Future Winds (18 page)

Panting, Leon looked down and was afraid to remove the clothing and inspect the damage to his leg. He knew the wound must be bad from the intense amount of blood that oozed forth.

Glancing down at Kaito, who was covered in black soot, eyes closed, and motionless, his only thought was,
he may very well be dead.
He wanted to check if his friend was breathing or had a pulse, but figured it best not to. Extinguishing the illusion of hope that he held of his comrade’s well-being by confirming him to be dead was something he just would not do.

“Just made it out of there, huh pal?” Leon said out loud with no response from his stagnant ally. “Yea, you are right about that one,” he added with a laugh. “Yea, no don’t worry about me. I will be alright. Just gonna rest my eyes for a minute, then I will handle it,” he finished softly while closing his eyes. “Alright fine! Stop fucking bitching about it! I will address the wound,” he moaned with a face and beard covered in black. “You are a whiny little shit sometimes. You know that, Kaito?”

Looking down at his leg, he ripped back his pants and assessed the damage. The metal went deep and spurts of blood squeezed out from around the jagged edges at a pulsating rhythm.
As soon as I remove this thing, I am going to lose the rest of my blood,
he thought, looking around for an idea. Bits and pieces of the armadillo were scattered about, some still on fire. He clambered over to a chunk that was still radiant and red, wires on the underside were still aflame but the metal surface was cooling quickly.

So with no time to spare, he pulled at the shrapnel lodged inside of him, screaming a mighty soul shattering roar like a bear lusting for a kill before he devours his target. It began to give way and slide out, taking with it chunks of meat and flesh from his leg. As soon as it was out, and cast aside, blood began pouring forth like an undammed river.

He continued to howl in agony, now from the pain of cooking his flesh alive as he pressed his leg up against the hot ingot. It was a different feeling--a different misery all together. As grotesque as the stench of burning skin, it was nothing comparable to the sizzling torment of cauterizing his own wound.

With the injury sealed off, he tried to remove the hot metal plate from his leg, which was now stuck and fused as one with the burnt skin. Spent of all his energy, he somehow mustered enough force to rip the glued on sheet away, shrieking and gasping for air. Not wanting to know exactly how much skin was attached to the metal, he didn’t bother to look at any of the gore before him. He just fell backwards under the early dawn sky and closed his eyes with a trembling tear filled sigh.

***

The beast hung its head in what looked to be an emotional expression of sadness. Perhaps it understood it was going to die and felt hopeless in knowing that one of the most tiny and insignificant of species to have ever crossed its path had successfully disabled its front legs and would ultimately be the curator of its demise. The alien intruder known as man had arrived to deliver death. The goliath had not placed the order, but this one was on the house.

Jason felt nothing as he hovered over the beast. He watched it slip away in agony as dawn approached. A new day was inbound. This fresh morning did not bring with it the hopes and aspirations of life however. This daybreak would only serve to illuminate the truth that death was the only path of fate before the behemoth of stone.

Sporadic fires spread fast among the giant’s backside, consuming all the living plant life that grew and thrived in the safety of the once mobile plateau. Even those not afflicted by the flame began to wither and fall to the ground, as if abandoning ship.

The giant stretched its neck and let out a loud drawn out moan that sounded of whales crying in the ocean. This was precisely the moment Jason was waiting for as he was quick to thrust forward and unload every last anti-gravity bomb he had aboard down into the giant’s now open mouth.

Flinching in dismay, the goliath panicked and tried to upheave the twisting and turning that took place within its own throat. What was occurring was something the beast had never seen nor imagined. Its insides were literally being vaporized into nothingness and with this, Jason let forth a minute smirk of success.

“Sorry, not sorry,” he whispered.

Looking around for any sign of the armadillo, Jason spotted the flame roaring off in the distance that leaked a thick, black plume of smoke into the sky. Forward he soared to check for survivors and leave the giant alone to die a torturous death.

“Armadillo, do you copy?” he said into his radio, “Anyone alive? I am in route.”

He brought his hellcat down to the bare molten shell of the armadillo. What was left of the vehicle was nothing more than bits and pieces of warped steel wreckage.

“No one is alive in there,” he mumbled with a sigh before elevating back up and out to drift through the lonely pre-dawn sky--his only solace of solitude. He made way for the highest mountain in a range roughly a hundred miles to the east to watch the incoming sunrise.  

***

The hour had approached to begin the work day and everyone in block sixty-five calmly got ready while trying to ignore the fact that the two guards assigned watch through the night were still passed out, covered in their own sick.

“Oh, hey,” Lucas said as he climbed out of bed and got dressed. “How long have you been awake?”

