World War 97 Part 1

by David J Normoyle

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

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  Author’s Note

  COPYRIGHT

  World War 97 Part 2 – Chapter 1

  World War 97 – Part 1

  David J. Normoyle

  Locked in a perpetual and bloody stalemate, Earth’s superpowers battle each other century after century. Giant motherships prowl the skies, destroying everything on the surface of the planet, forcing humanity deep into underground cities.

  Jordi Roberts thought he’d found his escape from living underground by becoming an American Conference fighter pilot. But ever since a near-fatal crash, he suffers from nightmares, and the military won’t restore his flight status. Jordi spends his time drinking and seething about those he believes responsible for his plane’s malfunction—the sinister cyberterrorist organization known as Celeste.

  When the Conference is attacked and crippled by its closest ally, Jordi knows that the betrayal runs deeper than it appears. He suspects Celeste is involved. His investigations lead him to the heart of the American leadership and to a horrifying truth worse than anything he’s imagined.

  Part 1 of a 5-part serial. Each part is around sixty pages long. Look for the omnibus to get all parts together.

  Chapter 1

  The outside world clamored for my attention.

  I groaned and covered my head with the pillow, but another long screech from the doorbell stabbed deep into my foggy brain. I threw off my blanket. Whoever was outside my door wasn’t willing to take a hint. Just as I got to my feet, turbulence threw me against the back row of tomato plants. Cursing under my breath, I bent down to pick up the fallen tomatoes, threw them into the hydroponic bed, and kicked most of the leaves into the corner. I would catch hell from the next horticulturist who visited and maybe even get kicked back into a dorm cabin. In a one-person sleep-plus-growing cabin, I didn’t have enough space to swing an arm without knocking a leaf, and I had to abide the low purple lighting that the plants required. Still, the quarters were better than suffering cramped dorms filled with the stench of soldiers’ bravado and unwashed underwear.

  The doorbell screeched again. “Coming, coming. This better be more bloody important than world peace or...” I palmed open the door. “Oh... it’s you.”

  Darius Roberts, President of the American Conference, stood outside, flanked by two black-uniformed guards. A bitter taste lodged itself in the back of my throat. Now he decides to visit?

  “Jordi.” Darius looked me up and down with a slight smirk on his face, and I realized I was naked.

  “What are you grinning at, Dari? What you hide under your tailored suit is much uglier than this.” Everyone else might have to bow and scrape, but Darius hadn’t ceased being my little brother just because the country had been dumb enough to vote him into the highest office in the land.

  “That’s why I make a habit of wearing clothes. You should try it every now and again.”

  “You can hardly expect me to be in full dress uniform when you charge in here unannounced at some ungodly hour of the morning.”

  “It’s one o’clock in the afternoon.” Darius moved past me, ducking under a stray branch of vegetation. Darius had to stand in a crouched stance so that his head wasn’t among the tomatoes; he had been taller than me since he was twelve. “I find it hard to imagine what you’d look like in a suit,” he said.

  The guards began to follow Darius inside.

  “Not the mibs, Dari.” Bureau agents, who were always dressed from head to toe in black, were usually called mibs only behind their backs. They stiffened, adding dark expressions to their black uniforms and wraparound sunglasses.

  “Wait outside,” Darius said.

  “We were ordered to guard you in public at all times,” the stockier of the two said.

  “I’m in no danger from my brother,” Darius said. “You can protect me from outside the door.”

  The mib frowned, touched the side of his sunglasses, and slowly scanned from one end of the room to the other.

  “Alert, alert,” I said, mimicking a mechanical voice. “Large and dangerous weapon present.” I shook my hips back and forth. He ignored me and finished his scan.

  “You don’t have set your scanners to X-ray when the subject is already naked.” I held my arms wide. “You can perv without the glasses.”

  The mib’s mouth twisted as he turned away. He and his partner exited, and he palmed the door shut behind them.

