Boots of Oppression Read online

  I thought about taking my own life but knew I couldn’t go through with that though. So I was left to wait until the sergeant decided to end my miserable life for me. It would be an understatement to say I was in a pretty bad way about then.

  Chapter 6

  A harsh scream announced an incoming missile. A instant later the truck in front of me blew apart with pieces flying in all directions.

  A large panel of metal sailed at me. I ducked out of the way just in time to avoid decapitation which even my suit wouldn’t have prevented. Gunfire erupted from my right at the same time.

  Before I had time to think about what was happening, something hit me in the head, and darkness came.

  I became aware of my surroundings, not sure of how long I was out. Everything was dark, but heavy boots stomped not far from me. “Oh,” I moaned.

  “That one back there’s still alive,” A woman yelled. It was not Estevito’s voice.

  “I’ll finish the frickin’ bastard,” a man growled. I heard stomping as the man approached.

  “Helm, wait,” the woman commanded. “We might be able to use him. Maybe he has information he’d be willing to share with a little coaxing. Take his helmet off.”

  “Aw! You’re taking all the fun out of this for me,” the man grumbled.

  The viewscreen of my faceplate was black. Apparently damaged when I got hit in on my helmet by some piece of flying debris. I felt hands around my neck, and then I saw a slit of light peek up under the helmet. Then my helmet was off. I squinted once the bright light of day blinded my eyes.

  “What’s your name and rank, Spit?” the woman demanded, now hovering over me. A white covering hid her head and face. Dark glasses hid her eyes.

  “Private Triton,” I replied. “But I’m not a Spit.”

  “You’re wearing the uniform, Spit,” she said as she waved her rifle over my suit. A big man stood on the other side of me, also pointing a rifle in my direction.

  “Yeah, well, you got me there, but I’m from Riva Lontana, not Spitnik. The Spits, as you call them, take people from a lot of worlds.” As I rubbed my head, I felt a large bump on the side of it. I noticed that others were loading what they could salvage from our ambushed truck and scout vehicle and placing it aboard their own much smaller trucks.

  “How many troops do the Spits have on our world?” the woman asked. “And remember you’re only alive because I’m thinking you might fricking know something.”

  “Threats your currency?” I peered at her. I didn’t like being bullied. Even if I had maybe been playing for the wrong side.

  Helm lifted his rifle and pressed the muzzle against my forehead.

  “If you’re going to shoot me then, just get it over with,” I mumbled. “At this point, I’d rather welcome it.”

  “Helm, leave him to me,” the woman commanded.

  The man scowled before whipping the muzzle in a different direction. He stepped back several steps while his eyes continued to burn holes through me. The woman’s eyes remained glued on me as well, but her gaze was one of assessment.

  I was not supposed to answer questions if captured. But then again I wasn’t even supposed to get captured according to Spitnik military officers. I was supposed to fight until we won, or I was dead – whichever came first. But I wasn’t particularly feeling an allegiance to the Spitniks. I was ready to tell these people anything they wanted to know.

  I met the woman’s eyes. “I don’t know. About 90,000, I guess,” I said. “At least that’s how many their three carriers can hold, and they’ve only made a single trip out here so far. More are on their way, maybe up to another 90,000, but those are likely twelve or thirteen weeks away.”

  “Only three ships?” the woman questioned.

  “Three carriers,” I clarified. “Two destroyers and a couple of corvettes. The destroyers also each house a dozen fighters that are fast and agile but have a short range.”

  “I don’t believe this Spit,” the man said. “He’s seems too eager to tell us whatever we want to know.”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said. “I had heard from another source that the Spits don’t really have that many ships.” She turned back to me. “How many more ships are they going to send here?”

  “More? That’s almost their entire fleet up there,” I said. “At least that can cross over between stars. They have one other carrier that is elsewhere, probably picking up more bodies to put into their GATS. They have several more destroyers around Spitnik, but those don’t have jump engines. They can’t find enough tantalum to make more engines.”

  “Where was your platoon headed?” the woman asked.

  “Don’t know for sure. But Lustrous Hole, I think,” I said.

  “What do you mean ‘you think’?”

  I shrugged. “They never said where we were going. Look, I’m just a frickin’ private, and it’s my stinking first day as a GAT.”

  “So on your first day on Bahram you already know all about Lustrous Hole?” the man asked. I didn’t think either of them believed me.

  “I heard someone else mention the place, and it just makes sense is all,” I said. “Apparently, with the discovery there, the Spitniks really want those mines, so reinforcements there makes sense. Plus it’s about the distance the sergeant said we would be going.”

  “What discovery? What do you know about the mines?”

  “Nothing, but that tantalum was discovered there,” I replied.

  “Tantalum? That’s twice now you mentioned that.”

  “Yeah. When I was in the Navy, I heard that stuff is needed to build the wormhole generators for their ships. It’s supposed to be really rare stuff. At least the 180 kind.”

  “Navy? So now you were in the Navy too?” The woman stared at me.

  “Yeah, like I said. First day as a GAT,” I said. “I got frickin’ transferred.”

