A Flight of Broken Wings, page 2
part #1 of The Aeriel Chronicles Series
“Oh yes,” replied the foreigner, eyes bright with what Ruban thought (with some surprise) was genuine interest. “It is a fantastic place!” He looked up abruptly, dark, foreign eyes roaming the grounds before settling suddenly on the exact spot where Ruban stood. Taken aback, the Hunter gazed back at the young man questioningly, only to realise a little too late that the latter wasn’t looking at him at all. Rather, that exotic gaze went right through him, as if looking upon a scene entirely different from the one they currently inhabited. “There used to be a statue there,” he murmured in that strange, melodious voice, eyes flashing preternaturally silver for a moment. Ruban’s own eyes snapped up, confused, Hunter instincts flaring uncomfortably at the sight. A trick of the light, he supposed, trying to get his racing heart back under control. “I used to climb onto it whenever I was bored. Really had the most marvellous view!” he explained with a grin, at the girl’s bewildered stare. “I wonder what happened to it...”
“Ruban!” A voice called, and Ruban was yanked out of his ruminations by the sight of his partner, Simani Vaz, waving at him frantically from across the lawn. Her husband Vikram was with her, carrying a pile of what appeared to be ancient scrolls and voluminous texts from some long-forgotten gothic era. Ruban suppressed a sigh. He loved the man like a brother, but Vikram’s obsession with archaeology and historical artefacts could try the sweetest of tempers. And nobody had ever accused Ruban of having a sweet temper.
He jogged over to the pair, offering Simani an apologetic smile as he closed the distance between them. “Sorry guys. I just...got caught up with something.” He spared a glance at the gathering of reporters who appeared to still be squabbling over who got first dibs on the foreigner and his juicy scoop.
“Yes, we noticed,” Vikram said, a mischievous smirk lighting up his scholarly face. Over the past year, Ruban’s nerd of a friend had somehow gotten it into his head that he and Casia would make a good match, and it seemed he wasn’t planning to let go of his newfound matchmaking hobby anytime soon. Well, two could play at that game.
“Wonder what your students are gonna say when they see that expression on your face, professor,” Ruban shot back with a snigger. Before Vikram could begin to react, he whipped his phone out to click a snapshot of the smirking man. Hunter training did have its advantages, after all. “I swear, you look like a cat that’s just ingested a whole tub of cream. There’s nothing going on between Casia and me, Vik. Stop building castles in the air.”
“Hey! Give that back to me!” Vikram lunged at Ruban, who ducked smoothly out of the way, extending a foot to trip his adversary, only for it to be stomped on rather aggressively by an infuriated Simani.
“Ouch!”
“That’s m’ wife! Atta girl!” Vikram gave her an encouraging thump on the back, only to be pinned with a glare potent enough to curdle milk.
“What in the world is wrong with the two of you? We’re inside the headquarters of the IAW. For the love of God, behave yourselves!” She spun around and marched into the building, leaving the two men to rush in after her.
“Hey! Hey! Come on, Sim. We were just kidding around, you know that!” Vikram jogged after his wife as she strode up the stairs to the third floor, which housed most of the offices of the Department of Defence. Simani foreswore elevators with the passion of a saint against sin.
“What’re you two doing here this early anyway?” Ruban asked, catching up with the pair easily after registering their arrival at the front desk. “The official ceremonies won’t start until late afternoon.”
“What do you mean?” asked his partner, confused. “I received a call saying the Senior Secretary wanted to see us. Didn’t you? I assumed that’s why you’re here.”
“Well yes,” agreed Ruban, slightly embarrassed. “I just...didn’t realise it was something official. I thought he just wanted to chat. You know how he is. But if you’re here too...”
“I guess it must be important.”
The Senior Secretary did have an unfortunate penchant for inappropriate chumminess at the oddest of times, giving rise to some rumours about bias in Ruban’s selection into the elite Bracken Academy, due to him being Subhas’s nephew. Of course, those had been laid to rest the day Ruban had first held a sifblade in his hand, his natural talent for Hunting apparent to even the most reluctant of observers.
