Commandos (14 page)

The officials gathered in the comprised of the highest committee influential senators and the president. Victor was surprised by the silence that welcomed him in the room. The president tended to be a very talkative man. Files were scattered on the table. He could see in the politicians’ eyes that this time it would be something serious.

The president nodded and waved him to his seat. As he sat he caught a glimpse of the numbered files and instantly understood that the illusive information he’d been looking for had been right under his nose the whole time. They were the secret files of Levi, Alec, David and Jo.

The task he was about to receive from the Defence Council would be quite different from what he’d had to deal with so far.

“Victor,” the president started, “we have a rather unique mission for you.”
Victor surveyed the senators’ faces. Their grave expressions puzzled him for a moment.
“In a few days, you’ll be delegated to Earth.” The president handed him the commandos’ files. “Your task will be to gather all the commandos into a location of your choice and infiltrate the headquarters of the caliph.” He hesitated for a second and looked at his feet; the pressure on the senators’ faces would not let him falter for long. “You will take Kaminsky out. The commandos are at your disposal as backup. They’re your shield.”
Victor felt blood rushing to his face. His mind raced in random directions. Finally, a job to do, a chance to see Levi, but why Kaminsky? Why
this
job?
He had explained to the president on several occasions why he would not be the right man for the task. He could kill anyone but this man. Why him? After all the things session-chamber of the ten most he’d confessed. The president got up, uncomfortable, walked around the table and approached Victor.
“I am aware of your objections,” he went on, placing his hand firmly on Victor’s shoulder, “but we are out of options here. You’re the only one who stands a chance and should you succeed, our chances of finishing this war will improve greatly. Your country needs you.
We
need you. This may change the future of us all. Levi will help you through it.”
Agitated, Victor grabbed the files, rose sharply from his chair and started towards the door, when suddenly something made him stop and turn around towards the president. With sudden realisation he looked down at the files in his hands.
“Now I understand why they were exiled to Earth for such a trifle offense. A memorial erasure, nothing else really. But you’ve stripped them of their badges for it!”
He couldn’t hold his anger anymore. He had spent too much time pondering this inexplicable decision of the council. The president faced him and said, “Yes, it had to be done. By taking their badges and sending them down to Earth, separated from each other, we wanted to let them abate, to prepare them for this most important mission to date, to motivate them to look into a better future and to make them want to fight for it. When the best soldiers lose their badges, they’ll do anything to get them back.”
“I figured as much.” Victor was so infuriated; he barely stopped himself from crushing the files and tossing them back on the table. “I just needed to hear it.”
“The files specify the current location of all the commandos. You’ll find that Levi’s been working at the archives and…” The president reached into his briefcase and produced another folder. Kaminsky’s file. “You and Kaminsky go way back, so you won’t be needing this, but Levi, well... he was too close to digging up this stuff, which in part concerns him as well. That’s why we had to move him to NASA. I want you to break this to him when you feel the time is right. Everything’s in this file.”
Victor collected the folders and left. He walked briskly towards his quarters, his curiosity whetted. He’d have to make notes, learn as much as possible about the people who were supposed to be – what did the president call it – his shield?
“Since when do I need a shield!” Whipped up, he picked up his pace.

* * * *

In the last century, science had made some undeniably significant advances. Robotics, in particular, had enjoyed a period of unprecedented development. Modern robots could hear, see and analyse, and they were clothed in synthetic skin which replaced the old, metallic solutions. It allowed them to feel temperature and pressure. Robots were even given genders. Female ones were typically used for cleaning, whilst male robots were employed as drivers and worked at nuclear plants. Some models were even capable of duplicating themselves.

Some technological advances, however, greatly popular only a few years back were now banned and illegal. These included memorial erasures, cloning or brain implants, the latter of which were small electronic circuits placed in the brain to allow a direct link with a computer – to transfer thoughts or record dreams.

Those who used the technologies tended to fall on the brink of insanity, wiping their memories, breaking into other people’s thoughts or overanalysing their own dreams. Their lives soon turned into nightmares. Instead of forgetting about the war, they would start seeing enemies in every house and in the face of every neighbour.

Geneticists would return home after work and conduct private research in home laboratories, cloning animals, insects and human cells, dreaming up elixirs of eternal youth and immortality. The degeneration of society was soon alarming enough for the governments to step in. The practices were eventually banned due to the adverse nature of the social side effects they caused.

Cybernetics and information technology, on the other hand, continued to flourish, constantly opening new opportunities, be it desirable or not.

David was a great supporter of these fields of study. He built the transmitter later planted in the enemy’s base, allowing access to their databases and control of the system.

He was not particularly surprised to have been sent to Freestation near Old Cairo. He’d had a feeling they would choose it for his exile, due to both the tragic death of his sister and the UN military assault. He was now quite content to have been commissioned with the task of overseeing the rebuilding works
computerised system of remote
in the city via a

control. With the programme he had written, architects were able to freely roam a virtual copy of Old Cairo, surveying construction sites, identifying undamaged buildings and erecting new ones. To his own surprise, David found urban planning a completely engrossing and truly fascinating task.

