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  The Emperor continued, ‘I want to know who built it, why they built it and what it contains. I also need to know how long it has been there. Our security telescopes did not detect it when it was first being built and judging by the images I have seen, it is a fully functional group of buildings,’ the Emperor explained.

  ‘Yes sire. There is a gunship being prepared as we speak.’

  ‘Also, there is a civil servant who I expected to be euthanised. As far as I know this has not happened. The Cleaner Corp have failed to find him.’

  ‘I know who you mean. Dr Mitus Jackson. I have no further information at present. He may have been taken in by someone.’

  ‘Send your best men to find him,’ the Emperor instructed.

  ‘Yes sire,’ she said. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘I want instant updates Karry. On both of these tasks. Lastly, Prince Zarka. What information do you have, as discussed?’

  ‘If he is plotting to overthrow you these is scant evidence. Either he talks to his aides away from his offices and apartments, or he has no plans.’

  ‘Keep watching. Keep watching closely. Closer than now. Round the clock, everywhere he goes. That is all,’ he said and turned his back on her. She stood up and left the room.

  ‘Dr Mitus Jackson,’ Bander said out loud as he closed down his listening device and returned to his work.

  Chapter Five.

  The siren sounded again just before a message appeared in Don’s EyeSpec. ‘PLEASE EVACUATE TO STATION FIVE,’ it said.

  ‘Station Five? Where the hell is station five?’ Don asked his father.

  ‘What?’ his father asked.

  ‘Don’t you have an implant?’

  ‘I took it out and disabled it, once I knew I was out of the Emperor’s favour. They can track it and track you.’

  ‘I thought these things are encrypted?’

  ‘Doesn’t mean the government can’t track it. They put in back doors. That’s why the Emperor owns the company that builds them.’

  ‘There are other companies. Does he own all of them?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Search Station Five, LA,’ Don said into his EyeSpec. A map popped up in his field of vision with a red line leading to an overheard view of a large building.

  ‘THIS BUILDING IS USED AS A SAFE PLACE DURING A DISASTER,’ the text said. The alarm sounded again.

  ‘I guess we’d better go,’ Don said.

  ‘No. Let’s stay here. What if there are Police there? Secret Police even. You can go. I am a ghost. You can go and get yourself safe.’

  ‘You won’t be safe until I have registered you for the Emperor’s Award. That’s where I am going next. To New York.’

  ‘I see. Well I need to stay out of the way,’ Mitus said.

  ‘Okay. You stay here. But they might work out that one of the places you would hide is with your son.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘You might be better off on the move. Now you’ve got rid of that Tunic you’ll blend in with the crowd.’

  ‘I guess so,’ Mitus agreed.

  They got ready and left the apartment. They tried the lift. The button didn’t light up. ‘It’s been shut down because of the earthquake,’ Don suggested, having pressed the button several times. ‘We’ll have to use the stairs. They both headed off to the stair well. It was a long way down – seventy storeys.

  ‘They’re having problems with earthquakes all over the place. The world doesn’t like being smothered. Mother nature is hitting back,’ Mitus told his son as they headed down to the street. As they exited the building there were people running all in one direction.

  ‘They’re all going to Station Five I guess,’ Don said.

  ‘Let’s just walk. I’m too tired to run. I haven’t slept.’

  ‘I hear these bunkers have beds in dorms.’

  ‘Dorms? Shit. What if I share with someone who recognises me?’

  ‘No-one will know who you are Dad. We haven’t seen you for six years. How would anyone know who you are?’ as he looked round behind him, he saw the collapsed buildings on their sides. Huge hunks of concrete and metal, spread across the length of the beach front. ‘Shit, look at that,’ he said as he stared, hardly believing his eyes. There were also bloodied bodies all over the place. His father looked round also.

  ‘This is bad. We’d better get a move on.’

  ‘I hope my building survives. All my stuff, my life is there.’ After a while they turned and left for Station Five.

