The Road to Hell

Chapter 12

It was chilly on Olympus; Rosana had forgotten that. But as she took her first few steps down the loading ramp of the late Warden Carl Bingham's former yacht, she remembered it. She remembered the way her heart pounded, threatening to burst out of her fragile breast, when the Freedom Sword plummeted out of orbit and crashed onto this world. She remembered waking up to a nightmare that she couldn't escape from.

"Brings you back, doesn't it, Ms. Blake?"

She looked back at Zeus, who was patiently waiting for her to disembark. "Yeah," was all she said.

Olympus 4 was still a backwater rock in the middle of nowhere, but since it was the site of a famous battle, some company decided to set up a small but thriving tourist operation in which visitors could see the old ruined wrecks of the ships that crashed from orbit during the battle, explore the dank, lightless, caves where hundreds of men were slaughtered, and "truly experience the carnage of war" through battle re-enactments.

Rosana led the way from their landing pad straight to the ticket vendor and signed them up for the tour. While they were waiting for the tour to begin, Zeus bought them both slices of pizza. They ate in silence until Zeus said, "You've never been back here have you?"

Rosana shook her head.

"Would you have preferred not to come?"

The truth was that she'd never wanted to see this wretched planet again, but she wasn't going to let that get in the way of her job.

The tour began. They climbed atop of an open-air all-terrain land crawler along with a large crowd of unruly junior high students and their stressed out teachers. The tour was mapped out to take the visitors along the same path that the HDL soldiers took when they crashed on the planet and made their way to where Jean Jacques Desrochers and his people crashed.

After stopping to examine and explore the downed League vessel, the crawler travelled through a thick forest with massive coniferous trees. Of course, Rosana had never been here, nor had she ever had the opportunity to talk about what the other parts of the battle had been like. The tour guide told them how the League soldiers had to cut their way forward through this forest, repelling attacks not only from a local species of wolf-like predators, but also on the constant lookout for surprise attacks from the "insurgents," who had laid an unknown number of mines and constructed other deadly traps to slow down their opponents.

During this whole leg of the trip, Zeus stayed silent with his eyes closed. His mind was obviously back in the battle. Rosana knew Zeus had fought in alongside his father and hundreds of other men in this very forest. And it was here where he'd seen hundreds of men slowly picked off as they fought a losing battle.

After the forest, the tour came to the entrance of a small tunnel, and everyone climbed off of the truck and followed the guide into the darkness of the caves.

The caves. Rosana could only imagine what it would have been like to fight in there. The darkness was absolute, and the air was so still and musty. There was a strong scent of bat feces in the air, and the tunnels felt like they were closing in on her, about to swallow her up forever. The guide said the first part of the caves had been left unlit, to let the visitors have the full experience that the soldiers would have had entering the network of caverns.

Hours ticked by in the caverns as the group had to navigate through the natural labyrinth, occasionally stopping to discuss certain developments in the battle, the deaths of the League heroes. The tour guide did not mention that after losing so many men in the forest, Jean had to bolster his forces with able-bodied teenage boys to keep up the fight in the caverns. However, the guide did remember to mention that the League took heavy losses in the caverns, due to deadly ambushes and cave-in attacks used by the terrorists. James Stern and his men would not be deterred though, and the terrorists eventually withdrew from the cave and sealed the entrances behind them, preventing escape.