Escape From Asylonia, page 7
part #1 of The New War Series
Every last resource, every human being, every animal, vegetable and mineral came under threat from a force stronger and more advanced than anyone could have prepared for. All in all, it rendered individual nations, and their pursuit of power, wealth and religious dominance, entirely ridiculous. None of it mattered. If the whole of their combined resources were stolen from an invading race, what would they themselves have left to squabble over? Like a large family of bickering siblings who bawled and brawled and over a shared pool of toys, yet were quick to come to another's aid at the threat of the neighborhood bully, Earth’s inhabitants ceased fighting among themselves in order to confront an outside threat.
An emergency meeting of the organization known as the United Nations had been called and, within forty eight hours, the foundation of The United Earth Force had been set in place. World leaders declared binding truces which were still upheld as David Attreus sat and thought about them. Armies, navies, and air forces from each nation no longer sought to destroy one another. Rather, they fought side-by-side against a mutual threat.
Secrets kept hidden in the laboratories of developed nations, of hitherto unthinkable, all-powerful weapons, of battle strategies and of defence plans ,were all shared freely.
Brutal dictators agreed to fight with champions of democracy. Fanatical insurgents cooperated openly with their once sworn enemies of the West. The currencies of old were discarded, replaced by a universal United Dollar, and the sharing of the human and technological power necessary to defend Planet Earth and defeat the Temüjin.
There was much more defending than defeating in the first half of what had come to be known as The Final War, the war to end all wars, the war beyond which lay either the promise of permanent peace and unity on Earth, or else no Earth at all.
Despite the entire combined power and intelligence of the UEF, they were greatly outmatched by the advanced technology and pure strength of the Temüjin.
Entire lands were bombed out of existence by the invading race, forcing mass evacuations of entire countries. Populations had spread into the welcoming arms of former enemies. In an effort to better understand each other, they had gone as far as to develop their own sub-languages such as Neo-Gaelic or Modern Latin, each with their own dialects and their own unique slang. All the while, the coarse, simple language of English had been adopted as the principal tongue of modern United Earth. Mandarin came a close second.
New machines had improved every process of the war effort. New, hybrid jetcar-spacecraft vehicles had been hurried into production to take the fight away from Earth and out into the wastelands of space. New approaches to military training had produced a new kind of warrior soldier like Noah Fallon, for whom the pursuit of peace was as much an internal battle as it was an intergalactic war.
X.
In the dying moments of darkness, as two shallow suns slipped through the cracks of an all-consuming, murky-grey cloud, David Attreus crouched low in the mangled cockpit of an F-19 Thunder Fighter. His T-shirt rode up his back, exposing pale, blubbery skin, soaked in sweat and tickled by the frayed ends of wires, drooping from damaged control points.
The Thunder Fighter's computer system had survived in decent condition. Her aesthetic was blemished by the shattered glass of a display screen, and by dark groves, festering with brown, spongy glue where buttons had once sat. Yet internally she was unscathed. Behind a white, plastic face mask, David smiled with pride at the almost indestructible engineering of the United Earth Force, wondering if he had been personally responsible for putting this particular machine together. He didn’t think so, but it was possible, anything was possible.
His teeth ground that smile into a twisted grimace as he brought a UEF Standard Issue Lazer Knife down against the computer, looking to get at the hard drive. It broke free and smacked him in the chest with its weight. David stumbled, threw his arms out before him and fell forward onto his hands and knees.
'Ah you...,' he winced.
The cool chill of daylight sauntered through a chink in the ship’s body, dancing on the back of his neck as he crawled outside, carrying with him the hard drive, and a disc labelled United Earth Force - Satellite Navigation Guide V.3.5.’
The wind gathered her strength and coiled around his legs. A whirlpool of grit and gravel chased his feet as he lifted himself into the Thunder Fighter cockpit, then rolled the ship into the barn. Leaving her beside the Pipersport and the ravaged carcass of a hijacked UEF Salvage Ship, he covered all three both with grubby, oily-smelling canvas sheets.
Outside, his feet scuffed along as he squatted to pluck a dying dandelion from the ground. With its mouldy brown leaves and a limp stalk, damp with lingering rain water, it hardly looked like the most appropriate offering, but it was all he could find and it would have to do. He returned to the garden, dropped the dead flower on the grave of the dead soldier, then walked, with flagging legs and slouched shoulders, back towards the house, through the dim-lit kitchen, and down creaking, wooden stairs, into the basement.
Closing his eyes to shield them from the assault of artificial light, David felt the room cave in around him. He could hear echoes of his mother, screaming in the silence. He could hear the washing machine clack and thump against the side of the tumble dryer. The dryer itself drummed a thunderous backbeat to an abhorrent chorus that his childhood mind always translated as the gunfire of war. Moving among his father's possessions - tables strewn with maps, and crates overflowing with military regalia - he remembered using this noise as the soundtrack to play gunfights in which he, General David Attreus, always triumphed. Over this imaginary gunfire, he could hear his mother moving around the basement, dressing him down with her orders to pack it in and bloody well quiet down, David. If he thought about it, he could even see her as she went about the seemingly everlasting chore of doing laundry, and he could see now what his younger mind had once failed to notice. He saw her caught in her own private war, against herself, and against the incessant addiction to keeping up appearances which plagues the terminally houseproud.