Ness didn’t notice the words that Lucas formed. He was stuck in his own head, terrified that his younger brother would not be capable of the work load ahead of him. His mind raced for a solution to defend Lucas from the long, harsh, brutal day to come, but there simply was no such option available in any given route.

Lucas was to rejoin the workforce after given time off to rest and heal after being trampled in a frenzied stampede of frightened victims during the day one massacre. Today would be his first day at work on the planet to be called home.

The inhabitants of block sixty-five shuffled into a line and made way for the doors of New Horizon. Once outside, Ness was surprised to see that the crews who had worked through the night had accomplished so much. The base framework for three future buildings were in place and a staggering ten stories in height. A complex, multi-tier monorail system was being built around the city blocks, and a team of engineers were constructing the transport trains that would navigate the rails in the coming days.

“Alright guys, today we have a new site to dig out,” the block’s fat manager said with a look of exhaustion that carried over from the day prior.

The shepherd led his flock to a tapered off zone of dirt where three guards pointed and laughed at two others who wrestled about in the dirt.

“Let’s get to it people,” the manager sighed.

“So, we are just going to dig all day?” Lucas asked his older brother.

“Probably so,” Ness said as he heaved a pickaxe into the dirt to soften the soil.

“Well, that’s easy,” he said driving his shovel into the ground.

Yea, you think that now,
Ness thought.
Just you wait for us to be eight hours in and not even at the halfway mark.
The ground began to rattle, and Ness looked over to the warp gate which began to howl to life once more as it worked its magic to pull in another carrier.
How many is that now?
Ness wondered,
Three?

The boys and their respective block of companions, worked the dry morning away, mostly quiet as to not upset the guards. They removed the dirt from the zone soon to be the location of another small skyscraper.

A few hours into their work day a brute of a man, a soldier, jumped into the pit they had dug out and scanned through the cluster of workers. In full stride he approached straight towards Ness and stopped but a foot away. His armor color was orange, similar to the soldier Ness had seen the night before that silently passed by with a drone and rifle. He looked over to Lucas and then back to Ness.

“You,” the brutish man said as he pointed down to the two boys, “Come with me.”

Oh my God, he knows about the rifle! They must have found it!
Ness thought as the realization of what was happening before him came to fruition.

“Wait no, I can explain everything,” Ness spurted out, ready to spill the beans of the murderous man Roger and his eyepatch.

“Not you,” the man growled. “The smaller one, you,” he said, pointing to Lucas.

“What? No, wait!” Ness cried as he grabbed his brother's shoulder.

Losing him would be even worse than getting caught with the rifle,
he thought.

“He is just catching his breath for a minute. He will get back to work,” Ness pleaded. 

“Come on now, I don’t have all goddamn day!” the soldier barked.

“He is supposed to stay with me! That was the deal when we signed onto this project. We are not to be separated!”

“We need someone small enough in size to fit into a section of the warp gate that requires maintenance,” the man said with firm clarification.

“I will come with him, I-”

“I only need one boy,” he snarled, cutting him off.

“But I am his legal guardian. He-”

“It will only take a couple of hours kid, relax,” he said, again cutting Ness off midway through his sentence.

“It’s okay. I will be back in a little bit,” Lucas said drenched in sweat as he turned his head and forced a pathetic smile back to his concerned older brother. “I could use the break away from this pit of stink anyway.”

Tyler felt foolish for being so worried about navigating out of New Horizon. Aries had led him out with ease and now, with dawn approaching, the two crossed through the city’s construction sites. Sparks fell to the ground from above where crews welded steel together. An industrial skyline was beginning to rise and blend in with the high desert mountains off in the distance. It was all starting to come together and here he was leaving, perhaps never to return.

“What happens after we save Scorpio? We can’t come back here, can we?” he asked his drone upon realizing any welcoming party in their return would be holding handcuffs and a noose.

“I will figure something out, Tyler.”

“Yea, I am sure,” he said rolling his eyes.

How crazy to be adhering to the will of a robot,
Tyler thought.
It is supposed to be the other way around--robots executing the commands of man. Are artificial intelligence drones advanced enough to have desires and aspirations of their own? Who programmed free will and how? Or were the bots so far gone that they are now capable of freeing themselves from software boundaries and restrictions? A true form of life in the flesh of a metallic chassis and circuitry. If this were true, is man a god for having engineered such life?
The conscious debate within himself over what he did not and likely never would understand, scared Tyler out of his wits. He tried to shift his thinking towards a different topic. “Where are we going?” he called out.

“The only known entrance to the hive. We will try to navigate deeper once we gain entry and ping Scorpio for a more specific location.”

“But shouldn’t it be collapsed from the bomb?”

