Dragon (A Histories of Purga Novel)

They flew as fast as they could, but Rone wasn’t stupid. If Roanoke had been taken, then they couldn’t just fly over it without someone seeing them. Besides, if whoever was leading the Blak Army was smart enough to seize control of the city, then he was smart enough to post soldiers in the air above it.

He pulled in close to Darvian and gestured to his friend to land. Then they both angled into a dive and headed toward the ground.

They’d just flown over Raleigh, one of the cities in the Outposts, and it looked reasonably secure to Rone. He decided it was as good a place as any to regroup and come up with a real plan.

In a few moments, they landed. About three hundred miles away, they could faintly see Roanoke’s colossal outer wall. Despite how far away they were, the massive city could still be seen, like distant mountains. Rone stared at it, frozen in anger and shock as dozens of thinning smoke columns spiraled into the sky.

Rone and Darvian sat hunkered on the ground, watching the city and trying to figure out their plan to gain access into it when the sand in front of them exploded outward in a huge cloud. They flew backward, trying to scramble away.

A girl about the same age as themselves appeared when the dust cleared holding a blaster on them.

“Stay where you are!” the girl shouted. She had fiery red hair that was pulled up into a messy pony-tail. She wore standard Infantry armor and ballistic gear. A pair of dark shades covered her eyes and a half mask covered her jaw, mouth, and chin.

To their left and right, dozens of other people exploded out of the sand too. In a matter of seconds, Rone and Darvian were surrounded.

“Stop!” Rone shouted, his heart hammering in his chest. “Stop. We’re unarmed. I am Prince Rone.”

“Rone?” the girl asked. She pulled off her shades, showing bright green eyes, and then took off the mask.

“Fiona?” he asked, relieved. She was Lord Milo Rosburg’s daughter. Raleigh was the city he governed. “What are you doing out here?”

“Setting a trap for the Blak Army,” she replied in a voice that said it should be obvious. “Where have you been? You’re father’s been kidnapped. The Blak Army has taken Roanoke and killed thousands of our people. The Royal Infantry and Imperial Guards are all MIA. Panic is taking over. Everyone is scared. They need someone to rally behind.”

“They tried to take me out, but they failed. I spent some time recovering but I’m back now,” he explained. “I want to fix things. Where’s your father?”

Anger, guilt and shame warred for space on her face.

“He’s been gone ten months now,” she responded, coldly. “He was sent on an urgent mission to the Polaris Mountains.” She paused, tears sliding down her face. “He didn’t return.”

“You think the Blak Army got him?”

“My father was Imperial Guard before he was given his title. He was the best. No one could take him down,” she replied. “Unless they were waiting for him. They probably set a trap and took him before he had a chance to protect himself.”

“Can you tell them to put their guns away?” Darvian cut in.

Fiona absently waved a hand and the soldiers dropped their weapons. Then she deliberately rolled her eyes at Darvian, which he ignored.

“Return to your spots,” she yelled.

The Raleigh soldiers ducked back into whatever holes they’d climbed out of and it was just the three of them again.

“Why would they take your father?” Rone asked. “They attacked Roanoke. He’s the Lord of Raleigh. An Outpost city. What about your father was threatening enough to remove him ten months before the army even attacked? It doesn’t make any sense.”

He shook his head in confusion.

“I don’t know,” Fiona responded. “But they’re gonna wish they’d never had the thought in their heads. I’ll make sure of that.”

“Is there any intel you could give us?” Darvian asked.

“No. Our reports are scattered but it appears that their numbers are strong. They planted bombs and waited for them to explode. Then they attacked during the confusion. The Royal Infantry and the Imperial Guards were driven from the city. There are reports of civilian refugees. We haven’t heard anything else for a week and a half now,” she responded, looking at Rone and pointedly ignoring Darvian, who let out a frustrated sigh.

“What do you think we are going to do?” Darvian asked, looking at Rone. “Walk in there and tell them that they should all give up because you command it?”

Fiona snickered.

“They’d kill you on sight,” Darvian went on.

“I know that,” Rone responded, irritated. “But I don’t necessarily have to look like myself. I had Bastion use my nanos to make me look like Lady Guilder, remember. I can do it again to look like someone else. Then we can sneak into the city, find my father, and get him out.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Darvian said.

