Fools of us All - Chapter 3

I ducked behind a row of garbage cans, holding my breath as the cop car drove slowly by. I don't think they were looking for me specifically, more that they were doing a random search, hoping to round up some 'undesirables'. I definitely would have qualified in that category. All of this trouble over one hijacked broadcast signal. I'm curious to know what will happen after our next strike.

The past month had been pretty hard to get through. I had realised that the country was in bad shape, but that meeting I had attended really opened my eyes.

Just then a loud crash came from behind my head. Immediately the cop car stopped, its spotlight coming to a rest on my hiding spot, casting weird shadows around me. The garbage cans still hid me from their view, but if either one of them got out to check out the noise, I was in serious trouble. I reached down to my ankle holster, silently cursing the decision to leave my large knife at home. A door on the car started to open, but just then a large black tabby jumped out of the can it had been hiding in, rushing off with a startled yowl. The cop car slammed shut and it drove off, leaving me alone in the dark once again.

Not wanting to take anymore chances I hurried down the alley, turning into a doorway, knocking gently on the boarded up door. A small knothole opened and shut, quicker than most people would have noticed if they weren't looking for it. A small click came from one side and the door slid open. I walked in, feeling the air in the enclosed entrance settle around me in that peculiarly stifling manner that it had. A bright light shone along the length of one wall, floor to ceiling. It started to move, spinning around the room, circling me a few times. When it was satisfied that I wasn't carrying any tracking devices or anything else that I shouldn't be, a door on the inner wall slid open. I stepped through into a dark room full of computers and largely devoid of people. At one of the computers sat Dar, his shaved head glowing in light of the monitors. He glanced up and offered me a strained smile before going back to his work.

From behind a hand grabbed me on the shoulder, spinning me around. Instinctively I leapt back and landed in a fighting pose, my heart thumping heard in my chest. The deep chuckle coming from the man before me helped me to relax. Dun was a large man, roughly six and a half feet tall, built like an angry muscle. He had been teaching me to fight and seemed pleased at my reaction, as well as amused. "You need to relax a little, girl. This is a safe place."

Taking a deep breath I calmed myself down. "Sorry, I just about had a run in with the cops. I'm just a little worked up, that's all."

Continuing to chuckle, he patted me on the shoulder in a fatherly manner before continuing on to his office. He did much of his work there, but that did not mean he was an office drone. He possessed one of the quickest technical minds I had ever known and could assess a tactical situation accurately with merely a glance. Before joining the organisation he had been in the military and had never forgotten his training. He was still on their most wanted list for going AWOL a few years back. Fresh on that less than amicable parting he had started the organisation, an underground group that was trying to fight against the corruption and greed that had overtaken the leaders of the world. It was an uphill battle.

My role in the organisation (one month and I had never heard it called anything else) had been a combination of technical expertise and front-line guerrilla warfare. I found that I was a quick study in combat, and that my past training in fibre optics and computer programming was very handy. Over the past weeks they had trained me on what they wanted to do, and how they wanted to do it. Dun had said that I was one of the quickest studies he had ever seen. He said that if I put my mind to it, I could probably have any role I wanted in the organisation, echoing something I had heard from my father many years ago.

I nodded at Dar as I sat at my station, connecting to the network. As I did I wondered about that connection to my father. My memories of him were mostly happy. He had been a large bear of a man, a construction foreman in the last years of the human control of the industry. When he had lost his job it had nearly crushed him. In his mind, it made him a failure as a husband and father. He fell into a depression that lasted until he had found work in space, mining the valuable metals and resources found on distant moons. It was a tough job that would take him away from his family for long periods of time, but he felt that it was the only way an uneducated man like himself could provide for his family, so he went away to space.

When the company contacted my mother and me to let us know that he had died, they had also told us that the body was unrecoverable. It had destroyed my mom. The last time I had seen her, she had been sitting motionless in a wheelchair, dead to the world. It had become to painful to see, so I stopped visiting. By then I had graduated from college and was well on my way to a career.

But even that dream was gone now. Briefly I looked around at the room, at each row of computers and the technicians working on them. I then looked back at Dun’s office and smiled. Maybe the reason I felt that this was such an important place was because it was the family I had lost. Maybe I was home again.