Citizen (Citizen Saga Book 3) Read online

I'd always known we traded with other nations beyond our invisible but impenetrable walls. My father had taken one of the last aeroplane flights to and from Tehteh Airport in order to renegotiate one of those trade agreements just over ten years ago. But the average Citizen never got to see what lay beyond our shores. We just accepted what we were given, never questioning what we had to sell in order to receive.

  Wánměi the provider of all good.

  Recent rumour had it that we traded drones. And from several vid-screens I could see the inside of containers that did indeed have drones stacked one after the other in an orderly line.

  Their eyes glowed red. Shiloh red.

  I shook my head and forced myself to turn away from what I had expected, but hadn't dared to allow myself to believe.

  And took in the most distressing vid-screen images of all. There were two screens, each divided into four different container views.

  I made a sound, a half cough half wretched gag, as the reality of our trading demands set in.

  Drones I could understand. Shiloh controlled drones had me feeling a fear and dread that stole all reason.

  But this?

  "Lena?" Tan asked over the airwaves. "What have you found?"

  The ship jolted. The engines roared to life. The lights on-board the deck dimmed to safety only levels.

  And the people, the families - men, women and children - inside the eight containers screamed, huddled together, and sobbed in angst and near darkness, as I watched them on the vid-screens.

  Chapter 2

  You’re Dying

  Lena

  "Lena, talk to us," came Trent's voice through the earpiece. I must have been quiet too long, for him to have taken over communications from Simon.

  "You're meant to be in bed," I replied, still in a state of shock, staring numbly at the vid-screens.

  "I'm fine. Are you?" he snapped back. His temper twice as short since being nearly killed.

  I sucked in a breath of air, reminding myself he wasn't angry at me. Or maybe he was. Trent seemed to be angry at everyone lately.

  "We've got a problem," I said, flicking my eyes from one vid-screen to the next, trying to determine if they were labelled, identifiable. Or if the cameras themselves could be mapped out on some diagram I didn't yet see.

  I couldn't make anything out that led me to locate which container was which. Which container housed human beings and which did not.

  "What's the problem?" Trent asked, and just hearing his voice in my ear helped calm my pulse.

  "We've got eight containers full of people, and an untold number full of drones. Shiloh drones," I added.

  Silence.

  Then, "What do you mean full of people?" This time from Tan.

  "I mean full of men, women and..." My voice cracked. I swallowed past a dry lump in my throat. "Children," I managed.

  Only increasing static over the earpiece.

  "Are you still there?" I asked, the spike of my pulse letting me know Trent's voice hadn't alleviated all of the panic.

  "You're heading out of range," Si advised. "We'll lose you in approximately two and a half minutes."

  Great.

  "Lena!" Tan again. "I'll be there as soon as I can." My eyes came up and scanned the surroundings. We'd moved off from the docks and out into the main channel. I could still see the lights of Wánměi. And in the distance only darkness.

  "How...?" I started, but Tan overrode me.

  "Get somewhere safe and I'll find you."

  "I am safe," I argued, just as I spotted movement out on the deck.

  I ducked down beneath the bridge windows. The darkness now outside would make me stand out for sure.

  "There's someone on-board," I whispered, glancing at the closed door to the bridge and noting there were no other exits available.

  "Of course there is," came Si's sardonic reply. "It's a ship."

  "No," I offered, moving along the bridge controls and looking for anything that would give me an advantage. "The bulk of the internal areas of the ship are abandoned. Even the galley. If there's someone on-board they either shouldn't be, or they make up a skeleton crew."

  "Automatic piloting," Si said in awe.

  "Just enough crew to ensure the humans get there alive," Trent offered, in a more subdued tone of voice.

  I blinked several times to process those words, but my mind kept stalling on the images of the children.

  "Listen, Lena," Trent added. The static grew worse. "It's safe to say he'll be armed. May even be a drone."

  "No red light," I managed.

