The Justar Journal: An AOI Thriller

by Brandt Legg

  “Yes, those things occur when someone makes the connection to the infinite. Even an accidental brush against the universe produces genius. Some of the greatest people in history have had mere moments of touching the source. Where they reached into the stars and pulled out magnificence, enough to inspire the rest of us, to leave a mark of awe imprinted on the world.”

  “Can we get drunk and discuss philosophy later?” Miner had asked impatiently. “Our friends are busy taking over the world.”

  After that, Blaise brought them back online and Miner gave the order to attack Deuce. In between monitoring the action on the islands, Miner had moved to engage the AOI in four key areas. If the Chief was going to blame him for the violence, he was going to make her feel the reality she’d created. He’d also sent a secret message to the A-Council explaining the situation and, in a final act to thwart the Chief, he’d sent small groups of guerrillas to all forty-eight AOI prisons hoping to aid the escapes.

  Blaise had promised to share the prophecies, and even though Miner didn’t trust him, he had the advantage. It would be his team that recovered them, and if, somehow, Blaise did manage to get his hands on them first, Miner figured it was better to have him get them instead of Deuce, the AOI or, worst of all, the monsters, which is how he now referred to the Imps and CHRUDEs that made up the Trapciers.

  Blaise was back in a zoom. “Damn it Lance. Your jerk-force has just blown the boat carrying Deuce out of the water.”

  Miner smiled. “Too bad. I certainly hope Deuce is dead.”

  “I don’t care what happens to Deuce, but as I told you earlier, he most likely has the key to the prophecies on him. It does me no good at the bottom of the ocean. Your people are supposed to take him prisoner! He’s a damned businessman! How hard could it be for a few hundred highly trained soldiers to grab an old lady, a writer, and a businessman?”

  Miner would like to have the prophecies, but he’d managed his whole life without them and wasn’t even sure they were real, or accurate enough to worry about. He was willing to take his chances with the forecasts made by the DesTIn programs and let his P-Force overpower the AOI while they were fighting a multi-front war.

  Still, he needed to keep Blaise happy. At least for the moment.

  The Chief was in the AOI war room in Washington. It had been constructed on her orders at the beginning of the Doneharvest, and used infrequently since when some serious crisis arose. Two years ago a major earthquake in the Chiantik region required the AOI to assist in disaster relief. The situation in the Amazon when P-Force, BLAXERs, PAWN, and the AOI had stared on one another had also required the war room.

  Above the entrance to the underground command center the words, “PEACE PREVAILS ALWAYS,” etched in gold, seemed odd for a war room and now, more than ever, they were extremely out of place.

  Giant VMs filled the walls, enabling the Chief to see the entire world. Her seven top advisors were all present. Each sat in a hovering Tru-chair, floating through the room, working virtual keyboards, holographic maps, and interpreting up-to-the-second scenarios – their own kind of prophecies. The INUs were so advanced that their programs could predict events days and weeks ahead of time with alarming accuracy, and, like the Justar Journal, they would rewrite themselves as variables changed.

  The head of each of the twenty-four regions was available on a live feed as they worked in their respective regions to abate crisis after crisis. Their images floated in a ring on the exterior wall just under an active map and real-time footage from each of their regions.

  The Chief barked orders and sought updates in a constant barrage of statistics, data, and requests for action and troops. The prisons had been a low priority in the early hours of the war, but now, as some of them had fallen, and with word that inmate Lex Evren, aka Polis Drast, had escaped, they were getting the Chief’s glaring attention. Talking to the head of the Pacyfik, and the man in charge of AOI prisons, the Chief showed garbled footage of the Drast escape.

  “He had inside help!”

  “Even without that,” the Pacyfik head said, “with the war and the prison uprisings, he may well have escaped.”

  “Oh, I guess we should be glad it didn’t rain today, or the wind didn’t blow too hard,” she said sarcastically. “These prisons are supposed to be rocks! Secure. Impenetrable. Escape-proof!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the prison official said.

