Dedication (The Medicean Stars Saga Book 1) (3 page)

The Capital

Congressional Chambers

The Tuesday afternoon lethargy is all gone, the peaceful routine has been shattered and the congress has come alive. Gavitte is grasping both sides of the podium, his knuckles turning white as he tries to dig his finger nails into the highly polished wood. Spittle flies from his lips as he speaks with a passion he’d thought had long since died within him.

“… we can’t keep just managing the problem we must find a way to fix it!”

The gathering before had been slow to respond, even Gavitte’s fiery words taking time to melt through the layers of ice they’ve cocooned themselves within. A senior member perhaps less distracted than the others turns languidly to the microphone before him and, overriding the feed from the podium, looks down his wrinkled nose at Gavitte’s outburst.

“Senator Gavitte you are out of order, stand down.”

“I will not stand by and let your bickering and power struggles leave this nation neglected until it collapses in on itself taking the world with it.” Gavitte shouts while striding out from behind the podium, having lost the benefit of its microphone.

“Senator, you will stand down or be removed from this chamber and face criminal charges.”

There is a pause, the breathing of the suddenly excited elite can be heard over the drone of air conditioners, and then something snaps within Gavitte. Last night’s strange encounter, the frustrating line of thought he’d pursed on his morning commute, and thirty years of frustration come crashing down, filling him with uncontrollable emotion. His face, which had been flushed with anger, goes pale. His breathing, which had been short and sharp, each breath sucked in quickly to help expel another word, deepens, allowing him to draw in a full lungful of air. Gavitte turns to the man addressing him from midway up the tiered seats and lets his rage and turmoil issue forth; it nearly knocks the assembly off their padded thrones.

“I will not stand down, you will!” Gavitte’s voice rises over the confused assembly. “I will not let these people be led blindly towards their own destruction with your assurances of safety. Your dynasties will end, I’ll see to it myself if it’s the last thing I do!”

“GUARDS! Arrest this man for treason!”

“This is not the end, people will hear my voice, this country will be free once more.” His last comment is cut off by the re-sealing of the chamber and the closing of the large oak doors that once stood for integrity. Unfortunately for the ruling bodies, the doors could not stop the state communication network, which broadcasts live all speeches given in this hall, from beaming this particularly indecorous moment to the few who had been watching, and waiting. If the communications network had only been more glamorous or required a bigger budget, it might have attracted enough graft and corruption to have ground to halt long ago. Unfortunately for the decorum of the Senate, this arm of the bureaucracy has been running remarkably smoothly while serving its intended purpose: providing the people a level of transparency into their government, if they only care to look.

“Well, now that that little nuisance is gone, I recommend we all adjourn for the day as it is almost one-thirty; everyone has a written copy of the report?” says the senator who had ejected Gavitte, while stretching back in his chair.

The assembled shuffle their papers, and magazines, together in a show of self-importance and head for the nearest exit, as if the fire alarm is ringing in their ears, instead of a condemnation of their perfect little world. Some wear expressions of worry, but most seem simply relieved that the outburst shortened their workday significantly. As they bunch at the exits, talk of possible earlier tee times and drinks at their private clubs fills the hall of power. Soon all the worried expressions have vanished to be replaced looks of gleeful anticipation and excitement reminiscent of a school yard on a snow day.

Outside, Gavitte is thrown into a waiting police van and shackled to the wall. The light is cut off as the doors slam, and the van speeds off, weaving its way through the idling traffic. Gavitte is still too stunned by his own outburst to really process what is going on around him.

His eyes are just beginning to get accustomed to the darkness, allowing the three fully armored marines to take shape before him. As their forms come into focus, it is obvious that the three assault rifles pointed directly at his chest all have their safeties off. Before Gavitte can worry too much that the bouncing of the van might make one of their fingers twitch on a trigger, the van is thrown to a halt, and the sound of automatic gunfire from outside assaults his senses.

