As promised during my video livestream, here’s the full completed chapter. This is the opening chapter for Epsilon: Redeemer, draft 4.
One
<probably winter 2163 or 2164>
Perie, Caldin – Borderworlds
“Luc! Luc, get over here. I need your help.”
I’m still not sure how I heard her over the roar of burning rubble from a nearby explosion. Her voice echoed from an alleyway a few dozen yards away and I cursed under my breath as I darted in that direction, gaze scything back and forth, seeking any sign of the Imperium soldiers that were still in the process of landing in the capital. I saw no one as I ducked into the shadows of the alley, moving toward the sound of her voice. Renegade was on her knees next to someone, cradling his head in her lap.
I felt sick. No. No. “That’s not—”
“Help him,” she whispered, staring up at me with tears in her eyes. She sounded hoarse, as if she’d been calling for help for a long time. I had no way of knowing.
I fumbled a light stick from the pocket of my jacket and snapped it to life. On the ground, Wil Terrel groaned.
“No,” he slurred. “They’ll find us.”
Fuck. My instincts had been right, then. There must have been some Imperium soldiers in the vicinity—or there had been at the time of his injury.
Either that or whatever happened had scrambled his brains.
Ren shook her head as I knelt down, already starting to unpack my kit. “If Luc doesn’t have light to work, that’s not going to matter.”
It might not matter anyway. Things already looked bad as I got to work, peeling back what was left of Wil’s pant leg to find a wound oozing blood almost lazily. I spared a moment to be relieved that it wasn’t an arterial bleed, then muttered a few curses under my breath as I realized how much shrapnel was stuck in the wound. Some of the pieces looked pretty big and were lodged deep as best as I could tell in the dim light of the stick’s glow. “Wil?”
He groaned again, shifting slightly. Ren’s hands tightened on his shoulders. “What?” he croaked. His eyes were slivers, gleaming in the dim, and his breath came shallow, as if his ribs hurt as much as anything else—or perhaps more.
What the hell did you do?
One hand covering the worst of the wounds in his thigh, I pointed toward the building burning across the street, one that we could feel the heat from even at this distance. “Were you in there when it exploded?”
“Coming out,” he said. “Had to make sure it had been evacuated.”
Ren stared past me, at the burning ruin. She went tense for a moment, as if finally realizing what the building was, where we were. “That’s the Alliance post. You blew it up?”
Pain contorted his expression and he looked away. I winced with him and got back to work. It didn’t matter anyway, not here and not now—maybe later it would.
“I had my orders,” I heard him murmur as I knotted off a tourniquet around his thigh, then started to at least try to get an idea of what else might be going wrong—the thigh had just been the most glaring and obvious from my angle. There was certain to be more and worse, especially that close.
I don’t have enough light. We have to get him out of here.
But where?
“Orders?” Ren blurted. “Aaron, orders from who?”
All three of us went very still for a moment. Ren’s eyes widened. Wil sucked in a breath. And me? I just stared at the two of them, thoughts suddenly starting to race as I could feel Ren’s blocks fragmenting even further, the cracks growing bigger, the leaks stronger, more important.
Shit. Shit, shit. Of all times– “You called him Aaron,” I said when I finally trusted myself to speak.
“Never mind that,” she snapped. “Did you order him to blow the post?”
I stared at her for exactly three seconds before I remembered what I was supposed to be worried about. “Why the hell would I ask him to do that?”
“It doesn’t matter who gave the orders,” Wil whispered. “Just that the job’s done.”
“It doesn’t matter? Of course it matters! I have to account to—to—” Ren went quiet, staring at me. I didn’t look at her, though her voice was urgent, desperate. “Luc? Luc, what’s happening?”
“Help her first,” Wil rasped. “I’ll keep.”
“You shut up, Wil,” Ren snarled, glaring at him for a moment before she looked at me again. “Help him. Save him.” She sniffled, tried to wipe her face. She ended up leaving a smear of soot and blood on her cheek in place of tears. “There’ll be time enough for the rest of it when this is over.”
I grunted and kept working, the leg first, then moving on from there. I just needed to enough to get him mobile, to make it safe for us to move him. Where we would go was something I was still trying to figure out. There was only so much I could do in that alley. It was too dark and I already knew that the damage was too extensive. We needed him mobile enough to get out of there. I couldn’t do much more than that, not there, not then.
It struck me like the thunder that rolled in the distance. “We’ll need to get him to Father Alex,” I said after a few minutes of tense silence. “The Cathedral should still be safe.”
“Do you really think we’re going to be able to turn the tide?” Wil whispered, his voice distant. He was pale, washed-out in the glowstick’s light. “Do you think we’ll be able to force them to leave?”
I heard his thoughts, clear as day. Is the Cathedral going to be safe enough for her? Will they leave us alone there, if we can somehow make it that far? His lack of confidence left me slightly shaken.
“Don’t be stupid,” Ren said quietly. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
I stared at her for a moment, silently grateful, then nodded. “Let’s get ready to move. Can you walk, or am I going to have to carry you?”
“Going to have to walk. I think I’ve got some broken ribs.”
