by Ran Vant
Michael stepped forward into the room. As Dante followed, a heavy armored door suddenly slammed downward, nearly cutting Dante in half and leaving Gabriella trapped in the corridor behind them. Dante quickly tried to contact Gabriella, but the communications couldn’t penetrate the thick door. Not only that, but he found he could no longer talk with Lightbringer through the comlink.
Michael’s voice slit opened in his visor so he could talk directly with Dante. “They were expecting us.”
“We could melt the door, give ourselves more options,” Dante responded as he prepared to release a fisted beam. But before he let loose, an explosion in the contained stone vault seemed to hit them from all sides, knocking Starmaker and Lightbringer to the ground and unconscious darkness.
24.
Circle of Light
Michael saw nothing but darkness. He wasn’t quite sure where he was. “My visor must be broken; I don’t have any light amplification,” he thought. Then the blackness slowly receded as blood returned to his natural eyes. And suddenly the uncertainty was gone and he remembered: the explosion.
Michael jumped to his feet and saw four figures dragging Dante’s body towards a newly revealed opening in the vault. He was sure the opening hadn’t been there before. “Fallen!” he called, fruitlessly trying to send the signal for an injured or killed guardian. Communications were still down. He wasted no time. Michael raised his arm and fired at one of the figures dragging Dante’s body, dropping the man to the floor, before another attacker fired a projectile back, penetrating the armor of Michael’s right thigh.
Michael grimaced and charged forward, reducing two more attackers to pools of goo on the floor. At first, if he could see the enemy, they died. Until they massed. Several more figures appeared at the new opening and began firing rail guns and energy blasts as they charged forward. As Michael reached Dante, a slicing motion of his dark metallic feathers eliminated the last figure in his immediate vicinity. But more and more attackers were emerging from unknown passages, and they would be upon him in an instant. His armor was nearly at the breaking point as energy blast after energy blast pounded him.
Seeing the attackers approaching fast, Michael threw himself upon the sprawled Starmaker and extended his wings around them both, creating a small cocoon. There were too many. He waited for the charging figures to get closer. In fact, Lightbringer wanted the attackers to come closer. Into the kill zone.
Michael's armor began to glow with a faint blue light, and as the attackers neared, he activated the nova device. Blinding blue light erupted from Lightbringer as everything in a ten-meter radius was vaporized, creating a sphere of nothingness.
Michael and Dante fell to the bottom of the newly created ten-meter-deep pit and hit with a thud. Michael unwrapped his wings and looked up. Light flooded down like a spotlight. Directly above him was a large, perfectly circular hole in the ceiling. The tunnel was shallow enough that the nova device had vaporized all of the material up to the surface of the garden, revealing a circle of sky above and an escape route from the trap.
Lightbringer grabbed Dante under his arms and launched himself upward towards the light. No energy blasts followed him from below as he burst to the surface, extended his wings, and flew higher, leaving the garden behind. Ahead of him he saw Gabriella and Martha circling higher. Before he even had a chance to contact Fortress Magritte, a massive barrage of energy bolts thundered from its underside. The bolts sizzled over Lightbringer’s shoulder, and he heard the muffled impact thuds in the garden below. By the time he reached the ledge of the fortress with Dante’s lifeless body, the quiet English garden and the warren below were nothing but a smoldering memory.
25.
Pulverized
It was black. Jack couldn't breathe. Pulverized granite and concrete filled his nostrils and coated his mouth. Jack coughed and hacked out the chalk-like substance, then vomited onto the rubble. His left arm screamed at him. The bright blue flash had scalded the exposed limb. Then the energy bolts had hit. The rail gun he once held was gone. Already, he could feel his arm oozing blood and liquid through the thin layer of powder that covered it and the rest of his body. He felt the weight of debris on his lower body.
He tried to call out to anyone else alive, but the only thing to emerge was a dust-clogged raspy exhale. Jack closed his eyes in the darkness and felt his breast pocket: it was still there. He took out the illuminator and flicked it on. A haze of pulverized rock hung in the air.
