World War 97 Part 1 Page 4

  She was letting me off easy. It wasn’t what I deserved, but Christina had a generous soul. It was what made her a great nurse and why I’d married her.

  “I got off lucky.” That was the pure truth. I hadn’t tried to sugarcoat anything in my debriefing. Despite their practiced neutral expressions, the interviewing officers’ disgust and distaste at my actions had been clear. At the hastily convened court martial, the judge had said he wanted to send me to the firing squad, but he had been persuaded to take into account the sudden loss of my brother, plus my mental condition due to a plane crash while on duty. He’d hammered down his gavel on the words “dishonorable discharge.” I had felt no relief at the pronouncement.

  “What would it feel like to stand in front of a firing squad?” I asked Christina. “In the last moments before you were shot.” I wasn’t sure how much she knew about what had happened; I hadn’t heard any mention of a deserting pilot in the news reports about the battle. The ACM seemed to be keeping my abhorrent involvement quiet, likely because I was the president’s brother.

  “Please don’t talk about stuff like that. Now, you have to get ready. Darius’s funeral is on today.”

  “I don’t want to go.” After the court martial, I had found the nearest bar. “How did I end up here back in my bed?”

  “Two mibs dropped you off. They said you’ll spend a night in jail the next time they find you passed out like that.”

  “Don’t worry, it won’t happen again.” Until tonight, I added. “Is there any way out of this funeral?” I didn’t need to say goodbye to an empty box.

  “The whole nation will be watching. His own brother has to be there.”

  “No one will notice through the waterfalls of fake tears.” They probably wouldn’t all be fake, but Darius’s worst enemy would be inconsolable with grief in front of the cameras. The hypocrisy of politics made me sick. How many would be crying for the real Darius as opposed to mourning a president, a symbol, a figurehead? Still, Christina was right—I had to go. “Okay, I’ll get ready.”

  I walked into the bathroom, turned on the shower, then ducked my head back out to make sure Christina had left the room. She had. I closed the toilet lid, stood on the seat, lifted a roof tile, and moved it aside. I reached my hand in until I gripped the handle of a bottle. I pulled out the Invernes Red. My mouth watered at the sight of it, but I put it back. The smell of whiskey would give me away too easily. I fumbled about in the roof cavity a bit more until I found a bottle of Bearded Pirate’s White Rum. It was cheap stuff, but I would have drunk hydraulic fluid if it would take the edge off my hangover.

  I took a slug. It ripped down my throat and bedded down in my stomach like liquid barbed wire—but in a good way.

  I started to return the rum to its hiding place then thought better of it; I was in for a long day. I took another long drink then hid the bottle under the bed, surprised that a quarter of it was gone already.

  After a long shower, I dressed. I had my military jacket halfway on before I remembered the dishonorable discharge. Most likely no one would make a fuss if I did wear a uniform; the powers that be would probably prefer to see me standing beside my brother with shiny buttons. That didn’t matter, though—I knew I wasn’t entitled to wear it anymore. I found an old suit in the dark recesses of the closet and put that on instead. It smelled like dust and looked like shit, but it would have to do. One good thing came out of having to change clothes—during my suit search, I’d found a hip flask.

  So I took my bottle of rum from under the bed and filled up the flask. Never one to waste alcohol, I finished off the remainder in the bottle. I would soon be drunk enough that I wouldn’t give a crap about my ugly ill-fitting suit.

  “We’re going to be late,” Christina called out from the other room.

  “Coming.” I rinsed my mouth out with strong-smelling mouthwash then entered the front room.

  Christina had put on a pin-striped dark pantsuit, and her black hair was pulled back into a bun. She was wearing only a hint of makeup, but it was skillfully applied.

  “You look good.” In her funeral outfit, she looked much different than she usually did—strangely sexy, though.

  “Compliments work better when you keep the surprise out of your voice.”