  I grinned. Making fun of the mibs felt good. They tended to be a humorless bunch. Of course, that added to their power created a dangerous combination, so testing them wasn’t normally wise. Darius’s presence gave me that liberty at least.

  “Aren’t you a bit old for teenage jokes?” Darius’s half-smile indicated that he hadn’t minded as much as he pretended to.

  “Aren’t you normally guarded by the ACM?” The American Conference Military was usually responsible for the president’s safety. Tension between the two armed branches of the Conference, the ACM and the Bureau, didn’t surprise anyone. From our point of view, we were on the front line day in day out, protecting our country, yet still subjected to the heavy-handed policing of the mibs when we were back in the undercities. From their point of view... well, they were all assholes, and no one cared what they thought.

  “Used to be. These are new. I haven’t house-trained them yet.” He sighed. “Things change. Politics, you know.”

  “Your choice of guards is political?” The mibs should have jumped when Darius told them to, not questioned him.

  “In my position, everything is political.” Darius shifted uncomfortably. “And walking that tightrope gets tiring. Is there somewhere to sit?”

  “You poor dear, you must have it tough. Being supreme leader—why, that’s as bad as it gets.” I was surprised by the anger that had bubbled up in me at seeing him. I had thought I’d long accepted my mother and brother’s disinterest in my well-being.

  “I’m sorry.” Darius looked me directly in the eye. “I should have come to see you. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  I shrugged. A few words weren’t going to change anything. And my family not visiting me in the hospital after the crash was merely the latest incident that showed they didn’t care. “Sit. There’s a chair there under those clothes.” He hadn’t lost his boyish good looks, but wrinkled shadows gathered under Darius’s eyes. He wasn’t lying about being tired.

  Darius picked up the clothes and looked around for somewhere to put them.

  “Just throw them on the floor,” I said. “That’s what I do.”

  Darius put them on the bed instead, and he sat down. “I know I’ll always just be Little Dari to you, but I do need some boundaries. You can start with pants.”

  I grinned and framed my crotch with my hands. “That much magnificence must be off-putting; I’ll give you that.”

  “Rather, shriveled and decrepit things remind me of mortality.”

  I giggled in spite of myself and looked around. My pants were, for some unknown reason, hanging from the handle of a closet. I retrieved them and put them on. I picked up a T-shirt from the floor and gave it a sniff before putting it on.

  “Rancid level of shirt at acceptable levels?” Darius asked.

  “I didn’t ask you to slum it. Shouldn’t you be drinking sparkling wine with the Latino glitteratti?” All the latest news reports were about the president’s upcoming meeting with his Latino Territories counterpart aboard their flagshi
p devastator. I still hadn’t expected him to visit; Darius had never called before when he was on the Eisenhower.

  “I’m not meeting them until tomorrow.”

  “So you found yourself on the same ship as me, and you had a few hours to kill. Is that it? Might as well see what your deadbeat brother was up to.”

  Darius rubbed his temples. “There are things we need to discuss.”

  “So not just a social call.” That made sense. Darius had stopped just hanging out with me when he was fourteen. “We should have a drink together. Who knows when you’ll have time again? I might not survive the next crash.” I realized right then why Darius had come. Nearly a year had passed since my crash, and I was still waiting to have my flight status restored. I vaguely remembered sending a drunken message to the president’s office several weeks back, complaining about that. I hadn’t received an acknowledgment, but he must have seen the message.

  I opened a cabinet and frowned when I found it empty. I was about to check the fridge when I heard a grinding sound. Turning, I found Darius twirling an empty bottle on the counter.

  “I can see why you opened the door with such a scowl,” he said.

  Shit, I must have drunk the whole bottle the night before. No wonder my head feels like a devastator crashed inside it. “I finished the last sips of that one earlier,” I said.

  “It’s okay. I don’t have time for a drink,” Darius said. “Plus, you should allow time for the blood to circulate through the alcohol in your veins.”

