Future Winds (11 page)

***

Aisha made her way to the vice admiral’s command chamber and was stopped at the door by two emotionless men in all grey armor.

AI drones
, Aisha thought.
I didn’t know these things still existed.

A nasty series of events caused public outcry years back that regulated that artificial intelligence drones were not to be constructed to resemble men or women.

Nonetheless, here they were standing in front of her. Their armor being all grey was a sign that they were in fact robotic as it was accustomed that their color reflect their personality: a clear slate of emotion.

“Good afternoon, Miss Sayegh,” they simultaneously greeted her in a flat, monotonous accent as they moved aside to allow her passage. 

How did they know my name?
she wondered.
Are they that advanced in biometrics scanning?

The hydraulic door they stood in front of opened and she was quick to scurry through to escape the uncomfortable situation of having to converse with them. They creeped her out more than facing a seven-foot locust. That she could deal with. She could slice those bugs in half one after another for days on end, but an emotionless robot that looked like a man and was smarter than a thousand men put together was just a pill she could not swallow, at least not today.

She was unsure if being in this room was any better than being out with those robots as she looked around and noticed she was beyond out of place.

The vice admiral was sitting on a control counter reaming out a woman below her who wore a headset and relayed what was being shouted to her to someone on the other end of the call.

The room was large, but had a very claustrophobic feel to its layout. Hundreds of thousands of buttons, data servers, and LED lights filled the walls. Screens with hundreds of tabs of spreadsheets took up every square inch of spare space and a handful of the ship’s top engineers plugged away at buttons, keyboards, and voice calls.

Vice Admiral Fox noticed Aisha at the entrance of the data room and jumped off from where she sat while chewing out the poor girl with the headset. She walked towards Aisha.

What can this be about?
Aisha thought, nervous of the conversation that was about to transpire. To say the vice admiral was intimidating was an understatement to say the least.

“When I request you come see me, I was informed you would not be well enough to be out for some time,” she said with a smile, extending her hand as a means of more personalized welcoming.

She was left handed. This meant Aisha had to use her prosthetic arm to abide by the means of greeting.

Aisha extended her hand and delicately shook the vice admiral’s in return. She was careful not to squeeze too tight and risk ripping Fox’s hand clean off. Aisha could actually
feel
the exchange of handshake within her fake arm.

Incredible,
she thought.

“How are you feeling? You look well.”

“I am okay,” Aisha said. “A little tired, but I am getting used to the change and excited to get back out to work.”

“I am sure you are,” Fox said with a smile. “Anyway, you are probably wondering why I asked to see you. I am a little busy at the moment but could use ten minutes away from all of this, so why don’t you come with me to the deck and we can chat.”

Aisha followed Fox across the data room and through a door that led to the ship’s deck. If the prior room felt claustrophobic this one would be considered agoraphobic in its layout. The room was massive and three fourths of the walls were solid glass as to see out ahead of the ship when piloting it. Only a small handful of controls resided in designated command stations throughout the room. A large, black table that looked to be constructed entirely of thick glass, lay at the heart of the room.

“Have you ever been on the deck of a vessel this size?” asked the vice admiral with her arms crossed behind her back.

Aisha shook her head. “No. It’s much bigger than I imagined.”

“It is and sometimes it doesn’t feel big enough,” she paused to glance around the large room. Its three enormous shatterproof windows allowed in so much natural light that the deck had a sense of warmth to it.

“I watched the tapes from the assault the other night,” she continued as her eyes drifted over Aisha’s face as if reading tiny letters that were printed across her skin. “Do you know how many of those locust you killed?”

Aisha felt she was being interrogated and quickly became very uncomfortable. She didn’t think this was going to be an ambush of admitted guilt.

“I applied a thermal filter to the feed and watched you execute twenty-three. We counted over a hundred total kills and you were directly responsible for taking out a quarter of them by yourself. Impressive.”

Okay, so maybe she isn’t grilling me
, Aisha thought perplexed.

“This planet has shown to be more dangerous than anticipated. While I can deal with the challenges at hand, and am ready to confront whatever may be in store, the greatest danger I feel is what we brought with us.”

“What we brought with us? I do not follow.”

“Even though all the civilians are separated into cell blocks on all of the carriers there still seems to be a unified uprising in the works. What little intel we have gathered shows a high percentage they will target higher ranking members of the military and assert themselves into the position of power then spark a full blown rebellion to overthrow the political seats within the UIGN.”

“But why would they do that?” Aisha questioned.

“It’s the ole saying, you give a mouse a cookie, he gets parched, and will always follow up by asking for a glass of milk. We gave these people a future, a way off earth in its hour of destruction, jobs and hope for a new life, but now they want more.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

The vice admiral hopped up onto one of the command tables. They were not intended to be sat upon, but this was her ship and she could do as she pleased. In doing so she came off to Aisha as being slightly more relaxed and welcoming. A feature Aisha did not know the vice admiral was capable of showing.

“I want you re-assigned as my personal detail. You won’t serve me in errands or other petty matters, simply defend myself and the ship’s bridge which is the main access point to all New Horizons data and greater communication systems.”

Aisha nodded her head. She knew this type of inquiry was more or less a command. She highly doubted refusal of this request was an option.