  “Marla,” a man shouted. “The trucks are loaded. We need to get the hell out of here before the Spits send a flyer looking for them.”

  “Can I finish him now?” the man next to Marla asked. He was a big guy with broad shoulders and a square jaw, and he stared at me with burning eyes.

  The woman turned and considered my fate. “No. Go fetch a set of clothes that’ll fit him.”

  The man scowled and turned away. I understood the clothes. The woman wanted my armored suit. I totally got the man too. I held no grudge against him for wanting to shoot me. The woman I wasn’t so sure about yet.

  “Then bind him and stick him on a truck,” the woman ordered.

  At least I was still alive, and, for a bonus, she didn’t call me a Spit again. Sometimes you have to count the little victories in life.

  After I exchanged my armor for trousers and a tunic, the big man zip-tied my wrists together and prodded me toward one of the trucks. I had no boots, and the sand burned the bottoms of my feet and between my toes.

  I didn’t know where they were taking me, but I figured I would only be alive as long as I was useful to them. As crazy as it sounds, I actually thought my situation had improved since being captured by the resistance fighters.

  I noticed all the dead GATs lined up along the road; most were in skinsuits, stripped of their armor. The GATs didn’t look as big and muscular when nearly naked. Those still in their suits were all mangled with armor that was now useless.

  “Cover his head,” the woman yelled back.

  A sack went over my head and everything was black again. But I could still hear, and I could still feel pain too. A couple of the guys tossed me up into the back of one of the trucks none too gently. My head still pounded.

  I thought about the trucks I had seen before I was blinded. They were covered with a fabric over them that was patterned after the desert for camouflage. I had spotted one section where the fabric had pulled away from the surface and it had foil on the backside. I think the camo fabric also hid the infrared signatures of the vehicles. Spitnik trucks did not have that type of tech. I guess the Spits wer
en’t concerned about being attacked from above or tracked by satellites since they always owned the high ground.

  The truck I had been tossed onto rumbled along down a winding path for a long time. I thought it was about two hours, but it was hard to tell with my limited senses. Finally, the vehicle stopped moving, and I heard others jump out of the trucks.

  “Get the prisoner out and bring him up here,” the woman in charge yelled. Perhaps she had decided this was to be the place of my execution.

  Someone grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the back of the truck. I stumbled and fell to the dirt. I was then picked up and dragged along for a short distance. A hand scratched at the back of my neck, and the hood came off.

  Bright sunshine streamed into my eyes, blinding me temporarily. The day was long on Bahram. Being a moon, it was tidally locked to its gas giant, Dosei, which hung above the southwestern horizon. Dosei would never move in the sky, unless we moved across the surface of Bahram. One side of Bahram almost always saw at least a portion of the blue and green banded giant with its rings while the other side of the moon never saw it. But moons rotate on their axes to match their revolutions around gas giants. Bahram took ninety-eight hours to circle Dosei and rotate on its axis, so forty-nine hours of daylight and forty-nine of night.

  My eyes slowly adjusted, and I no longer squinted so hard that I just closed my eyes.

  “What do you see around you,” the woman asked me.

  I squinted at the buildings of the small village in front of us. Roofs were missing; walls had crumbled; the buildings had black scorch marks across them. Then I saw a body. And then another. Many more bodies were all piled up near a wall. All with dark streaks down their heads or their chests. There had been an execution in this brightly lit but dark place. These people had all been lined up and shot just like back in that nameless village.

  I felt a queasiness in my stomach. No longer able to hold it in, it came up. I puked my guts out, turning the red sand into orange.

  “What’s this place?” I asked. I didn’t want it to be just another nameless village.

  “Hogan’s Crossing.”

  I wagged a finger at the bodies. “Why?” I asked, still coughing.

  “The Spits thought they were aiding us,” the woman replied.

  “Were they?” I regretted the question as soon as it left my lips because it really didn’t matter. The man named Helm jumped toward me. The next thing I knew a fist flew into my face. I rocked back a step.

  I felt my lip split. I stared at the woman and then glanced at the man. “Yeah.” I licked my lip and tasted blood. “I had that coming.”

  “Helm, put him back on the truck,” the woman commanded.

  “Hood him again?”

  “No. I think it’s better he sees the trail Spits leave behind them,” she replied.

  They threw me back on the truck. As the truck rumbled along, I stared at the burnt buildings of the village shrinking behind.

  “Bring him over here,” the woman named Marla commanded. Her head was no longer covered. Her short dark hair and weather-wrinkled face made her look older than I was betting was her actual age.

  We were out in the middle of nowhere on a dirt trail. Low hills stood two or three klicks off to one side. More distant hills shimmered off far in front of us. Red sand dominated the landscape around us.

  “Recharge all the trucks off the fusion wagon,” Marla ordered. “Make sure the drivers get a meal. The rest can eat on the trail if they have to. We have a long ride ahead of us. Tinny and Andi, stay on the rocket launchers and watch the air for incoming.”

  “You’re taking us to Lustrous Hole,” I commented from the rock I sat on.

  “What makes you think that?” Marla turned and stared down at me.

