

“They wanted to leave a mark,” he surmised. “Let the world know that they lived and they loved.” Jon pointed out one carving in particular. He’d seen countless other carvings just like it in his youth, but it was the only one of its kind in the cave. Some of it had crumbled away, but Jon could make out the outer design: a heart with a cross inside and initials on the four corners of the cross. The cave was probably used for more than just a hideout for people escaping biomechs. “Looks like at least one couple found this cave and left their mark.”

Jennifer chuckled. “I had to ask Mentor what that symbol meant. A human heart doesn’t look like that, and what did a cross with letters that don’t correspond to directions mean?”

“Oh, I think they indicate a direction, just not geographically.” It was a symbol that showed the direction the heart was going. “And those are two people’s initials. Probably some young couple found this place and came here to be alone.”

Thunder and lightning began to roll by again, this time even closer. Dust shook from the ceiling and landed in the fire, making it sputter and start to flame out. Jennifer added more firewood and watched the flames leap up again. Then she snuggled back under the jacket, back under his arm and leaned against him. “Maybe this cave was more comfortable one hundred years ago?” she suggested. “It just seems dark and gloomy to me.”

“Maybe it’s too many bad memories connected to it?” Jon suggested.

“Could be, but it’s nice to know some good memories got made here, even if no one knows who it was.”

Good memories made by people who loved each other who came here to be away from prying eyes. People could talk without anyone overhearing. Secrets could be shared or thoughts could be confirmed.

There was one thought that had been running through his mind that he needed confirmation on.

“Jennifer,” Jon gently tilted her head up so he could see into her eyes. He had to know. He didn’t want to guess. He didn’t want to assume. He had to know. “I wish I had been able to walk with you to the water station. If I’d been there, maybe they wouldn’t have focused on you. They would have seen two resistance fighters needing help instead… but what you did at Oasis… you put your life in the hands of strangers just to get help to me.”

“You were hurt. Soaron was still in the area. I never considered Blastarr could be nearby as backup. If I hadn’t agreed –”

Jon leaned a little closer, his hand never moving from her. “No, Jennifer, what you did for me, I’m not worth you giving up your life to people who don’t know the truth about the Dread Youth. They don’t know what you saw, what you went through… how you learned the truth.” He gently pushed the wayward strand of hair away from her face. “You’re too important to risk your life for me like that.”

Jennifer reached up and took Jon’s hand. “No I’m not. I’m a soldier, just like you, and like you said, sometimes we have to do the right thing regardless if it’s the right choice. We risk our lives fighting biomechs and biodreads. Any of us know that we might not come back from a mission. I’m no more important than anyone else.”

Jon shook his head with a slight smile. “You’re important to me, but you didn’t make that agreement because of a biodread being out here, did you? Was there another reason?”

She didn’t say anything. Jon gently cupped her cheek, his thumb lying close to the wound at the corner of her mouth. “Jennifer?”

“I couldn’t let anything happen to you,” she said lowly. She looked down and saw Jon’s leg shaking a bit. Her voice took on an edge, as if she was trying to change the subject. “You shouldn’t have pushed that leg the way you did. It couldn’t –”

“Blastarr was heading to Oasis, and I couldn’t let anything happen to you,” he told her, his voice just as low. He couldn’t move his gaze from her eyes. What he saw reflected there… no, he wasn’t guessing any longer. He wasn’t assuming. He wasn’t hoping. There was no need.

He leaned toward her and tenderly kissed her on the cheek.

No, there was no doubt, not anymore.

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Jennifer closed her eyes when she felt him touch her cheek. She felt his nose brush against her skin as he sat back a little.

He kissed her.

He kissed her?

He kissed her!

She opened her eyes to find him looking back at her, a small smile on his face. That was not a goodbye kiss, a hello kiss, a congratulatory kiss, or a good luck kiss. It was not a kiss shared by two friends.

It was not an inappropriate kiss.

The look in his eyes, the way he held her, there was nothing confusing about what she was feeling.

And Jon?

No, there was no doubt how he felt about her anymore.

She closed her eyes again when he kissed her a second time, close to the wound near her mouth.

There were butterflies in her stomach. She’d heard the expression before, but she had never felt the sensation until that moment. She didn’t know if it was excitement, surprise, confusion, anticipation or exultation. In that moment, she felt like she was going to burst in twenty directions at once.

The look in his eyes – she had told him all of it. All that she hated to think about, all that she never said aloud, all the secrets she tormented herself with, he understood. That was the one thing Jennifer had wondered about -- could anyone understand what had happened? How could anyone hear about some of her darkest secrets, her deepest regrets, and not turn away from her in disgust?

Jon didn’t turn away.

But right then, at that moment, several barriers between her and Jon had been shattered. She didn’t know where they were going to go from there, but at least she knew how he felt at that moment. A kiss wasn’t simple by definition. Neither was the way he held her. He truly cared.

~J~U~D~G~M~E~N~T~

Jon knew.

Jennifer knew.

A particular boundary had been ripped to shreds. Looking into her eyes, Jon could see that there was still so much hidden inside of her. She had told them so much, had shared so much of her life with them, but there was much more that she still had to face. Some of it, she might not be aware of. She’d reveal more as she grew more comfortable with him, but more importantly, with herself.