  I felt a flush underneath my skin. It had been a while since I was last with her. I reached out, ran my fingers up her forearm, and touched the back of her neck. “We have time.”

  Distaste swept across her face. “Not now, Jordi. We have a funeral to attend. You’re in mourning, remember?”

  “Can’t someone be sad and horny?”

  Christina gave a disapproving shake of her head and swiped open the door. I followed her outside, feeling bitter. It was my brother who was dead. How I should grieve wasn’t up to her. She led the way to the nearest conveyor pod. Her shoulders were hunched forward, and she took small, rapid footsteps.

  The walk to the pod reminded me how much I hated the undercities. Cold clamminess hung in the air, and the lighting was minimal. The air conditioning thrummed, and I could hear the drip, drip of running groundwater behind the thin metal walls. I could almost sense the crushing weight of earth all around me. People weren’t meant to live underground. Up above, thundering waterfalls were adorned with permanent rainbows, and mountains of ice and snow soared into the heavens. I’d flown over giant rivers that could carry tree trunks as if they were twigs, and I’d watched a giant sun shimmer as it set over a red desert. Humanity had lost so much all those centuries of years ago when the World Wars condemned us to live underground. The dishonorable discharge had effectively cursed me to a life underground. I had earned my punishment, but did the rest of humanity deserve that same sentence?

  People were allowed to leave the undercities, of course—the mibs didn’t stop them from going up to the surface. Only returning was not allowed; people who left renounced their citizenship. It was called going rogue. For the families left behind, their loved ones might as well have been dead, since there was no chance of reuniting again. And for those who went rogue, with no civilization or technology, and with devastator-based fighter planes ready to attack anything on the ground, actual death wasn’t too far away. Arianne had done it. She’d told no one as far as I knew—she’d just walked out of Under Nyork and into the rubble above. I only found out by doing a search for her on the system after I hadn’t seen her in a few days. That had been over a year ago, but thinking of her still hurt. That woman had held some kind of spell over me.

  Christina pressed the button at the conveyor entrance, and we waited in silence. Before long, we heard the whoosh of a pod arriving. The doors opened, and we stepped inside. Christina keyed in the destination, and we whooshed off. Above the conveyor destination controls was a small screen showing the news, with no sound. So I got to watch the Eisenhower fall into the sea for the hundredth time. It hit the water and stopped dead, then the massive explosion of water rose into the sky all around it. There was a terrible beauty in the sight of those walls of roiling white water. The devastator broke up, and the individual compartments began to sink. Giant waves rolled back and forth across the wreckage. Tsunamis had struck the Canadian and Northern European coasts in the aftermath of the crash, though they hadn’t affected much since the coastal undercities had strong tidal defenses. I turned away from the screen, unable to look anymore, not wanting to think about the thousands who had died in that instant when the Eisenhower crashed into the sea.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Christina broke the silence.

  “About what?”

  “You know. Everything. The Battle of Rockall.”

  “Not really.” The battle had been named for the nearest island, which was nothing more than the tip of a rock peaking over the surface of the ocean.

  “The end of this war had seemed so close until this happened. Now, I dunno, never seen the talking heads look this scared. They are always worried, you know. They worry even during peacetime. Now they look shaken,” C
hristina said.

  “Losing a devastator. It just doesn’t happen.”

  “Not in a long time. And now we’re outnumbered three against two.”

  “Not four against two?” It had been American Conference, Latino Territories, and European Union against the Russian Federation, Chinese Empire, and Greater India for as long as I could remember. With the Territories switching sides...

  “The Chinese haven’t attacked since the Battle of Rockall. No one knows why.”

  That didn’t make any sense. Our enemies would never get a better chance to crush us, especially because we were also being attacked from the inside. “Did any news reports say that Celeste were involved in the Battle of Rockall?”

  “I haven’t heard them mentioned.”

  “They never know shit on the news reports. Always idiots talking out their arses.” Celeste were at the heart of the betrayal, somehow—I just knew it.