As David got older, the violent plays he would act out in the basement gave way to the quieter activity of serious study. His eyes absorbed the photographs of military aircrafts and jetcars lining the basement walls. His fingers put screwdrivers to engine parts and his mind familiarised itself with the complexities of computer terminals. Even still, even then, there was Sherri Attreus, her words of discouragement like klaxons over the bomb blasts of the tumble dryer.
'The Earth Force isn’t for you,' she would say. 'You're not cut out for that kind of thing David, not you. You won’t be any good at it, not in the slightest. Why don’t you cut out all this bloody stupid thinking and go get a nice, sensible job? Something you’re cut out for, something even you could manage.’
Her every put down caused one of two effects. When he was feeling particularly strong, proving her wrong proved to be his greatest motivator. He would show her just who was cut out for what. The rest of the time, which was most of the time, it only weakened his morale, and lay heavy on heart.
Yet despite whatever hurt she may have caused him, David Attreus held no resentment towards his mother. He thought that, in her own weird, not-particularly-loving kind of way, she loved him, that she only wanted what was best for him, and for her.
He hoped that what he interpreted as emotional pain, she intended as an attempt to protect him from the physical pain, injury or death that could well prove to be the consequence of enlisting in the United Earth Force. More than that, she was trying to protect herself, from having twice the worry and despair and fear. It was bad enough having her husband away at war, without having to contend with the ever-present threat of losing her son to the bullet, too.
He did not like it, but it made sense, and he refused to hold his mother's attitude against her, even when her already cruel putdowns became laced with pure hostility following the death of Alan Attreus, the United Earth Force’s celebrated Wing Commander, her husband, his father. Where he held onto the hope that he would be united with his mother through grief, she had only pushed him further away. David was never sure whether Sherri Attreus was unwilling, or simply incapable, of being there for him when his father died. He only knew that she had not been, and that, despite his best intentions, she had shunned his every effort to be there for her.
He would sit outside her bedroom door during the long hours of her isolation, her harrowed screams and torrents of tears drowning out the sound of his own gentle sobbing. Every now and again she would emerge, her eyes bleak and the grey wires of her hair crawling over the crevasses of her haggard face. She walked slowly, dead in all but the fragile beating of her heart, until her vacant eyes fell upon David, and the life which had been drained from her by her husband’s death was replenished by a repulsion for her own son. Once cruel barbs became spiteful, meant not to discourage and protect but to damage and destroy. She yelled, she screamed, she blamed David for the death of his father, never offering any reason why, but adamant all the same in her accusations, as though David's mere existence were reason enough to lay the blame at his feet. Then she would retire again, and hours of isolation would become days.
Unwavering, David refused to admit he had been hurt, and felt incapable of retaliating with anything more than persistent concern. Nor could his grief-stricken mind comprehend the idea that anything could be wrong beyond the natural process of grief.
There were times when he would wake from a troubled sleep to find she had slipped past him and shuffled out of the house. He would find her stood by the garden gate, looking out into the marshes, or moving around in an endless circle like an emotionless, walking corpse. Drained of soul, her heart seemed to beat only because it lacked the sense to give up. David would dash outside, press his hands into her shoulders, and guide the zombie that had once been his mother back to her bed.
People came by. The curious said they had neither seen nor heard from either of them for days, and asked if everything was alright. The concerned told him they knew what a terrible shock it must have been, when really, David felt they knew nothing of the sort. There were those who brought dishes of food which were always received with a thank you, and others still who offered to help around the house, always refused with the same level of politeness. To all of them, David was truly his mother’s son. He kept up appearances,and convinced them everything was fine, even after his mother had slipped out of the house and, instead of stopping at the garden gate as usual, had moved through it and out of sight.
He had told them, and himself, that she would be OK, that the whole thing had just broken her spirit, and that she had gone away simply to get a break, to gather herself together. David would go out into the marshes, expecting to find his mother alive, if not particularly well, and to bring her home. He found it better than facing the truth.
XI.
An old map hung against a damp-infested basement wall. The wrinkles of its weary face spoke of an area within a fifty mile radius of the Attreus home. Strokes of permanent marker were slashed across the areas he had already visited in search of his mother.
A stack of storage shelves, cluttered with weapons and instruments, taken either from the aftermath of battles, or from his father's work shed, ran from corner to corner. Discarded food packets and empty soda cans littered the concrete floor, rattling against David’s feet as he moved towards the mass of Temüjin body parts.
The brown, leathery armour squelched as he peeled it slowly from the creature’s flesh. The pockets held both a retractable whip and a smooth, flat computer device the size and shape of a well-worn pebble. Laying the former aside, he ran his hands along the latter, tracing the protruding buttons along its otherwise smooth edges, and turning it in his palms to view it from all angles. Fascinated by a device unlike anything he had seen before, David reluctantly placed it back on the table and set to work, bundling the sticky Temüjin limbs into the chest freezer. His forehead glistening with sweat, his every breath scraping against a throbbing chest, David placed a heavy crate of old books on top of the closed freezer - just in case - then grabbed both the pebble-like computer and the F-19 hard drive, and started towards the kitchen.