“Yes. The missile navigated successfully through the tunnels and made its way into the heart of the city. However, when I mapped out the caverns I discovered many smaller tunnels that likely lead deeper via alternative routes.”

As they walked, civilization began to fade away. The wind was refreshing, bringing a crisp, cool, pre morning air that smelled simply marvelous and abstract compared to the scents back in the industrial world brought into Flare by the carriers and their populous.

The sky slowly began turning pink as the sun was starting its rise. Its’ shine on the red rocks of the distant mountains, composed a symphony allure like nothing Tyler had ever seen. “I am not sure what is more beautiful, the sun rise here or the clear midnight sky,” Tyler said in awe over the greatness before him.

“Certainly a wondrous planet before us,” Aries added.

Down below the lower edge of the mountain range, where the rocks trickled off to expose a faraway sky, Tyler could make out dark clouds that sparked a silent red lightning. It was too far too tell for sure, but he assumed the lightning was accompanied by the odd balls of fire that were spewed down from such storms. “Haven’t seen one of those in a while,” Tyler said in reference to the storm off in the distance as he looked at Aries. “Will it cross our path?”

“Their trajectory seems unpredictable, but given the gap between us and it, I would say that we should make it to our destination well before it becomes a problem.”

Looking ahead at all the detail painted about the landscape, Tyler noticed what looked to be a pack of dogs roaming in the desert. “Do you see that?” he asked her.

“See what?” she questioned, turning to look in the same direction as his gaze.

“You don’t see those,” he paused, thinking of what exactly to call them as he made out more of the detail in their figure, “Four legged, purple creatures out there? There are three of them.”

“I am not sure what you are talking about, Tyler.”

How could she not see?
he wondered.
Her optics are light years more advanced than inferior human eyes.
Though now at a much slower pace, the two of them continued walking. Tyler squinted to gather more detail on what exactly the creatures were: veiny, furless, purple, dogs. None of them had faces: no ears to hear, no nose to smell, and no eyes to see. Just a blank empty face. While standing still, they turned their heads in the direction that Tyler and Aries walked, as if somehow observing them.

“I think they are watching us,” he said, beginning to feel creeped out.

“Tyler, when is the last time you have ingested water?”

She was implying that he was hallucinating the creations in his head. Purple, four legged, faceless dogs wandering about in the foreign dessert definitely sounded a little crazy.

“I don’t know. I am really thirsty though. I don’t have stimpacks either,” he said in a panic. He began feeling overwhelmingly dizzy and lightheaded as he started to perspire through his clothes.

“It is okay, Tyler. Try to remain calm. I will figure something out.”

His heart rate began to elevate. Not because of the realization that he had no rations for their journey, but rather in fear of the dogs; for, they began walking towards him at a steady, eerie pace. He was overwhelmed with a sense of imminent harm: a threat caused by the creepy presence of the devious, yet blank creatures. He pitched forward feeling more and more woozy. Holding himself up with his palms against his knee caps, he vomited into the dirt, before losing his balance and falling down onto the dusty ground unconscious. 

***

“Vice Admiral Fox,” said the humanoid bot, Linus, as he entered the bridge of the ship where she was reviewing data across her command table.

“What Linus?” she mumbled, maintaining eye contact with the intricate display of colors and numbers sprawled out before her.

“Tyler Flynn has escaped.”

This quickly caught her attention and drew her gaze from the data before her over to Linus. The bot approached and handed her a tablet with video from a security camera.

Her eyes boiled with anger as she watched the feed of Tyler and Aries walking down a hallway and making their way out of New Horizon without the slightest bit of effort. They passed soldiers who barely even made eye contact. “When was this?” she hissed.

“Directly after you left.”

“Where are they now?”

“They made it out of New Horizon and exited the city. We are unsure of which direction they went as the bot, Aries, scrambled video footage once they were outside.”

In a fit of rage she screamed like a barbarian echoing a furious war cry before battle, then slammed the glass tablet into the ground, shattering and distorting the display. The zoomed image of Tyler looking directly up at the camera overhead became stuck in a loop. “I should have just killed him myself right then and there. Now I have another problem to deal with,” she said, shaking her head at the broken glass.

“What are you going to do?” Aisha asked.

Fox pressed her temples inward with the tips of her index fingers and closed her eyes whilst letting out a long drawn out sigh.

“First I am going to kill the person that gave Tyler Flynn a bloody weapon. Then I am going to hunt down this worm and his robot. I will peel the layers of skin from his body in little sections while he is alive and then hang him with the bot’s inner circuitry!”

“We know who gave Tyler the weapon, a guard from block ninety-one was found dead with his neck broken this morning and his rifle was missing,” Linus explained.