The doors burst open, and the guards are turned into bloody pulp by concentrated fire from classic foreign assault rifles. Two bursts come from the glare and break the chains holding Gavitte to the wall. Stunned by the loud noise and light concentrated by the reflective walls of what remains of the police van, Gavitte lets his arms drop to his sides and stares stupidly into the opening, past the guards’ slumped bodies. Two forms step forward from the light. Gavitte can make out nothing more than silhouettes, even shading his eyes with his hand as his pupils are still struggling to adjust. It isn’t until the two forms drag him out onto the strangely empty street and down an old manhole that his thoughts begin to coalesce.

“Wha… who… why…?” Gavitte murmurs.

“Sir, this is no time for questions, we must keep moving,” one of the figures dressed in a dark outfit says. Gavitte’s tortured eyes can make out nothing more as darkness rushes in once more following the closing of the manhole above them. And with that he is dragged off down a seemingly endless tunnel, with water from last night’s storm sloshing around his ankles. The opaque, sludge-filled water hides numerous objects that threaten to trip him and send him sprawling into the muck.

After what seems like an eternity, yet is closer to a few minutes, his escorts throw themselves down a side passage. With all of them out of the main tunnel, the apparent leader speaks into a small shoulder-mounted microphone.

“All clear, proceed to stage two, over.”

With the last word, the tunnel through which they had come implodes, sending a wave of refuse-laden water and dust into Gavitte’s face, blinding him. The tears and dust streaming from his eyes rob what little sight he’d managed to regain as they stumbled down the tunnel.

After a brief pause dedicated to cursing and sputtering by all involved, the party moves out in the only direction left to them.

*

Above on the surface, the military is just beginning to arrive in an effort to control the situation. As transports and tanks roll through and over the cars deserted where they had sat in gridlock, a man in uniform with entirely too many medals on his chest steps from a helicopter.

At the instant he alights, he begins issuing orders.

“I want all the exits from those sewers in a three-mile radius guarded, and I want a team down there now.” Turning to an aide, he adds, “I want the entire schematics for this area, and I want to know the extent of the damage.”

People begin to scurry back and forth in order to carry out the demands, and the aide promptly returns with a small computer displaying the information requested.

“Colonel, it seems that the tunnel has collapsed for almost a mile in each direction.”

“Do we know if it was intentional yet?”

“It is hard to tell, there is a possibility that it was triggered by the explosives used on the van. Which means they are trapped in the rubble.”

“That would be appropriate justice, yet what about the side tunnels? They could have had some warning or may have done it intentionally and had time to duck out of the main tunnel.”

“Sir all the side tunnels in either direction for the length of the collapse are dead ends after only no more than a city block.”

“Then, we have them trapped. Get in there and bring me their corpses.”

Foothills of the Western Mountains

A University Campus

In a beautiful town with panoramic views far away from the haze of the city, with better weather than many vacation spots, and a night life that is the envy of a casino town sits a massive concrete building. Its towers rise up from the carefully manicured lawns of the campus that surrounds it, distracting from the scenery by their imposing gray bulk. The building stands for some as a testament to the triumph of knowledge in an otherwise uncaring world; but for others it is a prison, where rooms deep underground with no connection to the outside world sit under the unyielding glow of florescent lights, some of which surely haven’t been changed in the past decade as their flicker hints at an undying heart beating somewhere in the building. Fans move air, sighing through every hall, mixing the fresh smell of unwashed humans with the stale smells of ancient food lost in crevices, mountains of paper, and experiments long ago attempted and failed. The building rises from the ground indiscriminate of the existing topography. In places, its walls cut into the hillside like the prow of a ship through a swell, and in others, the ground drops away, revealing the multiple levels of basement, like bone and tendon exposed by a flesh-eating bacteria.