Jack lifted the debris off his legs, gritting his teeth at the pain emanating from his oozing arm. He gingerly lifted one leg, testing it, then the other. Each leg seemed to be okay.
As Jack struggled to his feet, he saw someone's dust-coasted leg sticking out from a pile of corridor panels. Jack stumbled over the rubble and started pulling panels off of the figure. By the time he got to the tactical vest, he knew it was Damien. A few more panels were removed to reveal Damien's unconscious face. Jack turned Damien's face sideways and dug out some of the grit from his mouth. As he did so, Damien gagged and came to consciousness.
Damien's eyes grew wide at the ghostly white figure looking down on him through the dusty haze.
“It's me: Jack.” The rasp barely sounded like Jack, but Damien nodded anyway.
“Can you clear the rest here? I need to check for others.” Damien nodded that he could.
Jack scrambled over the rubble. The corridor that led to the vault had completely collapsed. Even if anyone was alive on the other side, they were beyond Jack's help – if there was in fact another side: it might all be solid debris now.
Jack slid back to where he started and scanned the room for anyone else, randomly picking up panels, shining the illuminator, and coughing out a few “Anyone here?” inquiries. There was no one else. No bodies, no voices, no signs.
Damien found his voice. “Okay, kid, I don't know what in the world happened here, but it's time to leave before more of it happens.”
“Agreed.” Jack extended his good arm to Damien and helped him to his feet.
“I don't have a light. I'll follow you.” Damien stepped forward with an obviously severe limp.
“Can you keep up?” Jack rasped.
“I'm not as young as you, kid, but I can still out march you. Let's get moving.” He limped forward.
Jack nodded. “We'll have to go down. The only way out now is to go deeper.”
26.
The Green Light
Dante sat with his eyes closed in the large, black chair. Rex’s briefing seemed straightforward enough. Biofluid was probably under that garden. Biofluid was dangerous in the wrong hands, it could mean EMP-proof robos or worse, and Dante was confident they would intercept it before any harm could come from it. The only challenge would be finding clues that might lead Magritte to the manufacturing facility. His eyes remained closed as he felt the warm pulse of the pad humming quietly near his ears, gently recording his memories and patterns of thought. After a short while, he opened his eyes and saw that the indicator light, rather than the normal cool blue, was a bright green. “Apparently,” Dante thought to himself, “the mission was more challenging than I first surmised.”
27.
Time
He ran his hand across the top of his smooth bald head. He didn’t have much time. The Event was nearing. The first plan should have worked. It had to work, otherwise none of the other pieces worked. They all had to be convinced. Everyone.
It was inexplicable that it had failed. So much planning, so many mistakes. Now, he would have to start over. And without his best people.
Felix entered the elevator and began his smooth descent to the street below. During the entire afternoon of meetings in which the construction of a new building had been discussed, Felix was his usual quiet self. At work, he was soft spoken. His managers and colleagues rarely even noticed him except when his professional engineering competence, gained over twenty nine years, was required. Despite his expertise, he had never risen to a high level of ma
nagement.
It wasn’t that he had never been offered the chance to climb the corporate ladder, but rather that he had turned down the offers. His managers were never quite surprised when he turned them down. To the managers, Felix didn’t seem to have a strong leadership drive, and he rarely if ever worked long hours. Sometimes he would disappear in the middle of the day for a couple of hours, but his work always got done.
But his managers’ view that Felix didn’t have much ambition didn’t bother Felix at all. He preferred relative anonymity in professional and social settings; it made climbing the ladder of his second job so much easier. Not to mention the fact that anonymity happened to make staying alive easier too.
The descending elevator came to a halt. The door slid open and Engineer Felix T. Katz stepped onto the street. The bright, golden light of the evening sun shone along the long axis of the skyscraper canyon. And a little black speck hung in the sky.