  “I can see from the position of Dosei and the local star in the sky that we’ve come northwest. That is the direction of the mine, so I figured that was your likely target.”

  “You’re pretty smart for a …”

  “Spit?”

  “I was going to say foot soldier, but I remembered you said you were in with the Navy. How is it that you ended up in a GAT suit?” Marla asked.

  “Don’t know exactly. I guess the resistance has been more than the Spits expected,” I said, noting to myself that I used the term Spits. “So they transferred some of us coots down to become GATs.”

  “Coots?”

  “Yeah, Spits’ term of endearment for all us non-Spits,” I replied.

  “Why were you not in the vehicles when we found you?”

  “I like jogging in the desert,” I replied.

  She stared at me.

  “Punishment,” I said after a few seconds of silence.

  “For what? Being a smartass?”

  I laughed. “You’re not the first to accuse me of that. But, no. For refusing to obey an order,” I replied.

  “What order?” she pressed.

  My hands were still bound, but I brought them up and rubbed my face. I did not want to think about what I had seen. I was also wary of how she might react. “Doesn’t matter.” I mumbled.

  “What order?” She squinted at me.

  I stared back at her and then lowered my gaze toward my feet. “To shoot one of the villagers back there. We were shot at by someone in the village, so the Spits lined up three of the villagers, and they executed them. But I couldn’t do it.”

  Marla stared at me.

  “I couldn’t shoot him,” I mumbled. “He was just a boy.”

  “Tell me about your world,” Marla requested after a moment.

  I took in a deep breath. “Riva Lontana? It’s a world not so much like this one. A moon around a gas giant’s about all it has in common. Doesn’t have a ring like Dosei. Riva Lontana is a bit bigger than this world with a bit more gravity. Most of the world’s covered by a deep ocean. But there are four large archipelagoes and most of my people live on them. My world is tectonically active, so all the land is where plates come together and form mountains large enough to rise out of the sea. I heard your world does not have tectonics and almost no magnetic field. Star flares must be a bitch,” I chuckled.

  “Dosei’s magnetic field protects us to some degree. But tell me more about your world.”

  “There were about 250 million on my world before the Spits took over.”

  “And now?”

  “Don’t know since there hasn’t been a count since they arrived, but there are fewer than before.”

  “Why didn’t your people fight back?”

  “Fight back?” I snorted. “My world had no military when they arrived. We did not know how to fight.”

  “Why were you with the Spits then when we found you?”

  “Sometimes life doesn’t leave you much of a choice,” I said.

  “There’s always a choice.”

  “Well, my other choice was a frickin’ camp no one ever came back from.”

  Marla stared intently at me for several seconds. Then she reach down toward her boot and pulled out a long knife. She turned the blade toward me. I recoiled as she leaned toward me. But she slipped the blade between my hands and cut the zip tie.

  She pointed the blade at my face. “You have another option now.” She slid the knife back into its sheath strapped around her calf.

  I stared back. What was she offering?

  Shoom! A rocket shot away into the sky.

  Chapter 7

  A flash streaked into the sky toward the northwest, followed almost immediately by nearby explosions. Two trucks of the resistance blew up one after the other in quick succession. I did not hear the missiles coming before the explosions. That meant they were supersonic, probably launched from the air. I instinctively fell to the sand even though I was outside of the immediate blast zones. Shrapnel sometimes flew a long way. In the sky, a fireball erupted and a flaming fighter craft dove toward the desert floor and then exploded somewhere just over the horizon. The craft must have fired off two missiles about the same time the resistan
ce fighters fired off their missile.

  I glanced around.

  A man I had heard referred to as Jergen had been closer to one of the blasts and thrown to the ground by it, but he had been saved by the armored suit he had earlier taken off of one of the GATs. A few closer to the explosions were not so lucky.

  Jergen rose back to his feet and turned toward one of the burning wreckages. The one where Andi had been manning one of the rocket launchers.

  Several whistles streaked past around us. That was the sound of flechettes. GATs out in the desert were using the convoy for target practice. Jergen sank to the sand, flechettes having drilled holes into his back and out of his chest.

  “Oh, crapola!” I yelled. “Get down! Find cover.”

  Marla had already dropped to the sand and had her rifle pointed outward. She held her fire though, unable to spot a target.

  I crawled over to Jergen. I heard more overhead whistles. I should note that by the time you hear the whistle, the flechette is already past you. It only tells you somebody shot at you and missed.

  “Tinny, can you get a target on them?” Marla yelled. Tinny was on the other rocket launcher.

  “Can’t see where they’re at,” Tinny yelled back. “If they launch some grenades, maybe I could lock onto them.”

  Screams came from ahead of me as one of the resistance fighters was wounded. Others simply fell to the sand. Within seconds everyone was on the ground, taking cover, wounded, or dead like Jergen.

  I slipped the helmet off Jergen’s head, slid it on mine, and popped down the face shield. I crawled up to a boulder near Marla and peeked around the side.

  “Where are they? I can’t see them,” Marla complained.

  “There are two out at about 1700 meters,” I said. I had zoomed out on the video and used the rangefinder. “Give my rifle back to me. I can help.”