Future Winds (12 page)

“Hey, Ness,” said his younger brother in excitement as he approached the bunk.

Ness rubbed dirt from his eyes and reopen them before forcing himself to get up and climb back down to reality.

“Hey, man,” he said, forcing his sore, exhausted body to descend down from the bunk. “You are looking better,” he continued as he inspected Lucas’ wounds.

“Yea, I feel better too. Wish they didn’t shave my head, but it will grow back. How was work? You look filthy. Why don’t you shower?”

Ness forced a smile. “You think that gross water can wash away this dirt from my bones?”

The water used for showering and drinking purposes was endlessly recycled and reused. It was never truly fresh, as carrier ships could not afford to waste a single drop of the liquid that sustained all life.

“Better than nothing,” Lucas said.

It was then that Ness noticed a boy about the same age as Lucas was standing beside him. The boy was dressed in fancy expensive clothing and had a purple electronic wristwatch on his left arm. This signified he was free and paid, or his parent’s rather, paid for his ticket to be aboard New Horizon. Working civilians were assigned to their designated blocks and could not leave, but the rich, free civilians could come and go as they pleased almost anywhere they desire.

His slicked back blonde hair made his forehead look big compared to the small frame of his body. His eyes scanned Ness as if in disgust for how dirty he was.

“And who are you?” Ness asked.

“Oh, this is Ryan. He is my friend,” Lucas cheerfully admitted.

“I heard that a second carrier landed today. Is it true?” The kid asked.

“Yea,” said Ness.

“That’s good. Mom says when the city is complete we can go outside. We will have an apartment with a pool and maybe even a dog,” said the small blonde boy as he smiled from cheek to cheek.

Is it wrong of me to hate this kid?
Ness wondered.

“That’s great,” Ness said sarcastically. “Looks like the line for the showers is dying down so I am going to go do that.” He listened to the boys converse while he grabbed his bar of soap, a towel, and washcloth.

“Maybe someday me and my brother Ness will have a dog too!” Lucas said with excitement.

The harsh reality was, neither Lucas nor Ness would ever own a dog nor an apartment with a pool for that matter. Hell, Ness didn’t even know if the two boys were even going to survive this construction phase, let alone whatever shit future may be in store for them after the city was fully built.

I should cut his arm off and take his data watch. Maybe I could pass as some rich kid and buy me and my brother a peaceful life of ignorance,
Ness thought as he bitterly walked off towards the showers.

Kio-Kai crawled out from under what seemed like an endless pile of rocks and debris. His body was broken and his antennas were gone. His face was only partly intact and he was left crying out in pain.

The city around him was in ruins. All the buildings gone--even the great colosseum which towered over all the rest, sculpting the city's historic skyline, was replaced with smoldering rock, ash, and smoke. Fallout winds howled and wailed about as sand, dust, and fire obscured any visibility ahead.

His head throbbed and his face stung. Bits of sharp rock were stuck in his chest and he was bleeding badly from the sockets where his antennas once hung. Attempting to remember what had happened, Kio-Kai closed his eyes and tried as best he could to tune out the chaos around him.

I was with Jek-Xio and Lai-Kai. We were in a bar. The last thing I remember was laughing at something Jek-Xio had said about... I don’t know... then... a bright light?
He thought as his brain frantically tried to make sense of it all.

He spun around and looked down at the pile of wreckage he was buried under merely minutes ago and began digging as if to have gone mad.

“Lai-Kai, Jek-Xio,” he called out.

As he dug he began to weep for his friends, fueling him to unravel the earth below at a faster rate. A few minutes passed and in that time he spent digging, his fingers were shaven down to nothing more than bloody stumps from clawing away at the rock below.

At last he found the twitching arm of a hunter and grasped it.

“I’ve got you buddy, hold on!” he cried out as he scraped away at more rock to better unearth the survivor.

Then the wrist of the buried Vai-Zik snapped clean off. Kio-Kai fell backward and screamed out in anger and frustration as the world around him continued to burn.

***

The man wearing the virtual reality headset called out to the vice admiral who was standing resolute with her arms crossed, staring at a screen that announced the progress of various construction units from the day that were coming to a close.

“It looks like the missile successfully navigated its way through the cavern and reached its destination in the heart of the insect hive.”