  They arrived at a large building with grey double doors and Police guards holding weapons, directing people through the door. ‘Come on!’ one of them barked. ‘There’s another quake on its way.’ Don and his father sped up through the doors and followed the signs into a large hall, with tables and benches lined up in long rows. It was busy and bustling and noisy as people chatted loudly, so that they could be heard over the din. Don and his father walked down the side of the tables looking for a space to sit. At the end next to a double door, they sat down next to a man with an implant in his neck. It was a brushed steel look. Circular with an access point for uploading and downloading data. ‘Hey,’ Don said as he looked at this man. He was dressed in grey trousers, a white shirt with a fine long red coat.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. At that point Don caught his eye as he sat down next to him. Something was off with this guy. He would stay vigilant. His father was exposed here. The secret police would love to get their hands on him.

  Don and his father chatted about the fallen buildings and the bodies.

  ‘You’re a wanted man,’ the man next to them suddenly blurted out.

  ‘What are you on about?’ Don asked, feeling defensive.

  ‘I’m a telepath. I can read your thoughts. You want me to keep quiet you’ll have to pay,’ he said, knowing there were secret police around monitoring the evacuation. Don leapt up and grabbed his arm in an arm lock, and put his hand round his neck, and quickly marched him out through the nearby double door, his father running after them. Immediately inside the double doors there was a bathroom. He pushed him inside the bathroom, grabbed him in a choke hold and began to squeeze the life out of him. He made gargling noises, grabbed Don’s arm to try and pry him off and as he died, he kicked his legs out in an epic struggle to stop himself being murdered. But it was no good. Don was too well trained and too strong for him.

  ‘Whoa, what are you doing?’ his father said.

  ‘If he doesn’t die, you will,’ Don replied as he dropped the man on the floor. Don checked his pulse.

  ‘How did you learn how to do that?’

  ‘When you’re in the Cleaner Corp, you get a combat upload into your EyeSpec. Hand to hand combat and weapons.’ He picked the dead man up and dragged him into a cubical and sat him slumped against the cubicle wall, sitting on top of the toilet seat and closed the door and locked it. He turned the outside lock with a key from the outside. ‘Come on, let’s go back.’

  ‘You don’t think there are witnesses in that hall, who saw you drag him out?’ his father asked. Don paused to think for a second.

  ‘You’re right. Let’s see where this corridor goes. Perhaps we can get out of this building and just take our chances.’ The two of them walked off down the corridor until they found an exit and went through the door. They walked back towards Don’s apartment block. ‘My SkyCar is in the underground carpark,’ he said as they walked towards it. As they arrived, they could see a security droid. It was 6’6” tall, white with blue stripes down it. It was armed with a high-powered laser pulse gun. It was long, black and bulky. Don and his father stopped.

  ‘We can’t get past him,’ Mitus said. ‘And there’s another one over there.’

  ‘We’ll head further inland. See if we can pick up a transport bus.’ The transport buses flew all over America, including New York. There was a station a ten-minute walk away. They headed there. But after just a few steps they heard the pistons of the android running up behind them. Don put his hand up surreptit
iously to tell his father not to look round. He waited, continuing to walk away from it.

  ‘Halt! Halt!’ the android said, his voice designed to sound robotic, so that they could be identified by its sound. As Don heard it right behind him, he round kicked it in the chest causing it to fall backwards. He then grabbed its head and moved it round quickly, breaking two wires from its neck and sending a spark which flew up into Don’s face. He held his hand up and jumped backwards to avoid the spark.

  ‘Run!’ he called to his father who took off ahead of him, heading to the transport hub. They hoped to get on a bus before the androids began to assemble to track them down and arrest them. As it stood, police, fire and ambulance vehicles were flooding in, along with search and rescue – a mixture of androids and humans. Don looked up as he ran, noticing the skycars and other flying vehicles, were crowding out the sky, making it darker. His father was still fit enough to keep up with his son. Everyone was fit enough. Modern medicine made sure of that.