“What?” Rone asked.

“I’m not a spoiled royal. I don’t have an avatar,” he explained. “Without one, my nanos can’t mimic someone else.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Rone assured him with a sly grin.

Darvian didn’t like the look on Rone’s face. He was about to say something about it but Fiona cut in.

“So you get inside Roanoke and get your father. Then what?” Fiona asked. “Getting the King isn’t going to solve our problems. Where are we supposed to get enough troops to retake the city?”

Rone hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” he said as he got ready to leave.

Darvian stood next to Rone. Then they watched as Fiona went over to one of the holes her soldiers were using to hide in. She rapped on something that sounded like wood and then a hatch popped open. A man’s face was visible for a second as Fiona talked to him. When she was done, she got up and walked over to the two of them.

“Ok. I’m ready. Let’s go,” she said, cheerily.

“What are you doing?” Darvian asked, somewhat angrily.

“Forgive me if I don’t feel overly confident in your guys’ abilities.” She smiled. She managed to make it look both sweet and sarcastic, all at the same time. “I’m coming with you. Besides, if I get the chance, I’m going to make whoever is commanding these rebels tell me what happened to my father.”

Neither one argued, although Darvian was clearly upset about the idea.

Rone, however, was happy she wanted to come along. He knew Fiona was a fierce soldier that could fight and shoot. Lord Rosburg had made it a point that she train (in everything from combat fighting to stripping a blaster and reassembling blindfolded) at about the same age he himself had started training. He wasn’t a fool, he knew they could use all the help they could get whether Darvian liked it or not.

“You both realize it’s over three hundred miles to Roanoke,” Darvian said. “How are we supposed to get there without them seeing us coming?”

“That’s where you come in, buddy,” Rone said, clapping his friend on the back.

****

It took them close to two and a half hours to get to Roanoke traveling on a three-person hover bike that Rone created. During the ride, Darvian’s nanos were spread out around them. He spent the entire ride concentrating fiercely on cloaking them, making them all practically invisible. It wasn’t perfect. The constant shifts in terrain, background, and plant life made it difficult to keep the camouflage perfect, but Darvian was practically unrivaled in this skill.

They finally rode up to the massive city fortress. There were a few tense moments of fear, wondering if anyone was going to spot them. Thankfully, no one did. They came to a stop at the base of the wall without any alarms going off.

Darvian was exhausted. Maintaining the level of concentration needed to keep the camouflage going had left him feeling weak.

“You okay?” Rone asked.

“I’ll be fine,” Darvian replied.

“Don’t mess this up. If they catch us because you’re too exhausted, I’ll throw you to them myself,” Fiona piped in.

Darvian shot her a fierce scowl.

“I’ll…be…fine,” he nearly growled, snarling out each word separately.

“Everybody remember the plan?” Rone asked.

Darvian and Fiona both nodded.

All three were pushed up as close to the wall as they could get, the top of which was so high that the soldiers patrolling it couldn’t see them. That took care of the human threat to their plans but it didn’t take care of the mechanical defenses. There were several safeguards along the base of the fortress wall. There were security drones that regularly patrolled. There were invisible laser grids that would sound alarms if anyone touched them. There were even buried land mines in some areas. Rone, however, knew the wall’s defenses extremely well. He knew its weaknesses. He exploited one of them now. It was a blank spot where the landscape dipped and rose so much that the laser grid had openings wide enough to allow them access without setting off any alarms. To compensate for the gaps in the grid, land mines were placed but Rone knew where they were and they picked their way through them without trouble. The last problem were the drones but whenever one would pass by, Darvian would cloak them.

“Bastion,” Rone whispered.

“Your Highness,” the avatar responded. His voice came out of Rone’s mechpak.

“Scan one of the soldiers,” Rone commanded. “We need a disguise.”

“Rhea,” Fiona whispered.

“My Lady,” a female voice responded.

“Scan a different soldier,” she told her avatar.

Darvian let out a disgusted sigh.

“You nobles get all the cool toys,” he moped, sounding like a petulant kid. Rone hid his smile. “Do either of you know how long I would have to save to get an avatar?”

Rone and Fiona didn’t answer.

