by Mark Bordner
Grozet stood there, staring at his dead guard, unable to fathom the fact that one of his own had just tried to assassinate him. He was the Messiah reborn, the savior of the universe! He asked himself how one of his own kind be seduced by the deceitful ways of Satan.
Grozet looked up at the stars and roared.
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Winslow, Arizona
10:30 PM
The last flight of the evening arrived at Charles Lindbergh Municipal Airport, the passenger shuttle pulling to a stop among the other aircraft parked near the terminal. This one was delivering a load of civilians. Most were workers who had been transferred in, the rest were refugees who had found their way home. The passengers were allowed to disembark at the gate, where a pair of tired-looking MP’s were standing watch, taking little notice of them as they walked by, carry-on luggage in-hand.
One gentleman in particular, Jeff, glided past among the flow of fellow passengers, then headed directly to the exit with a casual stride. He walked out into the night and followed the walkway around the E & O Mexican Restaurant, which in turn led him to the parking lot of the tiny airport, empty for the most part at that hour. He looked south and gazed at the historic downtown block, a mile distant. It would not be possible to walk directly over there, as the railroad ran perpendicular to it, and was securely
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fenced along the length of the rail lines. It would be necessary to follow the winding road that led east, eventually connecting with Route 87, which ducked under the trestle to run into downtown. Jeff did not mind this forced detour. His journey was nearly at its end, and a minor delay such as this would not serve to thwart him.
Less than an hour later, he was beyond the trestle and entering town. He paused at the traffic light and studied the buildings. They were ancient, but well cared for, lovingly restored while preserving the appearance of centuries-past. Jeff strolled the drag, taking it all in. The sidewalks were brick, as were the crosswalks, with abundant trees and flowers gracing planters along the way. There were curio shops, a coffee shop, an old-time theater with but one screen inside. The street lamps were designed as they once were back in the early nineteen hundreds. It was quaint and welcoming.
There were no other pedestrians out, and no automobile traffic for that matter, either. Everything was quiet, but in a good way. This was a place where he could have enjoyed growing up, could have called home. Emotions swirled within him.
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It wasn’t too late, he could still call this home. This was the Free Zone, and he was well beyond Storian reach. It would be so easy to just toss his pistol in a trash bin, register with the labor department, and earn enough credits to rent a house. The temptation was strong.
The Device embedded in his back registered these thoughts, though, and induced its influence on his brain. The pleasure center flooded again, and the mission perimeters were impressed upon him. It was imperative that he complete his task.
Jeff had no credits on him for a motel, and so sought out a dark corner of the town park and crawled back among the bushes, hiding in the shadows and falling into a limbo-like sleep.
Xxxxx
Secure Presidential Bunker
At this shared moment in time, Director of Intelligence Tom McDanlee was crouched over a workstation in the control center that everyone had nick-named NASA, for its similarity in
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design. Even at the late hour, there were scores of technicians busy at their terminals, monitoring activities throughout the world and even out in space.
Tom had been quite absorbed in his work lately, attempting to compile event data that had been recorded over a year prior by the buoys that were launched by critically damaged space naval vessels. This task served not only to record the names of those who were lost in action, but to study the tactics implemented by the Storian naval commanders, which could serve useful in any future engagements.
This recent undertaking had begun several months before, and was beginning to become daunting. There were literally thousands of crew members that had to be accounted for, and the side-chore of analyzing the movements of the ships only served to complicate matters further. He found himself absorbed in it for hours on end, and often became so entwined in the details that he didn’t finish the day until well after midnight.
As fate would have it, Tom was playing back the recordings of the last few minutes of life left in the USS Belleau
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Wood. The first notes he made were that the location of its destruction had initially been falsely documented. It had been the belief that this warship had been lost in the battle of the Kuiper Limit, at the asteroid belt. As it turned out, it had launched its buoy in lunar orbit. That ship was the one that had tried to defend Star Harbor.
Tom neatly printed this correction in his log book, a thick hard-cover that was already better than two-thirds full of carefully notated data. He un-paused the playback and continued watching. Less than twenty life boats had managed to deploy, that was sad. The crew manifest scrolled down an adjoining screen, complete with their photos and a brief bio of each person.