  "OK, human. But that does not mean harmless. Those people are being shipped like slaves. He'll be a lethal prison warden."

  "Or he's here to get them out," I offered.

  "Like you are?" Si asked and Trent growled.

  "Your safety first, Lena," he said, the words getting distorted at the end. "Jump ship," he advised, or at least, I thought he did.

  Only static filled my ears.

  "Trent?"

  Nothing.

  "Si?"

  Nothing.

  "Tan?"

  I clenched my fists and rechecked the vid-screens.

  OK. Friend or foe? And where was he now?

  The inside of the ship seemed deserted, but the bridge did look in working order. Maybe, if he was the prison guard, he spent all of his time here. But there was no cot to rest on, and surely he'd need rest. I hadn't worked out how quickly a ship returned to Wánměi’s port; last week's one had been different to this. But it was long enough to know the man stationed on-board would need to sleep. And eat. And he didn't do it here.

  But that didn't mean he didn't come here and watch his cargo on the convenient vid-screens.

  The ship might sail itself, but the cargo, the live ones that is, required some attention from time to time.

  I moved towards the door and peeked out the window. The stairwell was bare. But I couldn't leave yet. I needed to even the playing field a little. The guard would know which container housed which cargo. But the vid-screens told me nothing of location.

  They would, however, pinpoint the exact moment I sprung the humans. Because I had every intention of springing them from their prison cells.

  I pulled my laser gun from its holster attached to my thigh. Considered the fact that the moment the guard came back here, he'd know he was not alone. And then I fired.

  Sparks flew, circuits popped, the first vid-screen shattered and the smell of burned plastic and metal drifted in hazy tendrils of smoke on the air. But no alarms sounded. I repeated the process three more times, until the bridge was engulfed in dark billowing smoke and the odd spark illuminated the clouds like lightning.

  Then without further delay I took the opportunity to vacate the trap that was the bridge and moved through the door, stepping lightly down the treads, and pausing at the base to listen for sounds. The engine covered most superficial noises and the creak of the neglected vessel covered much more.

  But at least the guard, if that’s what he was, would be deaf to my presence as well. Hopefully he was still blind to it. Until he came back here, that is. But if I could get to him first...

  I moved out onto the deck. The last place I'd seen him. Feeling imagined eyes on my back the entire time I crept through the shadows.

  The squawk of a gull overhead made me jump, my heart thundering inside my chest, my blood roaring between my ears. I swiped the back of my hand over my brow and repositioned my hold on the laser gun. Flexing my fingers inside the gloves, glad to have something that would grip better than sweat soaked palms.

  Wánměi sparkled along one side of the vessel. Darkness loomed on the other. I watched the shifting lights of my city as they slowly moved past and then sucked in a deep breath and kept going. The man had been up the far end of the ship, towards the last containers to be loaded on the bow.

  I had a feeling he'd head straight towards the bridge to scan his charges now the boat was under way, but what he'd do afterwards, I couldn't guess. He had to sleep somewhere, but not anywhere I'd had the chance to check out. I needed to find him first.

  Of course, this might all be moot. He could have been here to free the families.

  Somehow, what with my luck, I just doubted that.

  With renewed determination I decided my only avenue of success right now was to assume this man was foe. The ship being on automatic pilot I could understand, but ensuring the cargo remained intact for the duration of the journey, and dealing with the offloading and consequent loading of goods at the other end, meant someone needed to be on-board in order to make sure everything went smoothly.

  I couldn't even begin to imagine who our trade partners were. How they operated. What they thought of a crew-less ship full of containers of drones and humans. The humans were the anomaly in my mind. Trading for drones made sense. Maybe our technological advancement was greater than other nations? But men, women and children evoked images of slaves, just as Trent had said.

  There was no way I could comprehend that.

  And why were they chosen? These families who huddled together in darkness with fear. How had the Overseers picked them? Or was this some sort of escape from Wánměi I had never thought of before? Not slaves, but refugees.

