Future Winds (13 page)

***

Kaito, Leon, and Tyler made their way back to base. Aries had informed them that they had a new mission and that there would be a group of soldiers waiting for them at specific coordinates back near New Horizon.

“No rest for the wicked.” Kaito remarked as they ventured back.

After hours of walking, the carrier was within eyesight and it looked as though there were now two of them.

Thousands of crews worked away as the sun began to drip out of view from the vast sky. They began to set up their lights for a night of continued labor, though given the brightness of the colossal moon, they really didn’t
need
extra lighting.

Tyler was not envious of their work in the slightest. There were plenty of men and women, adults of his own age and older, but the amount of kids and teenagers that ran off stimpacks for hours upon hours, tricking their minds into accepting the work as a regularity, it was something sad that Tyler had never really ever seen before.

The three men and their two drones passed a mech in a pit below who held together steel beams so that a crew of teenagers could weld them into place. Tyler stopped, his rifle slung across his chest pointed to the ground as per custom of a non-combat zone, and watched them work for a moment.

His gaze was caught by a girl who couldn’t be any older than twelve. She dripped sweat in her filthy clothes and was being yelled at by a soldier who pointed a rifle into her belly.

“Since when do soldiers command civilians?” Kaito questioned, then continued, “I don’t know about you, but this is not what I expected when signing up for this.”

Leon walked on, not noticing the scuffle below or that the other two had stopped to observe it. He had been quiet the whole walk back, as if stuck deep within his own mind in thought.

The soldier struck the girl with the butt end of his rifle. She fell to the ground as he continued screeching above her, showing no sign of mercy towards her as his peers began to laugh, which served to ramp up his outburst of rage even further.

“What could have she possibly done wrong to deserve that kind of treatment?” Kaito asked Tyler.

“She is just a little girl, what could they expect her to possibly do right after twenty hours of working?” Tyler said inaudibly, with his eyes fixed below.

On the ground, the girl cupped her face that now bled. The man that struck her knelt down to whisper something in her ear, then he groped the young girl’s chest.

Tyler raised his weapon in the air and looked down the rail taking aim at the soldier just below the neck. No one noticed. The conflict was too far away for any of them to see himself or Kaito standing on the ledge above them. He flipped off his safety.

“What the hell are you doing?!” Kaito choked out.

Tyler ignored him. The honest truth was, he didn’t know. It was as if his soul had left his body and another resided in his flesh. His muscles moved without command from his brain and without hesitation he burst three shots into the soldier's face.

***

The two pilots walked alone down a corridor after leaving Vice Admiral Fox irate on the bridge of the ship.

“You know, you don’t have to be such a jerk to her,” Lanfen lectured in her broken English accent.

“How was I being a jerk to her?” Jason snickered. “She has been on some psycho power trip ever since the president put her in charge of Project Salvation.”

“Well, she does have a lot to deal with and your attitude doesn’t help things, especially when she was helping us brainstorm a game plan.”

“Still, no excuse to act like a total cunt.”

Lanfen shook her head as they continued walking. Reasoning with Jason was futile. His ego was in control of his actions and everything he did was justifiable in his eyes one way or another. It made for a dangerous partnership between herself and him as far as piloting two hellcats went. Her actions were calculated and precise, while his drastic and risky. But there was no denying the guy had a sixth sense in the pilot's seat. They had escaped some close calls together back on earth fighting in the Onyx Wars that lead up to the Project Salvation launch.

In their mid-twenties, they were perhaps the most experienced pilots in the entire fleet; or at least that is the line Jason would feed Lanfen on a regular basis.

The two entered an industrial elevator shaft made of a solid piece of sheet metal for its ground platform and a few thin steel beams for walls. Jason pounded one of the buttons with the base of his fist then crossed his arms.

“So, how do you want to handle this giant?” he asked as the elevator whined and moaned to life.

“I really do not know. It’s bigger than anything we have ever faced, but as long as we keep our distance, we should be okay I guess, right?”

“Suppose we just go in hot and hope our weapons are good enough,” he said with his eyes closed as the lights cast shadows across his face in a strobe like speed from the elevator descending to the ground floor.

The truth was Lanfen was terrified, not of the giant but rather failure. If they fired upon the giant and failed to kill it, they would surely piss it off. What's to stop it from rampaging towards the newly established colony?

The doors opened and the two exited down into the hangar where their hellcats were undergoing standard minute maintenance. Other than the chipped paint on Jason’s from a dangerously close scrape a few years back, both vessels were identical in construction and appearance. Three sets of wings, all various in size and position, were fitted on the small vessels. The six wings total were equipped with additional thrusters and boosters that could be repositioned in the air and accurately controlled to allow for superior directional control.

Both ships had similar weaponry: light lasers attached to their underbellies for dogfights, missile launchers fixed to the smallest of wings, rail guns on the larger ones, and anti-gravity grenade launchers rested in a line on the mid-sized wings that were refined to fire an impressive distance of up to two miles before impact. The small handheld grenades were one of the most devastating in the arsenal. The bomb bay, being able to harbor four nova rockets, contained some of the most advanced and expensive explosives known to man. Guided by a digital mapping to the entrance of the cave, one of these explosives had been fired off into the heart of the bug hive just a few hours earlier.

“Systems good?” Jason called out to one of the chief mechanics on deck as they approached their ships.

The mechanic looked up from his tablet where he scribbled a few notes for himself.
“Hmm? Oh yea, you guys ran them a little longer than recommended, pushing their cores to their limit but everything seems to check out.”

