A New Divide (Science Fiction) (2 page)

              The pressure-stabilizing iron shutters were too slow.

              Mickey, previously eavesdropping on our conversation, managed to burst into the room and pull me back into the hallway before the intense pressure sucked me out into space. It was so silent, and through the hole in the terrace I could see the curvature of Minerva, where an ocean of ironclad warships was converging beyond the blood-red horizon.

              We had all heard the rumors: "Arcoh the Eminent will purge all of the Outlander civilizations, starting with the Raydenites, the most sinful and decadent race of humanity." We just wanted to be different, that was all. The kingdom, led by their all-powerful leader, did not see it so. He wanted to repeat history, revive war and destruction; because destruction, to Arcoh, was the only path we had left to creation.

"Collin! Are you all right? Can you stand?"
 
              It took a minute to get my bearings back. I could barely hear his question over the alarm and
Rayden One's
defense batteries firing at the endless stream of ships on the horizon. And the screams of the wounded; the horrid ringing in my ears made it all the more surreal.
              "The coach!"

              "What happened?"

              "He's gone, Mickey!" He pulled my collar and lifted me back onto my feet. "Collin, we have to go!"

              "Where will we go?"

              "
Rayden One
is falling from orbit! It will collide with the surface in seventy-seven minutes!"

              "This . . . this can't be happening . . ."

              "It is happening, Collin! This is no time to grieve. We have to move! Now!"

              We sprinted down the hallway dodging all sorts of bursting electrical interfaces, shattered
holos
, and Raydenites who were consumed by the chaos that surrounded us. Mass looting, groups of hopeless people praying to their different deities, they were all unable to grasp the gravity of the situation.

              "You never answered my question, Mick!"

              "We're going to
Rayden
. It's the only place they can't follow us!"

              "They will kill billions of us before we reach the Motherworld, Mickey!"

              "We have to try! Otherwise what the hell is the point of living?"

              Just as we ran around the next corner, I completely collapsed. I remember this pain, this unbearable pain. And this pain surged throughout my entire body in a synchronous pattern. I'm glad it only lasted but a few minutes, but that being said—I could feel it ever lingering, and moving almost as if it was changing me.

              Mick managed to grab me, and post me up next to the wall, when something greater caught his attention. A child.

              "Oh Christ, the kid. The kid, Collin!"

              Mick ran towards the boy, who couldn't have been more than eight years old, and snatched him up in his arms.

              "Mickey! What are you doing? Put that kid down!"

              "I can't just leave him here! Where are your parents, buddy?"

              "I don't know!" the child cried profusely.

              "Hey, calm down, little man, we'll bring you to the atrium. I'm sure your folks are waiting there for you."

              "Mick, look out!" The hallway rumbled furiously when a crusader drop-pod crashed through the hull ahead of us. The shockwave knocked all of us to our feet, I heard footsteps and soldiers mumbling as they stepped over me. The one in the head of the pack used his foot to turn my head with, and he laughed when he discovered who I was.

              "The King of Kings, the Iceman, you know something? You're a lot shorter than you look on the holo."

              I laughed back as I saw the boots he wore on his feet.

              "What shoe size do you wear?"

              "Twelves are a perfect size to crush a skull, gravball boy."

              "They most certainly are." Just as he was about to stomp my head in, I grabbed his gravity boot, and pressed on the heel where the trigger was, and activated the jump.

              He flew into the ceiling and broke his neck on impact, then came the other three.

              Most people are not aware of how intense the PGL is. We are soldiers—we are the faces that represent the people in our districts—and we wage war by sport. That is the only difference between a gravball player and a soldier. And something else, we survive the most intense close combat training program in all of Eden.

              "Get King! His eminence wants him alive!"

              I clutched the arm of the soldier on the left and broke it, and then ducked as a soldier behind me attempted to shock me with a TNC (temporary nerve corruptor). He missed and hit his squadmate, causing him to fall over completely paralyzed.

              I struck him in the face with a right hook, when the soldier behind me jabbed the butt of his rifle into the back of my head. He tried the stunt again, but before he could knock me out, I grabbed the rifle, and flung him over my shoulder.

