Phoenix Reborn Page 10

  The world watched, stunned as the former councilman had the life choked out of him and then as he plunged to the streets below.

  “It has all been a lie,” the narrator said loudly.

  Stahl was outraged as his bodyguards moved him out of the suites and down the hallway to the elevator. The six men moved with precision and speed, clearing the hall and the elevator as they all boarded.

  He knew the EMC could contain the story, playing it off as terrorist propaganda. But the fact that it happened on what should have been on the day that the Dragoon was to be publicly captured would cost him his life. If the man now ascending the building to get him didn’t do the job, Harruhama certainly would. As the lift arrived on the large gothic roof, Councilman Stahl knew he had terribly underestimated the Dragoon’s intelligence.

  His bodyguards pushed him along to a flat spot as the VS91-transport shuttle hovered down to retrieve him. He looked down as he was boarding the transport, at the crowd below. They were no longer quietly listening to the broadcast, but screaming and demanding answers. He and his bodyguards aboard, the VS91-transport began to slowly pull away to the chorus of the angry shouting of the crowd. Stahl heard the people yelling out his name with disdain. He looked out to see a man in a fine silk suit with a long black coat flowing in the wind behind him rush onto the roof top.

  Chester Stahl grabbed the microphone from the pilot of the transport and flipped on the external speakers.

  “You’re too late, Dragoon!” he shouted, his voice echoing over the park. “Your little attempt on my life failed!”

  Stahl’s eyes widened as the man pulled a large, triple-barreled weapon from behind his long coat and pointed up at him. He watched the man hesitate as the transport flew over the crowd, aiming his weapon right at Stahl. He took a deep breath as his transport drifted over the lake in the park. The moment Stahl realized why the man had hesitated, he knew it was too late.

  Strange blue flames erupted from the under-barrel of the weapon the Dragoon was holding, spreading across the sky toward the transport. The tiny flaming thermite discs sliced into the sides of the hull and began melting through the metal. The ship evaporated around Stahl as more and more tiny discs cut deep into it, damaging the engines. To the pilot’s credit, he managed to get the craft down into the lake before the melting metal consumed him.

  Stahl managed to get out the rear door as four of his bodyguards melted away with the transport in the water. He and the two other survivors swam to shore, desperately looking for escape as citizens from the crowd encircled his location. Whether or not they were there to help or hang him was a debate Stahl would never have. One of the bodyguards opened fire with his pistol into the crowd.

  Some people ran away from the shots, others ran toward him and his guards, overwhelming them. The last thing Councilman Chester Stahl saw were the furious eyes of the people who had come to hear him speak.

  ~ ~ ~

  Watching the transport crash into the lake, the Dragoon turned and launched a barrage of small thermite discs at the rooftop exit he had come through. The stairs’ metal housing began to melt into heavy molten drops as the Special Police squads ascended the stairs behind him.

  Watching the riot unfold below, the man winced as shots were fired into the crowd by officers as they were getting overwhelmed. He knew it wouldn’t end well, but he didn’t have time to think about it too long. He could hear the sound of approaching helicopters and knew that he had to disappear soon.

  The sound of the shot came after he heard the bullet whiz by his head. The sniper having misjudged the shot. The Dragoon didn’t waste any more time.

  With the exit behind him, full of soldiers as it continued melting away, the Dragoon ran as hard as he could toward the back of the building, up one side of a steep roof and down the other. The sound of bullets ricocheting around him pushed him to move faster.

  When he got to the edge of the building, he used the power of his mechanized battle armor to leap the gap to the next building, rolling out of the momentum of the fall. As he got to his feet, he removed the latex pieces from his face that he had been using as a disguise, then turned and dusted off his suit before kicking through the roof exit access and disappearing down onto the street below.

  The media would report on the riot for a full hour before getting orders to cease coverage. The government buildings in New York would go up in flames before the night was finished. In every major city in the world, the reaction was the same: the people watching the event grew furious at the exposure of the lies they had been told, and when the police began to fire upon the people, riots began to spread. Military and police forces around the globe were pressed to contain swarms of rioters.