Bastion and Rhea scanned two soldiers walking along the wall. When the scan was complete, Rone’s nanos surged around him in a cyclone that eventually settled into the visage of the soldier Bastion scanned. Rone was now a big guy with tanned skin and an ugly, brutish face. His dark brows looked like giant caterpillars crawling on his face. He had a thin mouth and a protruding chin. He was dressed in black fatigues, a black flak vest, and huge, black, combat boots. Rone also carried a long range blaster in both hands. A slim helmet covered his head, black, of course. Stitched onto the flak vest, just over the left chest was a white circle with a black shield in the middle. In the center of the shield was a spider with all eight legs spread and at the end of each leg was a sword pointing up. Written across the bottom in gold thread were the words Ex cineribus resurgam. Rone’s knowledge of the dead language (something that had only been spoken in the Old World) was rough, but he thought it meant something like “I will rise from the ashes.”

“How do I look?” he asked the both of them. It was odd for them to hear his voice coming out of a complete stranger.

“It’ll do,” Darvian replied. “Just try to make your voice deeper or something. You still sound like yourself.”

Without a vocal print of the man, he hadn’t been able to merge his voice into the disguise along with the face.

“What about me?” Fiona asked. She had the same problem with her voice but she looked and sounded a whole lot weirder.

Both Rone and Darvian gaped. Fiona was now a man over six feet tall with curly blonde hair underneath his own slim black helmet. He had a close-cropped beard hiding a weak chin and grey eyes. He was dressed in identical clothes.

“Well?” she asked again.

They had to visibly shake their heads as Fiona’s obviously female voice came out of her male disguise. It was disorienting, to say the least.

“It’ll do,” Darvian and Rone both said.

“For you though…,” Darvian started say.

“Right. I’ll try not to talk at all…got it,” she replied, rolling her eyes.

“We ready?” Rone asked.

Him and Fiona eyed Darvian. There was a sort of pleasure lurking in Fiona’s eyes that Darvian didn’t like.

“I don’t suppose I have a choice,” he replied.

Fiona and Rone didn’t answer. The next part of their plan was definitely going to be dangerous.

“Let’s get it over with,” Darvian sighed.

Without warning, Rone punched his friend across the face, just below the eye. Darvian went down with a grunt, stopping himself from crying out. They didn’t want unwanted attention. When he got up, he was holding his face.

“I didn’t think it was going to hurt that bad,” he whimpered.

“You’ll be fine. We just need to make it look real. Quit being such a baby,” Fiona said with an impish smile. “This is the only way we can get to where they’re holding the prisoners.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Darvian mumbled. “Don’t remind me.”

“Come on. It’s now or never,” Rone hissed, looking nervously around. A drone just passed them by. So far, they’d been lucky, but he didn’t want to push it. They had to leave, and now. “We’ll head to the gates and tell them we found you roaming outside trying to run away.”

Fiona created a pair of heavy restraints from one of her blueprints that completely covered Darvian’s arms from the elbow down, including his fists. A solid piece of metal went from one cuff to the other, binding them together. He tugged on them, but they wouldn’t budge.

“A bit realistic, don’t you think?” he asked her.

“I thought that’s what we’re going for,” she responded. “Look, don’t worry. They have a disengage word I programmed into them. All you have to say is…,” she smiled slyly, “moron.”

Darvian looked at her.

“What?” she asked, feigning innocence.

“Really?” Darvian asked, sarcastically. He pointedly ignored Rone’s quiet bout of laughter. “You’re still holding a grudge?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fiona replied, putting a hand to her hip. The gesture was undeniably feminine and looked very weird in her Blak Soldier disguise.

Rone and Darvian stifled smiles they couldn’t quite stop.

“What’s the matter with you two?” she asked, angrily.

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” Darvian replied. “Try to think like a guy. Doing that,” he gestured to where her hand was still on her hip. “looks like something a seventeen year-old girl would do.”

Fiona’s face turned beat red beneath her disguise and she was suddenly glad they couldn’t see her embarrassment. Her eyes, however, narrowed to slits as she focused on Darvian.

“I am so tempted to just give you over to them and leave your sorry butt in prison,” she threatened.

She walked closer to Darvian and then shoved him ahead of her.

He stumbled for a second and then started walking. Rone was on his left side while Fiona was on the right.