              Then quickly, I jolted up to the other soldier and grabbed his boot.

              "Stop resisting or I'll blow your head off!"

              "What a terrible waste of perfectly good boots." I grabbed his rifle and pointed it at the soldier I had previously flung over my shoulder, and as he rushed, I broke the soldier's leg. Out of pain he clenched the trigger, and fired a dozen rounds into his squadmate, who fell dead by our side.

              Only one remained, we fell to the ground and I once again tapped the back of the heel on his gravity boot. We shot like a rocket across the floor, and flew into the wall right beside Mickey and the child.

              I used the soldier's body to absorb the impact, but Mickey still had to lift me to my feet when the struggle had subsided.

              "Collin, that was freaking incredible, man! Those reflexes are on point!"

              "That's why they call me the juggernaut, Mick." I wiped the blood off my face and removed the boots from the first soldier I had just killed.

              "What are you doing?"

              "Terrible waste of good boots, don't you think? Here." I threw him the pair I removed from the soldier beside him. "He's a size 10½. That's you, right?"

              "Yeah, a perfect fit."

              I moved back over to the first soldier, and as I began to remove his boots we felt the entire platform quake below our feet.

              "I want my daddy!" the child cried.

              "Collin, let's get going, man."

              "I'm done here, just let me latch these." As I tied my boots I heard a laugh coming from behind us; it was the only soldier left alive, a broken arm and paralyzed by the TNC.

              "And where will you go, heathen?"

              "None of your business, asshole. Come on, Mick, let's get to the atrium."

              I found myself unable to leave, gravitated to the cackling laugh of the soldier. "It doesn't matter where you go, our King will find you. His Grace will burn all of you to ashes, destruction is our only way to salvation."

              "Shut up!" I kicked him in the head rendering him unconscious. As we made our way to the atrium something deeply concerned me that I never shared with Mickey. Every time I had killed, or mortally injured, another PGL athlete in a match my hands would shake. Eventually I got used to it. Fatalities are common in a PGL match, but no matter how many times it did happen, my hands would always shake.

              They didn't this time, and even more so—this wasn't gravball, this was my home. And my body was aching, it felt like spiders were crawling across my nerves. I couldn't help but think it was a reaction to the genome, even though it was a one in a billion occurrence. So I stayed silent until we had finally made our way to the atrium, which was overflowing with desperate souls.

CHAPTER 2 – PLANETFALL

              "Daddy!"

              "Oh thank god, Kevin!"

              I couldn't help but smile as Mick returned the child to his parents, but I was getting very impatient. We only had an hour before we would plunge to the surface.

              "Thank you, oh thank you so much. You are a godsend."

              "I couldn't leave him alone."

              "You two have to get out of here, this place is falling."

              "Trust me, pops, we know." I replied.

              "Follow me, boys, the escape pods are filling up fast."

              We made our way through the crowd-infested atrium, above you could see the light of one of the suns and the incredible warzone that Raydenite space had become. We waited to enter an escape shuttle for about fifteen minutes and when it finally got to be our turn, there were no more seats to be had.

              "What do you mean?"

              "Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached full capacity! Please take an oxygen mask and head to Vault 4! We will evacuate everyone in an orderly manner."

              "This is madness! You're just going to leave us here to die?" one of the frantic citizens shouted.

              "Sir! Head to Vault 4! There is no time to argue!"

              It was chaos, in a matter of minutes the crusader fleet had already won the battle, by striking fear into the hearts of their victims, my people. "Sir, please step back! We are at full capacity. We can fit two more, that's it. You, sir! You and your child go on through."

              "No," the father replied as he gazed into my eyes.

              "Sir, there is no time."

              The father of the child then turned to me smiling. "I want to give my seat to Collin King, on the condition he takes my son."

              "Oh my god, that's Collin King!"

              "Please, Collin, take my seat."

              That moment was incredible. I never realized how much the normal people in this world revered their PGL athletes, then again, I had never been in a catastrophic situation such as this. I often forget that we are the face of peace, for the people we fight for. And people admire that, they respect it, and they believe in that. People will die for what they believe in, and they believed in me. I will never understand why that notion is so easy to forget.