  I bit my bottom lip and hesitated at the edge of a container, listening for footfalls. I was close to where I had seen the movement on the deck from the bridge. No obvious tread could be heard over the rumble of the engines and the creak and groan of the overused and under cared for ship.

  I shook my head, too many questions requiring answers I knew I'd not get on-board this ship.

  I pulled my mirror and checked around the corner of the container whilst in a crouch. No one walked the corridor formed by the metal boxes that I could see. I stood up and slipped around the edge, then walked swiftly to the next gap.

  A clang sounded out over my right shoulder, closer to the bridge than I now was. My head spun in that direction, as though I could see through the obstacles of containers between me and there. It could have been a loose chain rattling, but I had to take the chance that it was man-made.

  I started moving quickly through the shadows, pausing only briefly to check the coast was clear before continuing on around corners. Determined to find the guard before he made it to the bridge and my presence was discovered. I rounded two more corners, ran down two more empty corridors, the bridge looming over me on every step. If he made it up there, he'd see me down here in the rabbit warren of containers. My every move easily detected from the higher vantage point.

  The thought made me look up. Not because I had heard a sound, but because I decided a higher elevation would work in my favour.

  Unfortunately, so had the guard, who had somehow been aware of my presence.

  A dark figure dropped down towards me, but with the split second of warning I'd had, I managed to throw myself sideways and avoid being knocked to the deck beneath a ninety kilo solid mass. The deck thudded with his landing, his boots knocking the dust and debris and rust flakes up into little flurries around his feet.

  He swung something towards my head, forcing me to fall backwards to my back, but as I'd been crouching the distance didn't wind me this time. I rolled sideways and avoided another head shot, the ring of metal on metal making my eardrums almost burst as what appeared to be an oversized wrench met the deck, throwing off sparks of light that momentarily blinded.

  I blinked, pulled my laser gun from my thigh holster and took aim.

  The wrench connected with my wrist.

  The laser gun flew off and thunked into a container wall.

  He grinned. A tooth was missing. Grime had worked its way into the grooves of his ageing face. He had to be in his late fifties, maybe early sixties, which would have you believe he'd been manning this ghost ship since Wánměi closed its borders.

  "Wait. Stop!" I called out, cradling my injured wrist against my chest and holding up my free hand to ward his next attack off.

  I wanted to get some answers. I wanted to prevent the next skull crushing hit.

  But he just raised the wrench above his head, a deathly gleam in his dark eyes, and started to lower it.

  My hand found my spare conventional gun and I fired. Blood splattered over my face from the wound I'd inflicted in the centre of his chest. My ears rung, the smell of burnt primer filled the air. And the wrench fell from his suddenly weakened grasp, landing between my legs and then toppling over onto my left shin.

  I gasped at the sharp spike of pain, even as I was crawling backwards, trying to get away from the guard when he collapsed to his knees. His face showed disbelief and agony. But no regret.

  "The humans!" I demanded, moving to a crouch and ignoring the throb in my lower leg. "Which containers?" He said nothing, so I repeated it in Wáitaměi. He looked of Anglisc decent, but that did not mean he spoke Anglisc. Not in Wánměi and definitely not at the docks.

  He laughed, and blood pooled in his mouth, trickling over his chin.

  "You're dying," I offered, my voice devoid of all emotion. "Tell me where they are. Do something worthwhile with your last breath."

  He opened his mouth. I leaned forward, not too close he could lash out with a concealed knife, but close enough to hear his whispered, gurgled words.

  "Wánměi above all others," he managed. "Wánměi leads the way."

  And then he was dead.

  Chapter 3

  It Was Lena

  Trent

  "Where's Tan?" I asked Si, wincing when I pinched the stitches in my side; leaning too close to his vid-screens in a desperate attempt to see what the hell was going on.

  Thank fuck for bullet proof vests, without them I may have suffered more than just a laser injury to my side, under my armpit where the material gaped, during the battle at the Ohrikee. Just a bugger it had nicked my lung.

