Puar shut it off, dropping to his knees. He’s dead! Puar’s voice rang in his head as if he had said it aloud. Before he could even register what his inner voice was telling him, his mother was there with him, kneeling beside him. Together they wept on the ornate carpet of the Honorifical Office, the office that, as far as they were concerned, would never be filled with as much love and devotion for the common people of Seryys as it had been the day before.
Khai pulled out of the line for orbit and was headed for the luxury high-rise where Prime Minister Puar’s shuttle had crashed. He had to see it with his own eyes to believe it.
“Is this wise, Khai?” Joon asked.
“Do I care?” Khai shot back at the mouthy computer.
“I suppose not.”
“That’s right. Now shut up and let me drive.”
“As you wish.”
He piloted the ship into a sky traffic that floated nearly a hundred feet from the building. From that distance, he couldn’t see much at all.
“Computer, are there any binoculars onboard?”
“Affirmative, in the survival kit attached to the wall directly behind you.”
Khai fished out the binoculars. “Take over. Swing around so I can get a closer look.”
Khai worked his way to the hatch and opened it. It popped the seal and a rush of warm air filled the cabin. The hatch slid back into the ship and then slid to the right toward aft. Looking out the starboard side of the ship with his binoculars, he got a good look at the impact point. The shuttle was buried a good fifty feet into the building. Being heavily armored, the shuttle was still somewhat intact. But, as Khai certainly knew, it was clear that no one could have survived an impact like that. Smashing into a building at one to two g’s was fatal, regardless of how armored the car was.
“That’s it.” Khai said ruefully. “He’s gone. He’s gone and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Were you expecting to be able to?” Joon asked.
“I don’t know. I was hoping… I was hoping that it was just a mistake. Or that maybe… maybe he would still be alive. Do you have a police scanner?”
“Affirmative. My owner is, after all, a police officer.”
“I want to you to monitor the scanner for anything pertaining to the accident and transfer controls back to me.”
Khai pulled out of traffic and headed back for the departure point to leave for orbit and relative safety. Once in line, he transferred controls back to Joon and went back to the bedroom where he took a shower and got some long overdue sleep.
Minister Tran’Ri Trall sat in his office looking over files pertaining to some highly classified information when someone buzzed him over the intercom. He grunted annoyingly as he pushed the blinking button on his desk.
“Yes?” he hissed, not bothering to hide the irritation in his voice.
“The press is looking for answers to Puar’s death. They want to know if you have any comment on the situation.”
He scoffed in annoyance. “Tell them that a full-scale investigation takes time. We shouldn’t have any solid leads on a cause for at least another four days. Are you really bothering me for that?”
It had been only a few hours since his death. But he was already making plans to take over. As second in command, it was his civil duty to assume the mantle of Prime Minister in instances of impairment, untimely death or impeachment of the Prime Minister. He had his assistant compose the acceptance letter. All he was waiting for was confirmation of Puar’s death to sweep the nation. Then he would swoop in and pick up all the pieces.
“No, sir. I have news on the invasion.”
“Well, out with it, then.”
“There were two invasions, not one.”
“Indeed.” That piqued his attention. He leaned forward in his chair, resting his folded hands on the desk. “Go on.”
“As one might expect, one was on the new shield generator and the other was on the primary com tower near the SCMBHF.”
“Was either successful?” He was fishing for an answer.
“No, sir.” Trall’s hands began to shake violently. Can’t those blasted Vyysarri do anything right? “Colonel Khail-”
“Former Colonel Khail,” Trall corrected.
“Excuse me, sir. Former Colonel Khail was able to thwart the shield generator attack, while the other was-”
“Is he in custody now?”
“No, sir.”
“WHAT?” he shouted through a clenched jaw.
“He’s dead.”
“Oh.” He smiled a predator’s smile. “How… unfortunate.”
“I agree, sir. Apparently, according to the report that Captain Dack’Tandy Dah of SCATT filed through his official channels, Khail died in an explosion on the conference level of the shield generator building.”
