by S A Asthana
“No!” Emperor Akiyama shouted.
“Guards!” The scream for help echoed. Bastien rushed down a dim hallway. A chandelier’s bright lights glowed in the dining room beyond, and Reo’s limp body was discernable. Bastien’s heart beat in his ears. Was he dead? The plan had backfired. As another body fell to the floor, the sound of its weight hitting concrete soft yet heavy, someone yelled, “Etsy!”
Bastien charged into the dining room, and Marie and Yukito fixed him with maniacal stares. The royal family had been brutally attacked. There was no time to think, just act. Bastien aimed at Marie, but a horde of security guards rushed into the hall yelling, “Stop!”
Marie’s serpent tentacles had already receded into their recesses by then. She fell to the floor and shrieked, “Help us!”
“Assassin!” Yukito pointed at Bastien. Parisians were considered an unlucky lot. Situations like this cemented the claim. A storm of bullets whizzed past Bastien and one managed to graze his gun-wielding arm. “He killed my family!” Yukito wailed.
“The emperor is dead!” Marie mirrored the emotions of the emperor’s remaining son, the back of her hand on her forehead as if she was overwhelmed with grief. A true actress.
Fighting away pain, Bastien took his shot. Marie jerked away in a spray of blood. The bullet had struck her shoulder, a less than perfect shot. He aimed again as she recoiled backwards, but another bullet grazed his left thigh. Survival instincts took over and Bastien returned fire. One guard fell with a kill shot to the head, some took cover, but two held their position, returning fire. Bastien took another hit, this one to the left pec, and he nearly fell. A pain unlike any other burst into his body. Mustering all his remaining strength, he sprinted away and fled to the library. There was no way to get another shot in at his target now. Perhaps Marie wouldn’t survive the shoulder wound. Unlikely; probably nothing a quick surgery and some heavy-duty skin regeneration paste couldn’t solve. Oh, hell.
The sound of footsteps chased after him, their echoes drowning out other sounds. Bastien nearly slipped on the slick concrete but kept his balance, leaving behind a trail of blood. His vision blurred and his mind raged. Would he make it out alive?
He burst into the library along with a barrage of bullets. Splinters blew away from shelves and corner tables, covering the room in a flurry of chipped wood. Dropping to the ground and rolling onto his back, Bastien returned fire. Two guards collapsed. His Howa’s magazine was almost empty. As the remaining guards took cover in the hallway, Bastien kicked his legs frantically and scrambled to a corner on his back.
“Back up required now!” a guard shouted. Soon others would arrive and negate any chance of an escape. Bastien restocked his magazine quickly and clicked it back into place, all the while fighting an encroaching fog. Was the library really this dark, or was that his vision fading?
He exhaled a sharp breath and prepared to stand when a guard rushed into the library for another go at him. A bullet burst the man’s throat and dropped him. A successful defense, but it hadn’t come from Bastien. Hani stood just behind him. “Come on!”
Seeing the business end of her revolver pulsed motivation into his legs. Bastien stood with some effort. A few more guards returned fire from the hallway but the bullets only found walls.
“I’ll cover,” Hani shouted. “Go!”
Bastien hobbled away and Hani retreated with him, her line of fire trained on guards. Shots buzzed at the pair and into the harem wing. The door to the balcony remained open, offering a view of the hovering Nissan roadster just outside. Hani shouted over her shoulder, “Get in!”
The sound of footsteps grew as the security guards increased in number. Back up was burgeoning. Hani released rapid fire and screams followed. She was no novice. Bastien turned back and managed to get a few shots in of his own.
He stumbled onto the balcony. The pulsating pain in his peck was overwhelming. A chest wound — unless he received medical attention swiftly, he was as good as dead. Despite the agony, he struggled into the Nissan roadster. Hani followed and punched a blue button on the dashboard. The butterfly doors closed shut just as a swarm of guards rushed onto the balcony.
The car took a hail of bullets, dents spraying wild across its right side. Bastien’s window shattered, and shards of glass fell onto his lap. He cowered into his reclined seat just in time to avoid a bullet. Hani banked the car left into a dive and yelled, “Buckle up!”