  "Out of range," Si replied, then threw down his headset and pushed his chair back from the desk in defeat. "They're on their own."

  I shook my head, swiped at the perspiration that had beaded on my forehead - partly due to stress and frustration, but mostly due to the lingering pain of recovery - and slumped back in my own chair, staring at the images of the docks and the chaos that still existed there.

  I could see what Alan could see, through his night vision goggles; the eerie green glow of the images making the scene seem quite surreal. The office had caught fire, the dock workers frantically trying to put the flames out, the drones hemming them in so they couldn't flee.

  Tan's men had fallen back, minus Tan of course. Alan simply watched on from a higher vantage point waiting for instructions from me.

  "Where's the ship now?" I asked.

  Si turned back towards the vid-screens and tapped a few instructions into the system. Street-cams in Tahmahkee came up, then changed their viewing angles to show the coastline along that stretch of our island. No large dark shape appeared in the distance.

  "Will we be able to even see it?" I asked, hope and fear warring with each other.

  "It'll have maritime safety lighting on, we should see those in the dark."

  He moved on to the next and then the next cameras, hacking them in lightning speed and then overriding their controls, changing their viewing angle to better suit our needs. The Overseers would see what we were doing, if they were monitoring those cameras. Which you had to assume Shiloh was. If Si kept this up, they'd know the ship was our target.

  For a second, I held my tongue. The need to see how far Lena was from me overriding the need to protect the operation at all costs.

  But it didn't matter, Si had found the ship. From a street-cam in Geh Dowee, the very south-western tip of our island, just as the ship left our waters for whatever shipping channel it was programmed to take.

  We stared at the lights as they slowly grew smaller. The distance increasing with every pound of my heart inside my chest. It was already too far for her to swim; our original fallback position. If she jumped overboard now, she'd never make it.

  I breathed through the nausea that thought created. My fists clenched at the impotency I felt. I watched the screen as if my focus alone would make the situation alter. It didn't. Lena was on-board a container ship heading towards waters unknown.

  And with her was a prison guard tasked with...

  Fuck!

  "Call Alan and Tan's men back," I instructed, needing to be involved in at least some aspect of this, even if it was just supervising.

  "Where do you want them? Here?"

  I stared at the street-cam view at Geh Dowee. No other street-cam could get closer to the disappearing ship. It was the last piece of our island she would see.

  Or the first she would head for if she made it off that fucking ship.

  "Send them out to Geh Dowee. Right to the point. Have them ready to defend it, if necessary."

  "Defend it? Against drones?"

  I nodded.

  "It's Lena," I said. And there weren't enough words in the world to add to that to describe what I meant.

  But Si understood.

  "It's Lena," he repeated softly, and started issuing orders over his repositioned headset.

  I stared at the Geh Dowee street-cam image, knowing I wouldn't move from where I sat until I saw her on that vid-screen. I wouldn't eat or drink or take a break. I wouldn't rest like the doctor had ordered and Lena often threatened me with. I wouldn't deal with rebel politics and defending my position as its leader. I wouldn't strategize or analyse the state of play in Wánměi. I wouldn't theorise on where Harjeet Kandiyar had gone to or what Shiloh and the Overseers planned to do with the hidden knowledge of Chew-wen Wang Chao's death. I wouldn't do a thing but watch that screen, praying for her safe return.

  I wouldn't stop believing she would come back to me.

  It was Lena. No other words needed to be said.

  Chapter 4

  I Can’t Do It Alone

  Lena

  "God damn it," I muttered, staring at the still form of the guard. "Were you alone?" I asked him, well aware I was talking to a corpse.

  The ship rumbled on, the rock of the vessel over slightly larger waves letting me know we'd made it out into deeper waters. I let a frustrated breath of air out and then approached the body before me, rolling it over, so he was face up, sightless eyes staring into the night sky.