“Has he any next of kin?”
“None, sir.”
Good! At least some good news came out of this!
“And what of the second attack?”
“The Vyysarri were killed, but one of them seemed to be accessing the computer.”
Trall already knew where this was going. “What information did he get? Are we going to have to revamp our communication protocols?”
“No, sir. It’s nothing like that at all. He was trying to upload something from a memory stick. Base law enforcement was able to stop him before he could do anything.”
Interesting, he thought. “Do you have the memory stick?”
“No. You should be getting it any minute. I took the liberty of having it delivered straight to you before anyone else could even breathe on it. You should be the first to see what’s on it.”
“Excellent work.”
“Sir?”
“What now?” he asked impatiently with a roll of his eyes.
“Do you really think he’s dead? I mean, the man’s a legend. It just seems so wrong for him to die that way.”
“We can only pray to the Founders that he somehow survived,” he said, feigning sorrow. “But the cold, hard reality is that he’s probably dead.” He had to suppress another evil smile.
“You… really think so, sir?”
With any luck! Trall internalized. “Only time will tell. Thank you for your help.”
“It was my-”
Trall cut the channel. Khai had, yet again, thwarted his plans. At least he was dead, now. But he effectively pushed Trall into enacting Plan “B”- which involved the classified files he was reading. About fifty years prior, the Vyysarri had committed a whole task force of Vyysarri ships to an attack. The ships weren’t the attacking force as much as what the ships were escorting. The Vyysarri they captured in the ship being escorted was interrogated until he revealed that the ship was called the Hammer Cannon. It contained a weapon so powerful, that it could level whole cities with a single shot. It fired a high-density, focused energy beam that penetrated a planet’s crust causing a catastrophic seismic shockwave that rumbled cities to the ground. According to the tortured prisoner, the Vyysarri had used it once on another world far outside of Seryys Space with devastating results.
However, the Defense Navy was able to destroy the small armada and capture the Hammer Cannon. It was currently sitting in the hanger of Orbital Station 12…
Someone wearing a delivery uniform quickly entered and dropped a package on his desk. Trall signed for it and opened the package. Though his plans for the Hammer Cannon were pressing, he couldn’t help but see what was on the memory stick. He plugged it into his computer and uploaded the information. There was a single video file of some kind. He pulled the video and the visage of an attractive young woman—if not a little too nerdy for Trall’s taste—wearing a lab coat, standing in a dimly-lit office with the expression of someone who had the weight equivalent to the gravitational pull of a black hole on her shoulders filled the screen; she was beaten, battered and bruised.
“This is Doctor Tash’Door Tashar,” she said, her voice strained, “and I am the leading physicist of Opera
tion: Bright Star. If you are viewing this, then the Vyysarri were successful in their mission. This is a warning to the Seryysan People…”
“How interesting…” Trall mused, rubbing the top of his index finger along the bottom of his chin.
After watching the video he was speechless. But he didn’t have time to reflect. There was a visitor waiting for him in the lobby.
“Send him in,” Trall said.
A man, dressed in business proper, strolled in with a folder of paperwork. It was the Chief Medical Examiner, Ran’Dell Rashad.
“How do you do, sir?” deep lines in his dark face betrayed the confusion he was obviously feeling. “I have the preliminary reports on the bodies from the shuttle crash.”
“Good,” Trall hissed. “Come, have a seat. Can I offer you a drink?”
“Oh, yes, please. That would be nice.”
“Pick your poison,” Trall said, gesturing to the wet bar in his office.
“Just some ice water, please.”
“As you wish,” Trall said. “Me, I’m more of a Sarian Brandy kind of guy.”
“Normally, I am too. But I’m on the clock.”
He poured himself a drink and dropped three cubes of ice in it. Then he poured the glass of water, and with a slight of hand, slipped out a small bag with different ice in it. He dropped four cubes of that ice into the water glass and as he stepped away, knocked all the ice cubes to the floor.
