Dedication (The Medicean Stars Saga Book 1)

by Crawford, McCullough

  “Well, now that that little nuisance is gone, I recommend we all adjourn for the day as it is almost one-thirty; everyone has a written copy of the report?” says the senator who had ejected Gavitte, while stretching back in his chair.

  The assembled shuffle their papers, and magazines, together in a show of self-importance and head for the nearest exit, as if the fire alarm is ringing in their ears, instead of a condemnation of their perfect little world. Some wear expressions of worry, but most seem simply relieved that the outburst shortened their workday significantly. As they bunch at the exits, talk of possible earlier tee times and drinks at their private clubs fills the hall of power. Soon all the worried expressions have vanished to be replaced looks of gleeful anticipation and excitement reminiscent of a school yard on a snow day.

  Outside, Gavitte is thrown into a waiting police van and shackled to the wall. The light is cut off as the doors slam, and the van speeds off, weaving its way through the idling traffic. Gavitte is still too stunned by his own outburst to really process what is going on around him.

  His eyes are just beginning to get accustomed to the darkness, allowing the three fully armored marines to take shape before him. As their forms come into focus, it is obvious that the three assault rifles pointed directly at his chest all have their safeties off. Before Gavitte can worry too much that the bouncing of the van might make one of their fingers twitch on a trigger, the van is thrown to a halt, and the sound of automatic gunfire from outside assaults his senses.

  The doors burst open, and the guards are turned into bloody pulp by concentrated fire from classic foreign assault rifles. Two bursts come from the glare and break the chains holding Gavitte to the wall. Stunned by the loud noise and light concentrated by the reflective walls of what remains of the police van, Gavitte lets his arms drop to his sides and stares stupidly into the opening, past the guards’ slumped bodies. Two forms step forward from the light. Gavitte can make out nothing more than silhouettes, even shading his eyes with his hand as his pupils are still struggling to adjust. It isn’t until the two forms drag him out onto the strangely empty street and down an old manhole that his thoughts begin to coalesce.

  “Wha… who… why…?” Gavitte murmurs.

  “Sir, this is no time for questions, we must keep moving,” one of the figures dressed in a dark outfit says. Gavitte’s tortured eyes can make out nothing more as darkness rushes in once more following the closing of the manhole above them. And with that he is dragged off down a seemingly endless tunnel, with water from last night’s storm sloshing around his ankles. The opaque, sludge-filled water hides numerous objects that threaten to trip him and send him sprawling into the muck.

  After what seems like an eternity, yet is closer to a few minutes, his escorts throw themselves down a side passage. With all of them out of the main tunnel, the apparent leader speaks into a small shoulder-mounted microphone.

  “All clear, proceed to stage two, over.”

  With the last word, the tunnel through which they had come implodes, sending a wave of refuse-laden water and dust into Gavitte’s face, blinding him. The tears and dust streaming from his eyes rob what little sight he’d managed to regain as they stumbled down the tunnel.

  After a brief pause dedicated to cursing and sputtering by all involved, the party moves out in the only direction left to them.

  *

  Above on the surface, the military is just beginning to arrive in an effort to control the situation. As transports and tanks roll through and over the cars deserted where they had sat in gridlock, a man in uniform with entirely too many medals on his chest steps from a helicopter.

  At the instant he alights, he begins issuing orders.

  “I want all the exits from those sewers in a three-mile radius guarded, and I want a team down there now.” Turning to an aide, he adds, “I want the entire schematics for this area, and I want to know the extent of the damage.”

  People begin to scurry back and forth in order to carry out the demands, and the aide promptly returns with a small computer displaying the information requested.

  “Colonel, it seems that the tunnel has collapsed for almost a mile in each direction.”

  “Do we know if it was intentional yet?”

  “It is hard to tell, there is a possibility that it was triggered by the explosives used on the van. Which means they are trapped in the rubble.”

  “That would be appropriate justice, yet what about the side tunnels? They could have had some warning or may have done it intentionally and had time to duck out of the main tunnel.”

  “Sir all the side tunnels in either direction for the length of the collapse are dead ends after only no more than a city block.”

  “Then, we have them trapped. Get in there and bring me their corpses.”

  Chapter 5

  Foothills of the Western Mountains

  A University Campus

  In a beautiful town with panoramic views far away from the haze of the city, with better weather than many vacation spots, and a night life that is the envy of a casino town sits a massive concrete building. Its towers rise up from the carefully manicured lawns of the campus that surrounds it, distracting from the scenery by their imposing gray bulk. The building stands for some as a testament to the triumph of knowledge in an otherwise uncaring world; but for others it is a prison, where rooms deep underground with no connection to the outside world sit under the unyielding glow of florescent lights, some of which surely haven’t been changed in the past decade as their flicker hints at an undying heart beating somewhere in the building. Fans move air, sighing through every hall, mixing the fresh smell of unwashed humans with the stale smells of ancient food lost in crevices, mountains of paper, and experiments long ago attempted and failed. The building rises from the ground indiscriminate of the existing topography. In places, its walls cut into the hillside like the prow of a ship through a swell, and in others, the ground drops away, revealing the multiple levels of basement, like bone and tendon exposed by a flesh-eating bacteria.