But beneath that facade of overt exuberance, they both knew that Subhas Kinoh was an extraordinarily competent man, the reason why he currently occupied one of the highest positions in the Vandram Government. And if he had summoned two of his best Hunters to the IAW headquarters on Emancipation Day, of all times, something serious was about to happen, or already had.
“Well, I’ll be off to the library then,” Vikram said, as they finally reached the third floor landing. “Gotta return these books to the archives.” He held up his monstrous tomes, displaying them proudly for his companions to see. But if he’d expected them to recognize the volumes, he’d expected too much.
“What is that? Some sort of ancient gothic romance?” asked Ruban, squinting at a particularly large leather-bound volume with gold trimmings. “Looks eerie.”
“It’s a treatise on pre-Revolt architecture, you ass!” Fuming, Vikram tapped him atop the head with the aforementioned treatise. “Like this building for example,” he began, looking around with zeal in his eyes. “It’s been heavily restructured and modernized over the years, but the basics of the original design are still apparent in–”
“Was there ever a statue somewhere in here?” Ruban asked, curbing the flow of incomprehensible geekiness before it could begin. “Somebody told me today they remembered a statue on the grounds. A big one, I think it was. Big enough to climb onto.”
“Climb onto? Are you talking about the Statue of Zeifaa? Honestly Ruban! You do have the strangest ideas.”
“So there was a statue here?”
“Of course. The famous three-hundred foot Statue of Zeifaa, the tallest structure on the planet at the time of its construction. You know, Zeifaa as in the first Aeriel Queen of Vandram?” Vikram explained slowly, at his companions’ baffled expressions.
“The statue of an Aeriel? On IAW premises?!” Ruban growled, hackles rising almost unconsciously at the sacrilegious thought. “That’s impossible!”
“Well, it was destroyed over six hundred years ago. During the storming of the palace, most accounts suggest. So unless you saw a ghost, Ruban, I don’t know who could remember such a thing,” Vikram squinted at him. “Are you sure you’re not hearing things?”
“Oh, I probably misheard,” Ruban muttered as he spied Subhas’s assistant, a smartly dressed woman in her mid-fifties, approaching them from across the floor. “We should go now.”
“Yeah, see you Vik.” Simani gave her husband a quick peck on the cheek before making her way towards the Senior Secretary’s office, Ruban in tow.
Subhas Kinoh, the Senior Secretary of the Department of Defence, was a tall, well-built man in his mid-forties. He had the brown hair and sharp brown eyes that seemed to be a trademark feature of the Kinoh family, and a face that was all broad planes and sharp angles. A strong, rather arrogant jawline was softened by the numerous laugh lines around his eyes, which made him look rather more innocuous than his reputation warranted. As a field agent and active Aeriel Hunter, before accepting the more mundane position of a high-ranking bureaucrat, his record in killing and capturing Aeriels had been second only to Ruban’s own. Twenty years ago, he could easily have been mistaken for Ruban’s light-haired twin.
“Hello my dears!” Subhas greeted them with a broad grin, shaking Simani’s hand and patting his nephew heartily on the back, much to the latter’s consternation. “I hope I’m not disturbing you terribly on such a special day.”
“Are you kidding me?” Ruban threw himself into one of the chairs around Subhas’s gigantic mahogany desk. The chamber was luxurious in a subtle sort of way, expensive but sturdy furniture littered sparsely throughout the expansive space, the floor heavily carpeted in muted but tasteful colours. “I finished an entire bottle of aspirin in the first hour of last year’s ceremony. Can’t someone tell those brain-dead knuckleheads they’re babbling nonsense?”
“Ah, but every government needs a certain amount of nonsense to function smoothly, my boy.” Subhas smiled indulgently, “Perhaps you’ll understand that once you’re as old and grizzled as your poor uncle.”