  As they approached the station, they would have to ride the lift up to the skybuses that were leaving every few minutes to places local and national. They walked through the gap onto the station concourse, looked at the boards and found the right station headed for New York. As soon as one of them used a payment method, the authorities would know where they are going. And the SkyBuses did not take cash. Only funds from EyeSpec functions or the little chipped cards that people carried if they didn’t possess an enhancement like the EyeSpec. Not for many millennia. Don fully expected the bus to be intercepted, but he hoped the earthquake that had just happened and the one to come will keep the authorities busy for hours, if not days. The bus was large, had big wide windows and on the outside were two stripes, one dark blue, one light blue. There was no driver. They were all driverless and overseen remotely, in some high-rise control room somewhere in America. They waited patiently, with Don on the lookout for secret police and Cleaner Corp men. Don was anxious. Would he have the time he needed to register his father on the Emperor’s list?

  Chapter Six.

  Prince Zarka, the Crown Prince, swept into the Emperor’s office, followed by a large entourage, who quickly took up the available seats in the large ornate lobby. Against two of the walls were long shimmering gold sofas. The walls were covered in expensive red and gold patterned wallpaper on the top half – the bottom was a rich red colour with patterns and images showing ancient battles. Zarka’s Chief of Staff stood next to him. Zarka didn’t wait to be given permission to enter his father’s office. As he rushed through the door, his father turned quickly from where he was standing next to his library shelves which were along two walls. ‘My son,’ he said. The Chief of Staff closed the door behind him.

  ‘Father,’ he said in reply. He was wearing a custom gold and white tunic, with military insignia. He had long jet-black hair, that ran down his back tied in a ponytail. His face was beautiful. He was dark skinned with ice blue eyes. The elites had long since designed their babies, for looks, physical abilities, health and intelligence and Prince Zarka ticked all those boxes. He regularly trained in modern martial arts and detailed weapons training and tactics. He had been trained at the best military school.

  ‘I wish to see the approach of Karry’s Second on the unauthorised settlement.’

  ‘Of course. I am about to leave to go to the throne room,’ his father explained. He grabbed a long luxurious red coat, embossed with gems and intricate silk patterns, and put it round his shoulders as a servant approached and tied a clasp around his neck, to bring the two sides together. He shooed the servant away and left ahead of his son, through into the waiting area. Zarka’s entire group of assistants and analysts stood up and bowed and waited patiently to follow the Emperor through the large exit, with two large double wooden doors, covered in a sculpted relief of a dragon fighting a knight. The doors were opened by two armed guards. ‘I will see the footage in the throne room,’ he ordered. A senior aide rushed off down the corridor to quickly prepare the screen that would watch the raid. It was a hologram screen which was twelve feet across and six feet high. There was an Imperial logo on it as the Emperor, his aides and the Crown Prince and his aides filed in and found somewhere to stand. Only the Emperor and the Crown Prince were able to sit. Everyone else would stand. It was strict protocol.

  ‘Where is it then?’ the Emperor asked his aide.

  ‘Your Grace. They are a few minutes away I am told.’

  ‘Well, what shall we do with this crowd in the meantime?’ he asked with a smile and the crowd laughed nervously at his joke.

  After a while, an assistant hurried into the throne room. ‘It’s coming through now.’ Everyone went quiet and turned to the floating projection, clearing a space so that the Emperor’s view was unimpeded. The screen projected a crystal-clear image, as if it were a window. No interference or flickering, as if they were all there. The camera was mounted on one of twelve fighter drones, that were stationary in formation next to a large barrel shaped warship, with twenty missile tubes, laser pulse weapons and rail guns. The drones were grey in colour and short and squat, like a toad, with four arms. The front two were mounted with machine guns and the back two laser pulse weapons. They were also loaded with missiles.