              I was about to step across that threshold when Mick blocked me.

              "Don't you do this, Collin."

              "You could come too, somebody would happily give up their seat for you—"

              "I can't accept that. I refuse to trade a stranger's life for my own."

              "Mick. Come on, man," I whispered anxiously to him as the Rayden One guard shouted to us.

              "You have five seconds to decide and we are ejecting the pod!"

              "Go on through, mister, take your child to safety," Mick said.

              "Thank you, Mick, thank you, Collin. Good luck, you two."

              My face then became blood red, the situation angered me. We had a chance out and Mick destroyed it, but at the time I couldn't see the bigger picture—that was the selfishness inside me. So when Mick slammed me against the blast doors, and scolded me after the shuttle had ejected, I was just angry, and I wasn't willing to understand.

              "What the hell was that, Mick? We had a chance to escape! You've killed us!"

              "You seriously think your life is more valuable than any of theirs?"

              "Of course it is, Mick, we're PGL champions!"

              "So what? You take that away and then what are you? HUH?"

              My lip began to quiver, he had me. I had no answer. "You're nothing without that, Collin, and neither am I. We are just men, that's all. But we can be better than that, better than these bastards that are burning our worlds, and murdering our people. You said we're gravball players, right? Well then, let's do what we do best."

              "Which is?"

              "Call the ball."

              Then came the cracking steel collisions of the hull, I heard it above us, then I heard nothing. There we were all over again.

              The impact of a dead ship colliding against the atrium ceiling was devastating. What was worse was that there was no warning, no hint, and when the ship peeled away the pressure glass, the people left over were dragged out into space. It was a terrifying spectacle, and there would be no shutter, or blast door, to contain the pressure thanks to the carcass of a dead Raydenite Warship.

              I flew towards the hole along with the rest of the innocents, but in the darkest of moments my gravball skill set came in handy.

              Quick responses, never lose the edge, never lose your focus. That is what they teach you. I snatched a metal frame piece protruding from the warship. The mass of which was enough to save my life, and Mickey's, when he crashed into me. I tried to talk to him but the oxygen was being sucked out of my lungs, I was beginning to fade.

              Always as I begin to fade I am moved, and I was moved to tears as I looked out of the breach, to which I could barely hold onto.

              It is incredible how sound cannot travel through space, and thank the stars, because I could see it, and that was enough. Seeing the extermination that was unfolding, and observing the stained pieces of what had remained. In that moment I first began to lose hope, I couldn't believe what was happening. Why can't we ever have peace?

"Collin! You hear me?" Mickey asked as he switched on the com interface on our oxygen masks, after quickly fastening the rebreather to my face and attaching a safety cord to our waists. I gasped for air and was quick to respond.

              "Wha . . . what do we do?"

              "Well, we got the boots! Only way to the hangar is down there!"

              Mickey pointed to a hole in the hull roughly 1,500 meters from where we peered out of the breach. It was close but there were many obstacles before us.

              "That's suicide! We should have taken the shuttle, you dumbass!"

              "Ha! Survival favors the bold, I guess! In five seconds I'm going to launch off of you! Make sure that cord is attached, or we'll fall to our deaths! We're about to enter the atmosphere! You ready?"

              I took a deep breath and exhaled trying not to think of the millions of things that could go wrong. It was 1,500 meters to the hangar bay and with nothing to hold onto, a gravity-propelled freefall to safety.

              "Yeah! I'm good!"

              "All right! Five. Four. Three. Two . . ."

              One. He clicked the heel trigger on the metal frame behind us and we violently ejected out over the hull of the ship.

              "How did I let you talk me into this!" I exclaimed as we nearly dodged a flaming ship, gliding across the smoldering and sparkling hull of Rayden One.

              We flew across the hull traveling over 300 kph, about twice the speed Rayden One was falling, and dodging every single piece of shrapnel, and fissures, that had twisted the hull of Rayden One.

              Then the sound began to gradually return, and we were picking up speed, quickly. But it was still so silent, it gave us that chance to focus. "Collin! We have to dump our speed! See anything we can use?"

