***
Blake pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and kept typing. A retooled shipyard in the south west of Athens far below received his commands. The launch sequence began. He’d run through the simulation hundreds of times, but his dusky skin had broken out into a sweat despite his confidence.
Who is watching all these damned Fletchers, he cursed, and looked over at the back of the man who held the power over him. Who is his boss?
Rhys turned as if hearing Blake’s private thoughts. At least, since Blake had no iPC, there was no fear of those thoughts becoming public knowledge. He had heard the stories whispered in the crew barracks at the end of their shift. They’d said Simeon had created a new type of iPC that had given him mind-reading abilities, and was even able to control the subject’s actions.
Human drones. The thought terrified Blake. The technology had been supposedly destroyed when Simeon had died, but someone would eventually figure out how to take control of the thousands of people he had already infected with his virus iPCs. Simeon may have been too greedy for his own good, but he wasn’t stupid. He would have made a backup.
‘Where are we?’ The command snapped Blake back to his job.
Rhys was looking down, over the wide vista of cloud and sea stretched before him, through the floor window set into the forward deck of the bridge.
‘The Ravinicus is approximately 460 metres over Athens, sir,’ Solomon promptly answered.
‘I can see that!’ Rhys snapped, and looked at Blake. The excitement was building behind his deep blue eyes as he smoothed the non-existent creases out of his maroon-red vest. ‘Launch the megadrone.’
Blake tapped the last few keystrokes, and sat back. Rhys turned to the floor window, leaning on the safety rail with arms spread wide, and watched.
Far below, in Athens’ once bustling port of Piraeus, an automated dock set into the reclaimed seabed of the drained harbour opened its launch bay doors. A great plume of dust and water vapour erupted out of the hole and spread over the city. From the depths emerged a huge cylindrical disc, rising through the mist. A drone. The gigantic structure was almost a kilometre across. It rose higher and higher, pushing itself up against the pull of gravity in an oscillating motion on the airwaves.
Blake stared out along with the rest of the crew as the megadrone filled the entire viewport. The sunlight was snuffed out and the Ravinicus’ interior lighting filled their senses in its absence. Blake caught sight of Lucia returning from the landing bay, flanked by her Fletcher bodyguards. She dragged behind her a prisoner who was covered in enough dust to be a ghost. He had the sense to keep his eyes downcast, but he stole a few glances at the megadrone. The colour drained from the young man’s olive toned face in horror.
Rhys kept his back to them as he watched the enormous drone slide past them into the sky. It seemed to take forever. Finally the drone rose above them and the view was clear once again. Rhys turned around. He had a satisfied smile fixed in place. ‘Initiate Phase Three,’ he said to Blake, as he sauntered over to Lucia. She smiled up at him like a lovesick puppy. Rhys looked her prisoner up and down. ‘Who do we have here, my sweet?’
The young man raised his head and bored his eyes into Rhys’ in defiance. Lucia’s bodyguards stepped close in warning, but the man didn’t make any move. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘I would never forget a face like that, Fletcher.’
Blake and Solomon glanced at the prisoner. They’d both picked up on the young man’s accent: American, with a hint of Greek.
Blake looked out of the viewport to Athens several kilometres below. The once proud city had been beaten down by its mounting debt before the war. Its busy ports had been converted into dozens of drone production facilities around the harbours, identical to the one the megadrone had launched from. That construction had decimated the city, polluting it with chemicals and toxic gases. Nothing grew there now. It was a dead city.
Rhys smiled, showing rows of dazzling white teeth. ‘Ah! We’ve met? In combat perhaps, old chap?’
The man scowled. ‘Yes. I missed you. A mistake.’
Rhys burst out with laughter. ‘It seems you need more target practice! What’s your name?’ He put one arm over the man’s shoulder and waved the other at the bridge crew. ‘Tell everyone.’
‘Jayson.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Jayson Geor- uh, just... Jayson.’ His voice broke. Everyone on the bridge was captivated. Solomon took an involuntary step toward him.
‘How old are you, Jayson?’ Rhys said.
‘Twenty f-four.’
