Gavitte’s interest in the group is purely intellectual and passes quickly. Hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, he wonders what use he can be of now. Before, when they were still on Earth, he was going to be a figurehead, a rally point for the Resistance. Now the Resistance is no longer relevant under the mountain. What does a politician do when he is suddenly pulled from the greater society and placed in a subset where he is the only one? Politicians need other politicians to justify their existence. Sure he could fall into a managerial role supporting the general, but that is hardly as exciting as fomenting a revolution.
He lets out a sigh. The sound of his breath is lost in the excited babble of the group surrounding the general. At the bottom of his sigh as his shoulders have sagged into their most relaxed position, he catches sight of her entering the chamber as a few stragglers are leaving. There is something about the flat fluorescent light that makes her look radiant in her combat fatigues, her hair pulled up and tucked into a hat; Gavitte cannot help but smile and stand up a little straighter. She scans the hall quickly before heading directly for the group surrounding the general. Her long legs cover the polished floor quickly as Gavitte stares. Still mesmerized by her grace, he gawks. However, his greed kicks in, and he breaks free from his stupor, walking towards her, planning on intercepting her before she makes the group and is swallowed by planning and imperative action items.
She doesn’t seem to see him until he makes it around the edge of the group, his face having only been partially visible through the heads surrounding the general. But when he does register, her determined and focused look, with her jaw clenched forward and her brow furrowed, disappears and is replaced by a full-faced smile, and she veers slightly to meet him halfway.
Still awkward about displaying their affection publicly, they stop arms distance apart, half raising their arms in a quickly aborted embrace. With a furtive glance to the group around the general, Gavitte reaches out and grabs Angelina’s hand and gives it a firm squeeze before refusing to relinquish it.
“Hey, what are you still doing here?” she asks, happiness at unexpectedly running into him apparent in her voice.
“You know, just contemplating my existence,” he says straight-faced. “I mean, why am I even here? I have no purpose anymore.”
He holds onto the serious expression with which he had started for only a few more seconds as she studies his face. Caving to the pressure that is building up inside him, he cracks a grin. He may have spoken the truth, but in front of Angelina his existential crisis becomes only a joke to laugh at. His joy at her presence destroys his angst.
“You still have a use as far as I’m concerned,” she says, her eyes twinkling. “But really only the one that I can think of. I’ve got to go wrangle the general and get some decisions out of him. I’ll catch up with you later?”
Without really waiting for an answer, she leans in and gives him a quick but lingering kiss, and as their hands part, her fingers trail across his sending a tingling sensation up his arm. When they are no longer in contact, she smiles once more before turning and continuing towards the general and the now slightly more organized group around him.
Happy for the brief interlude with the woman of his dreams, Gavitte heads off in the direction of his room to organize and pack up everything he has been working on for the past several months. Maybe one day some of it might come in handy, but for now it is only so much paper filled with tiny scribbles, notes, and diagrams.
* * *
Down three levels from the cafeteria in one of the small common spaces, a regular poker group is convened. There is something of a rushed aspect in how they are sorting out their cash and shuffling the cards; a normal game would see a degree of hesitation as the players struggle to lengthen their eight-hour recreation period. Today they move a little more frenetically because of the general’s speech; partially because it actually took a chunk of time out of the day but more so because its content awoke a sense of urgency they had lost to the complacency of their routine.
The cards are dealt and the game begins, the pace of betting faster than normal until after only a few rounds, an early leader can be identified. Surprisingly the most consistent victor, a young company commander by the name of Rajesh, is in dead last, having lost nearly half his chips already.
“What’s the deal Raj? Your luck only good on Earth?” an older scientist, one Doctor Ferdinando Francesco de la Vega, but the people around the table know him simply as Fred, asks. Having left a very lucrative university posting to join the Resistance, a post whose wealth and notoriety he had never really felt comfortable with, he is normally ok losing the majority of the hands they play. Instead of a loss, he chooses to see it as a small price to pay for camaraderie. Today, not only is his stack the largest, it is nearly twice the size as that of the player in second place. His carefree and inquisitive attitude is the reason he has fit into the Resistance, as well as this particular poker game, so well despite being nearly fifteen years older than the woman seated directly across from him, who in turn is nearly old enough to be Raj’s mother.
She looks up from her cards and smiles at the professor, a rare occurrence given her usually taciturn and introspective style of play. Normally the other players find her impossible to read, because she always seems lost in tangential thought, barely paying her cards any mind. Fortunately for them, she isn’t exactly a star poker player, so despite her inscrutability she doesn’t always clean them out.
“Young man, nosy face over there is right, you’ve been off your game today. Do you want to talk about it?” she asks kindly, her smile taking the sting out of her jab at the commander’s age.
Raj lays his cards down on the table before looking up at the others. He turns to his left to respond to Marion’s question. She meets his gaze, and he sees her smile. It is the knowing and comforting kind of smile that seems to only come from widows and mothers: one part understanding, one part comfort, overlaid with sincerity and a sprinkle of humor. He smiles back at her feeling a little sheepish at how petulant he has felt since the general’s speech. His troubles don’t seem to matter as much as he contemplates those at the table.