“Oh please,” scoffed Ruban, glancing out the large window at the beautiful cityscape outside. Desk jobs certainly had their perks, boring though they tended to be. “We both know you could think circles around every one of those idiots if you wanted to. You should run for Prime Minister next time, uncle.”
Subhas laughed. “Well, that’d certainly be something, wouldn’t it? Although I must say, I’ve grown rather attached to this office. Which reminds me; there’s a reason I wanted to see you two today.”
“Yeah we figured.” Ruban glanced at Simani, who nodded grimly in agreement.
“Since you called the both of us together, we thought something might be the matter,” she said.
“Oh something’s the matter alright,” Subhas sighed, pushing his chair back to pull out two identical files from a locked drawer under his desk. “Lots of things are the matter. But first things first. Read these.” He handed the files to the Hunters.
Ruban looked down curiously at the thin brown folder in his hand. It was bare except for the word ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ stamped in large black letters across the top. Flipping it open, he started reading through the first document inside, also stamped ‘confidential’ in red ink across the margins.
“A new sifblade formula?” Simani asked, her eyes wide, having finished her perusal of the file before her partner. “How come we never heard anything about this?”
Ruban’s heart was hammering wildly in his breast. This was...revolutionary! If what he had just read in the file was true, it could mean a whole new dawn for humanity. A way to finally get rid of the Aeriel menace once and for all.
“It’s a highly confidential project,” said Subhas. “Has been until now, anyway. It was started almost two decades ago by the former Secretary of the Department of Defence. Back then none of us was sure that it would work, that it was even possible.”
“But it did work, didn’t it?” asked Simani with uncharacteristic excitement, waving the file in her hand. “It says here that by the end of last year, almost ninety-eight percent of the experiments were successful.”
“It did indeed,” Subhas smiled, steepling his fingers before him as he spoke, his elbows resting on his desk. “Better than any of us could have predicted. This formula could be...a game changer. It could herald a new era for humanity, an era free of the terror and constant strife we know now. Just the experimental prototypes of the reinforced sifblades have in multiple simulations, killed over five Aeriels at once. You don’t even need to stab them, really; the blade just needs to touch their skin and it sucks out every last drop of energy from their veins until they’re nothing more than a wrung-out carcass. If everything goes according to plan, we could maybe even make bullets out of the enhanced sif-ores. Hunting fatalities would go down dramatically; success rates of Hunts would sky-rocket. This country, hell, the whole world would be safer than it has ever been before!”
“What’s the problem then?” Ruban asked.
Subhas sighed. “We had kept this project a closely-guarded secret, obviously, for fear of an Aeriel retaliation against vulnerable civilian targets within the country if news of it got out. For the longest time, we were successful. However, in recent weeks it seems there has been a leak.”
“Where from? Have we identified the source?” asked Simani.
“Not with enough precision to be able to initiate proceedings against the perpetrator. So far, we have only determined with any certainty that the leak originated from the SifCo facility, the lab where the bulk of the experimentation is being conducted. Apparently someone within their ranks, perhaps one of the junior researchers, had been flouting protocol and talking about the project to outsiders, and the news somehow reached some people in high places within the Zainian Government.”
“Zainians? But what’s the problem then?” asked Ruban, frowning. “Isn’t Zaini our ally?”
“It is. Although they’re none too pleased that we’ve been keeping secrets from them. But that is not the main problem. The Zainian intelligence agencies have gotten wind of an Aeriel plot to steal the reinforced sifblade formula. And they were kind enough to let us know before such a thing could actually come to pass.”
“Steal it?” asked Simani, flabbergasted. “What could they possibly hope to do with the formula?”
“And how did they come to know about it anyway?” asked Ruban.
“Same way the Zainians did, I suppose,” Subhas said, his tone darkening. “The rumours caused by the leak must have reached them too. And that damned Zainian nobleman isn’t helping matters by babbling like an idiot to the press!”
“Zainian nobleman?” asked Ruban, surprised. Involuntarily, his eyes went to the window overlooking the vast grounds of the headquarters. “You mean that kid I saw downstairs chattering with Casia Washi and her coterie?”
