Birthright: Battle for the Confederation- Turmoil (40 page)

Chapter 1

“Everyone wants to believe that they’re destined for
something special- that their life will have a grand meaning or purpose.  Who
grows up hoping to just exist, get old, and one day die?  One could ponder how
many people daydream of suddenly learning that they’re important, crucial, and
will be rescued from their ordinary existence to instead lead a life of
adventure.  But what if the realization that you were one of the lucky few who
were special came with a price- that the fate of billions, entire planets,
rested on your shoulders?  That you were the one who would have to rise up and
carry the responsibility?  Would you still want to be special, one of those
people who were uniquely placed in history to achieve great things, if only you
were up to the challenge?”

This is the question that would haunt Matt Falken one
day.

Matt was an ordinary kid, at least in his mind.  He
was a high school freshman in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan.  He would
describe most things in his life as ordinary, which to a high schooler really
meant ‘boring’.  His parents were normal; his mom ran the IT department of a
local bank, and his dad was the pilot and one of the salesmen for a small
company that distributed sporting goods to larger chain stores.  Matt’s social
status was pretty low in the pecking order at school- he wasn’t in any sports,
in the theater club, band, or anything that made him stand out.  He wasn’t even
sure what social class the kids at school would lump him in with, but he knew
for sure it wasn’t any of the popular ones.  He had only one real enemy at
school, an older boy named Logan who had for some unknown reason decided to
hate him and vowed to make his life unpleasant.

Much to his disappointment, he had no girlfriend.  He
had a best friend who was a girl, a neighbor named Jessie, but there were a few
roadblocks there that put the brakes on anything more with her.

He had no real job, since he didn’t have a car and
wasn’t old enough to work late anyway.  He did what his mom referred to as
‘subcontracting’ for her; she would often bring home computers or other
equipment for him to fix, upgrade, or configure.  He was good at it, and it had
the bonus of getting him parts to build his own PCs as well as a source of
video game and fast food money.

The most interesting time in his life had been when he
was little, barely in grade school.  His parents had wanted to move from the
big city where he’d been born, and one summer they had traveled all over the
country by minivan and plane in search of a new place to live.  At night, in
hotels or at the occasional waterpark or campground, they entertained him with
crazy bedtime stories about people from space, who fought a war with a race of
evil aliens called Vortilons.  The name was a joke between him and his dad the
pilot, since a vortilon was actually a little fin on an airplane.

Anyway, the Vortilons hated the space people, and
chased them all over the galaxy trying to blow them up.  Luckily for them, the
space people were smart and held the aliens off until Matt had gotten old
enough to not want to hear bedtime stories anymore.  He never knew how his
parents would have ended the story, but they were definitely good at making it
up.

So there he was, in high school, where his biggest
challenge in life was doing his homework, getting good grades, avoiding Logan
in school, searching for a cute girl to go on a date with, and watching movies
on weekends with Jessie, who had as little social status as he did.

It was stable, boring, and never seemed like it would
change.  Then, one day,
everything
changed.

Matt closed his locker to see Logan steamrolling down
the hall, eyes locked on him. 
What does he want now?
Matt thought.

Logan walked right up to him and stopped to look at
Matt, who had quickly closed his locker so Logan didn’t get any ideas about
messing with the stuff inside.

“Something in there you don’t want me to see?” asked
Logan.  “You have some lipstick or a skirt in there or something?”

There were several thousand things Matt would have liked
to say back, but all of them would have resulted in a shoulder block into his
locker from the bigger kid.  So instead, he backed down.  Like he always did.

“Nothing interesting,” he replied.

“You got that right,” said Logan as he turned to
leave.  He brushed against Matt just enough to upset his balance a little, a
welcome relief from the standard shove or verbal insult.

That part of his day over, Matt brightened just a bit
because he knew he wouldn’t run the risk of meeting Logan again until the end
of the day.

“Funny how that jag does that five feet from the big
poster about not bullying, huh?” asked a voice from behind him.  He recognized
it instantly, and smiled as he turned around.  Jessie was there, ready to meet
him for their trek to English.  She jerked her thumb towards the colorful
poster above the lockers reminding students that bullying was wrong.

“Maybe he’s illiterate
and
stupid,” Matt
replied.  “He has many talents.”

She smiled again and they turned to walk to class. 
Where Matt was taller and skinny with dark hair and brown eyes, Jessie was
short for her age and, at least in his eyes, everything else was just right. 
He liked her figure, her just-past-the-shoulder length sandy blond hair, and
gray/green eyes.  But what made her fun to hang out with was her sense of humor
and her attitude.  The problem was, they had been friends for so long that the
window for leveling up their friendship had probably passed before he realized
the clock was ticking.  They had each watched and given advice as the other had
gone out on dates, and had taken turns buying sodas and burgers for each other
when those dates didn’t end well.  Matt had another guy friend who told him
that he and Jessie were pretty much dating anyway, but there were just no
benefits to be had.  Every time Matt wondered what it would be like to try to
hold her hand, put his arm around her, or more, he started to panic at the
thought that it would end badly for them just like all their other combined
dates.  He didn’t want to be eating that consolation burger alone because he
and Jessie had gone down in flames on a date. 

The end of the day came soon enough, and Matt was
extra relieved since it was a Friday.  Two days of sleeping in, no school, no
greater purpose than to do some gaming and waste away his valuable teenage
years.