  Clearly Darius had read my file. “Ha, ha. What are you now? My mother?”

  “I don’t know what Zirconia would do if she found you this steeped in drink, but I don’t think you’d like it.”

  “She long ago lost interest in me. You’re the golden boy.” Bitterness crept into my voice; any son who had a mother like Zirconia would have mommy issues.

  Darius stood and brushed his fingers through the leaves of the tomato plants. “You know, this is what I like best about devastators. It’s strange. These giant ships can circle the globe without landing for decades, they are run with this incredible fuel cell technology, they hold thousands of people and have a full economy of their own, they contain the attacking power that can destroy whole cities, and what I like most is the way they have woven crops inside some of the living areas.”

  I shrugged. “Means I get a cabin to myself.”

  “The history books say it was to reduce the air-conditioning requirements and make each part of the ship more modular, more self-sufficient. But I think it was more than that. The people who invented these had to know what they would bring. There was an arms race with every superpower simultaneously building these ships, and the designers knew that the world would be forced underground. Perhaps they thought having the vegetation entwined with the living areas would create an environment that allowed a more rounded crew than if everyone lived in a world of metal and plastic. Soften the grip on the trigger of such a weapon.”

  “We’re soldiers, not poets. I don’t think the leaves affect the decisions.” I had never known Darius to be melancholy. “Sounds like you need a drink even more than me. Luckily, I have some emergency supplies. Here, give me a hand with this.” I grabbed one side of the news-screen and pulled it loose.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Come on. Just pull out the other side.”

  Darius shook his head with wry resignation as he complied.

  “One, two, lift.”

  We lifted the screen up and away from the wall. A tangle of wires kept it attached. I raised my knee to take the weight of it, then I stuck a hand in behind the screen. After a bit of fumbling, I found the crevice near the bottom. I wrapped my fingers around the handle of a bottle and pulled it through the wires then out over the top of the screen. My cry of triumph turned into a despairing whimper. The bottle was empty.

  We replaced the screen, and I took a closer look at the whiskey bottle. I pulled free a note sticking out of the top and opened it up. “Dear Jordi,” I read, “Sorry, dude, couldn’t resist. I hope you are not desperately sober when you find this. Signed: Your greatest friend and worse enemy, Drunken Jordi.” I laughed. “I’m funny as a paper bag full of fighting clowns when I’m drunk—no one can deny that.”

  Darius glanced at the label on the bottle. “Invernes Red. You drink the hard stuff.”

  “Lets you know you’re alive,” I said.

  “You must be pretty dead inside if it took the whole bottle to do that.”

  “Why the fuck are you here?” I only put the question as politely as I did because I was still hoping Darius was there to unground me; I didn’t need any sermonizing. I just had to return to the sky; I needed that even more than Invernes Red.

  “To do this.” Darius lunged at me and wrapped his arms around me.

  I jerked back, trying to shake him off. “What in hell’s name are you doing?”

  He held on tightly. “Remember when we were kids, Jordi? People thought we were twins because we were never apart.”

  I stopped struggling, realizing that the uncomfortable wrestling hold was Darius’s version of a hug. “They thought we were twins because you grew faster than me.” Having a taller younger brother sucked.

  “Remember how we used to go exploring in those tunnels?” Darius’s voice cracked.

  Is he crying? Last thing the country needs is a blubbering president.

  “We were kings of our own world,” he continued.

  “I believe there’s a time limit on hugs. For hugs between men, at least. We have exceeded it.” Despite my words, my fingers were curled around the back of Darius’s suit. The initial awkwardness of the hug had melted.

  Darius loosened his grip on me, and we broke apart, though we didn’t fully release each other. Tears had wetted his cheeks, and I was about mock him for it when I realized that my eyes were moist. I blinked rapidly. I was supposed to be still angry with him.

