Colony 41- Volume 1 by S J Taylor

Author:S J Taylor [Taylor, S J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: South Coast Publishing
Published: 2019-04-06T22:00:00+00:00

Part II

Chapter 3 - Fight

I moved swiftly between tall, yellow-brown trees with teardrop shaped leaves, and others with spreading branches and white flowers and bark that bit into my hands as I made my way carefully at sunset. The wind blew through my hair as I went.

I didn’t know the names of the trees. The beauty and diversity of nature hadn’t been part of our course list back at the Academy. I don’t know if maybe the Colony people who studied the healing arts or food preparation or whatever learned about trees. Me and the other 26ers didn’t. Things like that don’t matter to an Enforcer.

Being able to move quickly and silently, to sneak up on an enemy without being seen, that mattered to us. I would never be an Enforcer. Not now.

But I could use what they gave me.

A person can travel overland at an average speed of five kilometers an hour, give or take. Faster, if they do more than walk. I wasn’t exactly walking. The bag of my supplies banged rhythmically against my back. The machete hung from my belt. I moved like lives depended on me. Because they did.

An hour and a half later, just as the sun was turning orange over the tops of the trees, I could see the Enforcer encampment not far off. Lights. Vehicles moving slowly back and forth. The noise of men and women and equipment.

Overhead, two HoverHawks floated in stationary position. The “flyers” that Ethyline had seen. They were black, flat rectangles the size of small houses, with four rotating cylinders at each corner. Antigrav engines. They allowed the HoverHawks to move like soaring birds. They carried up to a dozen men.

And, they were heavily armored.

The HoverHawks were a quiet thrum reverberating through the night. That, and the general noise of the camp, covered the sounds of my approach.

Jadran was right. Scary, how close his words had been to my own thoughts. I was never going to stay in the village. I didn’t belong there. That kind of peaceful existence was not for me. I needed to act. I needed to do something.

I needed to stop the Enforcers from hurting these people.

Closer and closer I crept, through the night, from tree to tree, from shadow to shadow. They had cleared away a large area of the forest to set up their camp. We weren’t at the coastline anymore, I realized. How far inland had they come already? These were the Outlands. What hadn’t been reclaimed by nature, like the area here around Refuge, was still toxic and radioactive and deadly. None of that would stop the Enforcers. What they couldn’t control, they would simply obliterate.

How many villages had they already marched through? What had happened to those places, I wondered? Probably the same thing that had happened to the Freemen who tried to stop them.

Nothing stopped the Enforcers. It was suicide to even try.

A grim smile crossed my face. So here I was, on a suicide run. I knew I could take out a lot of them.

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