The door behind them opened and in walked one of the humanoid AI guards.

“Miss Fox, you have an incoming transmission from a recon squad led by Leon Fleisher.”

“Patch it through in here,” she said without breaking eye contact with Aisha.

The transparent glass that made up the walls came to life and before them stood Leon with Kaito to his left and Tyler to his right. It seemed so real, anyone that entered the room not knowing this was a call may very well be fooled into thinking the three men were physically present in the room.

“What’s the report Fleisher?” The vice admiral asked as she swayed her feet back and forth, while sitting up on the table.

“We found the hive,” Leon said with a scowl of

determination and differentiation. His beard did little to disguise a faint smirk. 

***

Tyler stood beside Leon and Kaito for minutes as Leon sold himself to the vice admiral. It was almost cruel the way she made him look so weak before his peers with her attitude and facial expressions. She had wanted them to go out and look for the insect hive. Perhaps she truly did hope they would not return from their journey.

The live video feed Aries projected in front of them was quite life-like, even in the dimming sun, where they rested just outside the entrance to the cavern they had mapped out.

The vice admiral hopped off the table, stood up straight, and folded her arms across her chest. “And you got eyes on them directly?” she asked.

“Yes,” Leon answered with confidence.

“Have your drone send me the rendered map. I will forward it to a pilot. You guys have ten minutes to get away from there.

The session ended.

“Well, that wasn’t as rewarding as I had hoped,” Kaito chimed in.

Leon scratched his beard and wiped the sweat from his brow. The look on his face seemed to resemble a similar conclusion, as if let down by the lack of honor they had scored.

“So, what now?” Tyler asked, attempting to shift the mood in a different direction. Any would suffice he figured, given the awkwardness of the situation.

“Well, when we send the data, she will forward the map to her pilot then he will upload it to a smart bomb that will use the information to guide the missile through the cave and into the heart of that city. In ten minutes it will be as if it never existed and then, I suppose, we move on as if
they
never existed.”

The three of them called pest control. The service was approved and an exterminator was in route. It was not until then that it all sank in for Tyler: the absolute truth that an entire race of beings was about to be erased from history as they knew it.

Part of Tyler wanted to feel guilty and yet, should he feel so terrible for exterminating a nest of cockroaches?

What about a clan of primates?
His conscious plea for reason.

Though these creatures looked to be bugs, they were clearly more advanced. Along their own evolutionary track, they would almost fit in a place somewhere between a chimp and a man.

“Come on. Let's get out of here,” Leon said walking ahead. “We should make it back by nightfall.”

***

Fox exited through the single door on New Horizon’s command deck, retreating back into the data center room where engineers still plugged away, buried in a sea of controls.

Unsure what to do, Aisha followed.

“Did those two recon pilots that I sent out last night return yet?” Fox barked.

“They are on their way back now,” a short man, wearing a virtual reality helmet, responded.

Aisha wondered what the man could be seeing inside the artificial world projected around his face. The workings of these ships were beyond intricate. Engineers practically had the technology to literally step inside of software, and so, she figured he was doing something of the sort.

“Good, reroute them to the following coordinates,” she paused while pulling up data on a touch screen nearby, “delta charlie fiver zero delta orion niner fiver.”

She swiped her fingers across the screen a few times and then double tapped the glass. She concluded her actions via entering a sequence of encrypted code onto the device.

“Forward them this and have them upload it into the head of a nova missile, green light for execute, status change omega lion.”

A whole lot of security jargon to fire a missile
, Aisha thought.

***

After the longest day of his life, Ness and crew were done with their dig site. They were the first of any crew to accomplish their day one task and the sun had not even yet begun to set. They were rewarded by calling it a done day early.

Assured that ‘half days’ would never be anything close to a regularity, it felt all the more sweet to be returning to the ship for a shower and some sleep.

Though they came back with a sense of triumph, they were all well past the line of exhausted. There was no cheering or laughing, just long blank stares as they shuffled back towards the ship in formation.

They returned that late afternoon with twenty-seven fewer a number then they set out with that morning. Heat strokes claimed all twenty-seven lives. While all but eight died to the hypothermic tragedy within minutes, the remaining initial survivors passed away shortly after being transported to a medical bay.

Ness did not know any of them, but he did watch one of the victims fall to the ground and begin seizing around in the dirt like a fish out of water. It was a girl about his age. She was blonde and, if not covered in dirt and filth from a day of digging, she would probably have been quite pretty.

Two days in a row now he had seen death.

He entered the ship. The dramatic difference in temperature of being indoor with the shade and out from the sun’s blistering oppressiveness was well beyond the means of refreshing.

They entered their living quarters. Block sixty-five was printed in large red letters above the doorway and as soon as they had entered, people made way to the showers in haste. A line quickly formed and while Ness would love nothing more than to cleanse himself of the thick layer of dirt and dust that caked his skin, at this moment he would much rather simply sit down. And so he did just that, walking over to his bed he climbed up into his bunk, fell back and stared off into the nothingness that was his future.

In that moment he didn’t care about the city they were building or just how ‘valuable’ and ‘necessary’ he was to the mission at hand. He didn’t give a shit about the families of tomorrow or their children, let alone their children’s children. All he wanted was to close his eyes and keep them closed for eternity.