Marion’s husband had joined the general’s staff the year after he’d graduated from the Academy and through the years had risen to be a trusted lieutenant. Many years later their two daughters had followed in their father’s footsteps when the general was called upon to quell the unrest at the Bay City University. In one cruel twist of fate, all three of them had been killed.
At first she had shared nothing more than that her daughters had been on guard duty that day and that her husband and the general had been discussing how to organize some sort of negotiation with university’s upset staff. They’d been walking along the encampment’s perimeter when an ambush was sprung by what appeared to be a group of students armed with the latest military technology. Marion’s husband was shot in the back as he tackled the general to get him out of the way. Her two daughters went down fighting the nearly twenty attackers. They both died with empty magazines and not before taking fifteen of the attackers with them. The five remaining assailants fled when an armored patrol car showed up and started firing from its roof-mounted turret.
The attack ignited a firestorm on the temporary base and in the national media. Pundits everywhere were calling for the incarceration of the entire institution, some even going so far as to cry for it to be demolished completely. But General Lampard refused to lash out and act rashly. He didn’t even make a public statement until he had personally visited Marion at her house almost halfway across the country. Then he conducted a full investigation and released the findings publicly. It wasn’t hard to prove that the group that attacked them were trained mercenaries and not students, but the difficulty lay in finding the source of their payment.
Marion had remained at her home during the investigation, only leaving to attend her family’s funeral at the national cemetery. As soon as it became clear that their deaths were th
e result of something more sinister, General Lampard had assigned her a protection detail. Her story in the end was simply another straw that broke the general’s loyalty to the government; that they would attempt to not only assassinate him but frame the innocent student body for their actions made his decision to fall off the grid and start the Resistance all the easier. The attack had also provided another layer of validity to the riot the general had been planning to extricate the professors and his soldiers.
Over the next few weeks the riot had been executed and the general had gone into hiding, cutting off communication with the outside world. Despite his desire to remain incognito, the general had still found time to contact Marion as she grieved.
It wasn’t until her house had blown up, fortunately after she had snuck out for a nighttime stroll, that he’d brought her to the archive facility. The official ruling had been that the bereaved widow had committed suicide in the gas explosion she’d caused. It had seemed easier to just let Marion die from the public’s eye, and so she’d spent her time running the practical side of the base while serving as a liaison between the scientific interests and the military, having managed a local research lab before her apparent suicide.
Her tragic history and the stoic way she conducts herself gives her an approachability when it comes to personal problems that has made nearly everyone at the table share some issue close to their heart, except Raj. He has always listened politely, sometimes offered a thoughtful suggestion, but never shared his own experience. Today though, something is different. Today you might say that how far all of them have gone from the mass society has become tangible. Today the gulf that lies between them and those who used to be their peers and friends is real.
“We’re completely cut off now,” Raj’s voice is hollow, he seems drained. “We can’t go back now.”
The table sits in silence for a long moment, each contemplating his or her own situation. Marion, perhaps because she is the least tied to her old life, is the first to speak, her voice gentle.
“It is true, we can’t go back to our homes now. But if we’d remained on Earth, any contact we would have had with our loved ones would have just put them in danger.”
“The fate of the exile is the cruelest yet most promising,” Fred intones with a somber expression and a distant look in his eyes like he is quoting an outdated text, “for he is truly free. Being outcast from the society that created him, he owes no man a debt.”
“I know,” Raj says, “and I’m still excited for what our mission can mean to the world, but my sister was due to have a baby this week. I was going to be an uncle. Perhaps an estranged uncle, but now I’m never even going to know if it’s a girl or a boy.”
“Glad tidings such as those have a tendency to reach us no matter the distance,” Marion tells Raj with a reassuring pat on his shoulder. Raj’s glum expression does not fade. Instead it seems to deepen. He flips over his cards and pushes back from the table.
“I’m sorry guys, my head’s not really in the game today. I fold.” Without another word he leaves the room, head hung low.
Chapter 13
The Capital
Behind Closed Doors
The room is a mess. Empty coffee cups and delivery food boxes litter all available flat surfaces that are not buried beneath stacks of paper. A stale smell hangs in the air despite the incessant drone of the overhead diffusers. A casual observer would surmise that this room has hosted an intense working session for at least the last several weeks, so pervasive is the detritus. The casual observer would be wrong. Two days ago, the command center for the Youth Work Program Initiative, as it is known officially, was neat and tidy. Its purpose had been more of a convenient place to store some aging bureaucrats than a nexus for a last-minute military operation.
Despite the hectic two days that resulted in the mess to begin with, the room is now strangely quiet. The screens have begun to switch to their power saving modes, periodically shrouding a new region of the room in shadows. The overhead lights have already been dimmed, having been turned down by one of the last people to finally head home to his family.
