by Drew Avera
Chapter 23
I made it back to the palace within the few hours that White had been expecting me. I went straight to the conference room where we had met last and I could hear conversation once the elevator door opened. I walked into the conference room to see Kara and White sitting with an arrangement of food on the very large table. A media device was showing the report from the hospital where I had just killed Thom. The body had already been removed but the image showed people cleaning the blood from the pavement where he had fallen.
Kara looked up at me with a surprised expression on her face. She leapt up to me and embraced me. "You made it!"
I hugged her back. "Of course I made it." I said. I pulled the lottery ticket that I had taken from Thom's room out of my pocket and handed it to Kara. She took it and examined it closely.
"All of this violence for something this small?" She said.
"It's a lifeline." White replied as he stepped over to me. "More people have killed for an opportunity to live than they have in self defense. The logic does not make sense but it is true. It is the society in which we live."
White took the gauntlet from me when I offered it to him. It was clear that he had never held one in his own hands before. He turned it over in his hands, taking in every detail. The silver weapon was heavier than it looked. Each tiny control served a purpose. The neural sensors that stabbed into your wrist when you wore it reacted to your brain waves. For a policeman the gauntlet was a part of them.
"How do I put this on?" He asked. I took the gauntlet and manipulated a control that caused into open along a locking seam.
"Place it over your wrist and close it. It will lock once it is closed and you will feel the neural sensors enter your body. It is only painful for a moment." I said to him.
He looked at it questioningly. Was this something that he really wanted to do? "Will it work through clothing?" He asked. "I can see your jacket sleeve is covered by your gauntlet."
"Yes. The neural sensors will go through clothing. They will travel as far as the first nerve that they find."
White closed the gauntlet around his right wrist and grimaced once it was closed. It was clear that he felt a stabbing pain in his wrist. It was only for a moment before it passed. Kara looked at White, intrigued by this development.
"How do I fire it?" White asked. I demonstrated the use of the controls on the side.
"This is for the sight. This controls the power of the beam. This light will flash when you need to recharge it. Make sure that you keep it turned off until you can control your thought patterns in regards to firing it. A stray thought could cause it to fire on its own because of your nerves reaction to thoughts. This is a part of you. A limb that has grown that you now have to learn to control like an arm or a leg." I said.
White turned the gauntlet on and I grabbed his arm. He looked at me. "What is it?" He asked.
"The first rule is to never aim your gauntlet at anything you do not intend to kill. Accidents happen all the time with recruits. You have not had the training so it is very imperative that you follow this rule."
"I will." He said. I nodded my head to encourage him to take aim and fire at will. He had set the beam to a low setting and fired at a candle stick on a table in the back of the room. The sight had assisted his aim and he hit the target on his first attempt. A smile stretched across his face as he fired at the candle on the other table followed by the communicator that had been sitting next to it. I thought he was getting the hang of it.
"Very good. You have figured out how to aim and fire at will. That skill will be very useful in the future" I said.
Kara bit her lip. I could sense a bit of envy in White's new toy. It of course was not a toy, but she wanted one anyway. "What is our plan now?" She asked.
White looked up at her. "I'm glad you asked." He said as he switched the gauntlet off. He went to a computer that was sitting on the table and switched it on. A map of the transport station illuminated into a hologram. He had marked some points of interest on it already with a few notes written in the margins.
"This is the entrance into the transport station. There is only one way in and out so we are limited in our means of arrival. The marks on the map here and here are direct routes to the primary transports for the highest ranking officials of the Syndicate." He pointed those positions out on the map and enlarged the image around the second mark. "The second transport will be the easiest for us to access. It should be less guarded than the first and will not be filled with as many of the higher ups."
I looked hard at the image of the map and identified some hiding spots that would be available to me. "Why not try to take out the first transport?" I asked.
"If we do that then we will alert the guards of our presence. They will halt the departure of all the transports until they find who is responsible. It's a risk we don't have time to make." White sounded like a general who had gone over the plan thousands of times. He made a good call.
"Alright. When do we leave?" Kara asked. She seemed to be more in control of her emotions and more assertive. She was handling the situation very well under these dire circumstances.
"Just after midnight." White said. "We don't want to go too early because we may be identified if a large number of people are walking about. If we go later then our potential targets will be less but we won't have as large of an audience to get in our way."
"Good plan." I said.
"I thought you would say so." White replied. "In the mean time we should enjoy some food. It may be the last meal we have that has any consistency for several months." He laughed at the possibility of eating freeze dried food. All of our technological advances and space food was still disgusting.
The three of us feasted on the food that White had provided. There were all kinds of protein foods to give us energy. Steak and chicken were grilled to perfection. It was a last meal fit for a dying man. I just hoped that this would not be the last meal for any of us tonight.
We finished the meal and sat back to watch the media report. It showed images of the transports being fueled and loaded for the exodus. It seemed strange to me that there was such an event centered on this. These transports were going to leave millions of people to die. You would think that the whole population of the planet would be up in arms and going after the Syndicate. It seemed like people were too ignorant to stand up for themselves. That was probably true I supposed.
The clock chirped at midnight and it felt like the air in the room had disappeared. All three of us looked at each other and it was a moment of very real fear that closed around us. The only thing that allowed me to stand at that moment was my determination to save Kara from what would be the end of the world as we knew it. White stood up after I did and was followed by Kara. We three stood defiantly at our mission. Was it easier to sit back and let events unfold around us? Of course it was. We were not ignorant to that fact, but neither of us was willing to give up our lives without a fight.
We left the conference room and entered the elevator. From there we walked through the lobby and out into the square. From the square we were in the streets walking to the transport station. Every step brought us closer to another opportunity to live or to die. Each step closer to a reality that we had spent days trying to achieve, but seemingly felt unattainable. This was the final fight on Mars. Within hours we would either be dead or on a transport for Earth. Each step marked time as the seconds passed by, then minutes, until we could see the transport station in the distance. Illuminated by artificial lights the transports looked like huge metallic buildings. Primitive in their design, but advanced in their ability to preserve what life could fit aboard them. The reality of each foreseeable future passed through my mind. It was now or never.