The lifeboats had cameras of their own, and that data was beamed to the buoy. The pods began to seek one another out and link together, as they were programmed to do. This made it easier for them to share resources, and presented a simpler task for the rescue ship, having to retrieve one large cluster rather than have to hunt them all down. Only in this instance, no rescue would be forth-coming for those poor souls. Star Harbor had
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been destroyed, the Lunar colony as well. There was nowhere to go, and no other friendly vessels in the area to have saved them. Death by suffocation. Horrible.
Tom was looking at the manifest on the side screen, and so missed an interesting anomaly near the end of the buoy’s transmission. The tape ended and he realized that he had forgotten to log the last time stamp on it, and so reversed it a few frames. Tom froze, his eyes wide with astonishment. He was incapable of drawing a breath for a moment, unable to fully comprehend the gravity of his discovery. After a short eternity, he returned to his senses, and bolted from the chair, rushing to the nearest phone. No matter the late hour, this needed to reach the President as soon as possible.
On the screen, in a paused frame, the picture was of the exterior of the lifeboat cluster. The moon could be seen to the right edge, the star field in the center; it was the left edge of the screen that had captivated him. It was the unmistakable hull of a missile cruiser, saddling up alongside the lifeboats in a fashion so as to couple with the hatches.
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There, on the rear portion of the cruiser’s bridge tower, was the clear image of the Storian Empire.
Xxxxx
It had been a while since they had been drug out of bed and summoned to the briefing room in the middle of the night, and it was not a pleasant thing to re-experience. President Reyes, clad in a bathrobe, sat baggy-eyed at the head of the table, yawning. Command Admiral Green and Major General Parks looked no better, dressed in their pajamas. They were looking at the view screen and squinting at its freeze-frame, trying to comprehend what Tom McDanlee was so excited about.
“You do understand that the Storians traditionally never take prisoners,” Admiral Green told him. “Even if they took those crew members aboard, the odds are that they were executed after being tortured for information.”
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Tom nodded, “I know, but in this case, those men and women are still alive, all seventy-one of them that made it to the lifeboats.”
The senior officers exchanged looks of disbelief. Reyes sighed and rubbed her eyes.
“Tom,” she said with forced patience, “I understand your optimism,
but you have to accept the fact that those people are long dead.”
“I don’t have to accept that fact,” he replied with confidence. “I can prove to you that they’re alive.”
All three of them stared at him, incredulous.
Tom tapped the screen, keying up other displays, “Look, every crew member and officer in the Space Navy has an identification chip implanted just under the skin of their foreheads. It’s a micro-chip intended for ship’s security, so that a stow-away wouldn’t be able to sneak on-board. A person can be ID’d from any point in the ship by the main over-monitoring computer, because it emits a signal that’s on the same frequency as the Anderson Beam.”
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Admiral Green unfolded his hands, frowning. “So? How in the hell does that tell you that those sailors are still alive, after a year, no less?”
Tom pointed at the crew manifest. There was a red dot beside most of them, and a green one next to the remaining seventy-one, “The over-monitor that we have here on Earth still hasn’t marked them as deceased!”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Green insisted. “It’s just an over-sight.”
Tom shook his head fervently, “No, it isn’t! The over-monitor can’t mark them as dead if it’s still reading that Anderson wave, no matter the distance or time that’s passed. There are seventy-one signals still being registered. The transmission will cease only when death occurs to the body, because it’s the body’s own bio-electrical pulses that power the chip. Those sailors are still alive!”
The silence was profound. No one knew what to say. Each looked at the other.
“Can we trace that signal?” The President asked.
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Tom nodded, smiling, “I already have. The signals are coming from the planet Denmoore.”
Xxxxx
New Bedford, Pennsylvania
October 2nd
Minerva and Mark had met Ecu at the make-shift ICU, as it was her release date. The Attayan strode out with a big grin on her face, and gave her friends a big hug. She modeled her new leg, striking a pose. It was nearly identical to her natural one, the nano-morphing capabilities allowing it to more or less match. When she donned her armor, it would blend with that, mimicking to remain in-tune.
They walked downtown to meet up with the rest of their normal circle of friends for breakfast, arriving at the Denny’s to find it absolutely packed to the gills with customers, most of them in uniform. The harried waitresses were rushing to and fro in
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desperation, and cursing could be heard coming from the kitchen among the clanging of pots and pans. The dull roar of conversation drowned a good portion of it out.
The three of them looked at that, then at one another as if to say ‘Must we? ‘
That unasked question was answered by Ford, who appeared at the door behind them and motioned to follow. They exited, thankful that they would not have to push their way into that crowd.
