Insurrection (The Dominion series book 4)

CHAPTER ONE.

Five days.

It only took them five days to conquer Earth.

Humans tried to resist. Armies joined forces with previously internal and external enemies and attacked the invaders. Nothing like a common enemy to break down boundaries.

But the invader’s overwhelming fire power and complete disregard for life—their own and that of the humans—quickly overwhelmed the Earthen forces. They targeted government cities in all major nations, devastating the seat of power and killing or capturing the heads of state, then made a streamed spectacle of their long and painful deaths. The message was clear. Anyone who dared to oppose them would be terminated in pain-filled agony.

Casualties were rampant and estimated to be just shy of a million. That number was lower than expected only because the stats were still coming in. The prognosis was at least double.

Cal-Tan was making a hell of a point.

‘Is this our fault?’ I whispered for the umpteenth time.

‘He would have done it anyway,’ Aaliyah answered. ‘It was just a matter of time.’

I couldn’t shrug off our involvement in this as easily as she could. It was my family that was responsible for this genocide, not hers. And I wasn’t so sure he would have actually done it if we hadn’t pushed his hand.

Who was I kidding? Of course he would have. He’d been planning this for a long time. Something like a mass invasion takes preparation and time.

‘We could have warned them,’ I continued my useless self-pity rampage. ‘Told them the invasion was imminent.’

Jonah looked at me incredulously. ‘How?’

I stammered. There had to have been been something we could have done.

‘They wouldn’t believe us. Didn’t even buy into the whole Establishment thing until Ebony sent the last data. And even then, I don’t think they actually understood what they were facing. And, not to forget, we didn’t know.’ He shrugged.

‘We could have tried.’ I sounded like a broken record and was just about as useful.

‘Stop kicking yourself, Gabriel,’ Aaliyah sighed. ‘We’ve been over this countless times. There was nothing we could have done. Besides, it’s moot. What’s important is what we do now. How we combat this.’

‘Can we even do that?’ Jonah asked.

‘We can sure as hell try.’

That summed it up quite eloquently.

‘I question whether we should jump in straight away or wait,’ Jonah stated uncharacteristically.

Aaliyah and I both looked at him in surprise.

‘Don’t get me wrong, I want to kill as many invaders as possible. But…’

Never thought I’d hear a “but” in this context from the big man.

‘But we don’t really know what we’re facing. How many there are. And how many of us—any form of resistance—are left. We should plan our response.’

He was right. Though I’d never expected restraint from him. Even Aaliyah had to reluctantly agree.

‘What do we do in the meantime?’ A small voice asked from the corner.

I’d forgotten Tajan was here, but he was as much a fugitive as we were. More maybe, his stay on Earth was still relatively fresh and he wasn’t used to the dimension yet.

After the initial invasion, we’d quickly determined that—besides complete world domination—our team would be Cal-Tan’s main focus. He wanted us dead or at least stopped. This blitzkrieg was designed to quell any resistance or rebellion in record time, and he couldn’t use our stubborn obstruction or the hope we might perpetuate. He aimed for total command as soon as possible and our continued existence was a threat to him.

Delay was bad for business.

His strategy worked.

We had to go underground.

Most of us, that is.

Ebony and some of her crew stayed put. Their cover stories, whatever they were this time, were still intact and they monitored the situation from there. We reasoned Aaliyah, Jonah, Tajan, Kate and I were probably top of Cal-tan’s most wanted list as well as some of Ebony’s people who were too interesting for my father to pass up on. He wanted slaves, either dead—to be reincarnated—or alive. It wasn’t safe up top anymore for the likes of Tyrone, Caleb and Nasheed. So they joined us, literally underground.

Thank goodness Cal-Tan had never unearthed the connection we had with Ebony. I hoped she would stay safe and out of harm’s way. With the Thirty-eighth dimension now also accepting female slaves, she could be in the crosshairs. But I trusted her to stay out of trouble and there was always Sly to contend with, though he alternated between our group and Ebony.

Tajan was lost without her. Aaliyah tried to console him, to no avail. He’d found new reason and meaning for life working with our computer wizard on the inventions they’d created together, and now that was gone. He was effectively a lot worse off than he had been in Taxore. There he hadn’t been actively hunted. And his family was on Taxore, he was terrified what would happen to them. I felt sorry for him. My choice had at least been my own. He was more or less pulled into the fray by Aaliyah and the rest of us.

Talking about my other reluctant Taxorian friend. Initially she’d wanted to go off on her own. A one-woman suicide mission to kill as many invaders as possible before they annihilated her. Jonah managed to talk sense into her and convince her anything would be a lot better than what was waiting if she went alone. Cal-Tan would love to get his hands on her, almost as much as he wanted to catch me. Reluctantly, she conceded.