  The battleship was mostly made of premade, modified concrete parts, which are together in space, just outside Earth’s orbit. The pieces are prefabricated on Earth and then transported into space by a tele transporter. Then autonomous robots put the parts together. It was efficient and fast, allowing the space-based military to grow very rapidly. Teletransportation was only used for inanimate objects. Many thousands of attempts were made over the years to transport animals and other living things. But the death rate was too high (28% of the animals teleported died and 47% came out with deformities). There are hundreds of teleportation devices dotted around the main industrial cities of the world. The prefabricated carcass and the fittings would be teleported into space and then constructed by construction robots operating in space. There were also three large space stations further out in space, servicing thousands of ships. One of them was military (the largest one), the others serviced the thousands of people that would travel across the 8 other inhabited planets dotted around our part of the universe.

  It was a short hop to the moon, where the buildings were. The Emperor was offered the opportunity to start the mission, which he did. Once he’d said go, the fighter drones headed off down to the surface. Half remained within strike distance above the base, while the others went down close to the base and did a thorough scan of the building and its contents which was relayed back to the battleship, then transmitted live to the Emperors throne room. A landing crew of heavily armed battle droids were loaded quickly into a personnel carrier. It had long been the case that human beings weren’t used for these kinds of high-risk missions. Human beings would need life support suits that were vulnerable when live fire situations were possible whilst in space or on entities without breathable air. Droids were faster, more robust and didn’t need oxygen. They could also carry much heavier equipment. They were made of a dark grey battle armour, which was resistant to both bullets and laser pulse weapons. They could cope with modest explosions, without sustaining too much damage, but heavy bombardment would disable them eventually, given enough direct hits. They were 6’ 6” tall and 4’ wide and had both handheld weapons and built in weapons, including small precisely targeted missiles that were embedded on their backs. They had a 360° camera technology and a degree of autonomy. But given how deadly they were the designers were instructed not to make them too self-aware. Their AI systems were limited to focus exclusively on mission parameters and were programmed carefully to avoid killing their human masters. When sharing a battlefield with their human counterparts, should they be present, the marines wear a military grade EyeSpec, so that the droids can identify them as allies. However, it was rare for humans and droids to fight together.

  The drones scanned the building. The people in the throne room c
ould see an infrared picture. There were a couple of dozen heat signatures of varying sizes and shapes. The building was several stories high and had a pair of bay doors on the roof of the largest part of it. As the battle drones flew past the buildings, the bay doors began to open. ‘We have movement on the roof,’ Karry Diss’ Second said. The battle drones that were closest quickly got into position and waited. Once the doors were open there was a short pause and then a large ball like ship came out quickly and started firing from a group of laser pulse weapons all around it.

  ‘An unmanned laser pulse shooter,’ Karry said. It took out three battle drones immediately. Two exploded and one caught fire and fell towards the moon and crashed and then exploded. All the battle drones that were left including the ones within range near the battleship, retaliated quickly, firing a combination of missiles and laser pulse weapons. It took thirty seconds to destroy the weapon as it fell back onto the building missing the bay doors. ‘Wait,’ Karry’s Second commanded, as the firing stopped and the drones hovered silently, waiting for further instructions; interrupted only by a loud and intrusive buzzing sound, which was so loud it was almost unbearable. Everyone and everything else was silent, both at the scene and in the throne room for a good thirty seconds.

  The Emperor broke the silence. ‘What’s the delay?’

  ‘To see if there will be any other weapons launched sire,’ Karry said.

  ‘Okay, move in,’ Karry’s Second commanded. The personnel carrier with the battle droids in it, quickly descended on the building. The landing ship hovered above the building roof next to the bay doors as the droids jumped out of the ship and began to descend into the building. The picture both in the battleship and the throne room, switched to one of the battle droids. The droid looked round, 360 degrees and off on the left was a double door, open a couple of inches. There was a second smaller door on the other side which was shut. ‘Three of you go to the shut door on the right, blast it open if necessary. The rest of you open the double doors and clear the rooms one by one, neutralising threats you encounter,’ Karry’s Second commanded. The Second had operational control and the real Karry remained silent, trusting her Second to make the right decisions.