“Ack! Blast these old clumsy hands.” He smiled, walking over to Rashad. “Here’s your water, sir. Now please, give me a moment to clean up my mess. I want to be able to give you my full attention.”
He walked over to the sink and picked up every ice cube that hit the floor and put them all in the sink. He pumped the hand sanitizer past his hand into the sink while he ran hot water to melt all the ice, feigning that he was washing his hands. The “hand sanitizer” was a law enforcement-grade forensic cleanser used to clean up biohazards. He ran a cloth under the water stream and pumped some of the cleanser on it and cleaned the floor vigorously. None of this seemed uncommon as Minister Tran’Ri Trall was well known as a bona-fide germaphobe and was also known for having ridiculously potent cleaning agents in his possession.
“So, how’s the wife and kids?”
Rashad took a big gulp of water. “Oh, they’re the usual. My wife is just doing her usual mom thing; my oldest will be going off to college in two months and my youngest will be entering her final year of secondary school.”
“Where does the time go?” he asked more of himself than Rashad.
It had been almost ten years since he lost his family to the Vyysarri. They were vacationing on the beaches of the island planet of Seryys III. The planet was less than two percent landmass and the rest was fresh water. In fact, the water was so pure there that the Seryys government shuttled if from there to the outlying planets with thousands of huge ships that literally landed in the water and pumped it into their gigantic tanks. It was quite the spectacle to watch.
The Vyysarri knew that it was a hotspot for vacationers and knew that it was also lightly guarded, as most of the defense fleet was surrounding Seryys. They punched through and simply started bombarding the planet from orbit, targeting high population spots where casualties would be highest. It was a sick and cowardly attack whose only purpose was to cause death and destruction.
The hotel where Trall and his family were staying was among the first to be hit. As Trall went to the local market to buy some fresh flowers for his beautiful wife, the first laser cannon blast flashed through the clouds and turned the sand near the flower hut to molten glass. The next two or three shots, Trall missed as he was still trying to get to his feet.
The moment he stood, he looked up at the hotel just in time to see a cannon blast rip through it. He cried out for his loved ones. He couldn’t hear a thing—not even his own anguished cries, as the initial blast had deafened him. Two more volleys and the hotel was nothing more than a smoldering, twisted pile of metal girders and crete. No one still in the hotel at the time of the attack survived. What was worse was the fact that the bodies of his loved ones were never recovered, most likely having been incinerated by the cannon blasts. In hindsight, he decided that that was a better way to go than being slowly crushed to death.
“That’s a good question…” his sentence trailed as he realized he was having trouble breathing. He started making struggled gargling, choking sounds and feverishly clawing at his throat. He looked imploringly over at Trall who watched with an almost disinterested, detached expression, his mind still on his lost family. Eventually, he moved into action and called his assistant to bring in the EMRT, or Emergency Medical Response Team.
They were there within minutes. They got a brief summary of the events leading up to his collapse and then took over. They worked diligently on the poor man, but it was too late. He died of heart failure half an hour after the EMRT arrived. Trall suppressed a smile.
Chapter Six
“Heard your ship got stolen yesterday,” Captain Byyner said to Captain Dah.
“Yeah,” Dah said, stirring his soup and sighing.
“I thought you’d be a little bit more upset about it.”
“What’s a ship versus someone’s life?” Dah asked ruefully.
“Dah!” Byyner almost whined. “You gotta move past that! He was a soldier! He died an honorable death. What more would you want for him?”
“I don’t know, a clear name, perhaps.”
“Well, that’s not gonna happen. He lied on his application; he would have been put to death. I rather like the idea that he died a hero protecting the city rather than by lethal injection as a traitor.”
“I guess you’re right,” Dah said, feigning sorrow. “So, have you heard anything about Puar’s crash?”
“No,” Byyner seemed genuinely puzzled by this. “Trall’s being very hush-hush about it. No official press conference or anything.”