Rone leaned closer to his friend. “I told you that you shouldn’t’ve to dumped her,” he whispered.

“It wouldn’t have worked out,” Darvian mumbled.

“Let’s go. We going to stand out here all day or are we actually going to try and do this?” Fiona asked.

They kept walking, out in the open this time. Darvian pulled slightly ahead of the others while they made sure to keep their blasters trained on his back. He let his head droop slightly forward and allowed the huge manacles to dangle in front of him. He shuffled his feet in the sand and made two sets of long, wavering lines. He slouched and made sure not to look up at anyone. He kept his face blank and slightly glazed over, as if he’d just been through a horrible trauma.

When they got to the massive front gates, ten Blak Army soldiers were there to meet them.

With rifles at the ready.

“Ho, there!” one yelled. “What do you got for us?”

“Prisoner!” Rone shouted back, deepening his voice and making it sound gravelly at the same time. He shoved Darvian forward as they got to the line of soldiers. He stumbled, tripped on purpose, and landed in the sand at their feet, trembling with fear.

“Get up,” one of the soldiers screamed.

Darvian obeyed, getting up and awkwardly trying to brush sand off himself with the giant manacles.

“Don’t hurt me,” he squealed, keeping his head ducked down. His acting was quite convincing.

The soldier with the blaster pointed at Darvian looked to Rone and Fiona.

“Put him with the others,” he said, shoving Darvian back at them.

Rone caught him and roughly pushed him toward the city’s gates. They went to the right of them and opened the door that led into the pedestrian entrance. A soldier behind a desk was frowning at them.

“Who’s this?” he asked with a disapproving look.

“Found him wondering outside the walls, trying to hide. We were told to put him with the others,” Fiona said.

“Put him in Detention Sector 1,” the soldier replied, bored. He hit a button and a loud buzz filled the air.

Fiona pushed Darvian again and they walked over to a metal door. They went through it into a long hallway with grey walls and white tiled floors. They turned right at its end and went through one last door. On the other side was the city itself.

Roanoke.

Rone wasn’t prepared for what he saw. Rubble and debris littered everything. There was glass everywhere and whole chunks of what used to be buildings just lying in the streets. There were no bodies, however. The Blak Army must’ve removed them all.

“Where’s the nearest entrance to Detention Sector 1?” Fiona asked.

“Judicial Hall,” Rone replied without thought. “Assuming it’s not destroyed.”

“Let’s head that way,” Fiona said.

Darvian kept his head down and made his body keep up the trembling. He didn’t talk. He didn’t look at anyone. He gave the appearance of being completely terrified.

Darv, you should’ve been an actor, Rone thought to himself. You could give Harmony Vector a run for her money.

They picked their way through all the rubble, which wasn’t an easy task. Rone cursed several times when his foot struck a stray piece of rubble and twisted it painfully.

Fiona narrowly avoided a nasty gash from a sharp piece of metal jutting out of a damaged building.

Darvian tripped several times but managed to keep his balance and avoid falling. The whole while, he never slipped in his role. Not once. It was pretty impressive.

It took them a long time to get to where they needed to go. There was so much damage. It was everywhere they looked. It made it hard to pick their way through all the rubble. They also had to make sure to keep out of the way of roving Blak Soldier patrols, random drones, and what looked like construction crews clearing rubble away and rebuilding what was damaged.

After what seemed like forever, they finally got to Judicial Hall.

Most of it was still intact. One section of the outer wall on the bottom floor had been blown out, but it hadn’t been enough to destabilize the entire structure. The top three floors looked curiously pristine, untouched by all the smoke and flame. Thick, fluted columns of pure white marble decorated the front and terraced stairs led up to the doors. On either side were massive lion statues sitting on their haunches and watching with uncaring eyes at the devastated city around them.

And hanging from the roof, directly over the huge bronze doors leading inside, was a black banner bearing the same symbol on the patch Rone and Fiona were currently wearing. In fact, as Rone looked around he saw that those same banners could be seen practically everywhere.

How could this happen? he asked himself. How could they prepare something like this? How could they murder their own people?

He shook his head sadly as they went up the stairs to the front doors, each one antsy and filled with a wild, nervous energy that kept them rigid and wired.

Here goes nothing, Rone thought, hoping that he wasn’t about to get his friends killed.