  After my outburst, Christina was quiet until the conveyor pod came to a stop.

  “You shouldn’t have even been on the Eisenhower for the battle,” she said as she walked out. “The day before the battle, I was on my way to JFK flight deck to meet the shuttle, then I found out you weren’t on it after all.”

  I had been following Christina out, but that caused me to stop dead. The conveyor doors tried to close then reopened and tried to close again.

  Christina pulled me out. “I know. Weren’t you so unlucky to have missed that shuttle? That was all I could think of when I didn’t know if you’d lived or died. At least it worked out in the end.”

  Darius knew, I realized. That was why he had me ordered off the Eisenhower. He’d known the attack was coming.

  Chapter 5

  The funeral took place in Times Square, the biggest single chamber in Under Nyork. The conveyor pod left us a few passageways away, and the closer we got, the more crowded the corridors became. The people of Under Nyork wanted to say goodbye to their leader, but not all of them would fit into Times Square. The mood was somber. No one recognized me; normally I would have been glad of the anonymity, but I could have done with people stepping aside for us. In the final corridor, I had to squeeze through rows of tightly packed people, with Christina following in my wake. Even if I had been wearing my shiny-buttoned military uniform, cutting through the crowd would have been easier. As it was, people gave way for me begrudgingly.

  While I trudged through the morass of people, my mind raced. It didn’t make sense that Darius would have taken the transport to the Bolivar if he’d been expecting an attack. And yet, he hadn’t seen me in years, and he chose the day before the Eisenhower was attacked to call on me and have me ordered off the devastator. He couldn’t have known that I would disappear before my commanding officer had a chance to give me my official orders. And that awkward hug that had come out of nowhere. That wasn’t like Darius. Had he desired reconciliation because he’d known his time left was so short?

  At the entrance to Times Square, the mibs let us through without comment. The readout on their glasses told them who we were. An usher escorted us between the two columns of seating, toward the podium. Beside the podium, a wood-paneled coffin was draped with the red-and-blue leaves and stripes. A guard of honor, with ceremonial swords attached to their hips and old-fashioned rifles at their sides, flanked the coffin.

  The usher gestured at two seats in the front row. Beside those seats, Zirconia stared at the coffin through the black veil of her hat. We’d never called her Mom, Mam, or any other title of affection—she’d had no time for sentiment. Christina and I sat. I looked across at my mother. Although she was clearly aware of my presence—Zirconia was unaware of very little—she didn’t acknowledge me. I love you, too, Mother Dearest.

  I wondered what was inside the coffin. Was it empty, or had something been put inside to mimic the weight of a corpse? I didn’t understand the purpose of a coffin when there was obviously no body. Everyone had seen the explosion and knew Darius had been vaporized. I felt a catch in my throat at the memory. I blinked several times to clear my eyes.

  “You better not cry.” Zirconia didn’t turn her head.

  “I wasn’t planning on it.” I had a sudden desire to take a swig from my hip flask. It wasn’t the time, though. Zirconia had surely already detected the hint of rum on my breath—she wasn’t as easy to deceive as Christina was—and she would be watching my every move. When I was a child, I’d thought Zirconia was an all-knowing, all-seeing god. That was common, I knew, for kids of a young age. It was just a matter of growing out of it. Any day now, that’s going to happen to me. Any day now...

  There was a rustle of movement at the podium, and Chief of Staff Sam Burnett stepped forward. The hum of conversation gradually died away.

  “We stand here today at a bleak period in our great nation’s history,” Burnett said. “You’ve all seen the news. We have lost our flagship, and with our greatest ally now a mortal foe, make no mistake that we are in a fight for our very lives. And we have lost the leader who would have led us out of this dark time.