  History would remember it as the start of the Free Man Revolution.

  Chapter 10

  In a Perfect World

  It was an early morning on Aeris VII; the sun had barely crested the horizon when Marlena. She and Alex were to meet with two men that morning who had arranged an appointment with them weeks before. In their home on what the locals had begun to call “Valhalla Island,” the two greeted Doctor Franz Wagner and Earnest Evans, an engineer from the 3rd fleet who had arrived by way of a VS91-Transport Shuttle, which had set down on the landing pad between Tizona and Skoll.

  Marlena greeted to two men, who had become acquaintances through their many discussions in her role as leader of the Independents, and introduced them to her son.

  “As you know, we have twenty-one OMBI-soldiers held in our detention facility, gentlemen. I have examined the technology on my son’s arm and have sent you both reports on what I have discovered. Alex has filled in the details on the removed inhibitor chips.”

  “I have read your report, Captain,” the old, white-haired doctor said quietly, “and I am fascinated by the growing bond between the host and the device, as well as the bond he apparently has been forming with his ship.”

  “I want to know if it is dangerous to remove the 3rd inhibitor,” Alex remarked eagerly.

  “For now, I would leave it alone. The other inhibitors were to slow the development of the bond, but the third seems like it was intended to stay,” Engineer Evans replied.

  Evans had been an engineer since he was eighteen and had a knack for figuring out how things worked. The brown-haired man of forty-one had earned a reputation around Aeris VII for his ability to repair any device that was brought to him.

  “Do you know how or why no one else can pilot Skoll?” Marlena asked, curious. She had been unable to find the answer herself, despite her extensive background with warships and technology.

  “It’s hard to say,” Evans began, “but I have a theory that there may be some kind of virtual intelligence in the machine, which only recognizes one operator at a time. Actually, I believe that goes for the OMBI device as well.”

  “So you’re saying that both the ship and my bracer have some kind of a consciousness?” Alex asked in awe.

  “It’s only a theory, Captain, but I believe so,” Evans affirmed.

  “When you develop your data on it, please forward it to me,” Marlena said.

  “Absolutely,” Evans replied with a nod.

  Doctor Wagner spoke up then, “It is curious how the 4th inhibitor works. Each time I proceed into the detention facility to speak with the children from Black Squadron, they collapse from nausea and accuse me of being a ‘Gortha.’”

  “I had a similar experience during the battle of the Eagle Nebula, Doctor. I could feel the inhibitor altering the data between my eyes and my brain, if that makes any sense,” Alex added thoughtfully.

  “I see. I think it would be good, at some point, to remove those inhibitors from the rest of your squadron; you may find yourselves some powerful allies in that group,” Wagner commented, sharing a nod with Marlena.

  “Thank you, Doctor, I will bring it before the ICC. I appreciate you both coming by. But if you’ll excuse me, I have a preliminary council address to give,” Marlena said, getting up an
d showing the men to the door.

  ~ ~ ~

  Tizona had taken several hits during the battle, but the damage was light and Marlena had it repaired within two days. She left from her home that morning, after a preliminary conference with the Independent Council of Colonies. The Council had a great deal of agenda items, from current fleet distribution to casualties on the planet. Fortunately, with the attack happening at night, most of the officers and crew from the grounded Battle Frigates were in the city, so the majority of casualties happened on the two ships that were disabled in orbit.

  Of the two frigates lost, two hundred and twenty-one crew members were labeled either KIA or MIA, representing about half from each vessel. Casualties on the other side of the conflict were substantially less; since Skoll disabled the ships efficiently, many lives were spared. The detainment facility was getting full on Aeris VII so naturally one of the top agenda items was the discussion of prisoner transfers.