Skyscrapers and glass zoomed past as the roadster lost altitude. Bastien was pressed back into his seat, and blood rushed to his head along with a killer headache. Wind screamed in his ears. Breathing became labored. His black t-shirt was drenched dark red, and he feared an onset of hypovolemic shock due to blood loss. The familiar symptoms were already present — extreme fatigue, nausea, profuse sweating and dizziness.
“Fuck!” Hani exclaimed. “We’ve got a tail.” A police aircraft reflected in the sideview mirror. The tiny single-passenger Toyota’s white sphere shone bright under the piercing sunlight. It was locked onto the getaway vehicle.
“I-I’m hurt.” Bastien spit up blood.
“Hang tight!” Hani swerved the vehicle left in a deceptive maneuver and then to the right at a sharp angle. The roadster descended fast but the pursuer remained. The sun disappeared behind rising rooftops. Sleek skyscrapers shot up all around, their spires reaching for the dome, and the streets below became wider from the frenetic drop to safety. “Gotta lose this fucking guy.”
She fiddled with controls on the radio and picked up the law enforcement chatter. “Back up required. In pursuit of unmarked red Nissan 970Z roadster just over Harajuku district. Repeat, back up required.”
“Shit. Time to leave the party.”
The next several seconds were spent performing a maneuver Bastien was familiar with. The break off consisted of turning sharply across the attacker’s flight path, to increase angle of tail. While the Nissan was exposed to the police craft’s fire for only an instant, Bastien bet Hani was confident the pursuer wouldn’t spray bullets over civilian Nipponese territory. The Nissan completed a tight turn radius, and the fast-approaching police craft overshot its target.
As it slowed in the distance and rolled into its own turn, Hani descended into the cover of a narrow alley and shook the tail. Whether it was the surrounding shadows overtaking his vision, or whether it was fading eyesight, Bastien was drowning in darkness. There was a strange fog within the black. “I’m d-dying,” he whispered, just before a complete blackout.
CHAPTER 24: ALICE
Bastien’s whisper traveled by way of his hacked hearing aid. Alice listened in on the entire assassination attempt, hoping it would play out. But as the seconds had stretched to minutes, her expectations were crushed. Her jaw was slack and her mouth gaped. Failure. Marie was still alive. The menace to the solar system survived. How would this sit with Frank? What did it mean for Nippon One and Port Sydney?
Was Alice’s life over? Probably. A lump formed in her throat.
Frank had made it clear Alice would lose her life if Marie wasn’t taken care of. There was no room for interpretation. She’d seen what Frank was capable of during high stress situations. Striking her at the Agricultural Compound, shooting all those innocent Sydneysiders in cold blood, and then assaulting her once more to the point of nearly killing her — each escalation, step by step, showed a man on the brink of insanity. He wouldn’t flinch when he would gun her down.
As she agonized at the options, the Rogu Collective remained huddled around a small intercom system in the data center’s back end. Hani was keeping them appraised of the situation from the Nissan. “I’m parked a few blocks from you guys. The cops are crawling all over the place. First chance I get, I’ll zip over.”
“How’s Bas?” Dr. Bala asked, worry lacing his words.
“Not looking good, doc. He’s passed out. Gunshot to the chest. Blood’s everywhere.”
“You need to get him back as soon as possible. I’ll have the surgery room ready
for emergency procedures.” He canted his head at Nox and the man scurried to a door to prepare surgical equipment in the room. This wasn’t just a data center, after all.
“Was he successful?” Greg asked, his face tight with hard lines and angles. None of the Rogu were privy yet to the details — only Alice had listened in on the gun battle. Disappointment lay ahead.
“No.” Hani’s voice was sharp but tension blunted it some. “I think the entire royal family was wiped out.”