“That’s unusual,” Dah said, after spooning some soup into his mouth.
“Yeah. What’s worse is the Chief Medical Examiner died in Trall’s office from heart failure. He was perfectly healthy before.”
“I also heard that Sam’Ule San, Director of D-PAG was arrested for embezzlement.”
“Really?” Byyner asked, shocked. He had met the man once. Young and ambitious—and honest almost to a fault, Byyner couldn’t picture San as the type of scum who would steal from a company that was already paying him probably six times what Bynner made in a year.
It was all so weird how things were coming together and swarming around Minister Trall. Even Trall was the one who ordered Khai’s arrest. Trall was the last person to see Puar alive; the last person to see Rashad alive and… the last person alive who can claim the…
“Ti’tan’lium.” Dah said.
“What?” Byyner asked.
“The Ti’tan’lium. I think that’s the lynchpin. Trall is now the only one alive to lay claim to the Ti’tan’lium deposit under the city.”
“Yeah, but there’s a city over it. And the last report I saw said that it would destroy the city.”
“So why not speed the process up? Come on, Cap’! Think about it. The riots with gangbangers using military-grade weapons—outlawed weapons, the shield dropping momentarily to let in a force that would have maybe permanently disabled the shield generator if it weren’t for Khai’s efforts, it all makes sense. I’d bet my meager paycheck on it!”
“So what do we do? I can tell you that I’m not the hero Khai was.”
“No, but we can still make a difference!” He thought for a moment. “You know, Cap’. I think you shouldn’t get involved. I might have to do things that would be considered… oh, I don’t know, illegal.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m officially going on a leave of absence, sir. I’ll be honest—I don’t expect my job to be waiting for me when I get back. But I don’t want you to get implicated in any way.”
Byyner extended
his hand and Dah took it. “Good luck.”
“Thanks. I’m gonna need it.”
“Bet your ass you will.”
The next day, Dack’Tandy Dah, former police officer, set out on a task to help Khai get to bottom of… well, whatever it was that he needed to get to the bottom of. He knew the first person that he needed to talk to was Sam’Ule San. He had a hunch that the guy was innocent. And there had to be someone who saw Ran’Dell Rashad alive before he left for Trall’s office. He wasn’t interested in how he died, because Trall killed him to cover something up.
He got into his hovercar and left his garage—the garage attached to the house, that is— and pulled into traffic. He was headed for the Seryys Governmental Lockup within the city limits. It was a minimum-security facility to hold less dangerous individuals.
He pulled out that dedicated com unit and thumbed it on. “Uh, Khai? Are you there?”
“Yeah, Cap’. What’s up?”
“I’m not a captain anymore. I took a leave of absence to help you investigate. And I have my first lead.”
“Sam’Ule San?”
“Yeah,” Dah didn’t hide surprise in his voice. “How’d you know?”
“A hunch. I saw his arrest on the Net’Vyyd. He just struck me as the innocent type. Do what you can. I’m just laying low until I have a target.”
“Where are you now?”
“Just floating around.”
“You taking care of my ship?”
“Of course, what kind of a guy d’you think I am?”
“The type who’s hard on bad guys, ships… um, cars. I don’t know.”
“Point taken. I have to go, though. This link can still be traced, if used too long.”
“Got it. I’ll contact you when I have more information for you.”
“Good. Thanks, buddy. Talk to you soon.”
The line went dead. He was almost there. Time to make a difference.
“Good. Thanks, buddy. Talk to you soon.”
Khai killed the link. He wasn’t entirely truthful with Dack. First of all, the com unit couldn’t be traced; he used it on several worlds across the galaxy, but he needed to focus on flying the ship. Second, he wasn’t in orbit; he was dropping from orbit into the atmosphere of Seryys IV, the planet where he became a household name. It was an arid world where water was as valuable as Ti’tan’lium. He was there to meet an old friend. But what Dack didn’t know, couldn’t hurt him.
The Seryys Chronicles: Death Wish Page 8
