Weekly Drabble #238: Guerillas in the Mist (Patreon)

This week's prompt is 'siren call' from Pyro Hawk, and for it, this is how the writing and redrafting went:

Draft 1: mermaids

Draft 2: actual sirens

Draft 3: continuing the Scars side story of Khy-kala in G’halai; the ‘siren’s call’ was the preacher’s sermons

Draft 4: Watchers singing in Horrak-Sarn

Draft 5: the siren call of a downed aircraft

Hope you enjoy!

~

Guerillas in the Mist:

Herbert Osling took a quick toke from his pipe as he gathered his gear, enjoying the effects of the crackleweed. The initial flavour was like dried algae, but it left a pleasant warming effect that spread through his torso. Just the thing to take the chill off in the morning or keep it at bay as night fell. Sometimes, Herb wondered what the long-term effects of crackleweed were. Probably nothing good. Maybe one day in the future, there’d be someone who had the time and resources to actually study it. That day was why Herb was here, but until it came and that study was made, he’d keep smoking crackle to warm his bones in this nightmare urban sprawl.

The sun had risen, but there was still an ominous grey mist filling the City’s streets. It would burn away soon, at least in most places. In the deeper, darker depressions and ‘wilds’ of Horrak-Sarn, the mists lingered for hours. He looked over at the rest of his team; a half-dozen scouts and scavengers, ready to go. They were all reliable. He didn’t put up with grabbers in his team. He didn’t have the time or inclination to babysit anyone. You were in it for the long haul, or you worked under someone else. If he couldn’t trust someone, he didn’t want them in his unit, and the higher-ups gave him that leeway.

Except for night, after dawn was the most dangerous time of day in the City. Visibility was still low, the sun hadn’t crested most of the buildings and a lot of the night life was still out and about. It was also the most rewarding time – if you knew what you were doing and where to look. Night here could be fatal, but despite all the dangers, it wasn’t as if the population was dropping substantially every twenty-six hours. Not overall, at least. The population of free humans – the ‘grounded’ as the servants and Bennies sneered from their towers – on Horrak-Sarn kept growing. Still, not everyone made it through every night in Horrak-Sarn. Often they just vanished without a trace, but sometimes more of them were left behind.

That was where Osling and his team came in. They were a ‘triple S’ team – Sweep, Secure and Salvage. Once dawn came, they headed out to make sure nothing from last night was taking shelter in the rebels’ territory. More than one enclave had too late discovered that something was lairing on their doorstep, emerging at night to prey on men and women who thought themselves safe. That was Osling’s primary job; make sure the only things hiding here were what was supposed to be hiding. Gang-held towns and settlements did the same, as did the Bennies. Practically every week they found something. A new nest of Kraven, a shadow-cat, muties taking shelter from the sun, even a group of gangers planning a night-time raid on Herb’s enclave. There was no ‘safe’ on Horrak-Sarn, not without constant vigilance.

Trip teams weren’t just search-and-destroy units, but they also looked for survivors: people who’d been caught out too late, but still managed to find shelter. Night was lethal here, but you couldn’t assume that everyone who wasn’t home when the sun fell was dead. Three days after she’d gone missing, Herb’s team had found a lost courier at the bottom of a chimney shaft. She’d dove in there to escape a pack of tar hounds and broken her leg on the landing. Though badly dehydrated, she’d survived, but her days as a runner were done.

A trip team’s final duty was to locate anything useful dredged up orleft behind overnight. It was the smallest part of their responsibilities – you couldn’t exactly count on someone with expensive kit just dropping dead on your doorstep – but anything that could help, did help. Today their job was a bit more urgent than usual. Over the night, a security air car had gone down in this area. The fuckers had probably been looking for Herbert’s encampment. He didn’t know what had brought it down, whether it was mechanical failure, pilot error or enemy action, but it had dropped out of the sky before the Harpers could get one of their SAMs on it.

Jack said it was Watchers, but then Jack said everything was Watchers. He wasn’t firing quite firing on all cylinders, but who would after seeing your wife snatched off her feet right next to you? It was possible, though. For the longest while, Herb had dismissed the muties as anything more than a local, albeit severe, hazard. He figured all they did was flap around in small murders, picking off anyone or anything they could spot. He’d thought that way up until Dock 17.

Five hundred Bennies and two thousand slaves dead in an afternoon along with one very sizable docking tower. The Masters might not be scared of humans and they might only think of Harper’s Men as an annoyance, but they damn sure kept an eye on the skies.

Just like everyone else, I guess, Herb thought with a graveyard chuckle. Maybe we’re not that different once you get down to it. But still – fuck ‘em. One and all. “Okay, boys and girls,” he said as he doused his pipe, tucking it into one of his pockets. “We know what we’re about today, don’t we? Somewhere out there is a nice fat haul. The Bennies will have noticed they’re a flyer short, and they’ll be scrambling a salvage mission of their own. We have an advantage, though – we know where their flyer went down and we have good odds on getting to the crash site first. We grab what we can and boot it before they show up. If they do, then we have laws of salvage. This is our shit and we’re not giving it up.” He moved along the line. All of his team were armed; knives,pistols, shotguns, along with the Harpers’ weapon of choice, an import – in a manner of speaking – from Earth itself.

The good old AK-47, made in garages and machine shops throughout the third world and now here on Horrak-Sarn. All of the firearms here were made in the City. No one had yet managed to smuggle a weapon during their capture and even the most corrupt Benny wouldn’t risk picking up weapons on one of their infrequent raids. The Masters might not give a shit about the grounded, but they took a dim view of their servants aiding them – especially if they were providing arms. If you got caught, what happened to you made being staked out for the Watchers look like a kindness... and that gave a whole new dimension to the term ‘blood eagle’.

So every last one of these guns was locally produced, thanks to some escapees with experience in ‘resisting imperialism’. They had to drop all that shit, though. In the City, whether you were American, British, Pakistani, Chinese, Venezuelan or what-the-fuck-ever didn’t matter any more. You were in Horrak-Sarn and if you couldn’t put Earth’s business away, then you were dead weight. This cell of Harpers had City-born and Earth-born, and plenty of the latter used to hate each other.

Punctuating the thought, Herb passed by Lana, the trip team’s gunner. She was a bit small to carry a heavy weapon, but she had a surprisingly good eye, able to pluck the engine off a weaving gunship with a single shot. She was short, blonde and blue-eyed. Peeking over the edge of her neckguard was the SS tattoo she’d proudly worn back on Earth. Standing next to her with her anti-material rifle on his back was her loader, Kagiso, a South African national who’d despised ‘colonizers’. He couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, but he was a strong back with quick hands, able to set up and pull down the weapon faster than anyone Herb had seen.The pair worked as a well-oiled machine now. They’d dropped their baggage and were usually found laughing at each other’s slurs and dirty jokes.

It wasn’t always like that, though. A lot of the grounded only looked after themselves, their families, their own enclave and nothing else. Those were the grabbers. They only cared about the next meal, the next day and the next moment. The gangs and militias, the enclaves. They weren’t living, only surviving. There had to be more than that. What was the point, otherwise? Why not just walk back to the Bennies and tell them to put you back in a paddock if all you cared about was surviving?

That was why Herb and others like him had joined the Harper’s Men, why Lana and Kagiso had put aside a lifetime of hatreds to band together. There was no home. Not until the Masters were defeated, so you could either just survive like so many others tried, or you could do something. That’s what this was all about and why he was going to risk his life for a downed Benny scout.

“Right then, you mugs,” he said as he finished his inspection. “Dawn’s wasting. Grab your kit, get on your bikes and let’s get on the road.”