Dedication (The Medicean Stars Saga Book 1) (7 page)

She gives him a wink and starts to head off into the crowd. Jon glances at his watch, intending to make some complaint about the arrangement. However, before he can he can he finds himself on the ground with the sound of gunshots ringing in his head. His advisor is pinning him to the ground, the smirk gone from her face, as they hear an amplified voice.

“Everyone on the ground immediately,” the voice booms. “Anyone in noncompliance will be shot summarily for resisting arrest.”

The hall is stunned into silence. No one resists or even manages a coherent thought as they are rounded up, hands bound, and herded to one side of the room. Once they are all congregated, they are told to sit, as guards are assigned to watch them. The remainder of the military force spreads out through the hall, flipping over tables and knocking aside displays in their search for something. The academics huddle together as they watch their booths and research be turned into a slowly growing pile of scrap paper and discarded posters.

Once the hall has been completely dismantled, the officer seemingly in charge approaches the huddled mass of academics. He chooses to address them without artificial amplification, but his voice can still be heard clearly by all in the deathly quiet room.

“You are all to surrender your identification and remain here until instructed otherwise. You are not to talk.”

He charges a junior officer with ensuring these tasks are executed before disappearing into the rest of the hotel with the majority of his soldiers.

Jon can barely think, his mind churning in circles but only managing to process the obvious. Their stuffy conference is being held by the government for something, there are guns pointed at him and Lilianne. His mind loops, blinded by the strangeness of the situation, and he moves a little nearer to her, drawing comfort from her closeness.

Docilely, he hands his identification to the soldier who comes for it, and then leans back against the wall.

“Jon Denhart, I see. And…” the soldier says, taking and scanning first Jon’s identification and then his advisor’s, “Ms. Lilianne Esmali. You will be notified if charges are brought against you. In the meantime, remain here.”

The soldier moves on to the next knot of huddled academics and repeats the process. Time passes, the artificial light overhead does not change, but he knows it is clearly well into the afternoon before their identifications are returned, because his stomach is growling with hunger. No food or water arrives, and no one is brave enough to ask for it. More time passes, seemingly an equally long eternity as the duration during which their IDs were gone, and then this period is ended by a change in the soldiers who are guarding them. Eventually, after what must be close to twelve hours since the conference was interrupted, exhaustion, hunger, and dehydration begin to take their toll on the huddled academics. Slowly, one by one, Jon watches his distinguished colleagues fall asleep where they lie, on the carpet or propped against the wall. He manages to last another couple of hours before he too falls asleep, his head resting atop his advisor’s dark curls as her head rests on his shoulder. The shackles on their wrists and the shackles separating them socially forgotten in their shared state of human exhaustion.

Western Mountains

Abandoned Military Base

Deep underground, where it is damp and confining, and the walls seem to inch closer when you look away, Gavitte feels like there is one thing exploding with enough energy that it should bring down the whole mountain. He is sitting in a sterile and sequestered conference room, its walls painted off-white, the display boards smudged with partially removed tape and poorly erased drawings. The florescent lights glare unremittingly down upon the table, but Gavitte does not care. He is focused directly across the table at Angelina. He had started the meeting only stealing momentary glances in her direction, but as the hours wore by, he slowly lost focus, and now his mind has followed its own path away from the discussion in the room.

He feels that every minute they spend in the same room, the air between them becomes more and more heated. His heart races and palms grow sweaty. Insisting that he is not deluding himself, he concludes that he can’t just be making this all up in his head. Sure she has been aloof most of the time they have been in the base. But there was that moment in the truck on the way up from the train station, the note in the book she gave him for the trip out here, and, of course, there was the mysterious note he received before he had even met her. He can’t be imagining it all, she must be feeling something too. How could she not? The way she kissed him in the janitor’s closet at the train station was real, not just a ploy to keep him playing along, right? His entire world has been thrown upside down because of her, and not just because he has lost his job and taken up with the Resistance. But then again, what if this is all just in his head? She doesn’t even know him, more importantly he doesn’t even know her; who really are these people and what do they want with him?