‘Yes, I remember you from Hong Kong. You’re a decent pilot, kid. That’s the only reason I ordered the girl to spare your life,’ Rhys indicated toward Lucia and continued. ‘You know you want to be on the winning side. There’s no one left at the Academy now. It’s gone. Join us.’
At those words, Jayson’s years felt more heavy on his shoulders than ever. He slumped where he stood.
Lucia, bored with the conversation, attempted to hasten its conclusion. ‘There were others on his ship,’ she said.
Jayson was deteriorating fast now. Tears streamed down his face. ‘Ch-Children! Refugees from the island, fifty of them, and you killed them you b-’
‘I’ve heard enough,’ Rhys cut in. ‘You won’t join us, fine.’ He shoved Solomon aside and strode over to Blake. He put his gloved hands on his shoulders again. ‘Let’s do a test-run,’ he ordered Blake. ‘Set the megadrone to patrol outside the Confederate controlled urban areas. Destroy anything that moves.’
Jayson saw his chance. He dashed to the comm station before his captors could react. He opened a long-range channel and established a peer-to-peer connection with Sarah’s custom iPC address. He sent her the images he had seen of the megadrone, and the search pattern it would follow. It would be sent to her eye’s sight in seconds, completely untraceable. The guards rushed Jayson and cuffed him with a brutal blow to the head. He collapsed to the deck.
‘Take us out over the Mediterranean,’ Rhys ordered the helmsman. He kept his hands resting on Blake’s shoulders and spoke loud enough to be heard across the room. ‘I won’t miss you, Jayson. Be assured of that.’ To the guards, he said, ‘bring me his iPC before he leaves.’
Lucia stepped in before the guards could take Jayson. She hesitated as she looked into his eyes. A flicker of remorse played across her face for a brief moment. She turned her head and the concern vanished. She whipped out an old hunting knife with a repaired handle and shoved it into Jayson’s eye socket.
The bridge boomed with his shrieks of pain. It went on and on unending.
Rhys waved him away in disdain as Lucia dragged Jayson out the door. Solomon tried to follow but was blocked by the guards. He dropped his eyes to the floor as he returned to his duties.
‘Fletcher!’ Jayson screamed, his eye socket leaving a bloody trail behind him. ‘You can’t watch all of us all the time! Fletcher! You hear me? Fletcher!’
The wails faded as Lucia forced her prisoner away from the bridge. The room’s usual bustling activity resumed as if coming out of a daydream. One of the guards brought Jayson’s iPC over to Rhys. The metallic eyeball dripped mucus and blood. Rhys accepted the offering, still leaning on Blake as if in rapport. ‘That’s Sir Rhys Fletcher, thank you very much,’ he said with a sniff.
Blake kept typing.
***
The megadrone began its methodical orbit overhead, casting its pale red tracking beam over the planet.
Outside the Ravinicus, a lone body tumbled out of an airlock and hurtled toward the ocean. Jayson closed his one remaining eye against the wind that whipped at his face and into the exposed flesh where his iPC had been. As he neared sea level he sensed the red light through his eyelid. The disruption to the megadrone’s sensors triggered its alarm, and it entered into attack mode. The red light switched off and row upon row of weaponry emerged along the length of the giant mechanical beast.
Jayson reopened his eye in tim
e to see the entirety of Athens laid out before him. It was a desolate wasteland. His home’s capital had become covered in thick grey soot, as if it had been hit by nuclear fallout. Only the sea remained blue, yet even that was becoming tinged by the dirty machinations of the Confederacy’s unceasing industry.
The water rushed up to meet him as the megadrone fired its guns. A white-hot bolt of plasma streaked down to catch him. Jayson let out a long sigh as he caught a glimpse of the Acropolis, a crumbling beacon of community spirit long since extinguished.
Sarah would get his message. It hadn’t been a smart move, but Captain Jayson Georgiou had finally done something right in his life.
‘No more drones,’ he smiled at his imagined vision of the future.
He impacted the concrete ocean at the same moment the plasma struck. Jayson burned to a crisp and evaporated into obscurity as if he had never existed.
…The Exciting Sequel to The Covert Academy, Coming Soon!
***
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