Felix casually walked through the spotless city streets. Occasionally, he stopped to look at the goods displayed in the windows for the holiday season. He studied each item as if the fate of the world depended on his choice of this one or that. His mind, however, was elsewhere.
He turned from a window displaying the finest time-pieces available. The old-fashioned watches, used almost purely for ornamental purposes, had refocused his mind on the matter at hand: Time. It was running out. And he needed to be prepared.
Rounding the corner of the city block, he entered a smaller cross street where the canyon was in deep shadow. He turned his head upward, as if checking the weather, to see what the clouds might bring today. Seeing nothing, he stepped sideways into a recessed doorway. Felix did not ring or announce his presence, but opened the door quickly, and boldly walked in. Engineer Katz was left on the street outside, and into the room stepped Colonel Red, Director of Special Operations, 3rd High Command, Natural Human Alliance.
28.
Flora
The middle-aged woman walked through the small garden. Whereas thunderbolts had rained from the sky and destroyed a larger garden, this one remained, as did others. Small, overlooked, hidden. Life continued here unabated, and from pockets such as this, even the charred moonscape of the English garden would quickly recover to teem once more with all manner of plants.
Her small garden waited for its chance to flower. In some areas, shoots pressed up through the mulch. In others, flower buds waited patiently to burst into their full glory.
The woman leaned over the flower bed and pulled up one of the closed flowers by the roots. An intense shake loosened the dirt from the roots. She tore off the rest of the roots and took the stem in hand. It was amazing that such a narrow tube could support so many leaves and a large flower head. Such a little stem. If you cut the stem, the beauty of the flower would be yours. You could take it inside, put it in a vase, and enjoy the flower for a long time, even though it was cut off from its roots, from the very thing that nurtured the flower for so long, from before it had even had a flower. And later, from those roots, from the bulb hiding in the dark earth, the flower would emerge again. If, however, you pulled the flower up by the roots, it would never grow again. It would be gone forever. Some other plant would instead take its place. The ground would not remain vacant for long. Nature abhors a vacuum, and spaces are filled, either by the most fit, or the most desired.
She took the bud in her hand and squeezed it between her fingertips. The bud burst open to reveal the almost completely formed red petals, woven tightly together. They were glorious wings tucked in the womb, waiting to stretch out towards the heavens. But this flower would never bloom. The glorious wings would never open up to claim the sun and seduce the bees with their brilliant scent, their radiant crimson, their nectar of life. No, this flower would never blossom. The woman had cut its life short. Now, it was merely bits of red smeared across her fingers. Pretty red. Aromatic red. But not yet the flower it strove to be.
Flora looked down at the rest of the flowers that had not yet emerged. It was not yet their time. But their time would come soon enough. Very soon.
29.
What's New?
Martha, Michael, and Gabriella were finishing up a post-simulator evaluation and exited to a long hallway that encircled Skyguard’s Tower. Along one side, windows looked out upon billowing white clouds and a rich blue sky. As they walked along the corridor, a door opened to reveal a tall, assured looking Dante Starmaker.
Martha walked over to Dante and embraced him.
“What is new?” Dante asked the question that had become a Guardian ritual after restoration, though the question’s original humor had long been lost to history. For Dante Starmaker, it was as if only a minute ago he was sitting in the black chair feeling the warm pulses of the brain scan, preparing for the raid on the small garden in the Forest Quarter. In actuality, the raid had taken place over three days ago. During that time, Fortress Magritte had been carefully growing a new body and imprinting it with Dante’s stored memory and thinking patterns. Theoretically, there was no reason to assume that it wasn’t possible to regenerate a guardian instantaneously. However, at that time even gen technology had its limits, and the three day restoration period was necessary to train the neural pathways in sequence. Now, three days later, Dante Starmaker felt great after awaking to the green light in the black chair.
And it was always good to have the full team back together.