“Good, one less thing on my plate. I need to see the pilots. They have been gone almost an entire day and I want to know what they found during their initial recon mission.”

Aisha stood watching over the inner workings of the busy room for a few minutes. She tapped her foot trying to hold in the fact that she had to pee.

Should I just walk off and go? Do I need to ask permission? What do these people do when they have got to go? Do they ever even need to go to the bathroom?
Maybe they just wet their pants and continue working throughout the day.

Finally feeling as though her bladder were going to explode at any given minute, she walked towards the exit. In the hallway just outside the door was a restroom. She prayed either no one would notice her having walked out or, if they had, they would not care in the slightest.

In the stall she realized going to the bathroom may very well be one of the more uncomfortable tasks she had to endure with her robotic arm. Silly really, that she was equipped and capable of performing some truly incredible feats, but using the restroom was not one of them. While heading back to the data room, she noticed a man and women in aviator uniforms walking towards the doors.

“Woah, look at this,” the man said staring at Aisha's arm. “That thing is crazy.”

He wasn’t just skinny; his entire frame of build was small. His fellow pilot, a female accompanying him, was equally as small but she stood quiet. She started to look Aisha up and down trying to figure out just what was going on with this tan girl in white and orange armor who had a bionic arm and a sword draped down her side.

“What other robotic parts you sportin’ cutie?” the male pilot said picking fun of her.

Typically, Aisha would combat insecurities with sarcasm, but her mouth was dry and wordless.

“Your armor is not grey, so you are not AI,” the man observed out loud, squinting as if trying to figure out just what exactly she was.

Aisha simply walked back into the room as the two pilots followed her in with awkward stares.

The vice admiral caught eye of her entering the room, “Christ, where have you been?”

Aisha became warm and uncomfortable. How could it be that telling someone you had to go pee could be so nerve racking? She wanted to lie, then stopped herself. She questioned in her head why she would lie about something so insignificant and stupid.

The two pilots approached. “You told us to scout and so we ran until our burners were close to overheating. Lots to see out there.”

She wasn’t even questioning where I had been. It was a question directed towards those two
, Aisha thought, feeling daft.

“Then you had us bomb a cave,” the girl reminded.

The two were not afraid of the vice admiral and yet, here Aisha was cowering at the thought of going to the restroom.

“Well, give me the rundown. I have a briefing with the president in ten minutes.”

The three left the engineers and the data center and went ahead into the bridge of the ship. Aisha followed and lingered near the doorway as the three talked fast just out of ear reach. They leaned over the glass table that came to life with images they had apparently captured out on their recon mission.

A few minutes passed and then one of the grey robotic men entered the command bridge, “The president is ready for you.”

“Patch it through in here and leave us.”

Aisha turned to walk out.

“Not you,” Fox said motioning Aisha to come closer.

After exiting the room, the door shut behind the drone and one of the clear glass windows sparked up, illuminating a perfect image of the president sitting in a chair with one leg over another. He wore black, square glasses below his bushy eyebrows. He held a tablet in one hand and a glass of scotch in the other. Well dressed in a suit and for the most part quite handsome, he had broad shoulders and a long muscular neck. An unshaven face and black circles around his eyes suggested he had not slept in some time.

The two pilots backed away from the vice admiral and stood up straight with their hands behind their backs.

Aisha tried doing the same, but she couldn’t get her muscles to execute the motion in her bionic arm. So instead she held it in front of herself in an equally professional mannerism.

“I hope that you have better news for me than the last time we spoke,” the president said, his voice thick with authority that even the vice admiral could not undermine.

“First and foremost President Walker, the insect hive was found and destroyed. If anymore are found, we will be just as quick in dismantling them.”

“Just what I wanted to hear. Now what of the scouting?”

“We found a cluster of active volcanoes that form a ring around the planet's single great sea. To the east, roughly four hundred miles, lies quite possibly the largest volcano ever discovered in human history. It seemed to be inactive, but hot springs and geysers surrounding the great mountain for many miles suggest perhaps otherwise. We will have to run some tests to fully determine the level of threat it presents, if at all any. So that is on the agenda.”

“Did you find water?”

“We did. We pinged positive for streams, lakes, and ponds, but they were almost all exclusively underground. The few that were discovered above ground, were all at the pits of canyons so will be equally as difficult to reach and harness.”