“We’d be eating dinner by the time we got served in there,” The sergeant major told them. “I’ve worked something else out.”
He led them to a jeep that he had signed out from the motor pool and drove around to the side of town where most of the homes were clustered together, stopping in front of regimental headquarters.
“What good is fame if you can’t put it to use?” Ford joked.
They entered the house, finding their friends clustered around the dining table where an aide was just beginning to serve
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them waffles and bacon. Colonels Strasburg and Lafferty were there as well, laughing about something. Strasburg had a reputation as a hard-nosed individual that was monumentally difficult to please, but in so far, the senior staff of the 1st Battalion had seen mostly his jovial side. The man loved to laugh, and when in an informal situation, did so often.
“There they are,” The colonel said upon their entrance. “Sit your butts down and feed yourselves!”
The kids did not need to be told twice. Eating good food was right up there on a soldier’s list of things to do, next to sleep. The meal was hearty and they dug in with fervor while the adults tended to dabble at their plates and prefer to converse, mostly highlighting the brighter points of the recent few months.
As the meal began to wind down, a clerk entered the dining room and whispered something into Colonel Strasburg’s ear. He excused himself and left the room, but it was in a casual manner, nothing to raise any eyebrows. There seemed to always be something that demanded his attention, mostly documents in need of a signature. The talking and laughing went on in his absence.
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As the plates were taken away and the coffee served, Ford broke out one of his cigars and leaned back in his chair, lighting it. One of the kitchen staff happened to be passing by, and the pinch-faced woman gave him a sour look.
“You can’t smoke in here.”
Ford looked back at her coolly, puffing great clouds, and casually stated, “I’m not smoking, the cigar is.”
She huffed and went back to the kitchen.
Colonel Lafferty grinned, “You’re a brave man. I’m too afraid to light up around that woman.”
Strasburg came back in, his face set in a stony expression, and stood at the head of the table, “I was just on the phone with Major General Parks,” He announced.
The room fell quiet, suddenly serious, and everyone waited expectantly for what he had to say.
“It seems that the Storians have begun taking prisoners,” He said. “The Intelligence boys have discovered a POW camp is located somewhere on the planet Denmoore, in Storian-controlled territory.”
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The looks of surprise were not unusual.
Strasburg cleared his throat, looking directly at Mark, “This pertains specifically to you. Master Sergeant Corbin, I’ve been informed that your father and your brother are still alive. They are prisoners of the Storians.”
Xxxxx
WINSLOW, ARIZONA
Jeff had awakened late in the morning, his body was beginning to succumb to the effects of the Device implanted on his spine. Its control of him was specific to the programmed mission, and allowed little leeway in the other processes of maintaining his health. He looked sickly, his movements were sluggish. He wandered through the residential streets, past a school, following a sub-conscious compass that guided him without his even being aware of it.
After a time, he found himself standing on the porch of a
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particular house near the end of a cul-de-sac not far from the Interstate. His arm reached out on its own, and he watched it knock on the door, feeling as if he were merely an observer of his own body. He felt nothing by then, thought nothing, he was the machine, and the machine was him.
Jeff noticed that his other hand was holding the pistol.
When Minerva’s mother answered the door, Jeff raised the gun and pointed it at her face.
Xxxxx
CONCLUSION OF EPISODE TWO
To follow the adventures of Minerva and the Mighty First, watch for Episode Three, Sorrows of Enon Pass!
Thank you for your interest in this epic series!
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Excerpt from Episode Three
‘Sorrows of Enon Pass’
“Minerva, how are you doing back there?”
After a few seconds’ pause that seemed much longer, she answered--- her voice strained under the back-ground noise of battle.
“I’m okay, Babe,” She said. “Really busy right now, talk to you later!”
Mark swallowed. Every time they were in a fight, he worried about her. They had been married only a short time, and the thought of her being hurt, or worse, weighed heavily on his mind. “I love you, Minerva, be careful.”
There was no reply. She was evidently in the thick of it. Overhead of his position, a Navy jet took a hit to its fuselage with a loud crack, and flames trailed behind it as it arced down not far from their eastern flank, exploding in a great fireball on a hillside.
He mentally corrected himself, they were all in the thick of it right then….
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Other books by Mark Bordner
- The Mighty First, Episode 1
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