He stalled leaving his last class, knowing that Logan
would race out the front doors and be on his way home, no doubt to torture some
small animals or start a forest fire or something.  He knew this was the one
time of day when Jessie dealt with something similar.  There were some girls
she used to be friends with, and some time ago they had gone through some
massive falling-out.  They had un-friended each other online, deleted names
from phones, and taken down the pictures from walls and lockers.  She had told
Matt it was about some concert they were going to go to, but had been unusually
reluctant to give him more details.  She always told him everything, but on
that topic she didn’t want to go further, so he simply decided to classify
those girls as trolls and not think about them. 

The problem was that those girls had been pretty catty
with Jessie since then.  They’d tried to spread a few rumors, and were always
talking in hushed tones and pointing to her when she walked past, but Jessie’s
lack of overall school social status meant that nobody really cared what those
girls were selling.  Still, Matt knew it was hard for her, and it seemed like
that bunch of tools were one of the few things that could dampen Jessie’s
mood.  He hated them for that.

As the school was clearing out, Matt met Jessie in the
parking lot. 

“Still on for tonight?” Matt asked.

“Well, after I’m done with my busy schedule of lying
about finishing my homework and begging my parents for money, I’ll see if I can
still make it over.  I’m very important and in demand, you know.”

“I see.  So, seven o’clock?”

“You know it,” she said with a smile as she turned to
walk down the street in the opposite direction of Matt.  He turned as well to
make his own trip home.  He plugged his headphones into his cell phone, started
the music, and began the important process of tuning out the world around him. 

What Matt didn’t notice were the people closely but
covertly watching him from a distance.  There were two groups.  The first was a
car filled with four men, all in their early twenties.  The second was a team
of two men, also about the same age.  They, however, seemed to be following the
first group of men.  All were, in their own way, following Matt Falken.  Each
group, however, had their own reasons and plans for him.

Friday was pizza night at the Falken house.  It had
been a tradition for as long as he could remember, and his parents said it was
because since everybody was tired by the end of the week, unless Matt wanted to
cook them supper, his dad would just continue to pick up a pizza on his way
home from work.

They ate as they went through another tradition, a
quick recap of their days.

Dad had flown the company plane, an older twin engine
turboprop, to St. Louis to give a demo for some new soccer cleats they were
trying to sell, and mom had upgraded some of the servers in the bank.

“Oh, by the way, I decided to bring some of the older
parts back to the house for storage,” she began, which was tech support speak
for ‘though the company insists we inventory and store this stuff, nobody wants
it and even fewer people know what it does anyway’.  This meant new toys for
Matt.

Matt was up in an instant, the pizza on his plate
forgotten as he ran to the back hallway where their coats and everything else
was stored.  He came across a box and brought it back to the table.  Normally,
there would have been a few stern glances about making a mess while eating, but
his parents were both computer geeks as well, and they understood.

“I’m told those chips respond very well to
overclocking,” his mom said with a small grin.

She was right.  Matt looked at the model numbers on
the boxes, and knew he could take them up to 4 gigahertz on air cooling alone. 
There were two of them, and they were compatible with the boards he had in two
of his scavenged computers already.

“Awesome, mom!  Thanks!”

“Just no hacking from our own IP address,” said his
dad jokingly.  “Remember to use the neighbor’s wireless.”

After it was dark, Jessie finally arrived, though Matt
didn’t realize it at first because he was already tearing apart a computer to
swap out the parts his mom brought him.

“Hey, Jessie,” said his dad as he let the neighbor
girl in.  She and Matt had been friends for a long time, and him and Matt’s mom
hoped they remained so forever.  He hadn’t fully appreciated when he had been
young when his parents gave their opinions on his friends, and he had vowed to
try to keep his mouth shut about Matt’s friends when that time came, but he was
definitely glad she was around- she was a good kid and he tried his best to not
interfere in their relationship, in whatever form that happened to be.

“So, what’s on tap for tonight?” Matt’s dad asked. 
“He said something about downloading a movie…” Though his parents liked to give
Matt his space when asked, they were also smart enough to catch on to just
about anything that might get him into trouble.  Since they didn’t subscribe to
any services that allowed them to download movies, the choice of words had made
his father alert.

“Uh, not download,” she stated.  “We meant
rent
a movie.  Piracy is wrong.”

“Just remember, jail is worse than detention, and a
criminal record is forever.” He looked at the stairs.  “Matt,” he called up to
the second floor. “Jessie’s here.”  Matt didn’t respond, so his dad tried
again.  “I’m giving her a hundred dollars and the keys to the car.”

She laughed at that.  “If that doesn’t get his
attention, nothing will,” she said.

Still no response from Matt.  

“His mom brought home some computer parts,” his dad
explained, “so he’s probably tuned out the world while he works on that.”  He
gestured to the stairs.  “You know the way.  See you around, and don’t bring
law enforcement personnel to our house.”  He headed towards the kitchen,
leaving Jessie to make her way upstairs.

Matt’s door was slightly ajar, and Jessie opened it
quietly.  His room was a bit too dark- the ceiling light was off and he was
using the light from several lamps on his computer desk. 
This is too easy
,
she thought as she crept up on him.  He was focused on the screen in front of
him as some sort of test was running.  A computer case sat next to it, side
panel removed and fans making more noise than usual.

Still unnoticed, she snuck right up behind him, then grabbed
his shoulders and yelled “Boo!”

Matt jumped several feet straight up, shooting his
chair back into Jessie’s leg and causing her to step back as she reached down
to grab her smacked shin.