That thought sobers him enough to let his mind drift partially back, bringing the rest of the room into focus, and Gavitte finds himself partway through a discussion of how to move a potential popular revolt forward. The general who seems to run the installation is standing at the head of the table in front of the screen, leaning heavily on the table. His face is somewhat familiar, Gavitte has seen it somewhere before. He mulls through his experiences of the past few years until he stumbles upon it. This man is supposed to be dead. Gavitte had attended a memorial service in the Senate where he’d sat through hours of self-aggrandizing speeches supposedly commemorating this man and his command’s sacrifices at the Bay City University Riots. For the entire duration of the speeches, a portrait, with slightly less gray hair, had stood next to the podium with the same serious look as the man now standing before Gavitte, its image now a feature of Gavitte’s memory, and his name: General Lampard. If Gavitte’s recollection is correct, and this organization really is the Resistance the news is always going on about, the irony is most profound. Gavitte finds himself smiling at the corners of his mouth. Perhaps this might be a place where he can actually affect some change.

The general’s sleeves are pushed up, revealing well-muscled but hairy arms. Gavitte, not really finding the view appealing, lets his gaze wander across the rest of the meeting’s attendees. They are an assortment of former military, obvious by their upright posture and crisp fatigues, and civilians who vary from a rough, bearded former rancher to a wiry fellow whose eyes continually dart around the room and who is continually fidgeting with the pen in front of him. Gavitte’s gaze continues around the table until it settles on her once more. As if sensing his eyes, she flicks her hair and glances in his direction. It seems almost as if energy is arcing between them, even though they only met each other a few days before. Despite the fact that they had barely spent any time together until the car ride up the mountain earlier today, his heart is pounding in his ears loudly enough it should be interrupting the meeting. The inexplicable tension continues to grow, but he forces his thoughts back to the discussion at hand, focusing in time to catch the former rancher in midsentence.

“… I still don’t see why we don’t start him on the lecture series. Get him out to the people before the government can fabricate some sort of cover up.”

“If we do that, he’ll make it through three towns before a sniper teams take him out,” responds Angelina with a glance across the table to Gavitte. He is certain the glance, as brief as it is, says so much more about why she would be upset by that outcome than how it would frustrate their organization’s plans.

“But we can’t just let him disappear from the public’s imagination,” the rancher counters with an open palmed gesture.

“If I could perhaps say something,” interrupts Gavitte, his mind slowly connecting back to reality. “I may not know anything about planning a revolution, but I do know something about campaigns. And one thing we are going to need is a truck load of material to distribute before you put anyone out there to make a public appearance. It gives the people a chance to understand your platform before you try and sell it to them. It also is a good idea to send in some organizers first to make sure you have a core of supporters to help steer the crowd in your favor.”

“That is an idea,” the fidgeting man says, his voice flowing smoothly like oil and his eyes remaining shadowed despite the fluorescent glare in the room. “One that’s not too bad as well. Perhaps with that sort of start, we can build enough public support to hamper any assassination attempts.”

The calmness with which he suggests possible assassination sends a chill down Gavitte’s spine. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine the fidgeting man carrying out an attempt himself if Gavitte were to find himself at odds with him. Gavitte glances away from the man’s disturbingly dark eyes and finds himself drawn once more to Angelina. Her eyes are troubled, but the corner of her lips quirk up in an attempt at a smile when she notices him looking at her once more.

Turning to Gavitte, the general smiles slyly and gestures towards Angelina, who jumps a little in her seat as if she’d been daydreaming.

“I’ll leave it to Angelina to show you where your rooms are and to explain the routine of the base, Lampard says. “We’ll talk more about this once you get settled in. Welcome to the Resistance, David. We’re glad to have you on our side. My hope is that we will accomplish some great things working as a team. Now, I need to go yell at some mechanics for not keeping the civilian vehicles in good enough repair.” With that he stalks from the room, his stout frame displaying uncanny grace, moving like a coiled spring that is floating an inch above the floor.

The looming specter of what they are really involved in seems to have dampened the crackling energy between Gavitte and Angelina, or at least sent it to deeper, more subtle, channels. As Angelina shows him the way out, seeming troubled by something, their hands brush, causing goose bumps to cover Gavitte’s arms. But nothing more happens, as his tour of the base is practiced and brisk. Throughout the entire introduction process, they are both far too professional, hardly meeting each other’s glances. There is neither a chance for a private word nor an opportunity for another moment of “accidental” contact. Gavitte finds it hard to stay focused on the layout of the base, instead studying the layout of Angelina, imagining tracing patterns in her back and running a finger along the curves of her legs. He longs to express in some way the fire that burns within him, but she appears so calm and focused that there is no way she can be experiencing the same inferno. He hopes she feels something for him and that what he’d thought were subtle clues weren’t the product of his imagination.