  “You find me Drast,” she snapped to both of them. “By the end of the day!”

  They both answered in the affirmative, trying to figure out how it would be possible with their resources spread so thin and her deadline so close. In that same instant of their stuttered response, they also wondered what would happen if they failed.

  “In the meantime,” the Chief said coolly. “Any prison not brought under control within the next three hours, will be leveled.”

  “But Chief,” The prison official began. “With the war on, aren’t we going to need all the prison space we can get?”

  She looked at him as if he were a total fool. “We aren’t going to be taking any prisoners.”

  Chapter 26 - Book 3

  Drast studied Osc, certain he’d just been lied to, but unsure why. “Chelle doesn’t have a son.”

  “She had me out of the system when she was seventeen. Before you knew her,” Osc explained, removing the rest of his heavy riot gear.

  “But I knew her through the years when you would have been growing up. She had no child.” Drast looked out of the Flo-wing, wondering where they were taking him.

  “I was raised by someone else,” he said, averting his eyes.

  “But why did she give you up?” Drast couldn’t imagine Chelle doing such a thing.

  Osc didn’t immediately answer. He continued to stare at the ocean blurring by below them. Finally, he spoke, but still didn’t look at Drast.

  “My father had used his bearing rights. He was married. And my mother had sold hers.”

  “Sold hers?”

  “Many wealthy couples want more than two children, and they hire brokers to secure the bearing rights of girls from poor families,” Osc said, anger showing on his face, tensing as the words chopped out. “A broker had convinced her. Gave her money in exchange for her right to have a child.”

  Drast, of course, knew about the selling of bearing rights, but he had more questions. How long before she had gotten pregnant did she sell them? Why didn’t the father try to buy the bearing rights back? What did she need and use the money for? But he didn’t ask any of them. They were all about the past, which was obviously very difficult for Osc to discuss. Drast, a trained interrogator, could have verbally sliced and diced Osc and his story, but given the events of the last hour and his present location, he didn’t think that wise. Instead, he asked a question much closer to the present time.

  “If you’re Chelle’s son, why didn’t you get word to me from her?”

  “I haven’t spoken to my mother since I entered the academy.”

  “Why?”

  “It was too dangerous. The illegitimate son of one of PAWN’s top leaders, deep undercover in the AOI to save the greatest traitor in the history of the Aylantik . . . can you imagine how much damage there would be if I were caught?”

  “But you were working with Grandyn.” This doesn’t make sense, but why the elaborate lie?

  “I had no idea that Terik was Grandyn until Lance Miner killed him,” Osc explained as the Flo-wing banked and descended until it flew about a meter above the water. “It was the most incredible coincidence that we were both in the Academy at the same time and became friends. I was always on the lookout for sympathizers to recruit. You know better than I do that there are only two types who enlist in the AOI. The ones in it for the honor, to protect the peace, preserve the Aylantik, and then those who just see it as a good career path. The latter, the people using it as a stepping stone, are often easily turned.”

  “Yes, I know that. I owe my survival to them. And to you.” Drast tipp
ed his head. “The Aylantik bureaucracy imagines everyone loves the world as it is, but the Chief understands that ‘Peace prevails, always,’ means peace at a price, and that price is usually paid by the ‘commoners.’” Drast stared back at Osc. “You said protect the traitor.”

  “The day you were arrested, my mother asked me to join the AOI to find you. She always believed they hadn’t killed you. But . . . if you were dead, I could still help the revolution from inside the AOI. And once I got in, I couldn’t believe how many ‘traitors’ were working for the agency.”

  “That has always been our best hope for victory,” Drast said. “I believe up to twelve percent of agents are sympathetic to the revolution.”

  “That’s even higher than I thought.”

  Drast nodded and was quiet for a while. In spite of himself, he believed Osc. Chelle had sent her only son to find him, to save him. He looked back at Osc and could see his mother’s eyes. The questions stacked up in his mind, but they would have to wait until he saw her again. He allowed himself to believe it was all true. It had been forever since he’d seen her, and now the war had begun. The war they’d tried for so long to start. They would fight side by side and love in the moments between.