  In this place, below where the plain concrete façade intersects the carefully landscaped grounds, there is a man sitting at a desk. When he entered the building several hours ago, he descended two flights of stairs to reach his office, but he could have just as easily approached from a different direction and entered the building one level below where he currently sits. However his relative position in space and time does not apply within the confines of his office; it sits outside the flow of space and time, remaining unchanged like a rock high up the bank of a river, only shifting when a clumsy traveler disturbs it with their foot or the river rises with flood water. His only proof that he is not the last person left alive is the occasional cough and click that comes echoing into his concrete-walled cube of an office as a door closes somewhere down the hall. He knows if he were to wander down that hall, eventually he’d reach a door that would lead him outside, where people are savoring the last of the sunny fall weather, but he lacks the time it would take to make the journey through the warren of halls. Like a casino, there is no change between night and day when on the inside. The assorted machinery continues to hum, the lights continue to buzz, and the stack of work to be done does not lessen. The man is somewhere in his twenties and looks like, at some point in the not-so-distant past, he had a life outside his current monastic cell. There is a fading tan visible on his arms, an athletic build to his body, and an upright posture proving that he hasn’t spent all his time as hunched as he is now.

  To his left is a stack of papers, while to his right is another, shorter, stack with red marks on the sheets. Before him is a single paper, this one about half covered in red ink; he moves through the page, making tick marks with the mechanical movements of someone who has resigned himself to his fate and takes his only joy from the efficiency of the system he is in. Behind him there is more paper—this work is actually his. He should be doing it, but the “opportunity” before him has a more concrete deadline, and de
adlines are the one element of normal space and time that manage to reach this place, so the “opportunity” is done first.

  The door to his cell opens; another young man walks in, pushing a stack of books off a chair and flopping down, his tall, well-muscled and tanned limbs draping over the chair, seeming to spill onto the tottering piles around him. He grins at the man hunched over the desk, flashing blindingly white teeth and crinkling his eyes in a way that has melted more than a few maiden’s hearts.

  “Dude, you have to get outside,” the man immediately starts in. “There is like a huge party thing going on in the quad.”

  His charm and excitement seem to be absorbed into the thick walls surrounding them as the man behind the desk looks up and sighs.

  “I've got too many papers to grade, see this stack, they need to be turned back tomorrow. And I haven't even started on my own assignments yet.”

  “But come on Jon, there is one of the water slide things that you run at then slide down... and all the freshmen girls are out giving it a try,” the interloper insists.

  Turning away from his papers, Jon finally meets his friend's eyes. “Ryan, you know I want to go with you, but I can't. I have way too much work right now. I don't get how you can go anyway, all this free time you seem to have, yet your research is further along than mine.”

  “Simple dude: I don't sleep.” Ryan says shrugging his broad shoulders with a twinkle in his eyes.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you can sleep when you're dead, and I ain't dead yet.”

  With that and a final “Later dude,” he gets up and strolls back out into the hall, heading towards the building's exit and those freshmen girls and their wet t-shirts.

  Chapter 6

  The Capital

  Sewer Tunnels

  Rushing along the tunnel in which they had found shelter, the team of rescuers and a stunned Gavitte are stopped short when they suddenly enter into a collecting chamber. Gavitte notices that, as a chamber for use as an escape passage, it lacks of two very important things: One, there is no manhole in its ceiling through which to access the surface world, and two, none of the pipes leading out—other than the one through which they just came—is actually large enough for a man to fit through. The smells of rotting plants, damp earth, and various acrid chemicals fill his nose as he looks back down the way they’d come.

  The light from combat flashlights dances around the entire room, ensuring its security before turning back down the tunnel they had traveled through, their beams quickly swallowed by the swirling dust choking the air. With only his gun mounted light to guide him, the leader heads towards the far wall of the chamber and begins counting the pipes in a semi-irregular fashion before reaching his hand deep inside one and twisting something. He switches off his light and crouches, as if waiting.

  Within moments there is a grinding noise, and the stale air is stirred as if by some passing spirit. The leader switches on his light once more and gestures towards the opening that has just appeared in the wall next to where he is crouching. It is time to move deeper into the earth, beneath the city.

  Gavitte still has no clue who his rescuers are, but since they are not pointing their assault rifles at him, he figures they are a better bet than his company on the surface—that and his captors on the surface are dead. Gavitte ducks through the opening and follows the leader of his rescue party, hoping that this part of the journey can be accomplished in a slightly more upright position compared to the half crouch that had taken them this far.

  As the door slowly grinds back into place behind them, a rat scurries out of a pipe near the floor and across the chamber, the sound of its nails scraping across the cold, hard, slime-coated floor, echoing back to Gavitte as he follows the leader’s bouncing flashlight.