Western Mountains

Government Work Camp

Many miles to the west, in the same mountains that are incubating Gavitte and Angelina’s fledgling passion, time has lost all meaning, except to those who keep the statistics and manage the logistics for the base. To them, it is interesting that—as a testament to the health of this latest batch of laborers—it took until the third day for them to start dying.

Out in the blazing sun of mid-morning, William continues to shovel away, lost in his mantra, until he realizes that the wheelbarrow he has been using is overflowing and that he is simply making a bigger pile on the ground. Surfacing partially from his trance-like state, he notices that the scrawny redhead who had been pushing the wheelbarrow is now lying on the ground with a small stream of foam coming from the corner of his mouth. His skin had burned to a shade of deep purple by the end of the second day, but now there are white splotches covering his face. William had never learned his name, yet he is lying dead, within arm’s reach.

William simply stands before the lifeless boy with a shovel half turned in his hand and a blank look on his face. Not even the crack of the whip by his cheek is enough to dislodge the fatigue-enhanced stupor.

“Git up boy, it ain’t break time yet,” yells the overseer to the redhead.

After kicking him in the ribs and cursing some more at the boy, the overseer unbuttons his holster, draws his firearm, and points it at the boy’s head.

“If you ain’t gonna work yur no good to me boy, you got one last chance to git up.”

When even this fails to draw a response, the overseer shoots the boy. Gore splatters everywhere, coating the overseer’s knee-high boots and William’s faded coveralls.

“That’s what ya git when ya refuse ta work.”

And with that the overseer returns to his lawn chair in the shade to report the discharge of a firearm and the subsequent need for another bullet. The necessary form has already been mostly filled out by his aide, who takes the proffered boots and begins polishing off the tiny pieces of brain and ginger hair.

The entire crew of teenagers stands dumbly, until the overseer glances up from his paperwork and moves his hand towards the pistol lying at the corner of his desk. Another wheelbarrow promptly arrives next to William, and he turns to fill it. The body and unattended wheelbarrow remain untouched as the sun beats down, seemingly intent upon turning them both to dust.

The remainder of the morning and a few hours of the afternoon pass before the overseer steps back out of his shade with new instructions.

“You all have been working out ’ere long enough, da boss says it’s time fir you to get inside and learn some of da fabrication. Besides we got another group coming tomorrow.”

They all form up into a ragged line, two by two, and are led up out of the pits towards a low building that is long enough to disappear into the heat haze. They enter through the nearest door and are greeted by the screeching and grinding of a bank of heavy manufacturing equipment churning away furiously. Once through the door, they are turned over to a new overseer, who is much like the last, except that this one is fatter, less sun burnt, and has better diction. Each worker is shown to a different station that is manned by a kid their age.

“Shift change in five minutes; you’d better learn your new tasks quick, or it’s back outside with you, and this time, the work won’t be nearly as easy,” their new overseer informs them, yelling to be heard over the ongoing manufacturing.

With that for introduction, William is thrust into the work of machining and manufacture, of what he has not yet grasped, but he can tell that it is something big, and that there are going to be a lot of them. Behind him, and through the opening and closing mouth of a hydraulic press, he can catch glimpses of large metal cubes, each easily twice as tall as him. The girl running the machine he is assigned to is busy bending strips of metal to form angle pieces. She is absorbed in her work, ignoring William standing behind her and only pausing to brush her loose hair out of her face and behind her ear.

As a new piece of metal is fed out of the machine, the screen to the right and above the station flashes with a picture, showing in three dimensions the angle to be applied to this piece. The girl takes the metal and inserts it into a vice at the base of the machine, manipulating a series of controls until the metal resembles the picture on the screen. Confirming on a readout, she takes the piece and passes it off to a conveyor belt on her left, while reaching for another and starting the process over. William watches this entire process four times before an air horn sounds somewhere in the long building, and the girl at the station finishes her last piece and disengages the machine.

“Good luck, be gentle with it at first or it will spit it back at you,” she says as she turns away from the station. Her eyes are exhausted and haunted, but she manages a faint smile as she walks past William. The air horn sounds again, and William steps up, grabbing his first piece from his right. Its weight drags on his arms, already tired from shoveling.