Around us, homes were raided, people executed in the streets and others taken away. There wasn’t a family left that hadn’t been impacted in some painful and terrifying manner. Daily streams showcasing the invader’s intentions dissolved human’s resistance to the new order. They became numb to the blood and gore on the TV stations and all around them.

Cal-Tan effectively quashed the resistance by killing human spirit.

They had lost too much and capitulated.

CHAPTER TWO

Underground was a parking garage in the centre of Los Angeles, right in the middle of the affluent financial sector.

After the first invasion wave, we’d moved out of town, but the need to help in whichever way we could, forced us to go back. This was where the invaders were harvesting their prisoners, the men and few women who would be sent off-world.

‘Have you heard from your contacts on Taxore?’ Aaliyah asked yesterday evening after yet another cold dinner, we didn’t dare to start a fire, not even this deep underground.

I shook my head. ‘The last communication dated from before the invasion. The coded message was short, only stating Cal-Tan’s personal trip to the Thirty-eighth dimension. That alone is food for thought. He’s always restricted his own transportation to the absolute minimum, reluctant to put his life in the hands of others.’

Understandable, that’s how he himself ascended to power. His father had been reduced to a gooey mush of blasted cells in a blotched transport. I doubt it was an accident, no one believed that where I came from. It was just too convenient and coincided with the development of the Twelfth dimension—Earth—as a supply route for slaves, something his father had countered. Cal-Tan had a hand in it, I’m sure of that. Besides, it’s no more than the enactment of a generations old tradition in our family. The son murders the father.

Aaliyah nodded; she’d heard about Cal-Tan’s patricide as well.

I shuddered to think what that meant for me but recognised the same pattern happening between us. He tried to kill me, and I wouldn’t hesitate to return the favour. After our last confrontation, it seemed like the only option. The brutal tradition would be perpetuated.

Cal-Tan’s interest in the Thirty-eighth was starting to get to me. My mother had no idea why he was so engrossed with the new world; he’d never shown so much enthusiasm for anything before, let alone another dimension. She’d reported that vast amounts of grunts, materials and supplies were being transported there but nothing had come back. What could the business model be for that? My father never did anything if there wasn’t a solid profit to be gained. He was single-minded in his pursuit of power though wealth, and this would be another important step in his masterplan. I just wish we knew why that dimension was so important.

‘This Thirty-eighth,’ Jonah asked. ‘Can humans live there?’

I nodded. ‘It makes sense for the prisoners here to be transported there. The atmosphere is conducive to human life as well as Taxorian. Probably quite like Earth’s. And I can’t imagine anywhere else, not with the last information. But the big question remains what his goal is. I feel it’s important, because it could potentially help our efforts to thwart him.’

I missed my mother’s communications. It was the one last link to my past that I wanted to perpetuate, but it had stopped right after the first invader set foot on Earth. Not only was it way too dangerous for all parties involved, but the method we used—coded public messages—hadn’t been available due to the disruption of all media outlets. The invaders had shut them all down and now controlled the information sent out into the world. Personal ads and podcasts were not seen as essential. We were running blind because of that.

Our team undertook small forays into the city to hassle the invaders and to stock up on supplies.

Generally, the most difficult thing to acquire at the moment was gasoline. But that was another benefit of hiding in the parking garage. Many of the neighbouring building’s permanent residents had left their vehicles in the garage in the lower, private levels, and we helped ourselves to the gasoline still in them. Yes, I felt bad, if anyone managed to leave, they would end up without fuel, but I reasoned our resistance efforts trumped the remorse I might feel, besides, we never emptied them completely.

There was little comfort underground, but staying alive was the priority. That and irritating the enemy. We stole out in the night and raided their depots, setting fire to anything we couldn’t use ourselves, attacked outposts where we killed the grunts manning them, and did our best to disrupt the harvesting.

The kidnapped humans were initially held in large buildings in the city centre, but our frequent attacks pushed the containment facilities further out, first to the suburbs, then the industry segments. The large warehouses made it easier for the Taxorians to defend themselves and their precious cargo. Our efforts dwindled after one monumental attack when the risks became too high for both our team and the prisoners.

Seven of us besieged a warehouse on the outskirts of town next to a residential area. In earlier days it had been a distribution centre for vegetables trucked into the neighbourhood.

I saw three loading docks that offered entrance to the vast open, inner area of the building. There were no windows, just a few small ventilation points high up the wall covered in wire meshing and the three offices at the left side of the loading docks. The fenced area around the warehouse was flat with truck bays lining the space between the warehouse and the road and neighbours about twenty metres away on both sides. At the back, high mesh fencing was almost up against the warehouse walls. The proximity to other buildings made that our best entry point.