  “I’m sorry, Jordi, about what happened to you. The crash. I’ve read reports. I can’t imagine how bad you suffered.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. Still, you could have pushed for a decent effort at capturing the bastards responsible.”

  Darius frowned. “It was an accident.”

  “They didn’t find any evidence, but I know. Come on. You believe it was a malfunction no one had ever seen before. Doesn’t take a genius to know Celeste was involved somehow.” The cyberterrorist organization Celeste had been causing more and more mayhem to our military each year. “I might have survived, but my plane sure didn’t. Knocking out our military capabilities while remaining in the shadows is exactly what Celeste do.”

  “No one claimed responsibility. Reports I saw said an accident was the most likely cause.”

  “Whoever wrote the report wasn’t inside the cockpit when the plane went down.”

  “As you say.” Darius dug his fingers into the skin of my shoulders. “I’m sorry I didn’t come visit you in the hospital after. I’m sorry it has taken this long to see you since. I have no excuses.”

  “Okay, okay, enough soppy stuff. What brought this on?” I broke contact and moved toward a bed of tomatoes near the back of the cabin. “If we are having a teary—sorry, I mean manly—family reunion, we definitely need a drink. And luckily, I have an emergency emergency supply.” I dug my fingers into the watery root system inside the hydroponic bed, trying to delve down to the bottom. My hand got stuck. I hadn’t realized the roots would grow so thick when I’d hid a bottle down there.

  “Jordi, stop, I don’t want a drink.”

  “Isn’t there something else you wanted to talk to me about? About my situation here?” The thirst had grabbed me, but the bottle was just out of reach. The roots weren’t going to stop me, no matter how thick they were. I gripped one of the tomato plants down by its base.

  “How did you know?” Darius asked.

  “I guessed. Come on, out with it. I’m free to fly again, right?” I wrenched the plant free, pulling it and
its tangle of roots from the bed, and put it on the floor.

  Darius sprang to his feet. “Wait. What are you doing? Aren’t you supposed to be taking care of those plants?”

  I paused with a second plant in my hand, the roots halfway freed. The horticulturist would have me ejected from the cabin if he saw this. I shot Darius a guilty smile as I placed the second plant on the floor; there was no point stopping. “I’ll tell them the president ordered me to do it. Might as well take advantage of having you as my brother.”

  “You’ve done enough of that.”

  My grasping fingers squirmed through the slimy root system of the other nearby plants and curled around a tube of glass. I pulled it out and triumphantly held aloft a full bottle. “I think having a visit from the president and not being able to offer him a drink qualifies as an emergency. Add that to a brotherly reconciliation.” The bottle was slick with hydroponic fluid, and the skin of my palm squeaked against the bottle cap as I tried to twist it off. “Wait.” I looked up at Darius. “What do you mean ‘I’ve done enough of that’? I’ve never used your position.”

  Darius glanced down at the tomato plants on the floor, and his lips curled downward. “You have a cabin to yourself. It’s been a year since the crash, and you haven’t been on active duty. Aren’t you done being sorry for yourself?”

  “I begged them to let me fly again. I didn’t ask for any special consideration.” I paused. “Or only once—I sent a mail to your office several weeks ago.”

  “It wasn’t forwarded to me.”

  “That’s not why you’re here?”

  “No. I’m here let you know that you are being transferred off the Eisenhower, effective immediately. You are to return to Under Nyork to continue your recuperation. From your evaluations, it’s clear you aren’t close to ready to resume service. I didn’t ask for you to be allowed to remain here, but I can only assume that nothing was done about you earlier because they knew you’re the president’s brother.”

  “No, Darius, you can’t do this to me.” I threw the whiskey bottle on the bed and grabbed Darius by the sleeve. “You don’t know what it will do to me. I only feel alive when flying. You don’t know what it’s like to be let free to roam the skies, only to have that taken away from you by cowardly pond scum.” Celeste hid behind their computer terminals when committing murder. They were the worst kind of traitors.