She could trust him. She knew that. He was the only one she shared her deep dark secrets with, and he held on to those secrets until she felt comfortable letting the others know. He was her confidante, and he looked forward to each and every moment she was willing to share with him.

“If there’s ever anything else you want to talk about, no matter what it is, you know I’ll listen,” he told her as he brushed his fingers along the strands of hair that had escaped her ponytail and framed her face.

She nodded. “I never wanted anyone to know about everything that happened there,” she told him. “The promotion, what I did, why I did it –”

“I know,” he told her. “What happened ripped you apart inside. It’s hurt you all these years, and what you know now has made it worse,” Jon agreed. How could he say this? She had never denied what happened or her part in it. She always took the blame on herself. “The fact that what happened hurts you to this day is all the proof you need that you’re a good person, and I really like the person you’ve become. It’s someone I want to know more about.” Then, he said in a lower voice, “I want to know everything – when you want me to know it.”

There it was, that smile of hers. The one that reached her eyes and let Jon get a glimpse into her soul.

He also knew that the boundary they had ripped through was as far as either were going to go at that moment. No more boundaries would be approached. He wasn’t going to go any further. He didn’t move away though. He kept his arm around her, keeping her warm, keeping him warm.

Jon glanced up at the ceiling again. “So, after pondering the mysteries of the drawings, what else did you do to pass the time in here?” Another loud rumble of thunder rolled overhead.

“We don’t have a hat or a deck of cards,” Jennifer mused. She looked around… “But –” She pulled her arm out from under the jacket and picked up pieces of rock. Immediately, Jon noticed the pieces were light and dark. She then drew a 64-checkered square in the dirt between them with her finger. “Then, I didn’t have much to keep me busy, but I think we can improvise a chess game. Or maybe checkers. Want the dark or the light pieces of rock?”

Power Base: Late In The Afternoon

“You two had us worried!” Hawk called out as he rushed into the landing bay. What he saw were two tired, dusty, individuals climbing off a damaged sky bike without landing pads. “That looks bad,” he pointed toward the bike.

“Compliments of Soaron,” Jon told him as Jennifer handed Hawk the data disk.

Hawk caught a glance at Jon’s leg. “That looks worse.”

“Still compliments of Soaron,” Jennifer explained. “How’s my jump ship?”

“Perfect,” Hawk assured her, noticing for the first time she was wearing a rather worn out jacket that he’d never seen before. It was too many sizes too big for her. Maybe it was for Tank? “It’s working, it’s humming along, there’s not a vibration to be felt.”

Hawk saw an amused glance pass between Jon and Jennifer, but there was something different about the look they shared. Something… very different. It was more relaxed, more personally expressive. It made Hawk think that maybe he shouldn’t be looking. There was an ease between the two that wasn’t there before they left. Something had happened that went beyond the tribunal at Oasis. Whatever it was that was bothering Jennifer either wasn’t bothering her anymore or they had been able to talk it out. Whatever happened on the mission, the ‘something’ that had been between them had been replaced by ‘something else.’ Or maybe whatever was the ‘something’ was had been removed? He’d have to figure that out by observing them.

Jon tossed Hawk a small metal box. “Here, we brought you something.”

Hawk opened the box… “Jack in the boxes without the jacks! My dad used to use these!” He picked up the wind-up flashlight. “My dad had one of these. Carried it for years. Said it was his good luck charm.” He then picked up the small heater. “And this gadget? It’ll keep you from freezing to death, but it won’t keep you really warm... the spring’s busted in this one. Hey, you two were in the mountains, and it’s wintertime. Did this heater work?”

“We lit a fire,” Jon told him.

Hawk was grinning like a kid on Christmas morning as he inspected the jack-in-the-boxes-without-the-jacks again. “Where did you get these?”

“Found them,” Jennifer told him. “Jon thought that you might like to have them.”

Hawk couldn’t stop smiling. Then, he looked up and saw how those two were moving – not well. That fight with Soaron and with Blastarr really took a toll on them. “Okay, you two get to the infirmary and let me make sure you’re all right. And you,” he looked at Jennifer, “you need to get some sleep. You look like you walked miles through the desert.”

“I did,” she told him.

Hawk’s sharp eye noticed the bruises. There was something oddly familiar about the pattern. “Did you go a few rounds with Blastarr? Personally?”

“Just one or two.”

“She won,” Jon interjected.

“Okay, exactly how beat up are you two?”

“Sore muscles from a crash and getting shot at by Blastarr,” Jennifer told him.

“I was knocked out once, she was knocked out twice,” Jon added.

“Jon’s leg needs medical attention,” Jennifer pointed out.

Hawk looked at Jennifer, then at Jon, then back to Jennifer again. “I’m guessing this debriefing is going to be rather interesting?”

“It won’t be boring,” Jon told him.

Hawk just shrugged and shook his head. “Okay. See you in the infirmary. I’ll get Scout and Tank started working on this bike. Scout will not going to be happy. He’s going to have to rig up completely new landing pads for this one.”

Hawk turned and walked back toward the control room, but before he left the landing bay, he turned back and looked at his prodigal twosome who had returned home. Jon placed a hand on the bike’s seat and leaned toward Jennifer. He heard Jon ask, “Would you really have carried me all those miles through the desert?”

The End

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