Phillip Long stands in the increasing darkness, his hands sunk into the pockets of his uniform pants, the matching jacket slung over his forearm. The stoop in his shoulders pulls some of the wrinkles from the back of the shirt he’s been wearing since he commandeered the room at the beginning of the frantic working session. Two days of scrambling to finalize a thirty-year program and coordinate the military’s first official strike beyond Earth’s atmosphere have left him drained, but this is not the reason for the circles under his eyes or his hanging head.
He scans the room one last time. Somehow this all seems anticlimactic. Outside there is a jet waiting to take him to his command, his final command if he understood the innuendo correctly. He will not be returning home, there will be no chance to say goodbye to his family. His granddaughter is only ever going to have faint memories of her doting grandfather, maybe an autumn day in the park or a birthday when he took her to a friend’s farm and helped her ride a pony. Those will be her last memories of him, he hopes.
If this mission goes as planned, he and his command of outcasts and political wash-ups will die anonymous heroes. It is only if they fail that their names and supposed crimes will be shared with the public. They didn’t tell him as much, but he has spent enough time in their system to figure out how it works: If everything goes according to plan, his family will no doubt be told he died of a heart attack while filing papers at his desk. Some of the nearly four hundred men and women in his new command will reportedly die in training accidents, while others may fall victim to a plague. None will die of anything resembling the truth. The deaths will not even be blamed on the Resistance unless there is a political gain to be had from it.
At least they are being granted clean deaths. He has seen others make the same political mistakes he had; their family names are now included with the most notorious criminals in history. No family member was safe; each one would fall victim to some accident or his or her own alleged latent criminal desires and end up in lifelong mental care or else dead. Then once the family was dealt with, they’d come after the offender directly. What would happen, no one really knows. One day they would be coming into work, grief stricken given the events befalling their families, and the next they would disappear. Usually it would be several months before they turned up dead in some dark back alley behind a disreputable establishment, but sometimes they would never turn up, leaving people to occasionally wonder but eventually forget.
General Long lets out a deep sigh. At least he can hopefully avoid that fate by executing this mission faithfully. Maybe his name won’t be remembered for what he has done, but in his mind the protection of his family trumps all other concerns.
The door out into the hallway resists his tired initial push, forcing him to lean his full weight into it as he exits the abandoned command center. The hallway beyond is in a similar, but slightly brighter, half-light. Its thoroughly waxed but well-worn tiles easily reflect the intermittent lights along its length. Between each light, the hall plunges into darkness, the definition of the walls and any possible doors lost to the shadows.
He strides between the light and dark sections, feeling the areas of light wash over him like slow waves, each one swelling to a crest in the middle and then receding back to nothingness. The hallway is long. Its end is lost in the distance, the lights seeming to continue on until they meld into one point. He walks for several minutes like this until he reaches a junction with another hall that appears identical except for its perpendicular orientation. General Long turns to his left down this hall and continues walking. Throughout his trek, his mind is blank. He allows the lights to wash over him while repeating his last thought in the command center.
“For them, do my duty. For them, do my duty.”
General Long is walking so automatically that he very nearly walks past the elevator doors without realizing it. In fact, had it
not been for the chime of the doors opening and one of his aides stepping out to greet him, he probably would have continued to wander the halls without aim until he grew too tired to walk.
“Sir! The jet is inbound. The pilot radioed ahead and says our takeoff window is in fifteen minutes,” the aide says crisply with a quick glance at his watch to confirm the time.
“Alright, let’s get going then.” The general shrugs as he joins the younger man in the carriage.
The elevator’s motion is smooth, and the lack of windows on the floor they just left means General Long never could figure out if they were above ground or below. The lack of windows could indicate that they were underground, he muses, his mind trying to avoid thinking anymore about why he is in this elevator at this hour of the morning. On the other hand, this building could just as easily be one of the boxy behemoths in the center of this government office park, built without windows because windows, at that time, were thought to lessen productivity and focus. The entire campus is accessed by a single security station on one side. There, employees, after clearing the security screening, enter one of the elevator carriages, swipe their badges, and are whisked off to their destinations. None of the carriages have buttons, so there is no way to know the extent of the complex or where one is going. The security computer handles the destination for each rider with almost perfect efficiency.
When the general and his aide step out of the elevator onto the plush carpet of a waiting room, they are greeted by a stunning vista through floor-to-ceiling windows. The sun is rising over the distant city, igniting the shroud of fog that normally clings to the buildings, turning them into silhouetted sticks of kindling in the heart of an inferno. Due to a longstanding series of height restriction laws, the general can clearly make out the buildings of the Capital towering over the rest of the skyline. The pink glow spreads across the horizon, slowly revealing the extent of urban sprawl. Intellectually, General Long knows the extent of the Capital, but seeing it firsthand is still impressive enough to take his breath away.
Seeds to the Wind (The Medicean Stars Saga Book 2) Page 11
