Strike As One!

They charge down the mountain--Elliv and Ketha on the back of a brown drake liberated from a sentinel who was not using it anymore. The sents on the other side of the river didn’t expect a full firing line facing them when the train was out of their way. The people of Korben fire volley after volley from behind him, lying in prone positions on rooftops and in alleys. It’s been a few years since most of them have fired a gun, but between them they lay down enough fire to keep the enemy in disarray, scrambling to find cover.

Elliv reaches the narrow metal bridge, with Maris behind him on the other liberated drake. This is the bottleneck, their greatest moment of vulnerability. But there’s nowhere else to turn, nowhere to go but forward. He puts his head down against the soft ridge of spikes on the drake’s neck and hopes their plan will work.

A bright shower of sparks flies over his head and a paper bomb rolls across the bridge in front of him. It bursts into a cloud of green smoke too thick to see anything at all. The drake’s heavy footsteps clatter against the rusty old bridge, and it shakes from side to side as they cross. Gunshots sound from both sides, echoing back and forth in the valley, but the enemy can’t aim at what they can’t see.

Maris has been dropping smoke bombs behind them the whole way as well, providing the concealment their allies need to advance behind them. But once Elliv crosses onto the far shore, he and his two comrades are all alone for a moment.

Elliv sights pairs of sents poking their heads out from their hiding spots--behind the concrete walls of the water reclaimer on their right, around the corner of the brick school building on their left, and the stone fence of the company office uphill ahead of them. The middle of town square is a bad place to be. He jerks the reins to the side and his drake makes a sharp left turn.

Ketha takes a shot toward the water reclaimer, hitting nowhere near them while trying to shoot from the back of a drake, but it forces them back behind their cover for a moment. Elliv aims to their left toward the school building but hesitates to fire near it. The sents there take their shots, but they fail to hit a moving target.

He takes his agile mount around the left side of the school and circles around back. He comes around to face them as they try to reorient themselves in the narrow crevasse they hide in between the brick wall and a steep hillside. Before they can raise their guns, Elliv takes a clear shot. At close range, he hits the man right in the chest.

The other gets them in his sights, at equally good range. “Down!” Ketha yells. Elliv puts his head down and hears a loud gunshot right above him from Ketha’s sidearm. He looks up and the other sent is lying against the slope having spasms throughout his body, with a bullet wound in his neck.

He pulls the reins left and guides the drake up across the steep hillside. It takes the slope with as much ease as the flat ground, digging into the hard rocky soil with its claws. Elliv and Ketha lean hard to the left trying to keep their balance. He looks down below them, seeing the women of Korben moving across the square through the cloud of smoke, finding firing positions and forcing the sentinels back.

Maris takes his drake up the mountain. Behind him tied down to his saddle is a whole stack of rifles and powder flasks and bags of ammunition. They must safely get them to the workers up in the refinery above them.

The sents stationed at the company office attack. Their guns resound and their bullets blow clouds of dirt from the mountainside behind them as Elliv darts side to side and makes them a very difficult target. Reloading in a situation like this is unthinkable. Besides, they are not his objective. He turns the drake to run straight up the mountain and past the sents before they can finish reloading. Even once reloaded, they do not fire at him. Now he is positioned between them and the refinery. Anybody would know better than to fire at a refinery full of volatile discordium.

Elliv and Ketha charge ahead and the drake clears the hill and climbs up onto flat ground by the wrought-iron fence surrounding the refinery. Elliv looks up at the twisted towers of steel, smoke-spewing pillars reaching high above them, a spiderweb of electrical wires stretching between it all. Against the backdrop of the green mountainsides all around, it is an abomination, a thing so far out of place that it’s repulsive, even not thinking of its purpose.

As the last two sentinels standing guard at the gate see them climb up to their level, their faces turn to terror. One of them raises his weapon, but Maris is faster with a smoke bomb concealing their location. Elliv charges ahead, rifle raised above his head with its sword-bayonet attached. The smoke burns his eyes and blinds him to what’s ahead, but his drake presses ahead in an unerring line.

He emerges from the cloud just a few Length from the guards. One dives out of the way, lying prone on the ground with his hands over his head, as Elliv charges, screaming out with all his force. The other stands paralyzed in fear, and Elliv slashes with his blade as he runs past. He catches the sent right at the neck and his sharp sword-bayonet cleaves his head off effortlessly.

Now past the gate, he pulls the drake to a stop and turns it around just in time to see Maris’s mount trample over the other sent lying on the ground. With Maris beside them now, he turns around and walks the drake into the hallways between the refinery’s strange machines.

As he and Maris ride deeper in, the machines start to slow down, and the metallic cacophony surrounding them begins to quiet. Workers emerge from the buildings in the complex and come out to greet them, while their foremen flee at the sight of the black and grey.

“Great news, fellow workers!” Ketha says to the gathering crowd. “You all have the day off!”

With cheering and shouting, the workers surround them as Maris distributes arms to each of them.

“Here you go,” Maris says. “Teams of two, you gotta share powder, stay together.”

Elliv and Ketha catch their breath and pour fresh powder into the chambers of their weapons. All around, workers load up their new weapons. They sling them over their shoulders, and they look around at each other and reach into their pockets to pull out grey cloth that they each tie around their necks.

“The union and the K.R.A. are one! We stand with you now, and until the end!” Elliv says.

The crowd circles close around their drakes and cheers and shouts.

Elliv takes a deep breath, looking around at the faces familiar or strange, all staring up at him. “Your liberation has begun! But it will be a long, brutal struggle ahead. If you have any doubts or reservations, take advantage of this chaos to get yourself and your family far away from Korben, it will be safe for nobody now. Our collective won’t judge you for that choice. But if you will stand and defend your home, follow us down the mountain now! We strike as one!”

He moves toward the exit, with Ketha behind him and Maris on his drake by his side, and an army follows him.

“Strike! Strike!” one worker shouts, and soon a chorus is chanting with him, “Strike! Strike! Strike! Strike! Strike!”

“K! R! A!” Maris shouts.

“Strike as one!” Elliv and Ketha call back in response.

“Strike as one!” the workers echo.

Outside the gates to the labyrinth of steel and flame, they look down on Korben, seeing the women below deeply entrenched behind the school and the old company store, facing heavy fire from the sents’ positions, and returning plenty of fire of their own.

“No time to waste! Move out!” Elliv shouts.

Elliv’s mount runs down the mountainside as the workers climb down behind him. The women fighting below see them and they advance from their positions. The enemy moves to take advantage, until some of them point out the approaching army above them. They try to move to better cover as the people of Korben surround them on two sides.

They break from their cover and run for the bridge, gunshots raining down on them from two directions. But when they reach the river, the smoke on the other side has cleared just enough for them to see what awaits them there--the other half of the women’s forces stand there with their guns trained on the white cluster, and at their head, Nadia, Kalen, and Annia, rifles in hand.

The sents look all around them and find lines of enemies with grey necks and rifles pointed at them on three sides, closing in and each maneuvering to ensure everyone has a clear shot. Sents begin to throw their weapons down to the brick road and put their hands up behind their heads. Some still stand firm taking aim at the people of Korben. But as their enemies close in and cut off any possible escape route, they hang their heads and drop their guns. They fall to their knees as workers and resistance fighters enclose them and come to seize their weapons. Not one sentinel can look them in the eyes.

END