Tripple Chronicles 1: Eternity Rising (2 page)

The next
day, Camden stepped out of his transport, his shoes splashing in the water on
the side of the road.
 
His camel
colored pants covered the tops of his brown leather shoes as he stood upright
and straightened his soft-rimmed hat.
 
He walked toward a small café on the outskirts of the city that served
coffee and eggs, while drops of water chased his heels with each step.
 
It was a chilly day and Camden felt the
icy rain penetrate his coat. He looked skyward to appreciate the dim ambiance
of the cloud cover.
 
Inside the
café, Colonel Ganesh sat at a table for two by one of the large windows facing
the sidewalk.
 
When he saw Camden
approaching, he took a quick sip of his coffee and stood up to greet him.
 
Camden shook his wet hat and was too
preoccupied with handing his coat to the host to notice, but when he was
situated, he saw Ganesh. His large, commanding presence was difficult to miss.
Camden strode over to greet him. They shook hands and sat down together.
 
Camden glanced out the window to look
at the rainfall again and Ganesh scanned the café quickly with his eyes to
check for any possible eavesdroppers.
 

“Hell of a
morning, isn’t it,” started Ganesh.
 
Camden gave a short chuckle.
                          

“Good
morning to you, too.
 
So what’s
this I hear about a promotion?”
 

“Oh, that,”
said Ganesh, suddenly looking modest.
 
“I didn’t realize word traveled so fast, but I’m glad it did because my
promotion is the reason I asked to meet this morning.”
 

“Oh, and I
thought you just enjoyed my company,” Camden replied.
 
Ganesh smiled over the lip of his coffee cup before he
sipped again.
 
He knew Camden had
seen the government’s news briefing on the latest and greatest in robotic
technology.
 
There was a clip of
Colonel Ganesh ceremoniously accepting his promotion.
 
Of course, briefings like that were just for show. The
public was not informed of what really went on behind the closed doors of the
government buildings, but it helped to keep their curiosity at bay.

A sleepy
looking young man in an apron took notice of Camden and walked over to take his
coffee order.
 
They both ordered
boiled eggs and fresh bread.
 
Ganesh also asked for seasonal berries.

“So tell me
about the new job and what it has to do with us being on the outside of town on
a morning like this,” Camden started again.
 

“Well,”
replied Ganesh “I have recently been asked to help oversee the government’s
robotics for scientific development and weaponry unit.”
 
He subconsciously scanned the faces of
the café’s other clientele again.
 
This time Camden noticed.

“Ahh,”
Camden sighed, “Am I to assume the obvious? That this meeting is not in your
appointment book?”

“Hmph. Let’s
not worry about that now. You should have asked me why I was chosen for this
new position and why I left my quiet desk job to take it.”
 

“Ok, then.
Why?”

Ganesh
pursed his lips for a second.

“Because
General Pike assigned Major Mace Magner as unit leader, that sorry, arrogant
son of a…”

Camden
interrupted.
 

“Who?”

Ganesh
remembered to breathe.
 

“Mace
Magner.
 
Not a soldier from any of
my training classes, although he joined around the same time I was working with
the new recruits.”

Camden
nodded and stirred sugar in the coffee that had just arrived.

“Go on.”

“Mace is a
heartless one,” Ganesh continued. “Thinks only of war and doesn’t see a need
for his unit to do anything, outside of building and perfecting master weapons.
Of course, General Pike will make the final decisions on what the unit spends
its time and money on, but the General trusts him completely.” His brow
furrowed and he added, “Could be related, those two.”
 

Camden shook
his head as Ganesh continued.

“The robotic
technology inside this unit has the potential for unprecedented medical and
scientific breakthroughs.”

Camden’s
eyebrows lifted.
 

“We must be
getting close to why I am here.”
 
He shifted a little in his seat and was suddenly more interested in
Ganesh’s pitch and continued.
 

“What is the
great need for master weaponry at this time, anyway?
 
We haven’t been at war in twenty years.”
 

“Yes, true,”
Ganesh
replied, “But, there have been recent
indications that our Tyrinian friends from the south are planning to engage us
again in the near future.
 
Most
likely within a year’s time.
 
Don’t
like the situation they are in due to their past defeat. After all these years,
they still can’t accept what’s coming. Want to try to stop the takeover
again.
 
And, word around the unit
is that they will actually try to move in on our territory. We do have the
richer landscape.” He paused for a moment. “I guess I would want it, too, if I
was living down there, so you can’t really
blame’em
for that. Not to mention how difficult we make trade for them.”

“I suppose,”
said Camden, wrinkling his brow in thought and continued. “Tell me more about
this technology.”

“Got your
attention, did I?” laughed Ganesh, just as their breakfast arrived at the
table. “Let’s eat first, and then I will tell you anything you want to
know.”
 

“Of course,”
said Camden politely.
 
“I have a
transport waiting for me just outside if you would prefer,” he hesitated and
looked around at the quickly filling café, “a more private conference.”

“Yes, a
meeting in the sky,” said Ganesh.
 
“I was hoping you would offer.
 
Most of us don’t have drivers in our employ, or transports with
armchairs in the passenger chambers.”

“It’s the
least I can do,” Camden replied with a smug grin.

The two men
kept the small talk going while they ate.
 
Camden tried to eat slowly to keep pace with Ganesh, even though he felt
like rushing through his breakfast so he could hear more about the government’s
technological development. Camden was practiced at being polite and restrained
his enthusiasm.
 