  A few minutes later, they landed on a remote beach north of Vancouver, in the country formerly known as Canada. The pilot gave them two codes, pointed up a trail, and told them a LEV would be waiting. They hiked up the hill on a narrow path through the trees. It was farther than they expected, but after almost ten minutes they came to a small parking area. No one was in the LEV, but Osc punched the code in the door and it opened. It had been preprogrammed, and took them on a winding drive through back roads for about thirty-five-minutes. They never saw another vehicle.

  Eventually they were carried down a long, secluded driveway, stopping in front of a security gate. The LEV was scanned and the high metal panels slid back. The LEV continued for another few minutes until it reached a small house shrouded in trees. At the door, Osc used the second code and it instantly opened.

  Inside they found food, water, blankets, cots, a lasershod, and an INU. Drast didn’t need to ask where they were. He knew enough to recognize a PAWN safe house. He got cleaned up and scrubbed off the blood. His hopes of seeing Chelle that day were quickly dashed, and as soon as they opened a VM from the INU, he knew why.

  The war had begun with shocking intensity. Drast and Osc watched the coverage across the Field, which was all they had access to at the moment, in stunned silence. Even in his time with the AOI, Drast had not seen scenarios such as this, and he worried that Grandyn had been right about what would happen if the war began in the prisons. As near as he could tell though, it had, or at least the start of the war and the prison uprisings had happened simultaneously.

  As Drast watched parts of cities crumble and calls for citizens to report immediately to their Health-Circle stations, he thought it looked far less like a revolution and more of a sequel to the Banoff. There were hundreds of PAWN arrests and raids on homes of rebel sympathizers. The worst scenes showed POPs getting blown up.

  “What is PAWN doing?” Drast asked. “The AOI is completely dominating.”

  “Remember, that’s just what they’re showing us,” Osc said.

  “They are showing us a lot,” Drast said, fully aware of how the AOI’s propaganda machine worked. “How can we reach Chelle?”

  “I don’t know,” Osc replied.

  “I can’t sit in this tiny cabin in the woods while all of this is going on,” Drast said.

  “There really isn’t a choice. We have to wait until PAWN contacts us.”

  Drast scoffed and shook his head. “Just look at this. If we wait too long there will be no PAWN left to contact us.”

  Chapter 27 - Book 3

  The panic on the tiny boat paralyzed them, and for an instant, as the Flo-wing zeroed in on them, no one knew what to do.

  “Can you do it again Dad?” Twain repeated.

  “I might not have to,” Deuce said, nodding toward a second Flo-wing above the first one.

  “Oh no, another one!” Nelson yelled, standing in a puddle of water from his dripping clothes, his shoes lost in the ocean.

  “That one is mine,” Deuce said triumphantly, and then, as if reacting to his words, it fired upon the first one. The strike hit perfectly, and the P-Force Flo-wing exploded and fell into the sea. Soon more Flo-wings appeared and began firing on the island. Even as their boat sped away, they could see BLAXERs landing and engaging the P-Force troops.

  “We’ll be all right now,” Deuce said. “We’re less than ten minutes from our rendezvous with a much better boat.”

  Good to his word, they soon met up with another vessel. Surprisingly, it was as much plane as it was boat. This new craft docked next to them and they carefully climbed aboard. Munna had been concentrating on her self-healing methods, and was able to make the transfer without assistance. Only the BLAXER captain stayed on the smaller boat, then he sped away, back toward Ryder Island.

  “I would hardly call this a boat,” Nelson said as he marveled at the interior.

  “It’s called the ‘Moon Shadow,’” Deuce replied. “We are almost completely invisible to AOI detection. And, because the Moon Shadow utilizes ADAM technology and relies mainly on solar, wind, and nano-energy sources, we can travel anywhere in the world as long as there is water.”

  “You mean it doesn’t fly?” Nelson asked, because it looked like an arrowhead with wings.