  Including the twenty-one OMBI-Soldiers of Black Squadron in custody, the prison facility housed nearly one thousand enemy troops. After the preliminary conference, Marlena nominated Alex as her proxy for the remainder of the issues and excused herself to make contact with her spy network on Earth.

  When she arrived at the array, she was glad to see that it hadn’t been attacked by any of the UEDF ships. She had gone to great lengths to conceal the location where she had built it and no one, other than she and Alex, knew where it was exactly. In her design of the array, Marlena used a slipstream generator to transfer the data more quickly. The stabilized wormhole could deliver messages nearly in real-time, since data seemed to move through the stream faster than matter. She also included a disrupter field that offered her both anonymity when transmitting and a minor cloaking ability for the array itself. She was proud of her work; nothing of its kind had been built before and it had only taken her fourteen months to complete.

  As she landed Tizona, she shut down the engines and walked through her kitchen, pausing to pour coffee into a thermos. She mixed the dark liquid carefully with light cream and synthetic sugar, watching the mixture blend into a dark shade of brown before sealing it up. She was the kind of woman who expected excellence from herself, even with simple tasks.

  Walking through her quarters, Marlena stopped, as she always did, to look at the pictures on her wall. On the wall was a picture of William poised thoughtfully over a set of blueprints with a pencil and T-square; in the photo he was looking up at her with a smile. She remembered the day that she took it, thinking about how proud she was of the man and his work. Tears rimmed her almond-colored eyes as she kissed her fingers and pressed them to the glass.

  “I miss you, William,” she said softly before moving on to the next photo.

  The next one she stopped at was a picture of Alex and Connor sitting in a bathtub together as young boys. Connor had been eighteen months old in the photo and Alex had made him a soap-bubble beard, which he wore with a smile. Both boys had such sweet smiles that they made Marlena’s heart ache.

  Taking a deep breath, she grabbed her datapad and walked out of her room. She opened the airlock to the empty cargo hold and exited out the ramp onto the grassy hillside.

  Walking over to the array, she felt a sense of anxiety, as she always did before these transmissions. She never knew what news to expect from Earth, but it wasn’t normally good. Until she had both of her boys safely at home, and some kind of high-grade defensive armament around Aeris VII, she would never feel totally comfortable.

  She went to her spot under a large tree, which had bright orange-colored leaves. She had put a rather comfortable wooden chair there to sit on while she communicated with Earth. Sitting down and taking a sip of her coffee, she activated the slipstream in the array. It took a couple of minutes to warm up and open the wormhole, but when it did, information from Earth began flooding her datapad.

  She watched as headlines scrolled across the screen, naming Councilman Kaufmann and Councilman Stahl deceased as well as giving a name to their Murderer, “The Dragoon.” The picture they showed was of a man dressed in a dark leather duster and wide-brimmed hat. Marlena thought he looked like a villain from a western movie as she scrolled through the story.

  She was surprised to see that her own name was in the headlines, questioning the true motives behind her death and whether or not the Gortha were even real. Overwhelmed by gravity of it all, she continued to read the story about the man who had exposed the current regime and the riots taking place in the major metropolis areas of Earth.

  Terrorist lies, sedition and conspiracy theories:

  “The death toll in the terrorist plot to murder Councilman Stahl has now been confirmed in the hundreds as special police scour the city in search of The Dragoon.

  The number of civilian casualties continues to rise as this terrorist’s killing spree goes on. Notably, Councilmen Kaufmann and Stahl’s deaths have both been attributed to the actions of a terrorist cell lead by The Dragoon.

  From what we know so far, The Dragoon is a man in his mid-thirties, who suffers from psychopathy and is highly trained in espionage and counter intelligence.

  During the broadcast of Councilman Stahl’s speech, The Dragoon ran a conspiracy, propaganda video regarding the Gortha attack in the Incident of 2115, which resulted in the death of Captain Marlena Mercer. The video errantly claimed that the UEDF cruisers turned on Captain Mercer; a claim which has been proven false by our fact checkers.