It went well, up to the point where we threw a smoke bomb into one of the open loading docks. Then, all hell broke loose. Blue laser beams peppered the outside area and pinned us to the walls of the warehouse, after which the invaders started shooting through the panelling itself, leaving massive holes where the material had been literally melted away.

We dove for the ground and scrambled away from the docks; our only real entry point which had just become a death trap. Retreat was our only option. I crept along the building edge and had almost reached the fence at the back just as the invaders swung their attention to the prisoners.

The screams of terror and pain from inside the building made me turn on my heels. I couldn’t leave them. Jonah and Nasheed had already entered the building by the time I reached the dock and dispatched two of the invaders. A further two continued to train their weapons on the prisoners with absolutely no regard for their own or the human’s lives. Jonah mowed one down. The other was taken out by fire from Tyrone and me. But not before they’d achieved their goal.

More than sixty young men lay at our feet, all of them dead or dying. The invader’s firepower had been so extensive some of them had been literally dismembered in the onslaught. There was nothing we could do for them. Nasheed found one man alive, but he died moments later in terrible pain.

The only sound was the drip of a broken water pipe.

The silence was oppressive and pushed heavily on my hearts. This should have been a freedom mission, now it was a slaughter.

‘Why did they do that?’ Tyrone asked, his voice resonating in the empty hall.

‘To safeguard the investment,’ I answered, the words cold but true.

‘How’s that?’

‘They will be reincarnated on Taxore,’ I explained. ‘The guards killed them so that they could be harvested.’

‘Sick.’

I nodded.

Prisoners were valuable to my father, dead or alive.

CHAPTER THREE

The hiding place had been compromised.

We had to move again. Preferably out of the city this time, there were no safe places there anymore.

‘Load everything in the trucks.’ Sly took control of the evacuation. He was back with the group and approached everything in his normal military manner. Exactly what we needed to evacuate.

The seven pickups from the underground parking garage we’d chosen for our hide-a-way stood ready, their tanks full. With its eight levels—five of which were underground—it was a warren of spaces to hide in.

The thick concrete and excessive use of steel in the construction protected us from heat sensitive locators as long as we were in the lowest levels. There were three stairways in addition to the five unused lifts. We couldn’t rely on continuous electricity anymore and standing in a small metal elevator while under attack didn’t seem like a good idea anyway.

The parking garage had three separate entrances for vehicles. Two routes for customers and one for the employees and maintenance teams. The last one was our way in and out. We reasoned it would be the least obvious exit.

Ebony informed us the invaders were searching the city building by building. They used advanced scanning equipment and were quick to open fire on whoever or whatever they found. One thing you could say for the Taxorians, they were thorough.

‘I’ve found you a new location,’ her voice resounded on the phone speaker. ‘It’s about three hundred miles west in the Rocky Mountains. The trip will be hazardous to say the least. The hunt for the resistance isn’t restricted to only the cities anymore, though it is concentrated in the more heavily populated localities.’

We decided to cut our odds and split the group into individual trucks. They would leave the underground garage one by one, half an hour apart and all under cover of the darkness. Jonah, Nasheed and Aaliyah were in the second truck, Caleb, Kate and I in the fifth. Sly would stay till everyone else had left and drive the final pickup together with Logan.

‘You all have a different route,’ she continued. ‘It will bring you halfway to your destination.’

The final location would be transmitted only after an airtight coded signal was received when we arrived at the stop point, just in case anyone was intercepted. We hoped everyone would make it there but had to plan for a worst-case scenario and keep the final coordinates under wraps. It brought home how extensive the invader’s control was.

We waited with bated breath. The first pick up left the building an hour after midnight. There was radio silence, and we had no idea after they left the structure whether they would be okay, even Ebony was in the dark. Jonah, Nasheed and Aaliyah were next. We said our goodbyes and Jonah started the truck. The sound resonated loudly in the otherwise empty space. A shiver ran up my spine, surely the noise would alert someone, but it was unavoidable. They left in a slow assent to the surface.

We repeated the process another two times and finally it was our turn. Kate sat on the back seat while I took up a position in the passenger seat. Caleb drove. Sly slapped the side of the truck to indicate we should leave, and we were off. Caleb slowly circumvented the steep ramps up from the eighth level. I kept my eyes peeled, looking for anything out of the ordinary. We reached the fourth level without issues, and I started to breathe a bit. Prematurely, as it turned out.

A blue laser bolt narrowly missed us and slammed into the wall behind the truck, disintegrating the concrete and exploding shards everywhere.

‘Lay down,’ I screamed at Kate as the rear window shattered.

She quickly slipped off the seat onto the floor, hiding from sight and hopefully out of danger.

Caleb swerved for yet another beam which narrowly missed our vehicle. He floored the accelerator, and we sped up the ramp at neck-breaking speed. I peppered the area where the lasers had come from as we passed and was rewarded with a loud scream and the weapon losing its aim.