“Good, we are undocking.”

“Uhm, well you guys really should let the cores cool a little longer,” the mechanic suggest with unease.

“Not an option,” Jason said as he climbed up into his cockpit and fit his hololens helmet over his messy hair.

Lanfen scaled up into her vessel and squeezed her helmet over her long black hair. She strapped herself in then ran her fingers across a line of switches, flipping them into the on position

The light hum of the engines roared to life. Hellcats had some of the quietest engines man had ever conceived, especially impressive given just how powerful they were.

“Where are you guys going?” The head mechanic called up.

Bureaucracy dictated he had to record every little thing these, beyond expensive, aircrafts did.

“We are off to see a man about a horse,” Jason called down before sealing off his cockpit.

Lanfen closed the cockpit to her aircraft and engaged a row of switches within the cabin. A full and intricate holo display quickly appeared and surrounded her. A fully digital array of colors and lights lay out the complex navigation controls of her hellcat. She clenched two multidirectional levers in each hand. As the blast doors to New Horizons shuttle bay opened, Lanfen punched her thrusters forward, sending her aircrafts out of the hanger at high velocity, in search for a walking mountain.

***

The soldier that Tyler shot spewed blood quickly from the veins split out his open neck. His head was gone. Bits and pieces of brain and bone lay scattered on the ground in a pool of red.

His comrades, no longer laughing at the girl, were now panicked--pointing their weapons in all directions. No one but Kaito knew it was Tyler's doing; he still had his suppressor attached to his rifle and they were a good distance away.

He could go, slip away, run and no one would know of the atrocity he had just committed. All he would need to do is shut Kaito up. Hell, Kaito was a coward. He could even kill him if he really had to. Kaito looked on, frozen solid in a state of complete shock.

Tyler drifted the aim of his rifle onto another soldier who shakily scanned the dusky horizon for the assassin. With a blank slate of emotion, Tyler dropped the soldier with two shots to the chest that tore open his ribs and sprayed chunks of his insides onto a comrade who Tyler then fired upon next.

What am I doing?
Tyler thought in horror.

Only two soldiers were left of the five that laughed at, beat, and groped the girl. They now figured out which direction they were being assaulted from and began to return fire. Kaito’s bot, Libra, activated her energy shield, absorbing the incoming projectiles which would have certainly killed both Kaito and Tyler. Tyler’s heart felt as though it was pounding so hard it might blow out from his chest as he took his time aiming at the remaining two. He hit them in the limbs, severing them clean off as if toying with them, before ultimately ending their lives-- insuring his final two kills in his murder spree were as brutal and vicious as possible.

Libra disengaged the shield that ensured their safety and Tyler dropped his rifle in shock. Falling to his knees he looked down at the gore he had created: five bodies turned to chunks of meat like pigs to a slaughter.

At this point everyone in the nearby vicinity was now looking at him: workers, Kaito, Leon, and soldiers who approached to take him down.

They will end my life. I should end it first,
he thought. On the ground he outstretched his arm, reaching once more for his weapon, but felt the blunt impact of force to the back of his head.

Kaito had struck him so hard with the butt of his rifle, Tyler quickly fell forward and passed out.

***

Leon, now standing by Kaito, watched as soldiers placed Tyler in electronic handcuffs and dragged his unconscious body away. Aries drifted behind him, accompanying her now murderous master.

“What the hell happened?”

“Well,” Kaito paused, still in awe over the bloody scene, “He just snapped, I guess.”

Leon's eyes were cold and tired. Being unsure of when the last time he slept was, he unslung his backpack and withdrew two stimpacks. After handing one to Kaito and injecting himself with another, he rose to his feet.

Two men in the large pit below loaded the dead bodies of the fallen into a truck as their blood still dripped warm. As they drove off with the carcasses, they left behind the bits and pieces of unidentifiable body parts in their scattered pools of respective red blood.

The construction men and women were back to doing their grind and the little girl who was assaulted was pulled to her feet--cast back into her line of work as if nothing had ever even happened.

Kaito was stuck in a daze, staring at the blood on the ground. “Will they kill him?” he asked, saddened and already knowing the obvious answer to his question.

Leon had never thought Tyler was capable of such a brutal, heinous act of treason, but whatever was to happen next to his comrade was well out of his boundaries of control. He had no idea why Tyler did what he did, but the UIGN would, without question, execute him for his crimes.

Leon put a hand on Kaito's shoulder. “Come on, let's go,” he said, and the two men, with their single drone, quietly pressed on.

They ventured for another fifteen minutes, crossing through multiple labor forces where men and women of all ages shared the same miserable look of sadness as they labored away in the light of the setting sun. Some dug into the dirt with shovels and pickaxes, others lay and evened out liquid stone, while some welded steel pylons into the setting cement.

A handful of mechs joined in the labor, performing the tasks too great for man. Leon could see someone inside one of the mechs. The control panels for the machines were a hotbox of radiated heat and the driver poured sweat, looking as though he were about to melt away at any given minute.

They approached New Horizon where a short brutish man, an officer to his peers, flagged Leon and Kaito over. They had been waiting for them, surrounding a large vehicle that they had been collectively working on.

“I thought there were supposed to be three of you,” the man pointed out.

Our third got tied up. What’s the word?” Leon countered, sidestepping away from the awkward question.

“I am not sure of the particulars. It was relayed that whatever you guys are doing is highly confidential. We were just informed to ready up an armadillo for you. Apparently the details will be confirmed when you are aboard and biometrics confirms identity.”