I was fairly certain that he did—probably more certain than he was, but knowing him, he probably knew what broken ribs felt like from experience rather than training. I killed the glowstick after tightening a few pressure bandages around his thigh, which was the source of the worst of the bleeding that I could see in the alleyway’s dim. “Ren,” I said quietly. “Take point.”
She looked like she wanted to protest, but she clammed up and nodded after a heartbeat’s span of hesitation. She leaned down and kissed Wil’s forehead before she helped me get him upright, his arm across my shoulders. I took most of his weight as Ren picked up her weapon and Wil’s. She edged out of the alleyway first, checking the street in either direction, then set out, waving for us to follow.
We did, moving slowly and deliberately. I might as well have been carrying Wil, for all that he was able to support himself. I wasn’t sure how he’d made it into that alleyway in the first place—maybe it had been pure adrenaline that got him through.
Blood was matted in his hair from something that had mercifully stopped bleeding already, but there was a damp spot spreading across my shoulders as blood leaked from a wound in his arm I hadn’t noticed in my haste to get him mobile. I grimaced as we moved. There wasn’t any doubt in my mind that he was going to look worse in full light than he had in the dim of that alleyway.
“The alliance isn’t going to show up to save us,” he whispered as we paused in a doorway after crossing Broad. The sounds of fighting had grown a little more distant now, though we could still hear them.
The people of Perie were fighting in the streets to protect their home. There was too much commotion for it to be just the Resistance standing against the Imperium troops landing, though there was no doubt in my mind that it was the Resistance leading the charge. That’s what our people were trained to do, what they’d sworn to do when they joined.
It was our job.
Maybe we’ve got them pinned down, I thought, trying for optimism I didn’t quite feel. I frowned at Wil all the same. “I’m not expecting them to. This is our fight. That’s been made abundantly clear.”
It struck me then that he’d probably be recalled after this, he and Ren, just like the rest—like the four Alliance SpecOps officers that had been assigned to the Alliance post up until a few weeks before. That had been a clue that we were in danger here, and yet—
I hadn’t acted fast enough. I thought we still had time, that they’d give us more warning, that they’d give us some warning. But even Wil hadn’t known, not until it was too late. I knew that as sure as I knew the sun would rise in the morning, regardless of how tonight turned out for the Resistance and for the three of us.
How long had they waited before telling him something was coming? Had they even known before we had? I hated to think that maybe they had.
Wil just nodded mutely. His thoughts were a maelstrom of pain and fear—the latter as uncommon as the former was expected. He wasn’t afraid of dying, though, and that’s what left me a little surprised, a little numb.
He didn’t want to lose her. Not again. That was what he was afraid of—losing Ren, losing his partner, the love of his life—all over again.
He’d done it once and never wanted to suffer that again.
I looked at him sidelong, speaking to those unspoken fears. “You’re not.”
Wil sagged, swallowing hard. He nodded slightly, eyes squeezing shut. A tear cut through the soot and drying blood on his face. “Right,” he breathed. “You’re right.”
Ren waved us forward, oblivious to what had just passed between Wil and I. “It’s clear. Let’s move.”
We stayed silent until we came in sight of the Cathedral. It was all we could do to stay hidden and alive. Despite my hopes, the streets were full of Imperium soldiers, though the groups were scattered and small—two or three soldiers in each. Of the Resistance, we saw nothing, but we could still hear the occasional sound of gunfire coming from the direction of the spaceport and Gamgee’s, the bar that had fronted our operations for years—almost as long as I’d been here on Caldin.
As we crouched in the shadow of the walls around the Cathedral’s gardens, Ren exhaled a quiet breath, looking up and down the street. “I’m glad that Sam and Mac aren’t here,” she said softly.
Me too. I glanced up and down the wall, frowning. “Can we make the gate?”
“The gate is watched by six Imperium commandos,” Alexei said, emerging from a clump of nearby shadows. The former Imperium intelligence operative’s expression was strangely blank, his accent thick to the point of nearly being impenetrable—I hadn’t heard it so thick in years. “Unless they are neutralized without raising an alarm, we cannot get in that way.”
I stared at him, blinking. “Alexei?”
He shook his head slowly. “Do not ask, leftenant, for you do not want to know the answer. I have killed today, and that is all you need to know.”
Wil shivered. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at Alexei.
“Do not be, shpionka. It was not your doing and they needed killing.” Unlike every other time I’d heard him say shpionka, this time it actually sounded like a fond nickname rather than a slur. Alexei looked at Ren and I. “We will have to climb the wall if we are to get inside.”
Ren looked doubtfully at Wil and I. “He won’t make it.”
“If it’s the difference between living and dying, I’ll do my best,” Wil said. He shifted his weight off of me and leaned against the wall. He put one hand against his ribs and winced.
She’s right. He won’t make it, but we have to get him inside, especially if it’s the only place safe—if they’re still secure there. I looked at Alexei. “Have they tried to go inside?”
He shook his head slowly. “No. The gate is locked, and they have not tried to force it. But I do not know who might be inside.”
We have to hope.
Hope, however, was running in dangerously short supply.