Not that he didn’t
enjoy spending time with Ganesh, the two had been friends for ages and it was
always enjoyable when they had a chance to just simply sit and catch up.
 

The two had
first met twenty-one years ago, before the second war between the two major
civilizations on the planet, Daxia and Tyrine. It was dubbed the ‘War for
Peace’, though it proved to be the start of a Tyrinian oppression that prompted
the current idea for vengeance and uprising against Daxia. As Camden chewed on
his bread, he remembered the start of their friendship. Ganesh had just been recruited
for his first special assignment team working with groundbreaking flight
technologies. The position was a big opportunity for him to prove his worth in
the military as a special operations soldier. His job was to deliver ‘smart
missiles’ to areas of high resistance, covertly and precisely.
 
The technology associated with the task
was advanced, even by present day standards.

Camden had
been recruited to the project by the government for his brilliance in
physics.
 
Back
then,
he frequently accepted government consulting positions because it was a way for
him to know what was going on within the institution, allowing him to keep
ahead of their technologies.
 
It
was important to Camden to have full understanding of the world he lived in and
where his species, as a whole, was heading.
 
Not to mention, he was compensated very generously.
 
For this particular assignment, he had
acted in an advisory capacity to the design and engineering teams for the
flight crafts and the weaponry units.
 
He made sure that the products from both teams fit together to create a
streamlined and nearly soundless flight, while having the ability to drop
weapons with pinpoint accuracy.
 
He
also worked with the soldiers assigned to the mission, explaining the physical
limits of the technology, so that the pilots could extract the most from the
sophisticated machines they were flying.
 
Ganesh was an eager student.
 
Clearly excited about his first important mission, he was taken with
Professor Camden Riles almost immediately.
 
Though Ganesh was five years older, Camden had already
established himself in his field.
 
There he was, at twenty-eight years old, entirely comfortable overseeing
a large-scale government operation, and no one ever paid him any disrespect or
created ill will over it. Ganesh on the other hand considered himself just
average, even though he was much more.
 
His good nature, physical strength, and solid work ethic set him above
his teammates, though he was too modest to realize it, even to the present day.
He had
a
immense capacity for learning as well, which,
combined with his other attributes, was why he was singled out for this
mission.
 

Camden
enjoyed working with Ganesh because he seemed to hang onto his every word and
frequently asked him thought provoking questions. About a month into the
assignment, Ganesh and Camden could often be found having conversations on
their
down time and even after hours over locally brewed
pale ales.
 
Throughout the years,
they kept in touch, though their meetings were sometimes infrequent. They
relied on each other and there was a solid trust between them.
 
They sometimes called on each other for
professional help and advice since the fields of physics and the government
often overlapped.

This overlap
was the reason Ganesh called on Camden today. Not only for his input, but also
for his help with an unofficial mission that Ganesh had assigned himself. He
not only needed Camden on his team, but also his best friend and scientific
ally, Lee Tripple, whom Ganesh called ‘The Recluse’.
 
Although Camden always spoke of Lee with the utmost
admiration, Ganesh found him weird and didn’t entirely trust him.
 
The few times they had met face to
face, something about Lee just didn’t sit well with him, and he prided himself
on being a pretty good judge of character.
 
He also had a hard time understanding Lee’s motives for
conducting certain experiments that he had heard about from Camden, like
attempting to clone cells from people who were dead. As far as he knew, Lee had
been unsuccessful, but appeared to be trying again and again… This seemed
downright creepy to Ganesh who believed that science at such a level was
unnatural and dead people should maybe just be left alone.

When Ganesh
and Camden finished eating, the rain was coming down in sheets and the wind had
picked up.
 
At the doorway of the
café, an employee offered to walk them out under a large rain shield.
 
They walked the ten steps to Camden’s
transport where Ari had the door automatically open for them to clamber
inside.
 
Ganesh wiped rain off of
his face with both hands and Camden pressed a button to ask Ari to circle the
outer edge of the city for a while.
 
Camden sat casually back in his plush chair, crossed one leg over the
other, opened a drawer on his side and pulled out a pad of paper and a
pen.
 
Sitting in the chair across
from Camden, Ganesh looked slightly less comfortable.
 
His composure was that of a guest in someone’s home. After a
brief moment of hesitation, Camden cleared his throat and repeated his earlier
notion.

“So, tell me
more about the government’s war technology and why you need me.”

Ganesh eyeballed his surroundings
again, purely out of habit and smiled to himself.

“Do you remember the project you worked on to develop
pressurized body suits for working in space?”

“Yes,” He
replied.

“And do you
also remember that pliable organic biomer metal? The stuff we brought back from
the Myris mining missions that you said could be made to grow?” Ganesh asked.

“Again,
yes,” Camden said. “It could allow humans to inhabit space by “growing” their
own pressurized armor to fit their bodies,” Camden laughed out loud.
 
“Of course, that was just a
theory.
 
The catalyst needed to
achieve that kind of accelerated growth would have be an exact complementary
composition to the biomer and occur in nature. Not to mention it would have to
divide as quickly as a virus.” How could he ever forget that outlandish
idea.
He won his first major GSS award for that one eleven
years ago.
 
The monetary prize had
been large enough to set him and his wife Rosa up for years…he remembered for a
moment Rosa’s face when he told her about it. How happy they were choosing
their new, larger home afterward where they began to start planning their
family!
 
Then, without warning, his
mind wandered into the upsetting memories that he worked so hard to block.