  “No, the shape is for speed. The Mood Shadow is very, very fast.”

  Fye had taken Munna to a bedroom to rest while her natural fiber clothes were dried in a solar dryer. Fye would have preferred to let them air dry on deck, but the Moon Shadow’s speed made that impossible. A porter brought Nelson fresh clothes made of Tekfabrik. They would size, style, color adjust, and, just as Deuce’s had, self-dry if they wound up in the water again. Nelson assumed that was extremely unlikely aboard a ship like the Moon Shadow.

  Grandyn suddenly had renewed hope for their chances. With the fast evacuation from the island and the near misses, he’d been feeling defeated, even scared. It’s different having to worry about a child, he thought, suddenly more connected with his own parents, but the Moon Shadow’s interior exuded power and supremacy like nothing he’d experienced before.

  The ship flew along at some unfathomable speed. The sides of the main cabin were covered with VMs in place of windows. He’d later learn they would retract to reveal see-through walls. The horrors of the war were exposed, but so was a glimpse of Deuce’s reach and might as BLAXERs were in transit to every hotspot in the world, and they were seeing it all happen live.

  With everything calm for the moment, Deuce finally took off his pack. Fortunately, its waterproof Tekfabrik covering had mostly protected the eight books. A little water had gotten in, but the only real damage was around the edges of the pages. They would dry out. He laid them open on a table. Grandyn took it as another display of Deuce’s confidence. He was obviously not expecting an attack.

  “Where are we going?” Grandyn asked.

  “I was planning to drop you, Fye, and Twain off on the coast at the redwoods,” Deuce said. “I’m not sure where Munna and Nelson want to go . . .” He turned toward Nelson. “But you’re welcome to stay on the Moon Shadow. It’s really the safest place right now.”

  “That’s up to Munna,” Nelson said. “Now that we’re at war, I don’t know what she’s going to do with the prophecies. You know she doesn’t want them used for war.”

  “It’s hardly her choice anymore.”

  “Really? You seem to forget how she blocked them back on Runit Island.”

  “No, I have not forgotten,” Deuce said, lighting up more VMs around the cabin, showing scenes from the war. “They’re saying that PAWN is doing this.”

  “The people won’t believe that,” Nelson said.

  “Why not?” Deuce asked. “You’ve been living in the revolution bubble for so long that you think e
veryone hates the Aylantik and welcomes a revolution. Well Nelson, I’m here to tell you that’s not the case. Look at what’s happening out there: a peaceful world turned to cold, brutal, war. The population has no point of reference. No one alive remembers the last war.”

  “Except Munna,” Nelson said.

  The point hit Deuce, and he momentarily wavered, caught by the images of death and destruction, realizing that the only person in the world who had seen such a thing before was the one demanding the prophecies not be used as part of it.

  “So she should want it ended as soon as possible, and the prophecies will do that.”

  “The Justar Journal is not for showing you how to win a war,” Munna said, walking into the room and stomping her cane on the ground.

  “Munna, how many need to die before you decide that we must end the war?”

  She smiled at him, as one would to a child that did not understand what they were saying. Then she walked closer to him and looked up into his eyes. “The Justar Journal was not created to show you how to win a war.”

  “Then what good is it? What’s it for?”

  “How can you, someone who looks to the stars so constantly, not know what the Justar is for?” she asked, still not taking her eyes off his.

  “If you know, tell me. Otherwise help me end this,” he said, motioning his arm around at the vicious images. Then, with a cracking voice, he added, “Please, Munna. Please.”

  She shook her head. “But I will stay with you a while longer to see if one of us changes his mind.”

  They watched the war news while Deuce directed the BLAXERs around the world and continued to monitor the AOI. Soon they were along a stunning stretch of coastline. Nelson recognized it as the area where they had pulled Twain out a few weeks earlier. It was part of a huge Earth Park. The Aylantik had combined and expanded eight former US State and National Parks into one super Earth Park that included all of the redwoods.