Next on the screen was the four-legged stone giant Aisha had seen the day they arrived. The pilots must have gotten quite close to the beast, as the detail of his being was immaculate. The plants along its back side were truly the most incredible collection of vibrant colors Aisha had ever seen.

“We also discovered a new species.”

The screen changed to a distant shot of the giant, one that could capture it in entirety.

“Now in the background there is a mountain range whose elevation is in the thirty to forty-thousand-foot range that certainly helps in comprehending just how massive this creature is. It appears to be standing upright at just shy of fifteen thousand feet.”

The president removed his glasses and rose to his feet with the look of wonder upon his face, “Does it pose a threat?”

“We are unsure. It showed zero interest in our jets, but there is no denying that if this creature approached a city, it would trample right through it with no resistance. Our energy shields were never designed to stop something of this scale.”

Walker let out a sigh and began to rub his head.

Hunched over the table, Fox maintained a stare into the eyes of the president. Despite his uncertainties, she was uncertain of nothing. “I know it is difficult to accept, but I think we both know what needs to be done with this matter. Even if the creature has no interest in us, it is only a matter of time until it accidentally levels a city.”

“Who knows that it exists?”

“Just us five,” she said implying herself, the president, the two pilots and Aisha.

“Label it as highly classified and handle it as you see fit.” He fixed his lenses to his face. “What of the workforce?”

“While the civilian workforce of our carrier is mostly construction units, the populace of the second ship that arrived today are crews that specialize in satellite tech. They are getting to work in the morning constructing and launching the first fifty probes, with an end goal of total planet coverage within two months and six hundred and eighty satellites total. After that they will move on to small space stations and progress eventually to much larger ones. This puts a little more pressure on acting quickly to handle the giant quietly.”

“I will leave you to it then.”

She nodded, stood upright and saluted. The two pilots did the same and Aisha was slow to follow through, but no one seemed to notice.

The glass returned to its transparent state and the president was gone.

Fox looked down at the table and sighed, “Ok, let’s figure out just how we are supposed to vaporize a walking mountain.”

“We could do the ole snow speeder harpoon tow cable trick,” the male pilot said with an overabundance of sarcasm.

The female pilot raised her eyebrows, “I don’t follow.”

“You know, against the imperial AT-AT walkers?” he continued, taking a seat at the large table and throwing his feet up on it.

The female pilot stayed silent with a dumb look of confusion.

“Star Wars?” he said slightly annoyed.

She shook her head clueless as to what he was rambling on about.

“Late nineteen hundreds classic? No way, have you not seen it?”

Fox turned to face the two, “How long do you think it will take to find it again?”

The male pilot looked at the vice admiral in horror, still perched back with his feet up on the table, now throwing his hands in the air, “Can you believe this girl has not seen Star Wars?”

Fox was getting annoyed. Flaring her nostrils, she took a tone of anger, “Focus, you idiot. We are not dealing with some twentieth century fictionalized threat, this is a real life monolith--a living, breathing mountain. Now, we need to act quickly. How long do you think it will take to track it down again?”

He did not seem to care for her outburst, rather he took pleasure in watching her become unhinged. “Listen Aunt Natalia, as you said, it’s a moving mountain. It’s not going to take long for Lanfen and I to find it again. Let us grab a meal and shower, we have been out flying since the early morning.”

He is related to her,
Aisha thought
, that makes sense. Explains her toleration towards his asinine personality.

“Just because I granted my late sister her dying wish of getting you assigned to my command, does not mean you get to address me by my first name while on duty, especially when aboard the bridge of
my
ship.”

Aisha looked to the floor and felt grateful she played zero role in this conversation.

“Are you taking out your aggression on us because the rumor is true,” he paused looking up from the table and over to her, “That there was an attempt on your life shortly after landing?”

“Jason, if you and Lanfen were not the best two pilots of the thirty aboard this ship I would be half tempted to strip you of your rank, throw you into construction crew, and see how long your attitude lasts in a life of physical strenuous labor. Don’t think I cannot groom two of any of the thirty pilots aboard my ship to take your place. Now get your feet off my fucking table and go attend to that giant,” she snarled, turning her back to them.

“And how are we supposed to do that?” he asked folding his arms.

“I don’t care, but I do
not
want to see your face again until either
you
or that behemoth is dead!” she finished coldly.