“One and the same, yes. I’m told he’s called Ashwin. Ashwin Kwan. Some distant relation of the House of Kwan, I suppose. I never can keep track of these elaborate Zainian family trees.”
“What’s he got to do with any of this?” asked Simani. Apparently, she too had noticed the exotic young man caught in some bizarre tug-of-war between the reporters.
Subhas pressed two fingers to his forehead, massaging gently. “Apparently, some fool in Zaini’s Foreign Office thought it would be a good idea to entrust that idiot child with the job of informing us about the leak that their Intelligence Office had uncovered. I suppose those Royalist idiots thought it would be respectful to send an aristocrat, or some nonsense like that. You know Zainians! This is why I could never tolerate hereditary office. Too much faith in genetics, I always say.
“Anyway, long story short, Washi found him in some pub near the border before he ever made it to the capital, and now he’s talking his guts out to them like there’s no tomorrow. He’s already appeared on some interviews with her, talking vaguely about secret experiments, nefarious Aeriel plots and whatnot. I’ll bet a fortune Washi is using his pretty face to whet the audience’s appetite for the real deal. I hear they’re gonna air an exclusive interview with him tonight itself. An ‘Emancipation Day Special’, they’re calling it,” Subhas groaned, his fingers clenching into fists. “If this gets out in the media, everything we have worked for in the past two decades will have been for nothing! Not to mention the inevitable retaliatory terror strikes we’ll have to deal with once the Aeriels get a confirmation of their suspicions from the press. Destruction and mayhem, Ruban, that’s what we’re looking at if that idiot aristocrat talks to Washi tonight. The theft of the formula will be the least of our problems then.”
“What do you need us to do, sir?” asked Ruban, his jaw set and a look of determination in his eyes. His posture was reflected by his partner beside him.
Subhas smiled grimly. “Well, firstly, I would like to put you, Ruban, officially in charge of the investigation into the leak and how it happened. Also, you are to investigate if there is any truth to the Zainian intelligence reports of a possible theft of the formula. If you do find any proof of it, you are of course to do everything in your power to prevent it. And Simani,” his eyes flicked over to the other Hunter, “You will, as usual, be Ruban’s second-in-command on this mission. Should our suspicions be confirmed, you two will have at your disposal the full resources of the IAW and the country’s Hunter Corps to prevent any threats to national security, and to protect the formula as well.”
“But why us, sir?” asked Simani, leaning forward. “I mean I do appreciate the trust that the IAW is placing on us with this mission, but surely it would be easier to just let the police look into the leak? After all, it is a purely civilian affair. We will of course investigate the matter of the theft, if the Aeriels are indeed planning something that audacious.”
“That’s a good question my dear,” said Subhas, nodding approvingly. “I would have assigned that particular matter to the police, under ordinary circumstances. However, as I said, Washi has already stirred quite the public interest in this affair with her cryptic little interviews with the Zainian. Nobody really knows the full extent of the problem yet, or even the exact nature of it, thankfully; but it appears the public has taken quite the liking to our foreign guest, and consequently to everything he has to say.
“Social media is abuzz with talk of nefarious Aeriel conspiracies to take over the country, or some such. And don’t take this the wrong way, Ruban,” he said, turning to his nephew with a placating smile. “I would have assigned this case to you with or without Washi’s interference. But having you as the face of the investigation does help our cause quite a bit. It would certainly appease the public for the time being. Ever since your extraordinary exploits during the Parliament attacks became public knowledge, the nation has been pretty much in love with you. There’s no one whose involvement with this case would make the public feel safer or better protected than yourself. The Prime Minister himself has requested me to put you in charge of the entire investigation. Of course, you can always call on the police for their help if you should require it. This investigation is top priority now.”
“That’s alright,” said Ruban, too preoccupied with everything he had just learned to be able to spare much thought for his uncle’s complicated political manoeuvrings. “Whatever you think is best, sir. But what’ll we do about the Zainian? Surely, you don’t plan on allowing him to appear for the interview tonight?”