  Chapter 7

  The Capital

  A Suburban Highway

  On the other side of the city, making its way through the sprawling suburbs is another armored van containing another captive, though this scene has a few key differences. There are no guards in this van—instead all the available space is full of hunched and morose forms, shivering despite the oven-like heat within the vehicle. And unlike with Gavitte’s van, no one is going to try to rescue its cargo.

  The form hunched in the darkest corner, his knees drawn close to his chest, is William, the misunderstood and yet no longer ignored suburbanite, who barely thirty-six hours ago was celebrating his youth in the rain by an airport. Crouched in the corner, he manages to insulate himself from the majority of bruises those in the middle of the van are receiving. Still his flesh is slowly being tenderized, thanks to the ride quality of three tons moving at a speed of well over three digits on roads that haven’t seen a maintenance crew since they were built.

  It is this comparative peacefulness that allows him to begin to form an idea, one which is simple enough that he might even be able to succeed in his pursuit of it.

  “I will survive,” he mutters into the ambiance of moaning and flesh colliding with hard steel. He repeats, “I Will Survive.”

  With this as his mantra, William passes the next day without food or water and with the ever-increasing stench of vomit, waste, and fear, as he remains huddled in the corner, the van swaying to and fro around him. He draws into himself, allowing his mind to retreat to the dark, quiet room of his interrogation. Sealing himself off from everything that surrounds him, he lets it go blank. Time passes indeterminately, each second seeming to drag by but hours seeming to pass when he blinks.

  As the sun rises to mark the beginning of what will be the second day in the van, the vehicle begins to slow. The vibrations from tires on relatively smooth pavement is replaced with the bouncing of tires on gravel, and the van finally comes to a halt. The doors are thrown open, casting the harsh light of day upon the nightmare enclosed within. Squinting through the light, William notices his fellow passengers. Each is as bedraggled as he feels, and a haunted look reflects from their eyes. None are older than he is, and he has more than year before society deems him mature enough to officially be an adult.

  “Git out ya’ maggots, it’s time t’ git t’ work,” growls a voice belonging to face that—if it weren’t for the grimace and the lack of teeth—would be called grandfatherly. The face sits atop a portly frame dressed in a military uniform that marks him as a sergeant. “Welcome t’ hell, ya’ pissants, you’ll call me sir, lord, or god if I address ya’ first. Otherwise you’ll keep your mouth shut. Now move it.”

  Still too stunned to move, it takes the repeated cracking of a whip and more curses by the rotund sergeant with divine pretensions before the contents of the van begin to shuffle out.

  “Now since it’s ya’ first day ’ere and I can tell you all are a bit tired so I’m gonna go easy on ya’. Corporal take ’em to the blast trenches.”

  The group of bedraggled teenagers is led towards a large, partially-completed earthwork. On their way, they are handed shovels and wheel barrows before being led down into the baking heat of the trench, and without any more introduction, the whip is cracked and they begin their shoveling.

  Shovel load after shovel load passes from William’s hands into the awaiting wheel barrow, until the numbness in his mind that he had hid behind in the van becomes his entire consciousness. With each thrust of the shovel, he grunts another syllable, his voice barely more than a whisper, yet he is unaware he is making any sound at all.

  “I… will... sur… vive…”

  Chapter 8

  The Capital

  Sewer Tunnels

  As another wall peels back, warm dry air invades the cold damp sewer, and a scent of roses reaches Gavitte. Before the misplaced first waft of the scent can be completely lost in the overriding smell of the city’s waste, the scent comes back just as delicately but with a strength and permanence behind it. The scent is accompanied by a rough grip on his shoulder and a toss through the opening onto a lightly rusted steel grate. The grate forms the start of a ramp that leads
up a short tunnel before moving out onto a catwalk.

  “Come on, we need to move before they check this tunnel,” says the voice connected to the firm grip and rose scent.

  Crouched where he landed at the start of the catwalk, Gavitte finds himself looking down upon what appears to be an underground lake in a natural cavern. A faint glow illuminates the water from within but is too weak to leave more than a vague impression of the cavern’s size as Gavitte looks into the distance. As he stands, his view pans about him. The only thing to break the darkness at their elevation in the cavern are the beams of his rescuers’ flashlights, each one casting a bright spot upon the handrail and walkway but finding themselves lost to the darkness beyond as they flit about.

  It is in this setting of no specific definition that he gets his first sight of her. She is nearly as tall as Gavitte, only tilting her head slightly to look him in the eyes. Her hair, when illuminated by the flicking of the flashlight beams, glows with a deep red hue that borders on purple. Her name is right on the tip of his tongue, as if he were introduced to her at some party, but he since forgot all but the feeling of her presence. He is about to wrap his tongue around it.

  “Angelina, all are through,” says one of the rescue party.

  “All right, close it up and rig the charges. We don’t want anyone coming through here after us,” says the voice belonging to the perfectly firm rear below the well hung utility belt of the now-identified Angelina. That catches Gavitte’s attention as she turns, jogging off into the ethereal cavern, her finely shaped legs quickly fading in the gloom but not from Gavitte’s mind.