Alice calculated the losses — Reo’s plan had not only backfired, it had cost him everything. Nippon One’s future lay in disarray. Word of the massacre could make it to the general public at any time. There would be calls for action, beginning with a citywide lockdown. It would be bad optics for a ranking Martian officer to attempt an escape moments after the royal family’s massacre, but Alice needed to bolt. Would she be arrested on suspicion? Or shot dead by paranoid law enforcement agents? No line of logic ended positively for her. Alice nearly lost her footing at the thought, but regained balance against a server tower.
Despite the concerns, she needed to flee the city and had only a small window to do it. Once Nippon One shut down its operations and borders, there would be no getting in or out. She’d be stuck defenseless and at the mercy of the Nipponese. Her mind zoomed in on the escape at hand with a singular focus, and everything else faded.
A sprint out of the datacenter and up the colorful staircase deposited her in a black alley. The electric town lights and sounds of Akihabara played not far from her, where a sleek, red Kawasaki motorcycle rested against a dumpster — her rental from the city’s spaceport. With a hooded black trench coat hiding her skintight red armor and a helmet, she jumped atop the bike and sped into the street, melting into its traffic within seconds. Countless ad screens enveloped her in their brilliance, the consumer goods bathing the coat in oranges, blues and reds. An anime played just ahead on a massive SONY screen — cartoon women with big breasts smiled from underneath pink hair, their hands holding toothpaste or some other innocuous item.
As Alice zipped around cars and buses, the giant screens started flickering one by one. She knew the announcement of Akiyama’s murder was about to go out. A line of low-flying police aircraft zipped past up above with sirens shrieking, and their presence confirmed the escalating tension. The details of the royal family’s demise were spreading in concentric circles one by one, pulsating outward like an unstoppable ripple. Pedestrians cut their conversations short as their attentions turned to the screens. Traffic slowed. Akihabara was morphing into something it had never been before — a quiet neighborhood.
Alice made a left turn when a screen ahead announced in a stern female voice with a thick Japanese accent, “Kon’nichiwa. The Lunar Police Department brings you breaking news.” Emperor Akiyama’s picture flashed large. “It is with great sadness we report the Nipponese emperor has been murdered.”
Alice kept up her speed and the focus on her escape. The spaceport was only a few miles away.
“Details are still coming in, and we ask all citizens to remain calm.” Several people, families and individuals, were already covering their mouths in horror, or throwing up their arms in panic. Akiyama’s murder was unlike any other news delivered to the city in recent memory. “We ask for all citizens to get home as soon as possible. A citywide lockdown will be commencing.” Another line of police aircraft buzzed past the skyscrapers above, headed towards the royal penthouse.
Alice merged onto a highway when the city’s screens and speakers broke into the Japanese national anthem in unison.
Kimigayo wa
Chiyo ni yachiyo ni
Sazare-ishi no
Iwao to narite
Koke no musu made.
Traffic became light. Most cars had taken their exits toward home. Alice continued her getaway, and as she neared the spaceport exit, a giant screen hugging a skyscraper to her right blared in Japanese, “We are just getting word of one more fatality in the royal family — Etsuji Honda, the heir to the throne, has been murdered as well. This is truly a sad day for Nippon One.” A Toyota police car sped past her, its sirens echoing wildly.
The exit deposited Alice at the large, block shaped spaceport compound at the edge of Nippon One. Tycho Crater’s western wall loomed large just beyond it and spread away to the left and to the right. The front half of the port jutted out of the lunar rock, while the rest lay encrusted within. Several vacuum tunnels led away from the compound, their lengths boring through grey rock and ending a mile out on the surface. There were ten in total, each a different size so as to accommodate different spacecrafts. One catered to Martian military crafts solely — diplomatic ties allowed for such distinctions.
The terminal that linked to this tunnel was usually gated and guarded, although at moment security was nowhere to be seen. Had the guards abandoned their posts? Confusion blanketed the city and its operations. Paranoia would surely follow when blame would need to be set at someone’s feet for the murders. That someone could very well be the Martians, specifically Alice. If the Nipponese could tie Bastien back to her, they’d have a direction to point their judgment toward.
She sped into the diplomatic terminal’s empty parking lot and discarded the bike onto concrete. Running in, she prepared to flash her identification at the front entrance, but even there she could see no guards. The place appeared empty.