  Also attributed to this terrorist cell is the rise of a new regime in the territory of Germany, which claims to be attempting to restore order in the region. To combat this threat, the UEDF has shut down the global power grid and access to food in the region, until this illegal government can be removed.

  Riots in Eastern Europe and Asia have been suppressed by UEDF troops as terrorist cells spread the propaganda piece regarding the death of Captain Mercer.”

  Marlena was stunned by the news as she read. She had read enough news reports that she could see through the outright lies and found herself liking this Dragoon. She had hoped that the people of Earth would resist sooner or later, but she hadn’t anticipated a global revolution springing up overnight, and in her name at that. Smiling, she began her transmission to Major Sanders.

  ~ ~ ~

  Alex listened carefully as members of the ICC talked about fleet redistributions to protect Aeris VII. The commanders of the 3rd and 5th fleets were brilliant tacticians, and Alex found himself learning a lot while he listened to them discuss their strategy. Occasionally he would chime in with a remark, which would often be incorporated into the plans. Alex had a great eye for tactics and efficiency and was happy that he could offer positive input on the conference.

  The commanders and civilian representatives were all extremely grateful for Alex’s participation in the fight. They all had acknowledged, in turn, how he single-handedly turned the tide of the battle with his superlative skill and unique vessel. Alex accepted it all humbly, not wanting to make a bigger deal out of it than he had to. He was already well-known in the Independent Colonies as a hero from the Battle of the Eagle Nebula and he feared that too much recognition would put a lot of pressure on him to perform in the future. He was an excellent commander and a brilliant pilot, but Alex Pereira had no ambition to become an icon of a rebellion.

  “Does anyone have anything to add before we close?” Commander Watson asked over the communicator.

  “Actually, yeah, I do,” Alex said, unsure of protocol.

  “Go ahead, Captain Pereira.” Watson sounded eager to hear what the boy had to say.

  “On my way from Sapphire City to my ship, I encountered a man who tried to kill me, an operative of the EMC.”

  “You are sure it was an operative, Captain?” Commander Clarke asked carefully.

  “Yes, sir, the man moved like a killer and was extremely well-trained. He identified himself as ‘Operative One.’”

  “If what you’re saying is true, Captain, we have a seriou
s problem here. The Operatives are espionage and assassination specialists, extremely well-trained at blending in. The fact that you survived is a miracle.”

  “Yes, sir,” Alex agreed.

  “We are all going to need to be very careful with an assassin loose on Aeris VII. We could all be targets.” There was an edge of fear in Commander Clarke’s voice.

  “Would you be able to identify the man if you saw him, Captain?” Representative Gellar asked.

  “I don’t know; maybe. His features and clothing were very plain. Even the way he approached me was casual, not like what I would expect from someone so highly trained.”

  “Understood. Operatives are known for their ability to infiltrate. I doubt any of us will see him coming until he is attacking us,” Commander Watson said sternly. “We must all take extra precautions for the time being to not let anyone we do not know near us, or give this assassin any clear shots. Thank you for letting us know, Captain.”

  “Sure. Anything I can do to help, Commander,” Alex said respectfully.

  He wasn’t happy about the exchange. He had hoped that the ICC would have some kind of a solution or plan to deal with an operative. So, Alex resolved to be especially vigilant and hoped that none of the leaders of the Independent Colonies would be hurt. If he had another chance to stop Operative One, he would take it.

  As the meeting adjourned, Alex felt himself getting restless at the thought of battling the operative again. Needing to take a break, he walked outside onto the patio with his datapad and wrote a message.

  To: Lyria Shepherd

  Subject: Dinner

  Message: Dear Lyria, Sorry I haven’t been around for the last couple of days. I had to help drag Frigates down from orbit and arrest their crews; exhausting work. I wanted to write you and let you know that I am okay and I am thinking about you. I know its short notice, but would you like to come over and have dinner with me tomorrow? I really want my Mom to meet you. Let me know. –Alex