Fatigue filled his bones, his body begged for respite. Ignoring its plea, David set about making coffee. The hot, black liquid sloshed around in the pot, the rising steam carrying a strong aroma to his nostrils as he sloped up the stairs and into his room. There, he kicked his stereo system into action, cranked up the volume, and got to work against a backdrop of galloping basslines and shrieking guitars.
Filled with contentment and caffeine, the roaring thunder of the music flowing through his blood, David dashed about the room, pulling together cables and connections, amplifiers and adapters, keypads, joysticks, busted yokes, batteries, power leads, circuit boards and circuit chips, fans, tools and half-broken gadgets, until the floor heaved under an orgy of electronics.
He shifted parts about and left others as they were. He slotted and unknotted, screwed and unscrewed. He booted and rebooted, uploaded and downloaded. He rocked to the frantic beat of his stereo, swallowing cups of coffee in enormous gulps, his body throbbing with the joy of the work.
He finished by placing the F-19 hard drive, and the Temüjin pebble-computer, on his desk, attaching them at one end to a bank of monitors, and at the other to four burly computer terminals.
The main machine fired to life. David rubbed his hands together and thrust them eagerly into the metallic keyboard. His fingers rattled against the keys like flying pistol bullets as he wrestled his way into the core databases of both computers.
Further hours disintegrated around him. The screens flashed with maps, facts and endless, rolling streams of statistics, with plans and policies and procedures, and with strategies and coordinates and reports. David Attreus drank it all in greedily, absorbing all the things that the high level of security at his day job had prevented him from seeing. Finally, his energy took a dip that no amount of caffeine could revive him from.
As if in sympathy, the computers slowed to a crawl in revealing their few remaining files, their secrets causing his heart to bomb into the lagoon of coffee in his belly.
The UEF had been defeated for control of the abandoned planet of Bathorai. Situated almost equidistant between Earth and the Temüjin's central battle station, it gave the enemy the perfect place to refuel and recharge before soldiering on with their next attack.
Just like the bad old days, Earth had been outmatched and outnumbered by Temüjin. The Battle of Bathorai saw almost a thousand men slain in defeat, and countless ships obliterated.
Further reports suggested that the Temüjin were working on some advanced weapon which would shoot bullets the size of asteroids into the oceans of Earth, causing roaring tidal waves capable of drowning entire lands.
Then there was the news, most curious and worrying to David, that all communication with The New World of Asylonia had been severed. No radio signals reached the man-made planet and certainly none had returned. With an estimated two thousand humans - including a number of individuals vital to the war effort - all scattered among the multiracial population of approximately eight million Asylonians, it was critical that Earth made contact. Yet even when they had sent ships to investigate the problem, those ships had come up against an impregnable electric storm creating a force field around the planet.
Pinching his eyelids together with his thumb and forefinger, David yawned deeply and tried to summon up a conclusion that was buried at the back of his brain beneath the blinding assault of fatigue. He knew it was there, some blurred and fragmented idea that he knew, without knowing how he knew, would make perfect sense when stitched together by a mind less addled than his was now. His body collapsed under the weight of the world, his chin struck his chest and the nightmare resumed.
XII.
When David Attreus next awoke, scrunching up fists and rubbing the knuckles of his index fingers into sleepy eyes, it was from a vivid dream.
He had seen The New World of Asylonia. He had seen that impenetrable electric storm, and had seen himself making his way through it, using a daring maneuver he had first learned in the Jet Fighter 2: Battle of Atillia video game. He had seen himself landing on the surface, and finding General Noah Fallon, safe and well, yet hopelessly stranded.
In the cold light of his reality, with nightfall once again descending beyond his window, he started to draw together the blurred fragments of the half-formed thought that had seemed so vague and elusive just a few hours earlier.
The dream validated his suspicions. The General had to be on that planet. Just had to be. He could not, would not, have simply abandoned Earth, not on his own free will anyway. Nor could Noah Fallon have perished. If he had died on Earth, or at least to the knowledge of the United Earth Force, there would have been lavish ceremonies and tributes in his honour.. The death of the General would not have gone unnoticed.
Fallon could not have died in battle on some distant star either. He was far too strong, too cunning, too intelligent for that. There had been nothing the Temüjin could throw at him in The Final War that Fallon had not overcome, and even if something had happened, David was sure he would have read about it in the confidential UEF files he had spent most of his night rifling through. The most recent item he had found concerning Noah Fallon had been little more than an update on his pension arrangements.
No, for reasons David still could not figure out, Noah Fallon had to be stuck somewhere on Asylonia, and he, David, would find him. Somehow, someway, he would command a ship to The New World. He would penetrate the impenetrable, and he would rescue his hero.
David Attreus cracked his knuckles and got to work.
XIII.