Sprinting past screens still focused on the royal family’s massacre, and scrambling to the appropriate aircraft section, Alice found her 1.V2 within a room with three walls made of glass. She released a long breath — the craft hadn’t been confiscated after all. There was no one around to take such a drastic action. No security, or any passengers. The compound’s pristine, off-white walls housed no one but her at moment, at least within the diplomatic terminal.
Swinging open the glass door, Alice ran into the room and boarded the 1.V2. She powered up the craft via a voice-activated command. Lights blinked across the dashboard while she said, “Initialize take-off procedures.” The craft proceeded to communicate with the spaceport’s host computer. A few lights flashed green along a wall terminal to the left, and a speaker blared shortly after, “Take off cleared.”
On Alice’s watch there were only five minutes remaining until citywide lockdown.
The 1.V2 purred to life. The round patch it rested upon swiveled a hundred and eighty degrees until the cockpit faced a circular door in the white wall. Alice licked her dry lips in anticipation. The exit door appeared to break apart into several slices, each swiveling open into the wall along unseen hinges. A tunnel, its circumference sectioned by piping, spread away under the guidance of white LED lighting. The host computer announced, “Initiate takeoff.”
“Takeoff initiated,” the 1.V2’s computer confirmed. The craft hovered just an inch above the floor for two seconds before exiting. Alice’s eyes turned to thin slits under the tunnels’ bright lights. The doors shut behind the 1.V2, and the tunnel hummed as every cubic inch of oxygen was siphoned out, initiating a vacuum state. This allowed for the 1.V2 to accelerate without friction and drag, enabling it to reach top speed. As it cleared the mile-long tunnel in seconds, another circle door at the end quickly opened and allowed for a speedy exit.
The moon’s rocky terrain swept away to the horizon, blanketing a stark contrast between its sundrenched light grey and space’s cold blackness. Mining stations with their compact domes dotted the landscape across the distance. Alice counted at least twenty as she released a deeper breath once the solar system’s silence welcomed her. Away from the cacophony of human existence, she was happy to be out in space.
The cockpit computer hummed. “Please, chart course, Lieutenant General Smith.” The 1.V2 hovered in place several hundred feet over gaping craters, but still within the moon’s gravity. Chart course, sure — a straightforward request. But where would she go?
The Earth loomed large to the left. Given the certainty of Frank’s reaction, Alice didn’t know what
she’d gain from heading back to Port Sydney. Earth, on the other hand, offered a new life. She could settle somewhere in its deserts and move as needed, just like the pirates. Perhaps she could join them. Hell, they’d seen what she could do already, and given her insights into Port Sydney, she’d be an asset. Yes, with her trusty 1.V2, the loyal Silent Spud, she could scour terrestrial lands for food and adventure. No more scowls and edicts, only freedom. How wonderful.
“How stupid,” she spat, her large forehead furrowed with wrinkles. Wiping away a bead of sweat, she chewed her bottom lip to the point of drawing blood. A war raged inside her. Ostracized and derided for merely being who she was, Alice was tired of proving her worth again and again, always to people less capable than her. Frank, the other soldiers, and even the citizens of Port Sydney — they’d never truly accepted her. She was their tool, nothing more — a data geek to be wielded as needed, even as an officer who would rank behind Crone.
“Not anymore.” She shook her head as her doubts gave away. “No more serving those inferior to me.” A plan formed. At first, there were only rocks and dust orbiting the hot sun that was her anger. The debris spun at immense speed. It collected and took shape, hardening into a globe complete with texture and smell. Her plan of a planet was replete with jagged terrain, pointed and merciless, and it fumed with the pungent odor of revenge.
Peering to her right into the vastness of space, she commanded, “Computer, open communication with Port Sydney. I want to connect with the High Council.”
“Connecting.”
A few beeps later, a voice came through on the open line. “Mindy, here. Lieutenant General, how may I be of assistance?” The familiar singsong tone relaxed Alice.
“I need to speak with the High Council… today.”
“Oh, I’m sorry but the High Council is not taking appointments for today. How about next week?”