In this place, below where the plain concrete façade intersects the carefully landscaped grounds, there is a man sitting at a desk. When he entered the building several hours ago, he descended two flights of stairs to reach his office, but he could have just as easily approached from a different direction and entered the building one level below where he currently sits. However his relative position in space and time does not apply within the confines of his office; it sits outside the flow of space and time, remaining unchanged like a rock high up the bank of a river, only shifting when a clumsy traveler disturbs it with their foot or the river rises with flood water. His only proof that he is not the last person left alive is the occasional cough and click that comes echoing into his concrete-walled cube of an office as a door closes somewhere down the hall. He knows if he were to wander down that hall, eventually he’d reach a door that would lead him outside, where people are savoring the last of the sunny fall weather, but he lacks the time it would take to make the journey through the warren of halls. Like a casino, there is no change between night and day when on the inside. The assorted machinery continues to hum, the lights continue to buzz, and the stack of work to be done does not lessen. The man is somewhere in his twenties and looks like, at some point in the not-so-distant past, he had a life outside his current monastic cell. There is a fading tan visible on his arms, an athletic build to his body, and an upright posture proving that he hasn’t spent all his time as hunched as he is now.

To his left is a stack of papers, while to his right is another, shorter, stack with red marks on the sheets. Before him is a single paper, this one about half covered in red ink; he moves through the page, making tick marks with the mechanical movements of someone who has resigned himself to his fate and takes his only joy from the efficiency of the system he is in. Behind him there is more paper—this work is actually his. He should be doing it, but the “opportunity” before him has a more concrete deadline, and deadlines are the one element of normal space and time that manage to reach this place, so the “opportunity” is done first.

The door to his cell opens; another young man walks in, pushing a stack of books off a chair and flopping down, his tall, well-muscled and tanned limbs draping over the chair, seeming to spill onto the tottering piles around him. He grins at the man hunched over the desk, flashing blindingly white teeth and crinkling his eyes in a way that has melted more than a few maiden’s hearts.

“Dude, you have to get outside,” the man immediately starts in. “There is like a huge party thing going on in the quad.”

His charm and excitement seem to be absorbed into the thick walls surrounding them as the man behind the desk looks up and sighs.

“I've got too many papers to grade, see this stack, they need to be turned back tomorrow. And I haven't even started on my own assignments yet.”

“But come on Jon, there is one of the water slide things that you run at then slide down... and all the freshmen girls are out giving it a try,” the interloper insists.

Turning away from his papers, Jon finally meets his friend's eyes. “Ryan, you know I want to go with you, but I can't. I have way too much work right now. I don't get how you can go anyway, all this free time you seem to have, yet your research is further along than mine.”

“Simple dude: I don't sleep.” Ryan says shrugging his broad shoulders with a twinkle in his eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you can sleep when you're dead, and I ain't dead yet.”

With that and a final “Later dude,” he gets up and strolls back out into the hall, heading towards the building's exit and those freshmen girls and their wet t-shirts.

The Capital

Sewer Tunnels

Rushing along the tunnel in which they had found shelter, the team of rescuers and a stunned Gavitte are stopped short when they suddenly enter into a collecting chamber. Gavitte notices that, as a chamber for use as an escape passage, it lacks of two very important things: One, there is no manhole in its ceiling through which to access the surface world, and two, none of the pipes leading out—other than the one through which they just came—is actually large enough for a man to fit through. The smells of rotting plants, damp earth, and various acrid chemicals fill his nose as he looks back down the way they’d come.

The light from combat flashlights dances around the entire room, ensuring its security before turning back down the tunnel they had traveled through, their beams quickly swallowed by the swirling dust choking the air. With only his gun mounted light to guide him, the leader heads towards the far wall of the chamber and begins counting the pipes in a semi-irregular fashion before reaching his hand deep inside one and twisting something. He switches off his light and crouches, as if waiting.

Within moments there is a grinding noise, and the stale air is stirred as if by some passing spirit. The leader switches on his light once more and gestures towards the opening that has just appeared in the wall next to where he is crouching. It is time to move deeper into the earth, beneath the city.

Gavitte still has no clue who his rescuers are, but since they are not pointing their assault rifles at him, he figures they are a better bet than his company on the surface—that and his captors on the surface are dead. Gavitte ducks through the opening and follows the leader of his rescue party, hoping that this part of the journey can be accomplished in a slightly more upright position compared to the half crouch that had taken them this far.

As the door slowly grinds back into place behind them, a rat scurries out of a pipe near the floor and across the chamber, the sound of its nails scraping across the cold, hard, slime-coated floor, echoing back to Gavitte as he follows the leader’s bouncing flashlight.