              There is only one way to dump speed in a gravity free fall, and that is to bounce off something else, essentially no brakes, just a crash.

              "Mick! We are clear below!"

              "Ready!"

              Having about five seconds before we passed our mark, and facing sure death, we had no choice but to try and use the surface of the hull. We turned ourselves around, clicked our shock absorbers on, and planted our feet.

              We hit, and when we hit, we hit hard. So hard we completely lost control of our trajectory and flew like rag dolls across the empty hangar bay, barely entering the hole caused by a stray crusader shell. We sped through the hangar so quickly before we could come to terms with our surroundings, and before we knew it we crashed into a glass pane.

              Five minutes earlier this wouldn't have been a problem, but Rayden One had dipped into Minerva's atmosphere, we were in the gravity well.

              The cord that he had attached to me launched me straight towards the pane. I spread my arms and caught both sides of the shattered pane, halting us in position. But I was losing my grip. Mickey could see the blood pouring from my palms while I tried desperately to hold him in place.

              "Collin."

              "Mick! You have to climb!"

              "I can't. You won't be able to hold me."

              "Bullshit! I've blocked for you how many times?"

              "Collin, you need to learn to let go!"

              "I can't, damn it! We're in this together! What did you just tell me? My life is no more valuable than yours, right?"

              "You can't always have what you want, brother; you will always have to choose between the two. I'm going to cut myself loose."

              "Like hell you are!"

              Just as Mickey was about to cut himself loose, we were pulled back into the hangar. I'm sure that we made quite a scene when we rocketed through the hangar. My people, we look out for one another—no matter what happens. I wiped my eyes and saw General Wright holding the unconscious body of Coach Cado. Never thought I'd ever be happy to see him again.

              "Coach!"

              But he didn't respond. Not a word, which I should have expected when I took another look at him; he was missing one third of his body. "He's out, Collin. We managed to stop the bleeding."

              "Is he all right? Will he live?"

              "It's doubtful. At least we can bury him on Rayden."

              "Where are you all going?" Mickey inquired.

              "To Rayden, brother, but first we must override the security doors so we can leave. What are the odds that we showed up just as you two were about to fall? Here!"

              Wright threw Mickey an ignition card and looked up at us with that same smile. That one, amazing how some people can keep so calm under absolute chaos. "The keys to my private shuttle!"

              "You're sure?"

              "We'll need a larger one! There are more of us behind the blast doors! I still have a favor to ask of you, Collin!"

              "Not a very good time!"

              "Ha! Soon then. I will see you both on Rayden! Good luck!"

              "Thank you, sir!"

              We made our way to Wright's personal shuttle. We entered the cockpit and Mickey released the door to the hangar. The bay doors began to open and we could finally see the surface. Our entire world was on fire, burning like a star, and crumbling into nothing.

              "All right, Collin, ETA to Rayden is about forty-five minutes with the half-light drive engaged."

              We unhooked and shot out of Rayden One, which was predicted to collide with the surface in one hour. Even 150 kilometers above the earth I still couldn't see any sign of life; it was all fire and smoke.

              Sure we were trained to fight in sport, but not in war. They broke the peace and no matter what we could have never been prepared for this. We never deserved this. Sure we were wild, we were sinners, gamblers, drug addicts, and criminals, but we choose to be that way. This was removing the choice altogether, it was a message that I had yet to discover.

(Klaxon wailing) "Thirty-five hundred meters till impact."

              "We've got incoming! Bogies at eleven and three o'clock high!"

I awoke an hour later
, bewildered at the fact I was still alive. I no longer had anything to tell the time, or to detail the extent of my injuries. My damned holoband was destroyed when we were flung out of the wreckage, and the smoke blocked out the sunlight when the crusader fleet set our home world aflame.

              Despite all of this, I knew it had been an hour, because
Rayden One
had fallen from its orbit, and had impaled itself into the city below. There was something about that moment. I never once gazed at that sight of that city in the sky falling to earth. My focus was diverted from the incredible spectacle of destruction by the man who brought that devastation upon us.

              "Greatness is measured by the lengths we go to achieve our desires," he said.