  “President Darius Roberts was a great man, and we need great men right now. And I’m sure that the Territories deliberately targeted him so as to weaken us. They thought it would leave us demoralized after losing the Eisenhower and our president at the same time. They expect that the Bolivar will be stationed above our heads in a few weeks’ time.” Burnett paused while his gaze swept across the watching crowd. “They are dead wrong. The loss of President Darius Roberts will make us stronger, not weaker.” He formed a fist. “Fury flows through my veins when I think of how our president was treacherously murdered, and when I look down on those who loved him, I see that same fury reflected in your eyes. And I know that those who have packed the nearby passageways because they couldn’t get in to the square feel the same, as well as everyone watching on news channels throughout the American Conference. That fury will feed our strength and determination. We will not bow before our enemies, and we will not allow the evil that inspired their attack to prevail.”

  He’s just using Darius’s death, I thought angrily. He was hijacking the eulogy to rally the people.

  “President Roberts, even in death, is still helping us, hardening our strength and courage at this vital time. Old friend”—Burnett bowed his head—“you will be missed and mourned, but more than that, you will be celebrated and remembered. Go now to your final resting place, knowing you remain forever in our hearts.”

  Darius the martyr—we will continue to use him even in death. I questioned whether Burnett had known Darius as a person or if he had always seen my brother just as a tool to be used.

  Burnett stepped away from the podium and nodded to the guards beside the coffin. They held rifles with metal barrels and wooden stocks, the type that were invented thousands of years ago and designed to fire bullets instead of electricity or laser, though I guessed they were only loaded with blanks for the funeral. As one, the soldiers lifted their guns. One fluid movement brought the guns to their chests, and with a second movement, they brought the guns to their shoulders, pointing upward.

  “Ready. Aim. Fire,” the sergeant called out. The soldiers fired the guns, and a deafening roar echoed through Times Square. The soldiers returned their rifles to their chests.

  “Ready. Aim. Fire,” the sergeant said again, and the procedure was repeated, exactly the same.

  Every motion was smooth and perfectly in sync, which I knew came from long hours of drilling, and their ritual gave more honor to Darius’s death than all of Burnett’s empty words could have. I adjusted my suit across my shoulders, once more regretting my lack of a uniform.

  “Ready. Aim. Fire.” With the sergeant’s third command, the salute was over.

  “Bloody fools will leave us all deaf with their military posturing,” Zirconia hissed. She had never had any respect for the ACM, and she’d been livid when she found out I’d joined.

  The soldiers with rifles marched out of the way, and six more soldiers came into vi
ew, taking positions on either side of the coffin. The sergeant stood in front and gave orders as the coffin was lifted and solemnly marched past us and out of Times Square. Several deep crevasses existed within Under Nyork; some were used for garbage disposal, and one had been assigned to hold the dead. Darius’s empty coffin was on its way to the graveyard chasm.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” Zirconia turned to face me.

  I guessed she meant my dishonorable discharge. How she always knew everything, I had no idea. “I thought you’d be glad. I’m no longer a soldier.”

  She lifted the veil from her face. “Maybe it’s for the best.” She sighed. “But if you couldn’t even do that well, what good are you to any of us?” She looked past me at Christina. “This is the wife? I didn’t get an invitation to the wedding.”

  “Would you have come?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have stood idly by while you married your nurse.”

  “Charming.” I touched Christina’s elbow. “Zirconia, this is my wife, Christina. Christina, I warned you about my mother.”

  Christina held out her hand. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Roberts.”

  Zirconia ignored the offered hand. “You can’t even get yourself married properly. Is there any task you won’t make a complete fiasco out of?”

  “You can’t just order the world like that,” I said. “Getting married isn’t a task.”

  “Of course it is. And it’s one that can be done right or wrong. Any old fool can get his girlfriend pregnant. Finding a worthy mother for your children—now that’s what you should be thinking about.”

  “Finding someone worthy to bear your grandchildren, you mean.” I glanced at Christina after Zirconia’s jab about pregnancy. Christina had been pregnant before we were married, but she’d lost the baby shortly after we had said our vows. I hadn’t told anyone; surely even Zirconia couldn’t have known about that.