Aisha looked to the ground. How foolish she was to glimpse up at Aries in that hallway when they were leaving and think anything other than the scenario where the robot saves its master. She felt partly to blame for not holding better intuition however far-fetched and unlikely it would have seemed at the time.

“Get out, Linus,” Fox said flatly.

The human-like robot nodded in acknowledgement and left the two alone on the bridge of the ship.

The glass wall began to flicker to life with color and sound indicating a live video feed call was pending.

“Answer,” Fox said firmly.

President Walker appeared on the display with a look that suggest he too was not pleased.

“Sir,” Fox said as she straightened her back and focused on him.

“I hear things are not going so well down there, Natalia,” he said with disappointment.

“A slight hiccup in security, but things are progressing ahead as scheduled,” she defended.

“Yes well, I believe the deal was for you to be granted a period of time to establish the city and implant a sense of trust in government,” he said, keeping his eyes perfectly still.

The vice admiral had nothing to say and what could she? Aisha wanted to step in and defend her, but knew that doing so would be like signing up for a public crucifixion.

“If you cannot maintain order, I will replace you with someone who can. It may have only been five soldiers on a dig site, and one night guard aboard your ship that got killed, and one terrorist extremist in your retention you allowed to get loose… petty in the grand scheme of things around here, but the events of Tyler Flynn will have a rippling effect on the citizens of Flare. You do follow, right Natalia?”

She nodded in comprehension, “I will send out teams to track him down and bring him back for a public execution.”

How did the president already know about Tyler and his escape when the vice admiral had only just learned about his escape a few minutes ago?
Aisha pondered.
Was someone reporting information to him before bringing it to Fox? They must.

“Don’t waste the resources now. You do not even know which direction he has gone off too,” he said with a sigh. “Let him run off and die in the desert. With no food or water, he will perish by nightfall. Focus on getting the city built, satellite coverage up, and unifying the people on the ground. When the sats are up, if he is still alive, they will find him and we can hit ‘em with an air strike.”

“Yes sir,” she said with a nod.

The president took a deep breath. “I like you Natalia and I think you are capable of leading the charge on Flare, but you are facing a real invisible threat here.”

“I know sir and thank you.”

The open communication feed ended and the vice admiral let out a sigh of relief whilst turning to face Aisha and prop herself up by leaning against the table.

“What was he talking about with invisible threat?” Aisha asked.

A glass tablet beside her began flashing, delaying her response to Aisha's question. Fox picked it up to read the message awaiting her eyes.

“Well,” Fox said pausing to think for a moment while she finished reading the message. “There are three types of people allowed access to Project Salvation. Members of military, members of the civilian workforce, and the rich, elite, political leaders.”

“What deems someone rich in a society without money?” Aisha questioned.

“Money exists; you just can’t see it. While most military personnel are signed up for a life of service, the workforce population has to work X amount of years to pay off the free ride across space. X is determined by multiple factors such as type of workload, performance, what they contributed prior to lift off, etc. What nobody knows is that in most cases, the debt you owe exceeds the amount of years you will live. So the exact figure of money you must work off is blurred behind a complex algorithm of smoke and mirrors,” she paused to take a deep breath, “And then there are the rich. It is basically a class put in place by the elite back on earth that would ensure they would not have to fall into the other categories of work. They paid for their entry and gave themselves their titles of political leadership. They most often refer to themselves as CU, Citizens United.”

“So, the president is just a self-purchased politician?”

“No, he is military. In the fear and chaos leading up to this point, a leader was chosen based on strengths and ideas. So, in that regard we were lucky.”

“So, who exactly are we talking about? Who is Citizens United?”

“It seems as though I have an unannounced meeting with them in less than an hour,” she said placing the tablet back on the table. “So, you shall see firsthand shortly. Just remember why you are here. Stay on your toes, Aisha Sayegh.”

“What is this, some conspiracy? We are all supposed to be on the same team here.”

“Conspiracy? No my dear. This is politics.”

***

Kio-Kai sleeps in a chamber submerged in lifeblood along with hundreds of other survivors from the bombing of Val-Muel. millions died in the city, now turned ruined wasteland, but the rest of the hive was mostly untouched. Tunnels collapsed that network deeper underground for miles, but in doing so sealed off and saved most of the hive from any backdraft blast. No active queen was hurt in the bombing, all nestled away safely many miles deeper into the ground, and so in enduring times of hardship, the Vai-Zik would again press on with their undying legacy.

The queens had instructed their clans to retreat deeper into the hive and stay dormant while they assessed the damage and determined what the best course of action to take might be. Aside from those telepathic instructions received, Kio-Kai’s time spent asleep, as he regenerated his broken body, left him trapped in his own mind and the sorrow he felt for his friends now gone was an endless pit that one hundred stone giants could not fill.