“The surface has been quiet again,” Martha responded. “It was bold of the truds to attempt the destruction of an entire guardian team, but I do not know what they hoped to accomplish. Skyguard says the post-mission analysis does not indicate that there was anything of value in the tunnel system.”
“What mistakes did I make?” Dante asked, having no memory of the time between his last brain scan before the mission and his regeneration. The green light that appeared after a scan was his only clue that three days had elapsed rather than three minutes. Dante knew that a blue light indicated a complete, successful scan, while green indicated a full restoration. Since he had seen green, it was vital to learn what happened from the others and from Rex.
“There was not much you could have done differently,” Martha said.
“Essentially, it was an elaborate trap,” Gabriella added. “We surmise that the biofluid and hyrdroil were simply expensive lures. Thankfully, they did not seem to have a follow-up plan. Their only accomplishment was tipping their hand regarding some novel jamming devices they developed. If the truds had been smart, they would have saved the jamming devices for a situation when those technologies would have mattered.”
Martha agreed, “That is one thing that is always certain: truds will make big mistakes. Rex has already upgraded the wings to prevent these new types of jammers.”
“The rest of the team returned from the mission unscathed?” Dante questioned, in only a slightly astonished tone, his pride slightly wounded. The massive and powerful Dante had fallen before, but rarely had he done so alone.
Michael walked closer to his teammate and slapped him on the back. “I took twelve energy and kinetic hits, but took no damage that a regen bath could not heal in an hour. However, my wings were quite damaged,” he said, referring to his power armor, “if that makes you feel any better.” He didn’t bother explaining that his suit had since been repaired. That was a given.
“How did we eliminate the aggressors?” Dante wondered, the question pointedly starting with “how,” not “did.” It was historical fact that the enemy was always ultimately destroyed. It had always been that way, and Dante had no reason to believe it would change.
Martha answered, “Lightbringer nova’d the aggressors in the immediate vicinity. Magritte then disintegrated the caverns as a precautionary measure when we had moved clear.”
“I am sure Magritte will have new simulations for us given the novel tactics,” Dante said, as he turned towards the simulation room which the others had left only a few minutes before.
The others foll
owed not far behind. They lived for it.
30.
Gathering in Shadow
Two was normal. Meetings of three or four High Officers were rare, while the meeting underway with five high command officers present was nearly unprecedented in the city's recent history. Such meetings were generally considered too risky. A single Gargoyle attack, a single Floater barrage, or even a little dragonfly drone could put an end to a generation of military planning for the natural human resistance. Nevertheless, sometimes things needed to be whispered among one another face to face.
Colonel Red was the last to arrive.
“Welcome, Red,” General Win greeted Felix.
Compartmentalization was essential in the Natural Human Alliance, or the Organization, as the trud military element was sometimes called. The normal organs of trud government were quite open and visible to the general public. The military, however, was an underground organization in spite of its nearly universal public support. The gens were too effective at destroying any visible military elements. Experience had also taught that treason was an ever-present risk and an all-too-common occurrence. The gens could be very effective in recruiting turncoats.
Colonel Red quickly glanced around the room. There were five other individuals present. Felix clearly recognized four of them. There was Colonel Blue, the Director of Intelligence with whom Felix had a long history. They’d come up through the ranks together, for better or worse. Next was General Win, who as 3rd High Command City Commander was pretty much as high of an official as any of the others were ever likely to meet. Red also recognized General Chi, who frequently seemed to appear when new technologies were involved, though it was never entirely clear where his responsibilities began or ended. He’d been around for what seemed like forever in trud terms, and though rickety, still had the sharpest mind of the bunch. Then there was the gentleman with the burn scars on his lower jaw, whom Felix had met twice before, but who had never been named in his presence. Nevertheless, Felix knew exactly who he was. The scarred one wasn’t a high command officer, wasn’t even technically Natural Human Alliance, but he might as well have been when it came to the current project. In the shadows in the corner, a fifth person was present. Colonel Red did not bother asking who it was.