He constantly improved his innovative solutions. Soon an architect designing a garden could smell the plants he had planted a moment earlier, all thanks to a prototype device transmitting sensual data directly into his brain, a completely non-invasive method utilising ultrasound technology. All these advances allowed Old Cairo to quickly recover from its ordeal, at least when it came to a computer simulation. In the real world, the municipality now awaited funds to allow actual reconstruction of the destroyed city quarters.

David purchased a patch of land on the outskirts of the city and designed a house he was soon planning to build there. He enjoyed the dry, hot air; the climate agreed with him and, most importantly, he felt useful. There was much to be done in the region.

The house he intended to build was to become a safe haven for his son and, who knew, maybe even another woman in his life. He missed Robert greatly as well as the guys and Jo, who’d always been there for him in times of need. He wasn’t sure if they were ever going to see each other again. What he wouldn’t give to at least know where they had been sent to. The need was so burning that he one day entered the city prefecture, sat at a computer terminal and downright hacked into the military database to find out. He managed to locate Levi in the former USA and Alec in Japan. He was of course less than eager to see Alec again. That man had been a constant nuisance, always ready to mess things up. Had it not been for Jo, David would surely have beaten some sense into him on several occasions. Alec was certainly one acquaintance he was glad to be separated from.

Oddly enough, he managed to find no information on Jo, even though he tried every hacking trick he knew of, and he knew a lot. The reason, he would later find out, was fairly simple. Embittered, after arriving at Tenerife, Jo had destroyed all her identification chips and had never registered at the local base. She had managed to sneak her way past border control and onboard a ferryboat which had taken her to a Spanish island called Fuerteventura where she would spend her time among the local fishermen.

As she came closer to the island, she realised how little she knew about it. It was part of the Royal United Nations archipelago, also known as the Canaries, just 100 kilometres off the coast of Africa. It immediately enchanted Jo with its golden sands carried forth by winds from the Sahara. The island was scarcely populated, mainly by fishermen and shepherds, at first glance almost uncontaminated by technology or modernity.

The water supply for the island was via ship transports regularly sailing back and forth to the continent. At first, Jo found accommodation in Betanucria, a small city built on the top of a volcano. She was soon scared off by its overwhelming quietness, so she had instead moved to a fishing village called Corralejo. She was quickly accepted into the small world of local fishermen and the sandy dunes offered a perfect setting for long walks during which she always remembered to do some training – martial arts in the morning and tai chi at sunset. During the day she would sail out onboard one of the fishing boats and in the evenings she helped at the local restaurant, learning the secrets of Guanchan cuisine. The multitude of tastes she experienced there, the diet based on fish, corn, bananas and beans, was beyond any comparison to the nutrition servings she’d eaten onboard the shuttle. She was now beginning to rediscover the sheer joy of eating, the pleasure of finding yet another palette of tastes with every freshly caught fish she was served.

After a while, some of the villagers began to suspect who she was, especially after she’d settled several of the more violent disputes in bars and pubs with military efficiency. Her commando background was also given away by the way she’d secured her house on the outskirts of the village and the amount of technologically advanced equipment she’d managed to drum up, not without difficulty, from the local military base. She also managed to obtain an army car which she used for long trips along the beach, when the sunset painted the sea red and the village was already fast asleep.

A group of Norwegians visiting the island managed to tempt her into two diving expeditions to explore the deep sea ecosystem of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the highest formation of the Atlantic Ocean bed.

She was enchanted by the deep sea, until very recently the least explored environment on the planet. The Ridge, stretching between Iceland and the Azores, had recently been studied by the Norwegian team, who employed robotic probes and who had managed to document over a thousand new life forms so far completely unknown to science. The research material they had managed to gather was enthusiastically welcomed by various scientific circles. With her knowledge of almost every type of vehicle known to man, Jo had helped them greatly in steering their stateof-the-art submarine, equipped with its complex console, especially since the ship’s captain was – as a local saying went – ‘sea-wise incapable’ due to the excessive amounts of guancha-malva – the Spanish wine he had a particular taste for.

When she returned from those expeditions, she was always happier and more enthusiastic than she’d felt in a long time. She would tell the fishermen of strange caverns left by an unknown animal in the slopes of underwater mountains, two thousand metres below the surface. They would then, in turn, talk of other mountains, particularly those located around the volcanic island of Lanzarotte and similar caverns often found there. These were things of legends, particularly since whenever one tried to return to the spot to see the caverns again they seemed to have disappeared, never to be found in the same place twice.

And so the next few evenings would be filled with various stories told by the people of Corralejo who clearly enjoyed Jo’s company. However, whenever she tried to share some stories from space with the Spaniards, they listened reluctantly and always concluded their place was here, on Earth, and they had no intention of moving anywhere else.

And so her memories of the shuttle and her life there were beginning to return to haunt her.
Magdalena managed to upload the whole disk before she’d died, but it seemed some memories were more difficult to recall than others. Every day she managed to regain some more. She certainly did remember Alec now. Not a day would pass without her wondering how she could have been so wrong about the man. She had once truly believed him to be her Mr. Right. Now, all she could feel when thinking of him was maybe not as much hate as simple distaste. She pondered a lot on this whole business with Diana and found solace in remembering her true friends, Levi and David, wondering where they were and what they were doing.
From time to time her face would suddenly brighten with memories of the night she’d spent with Victor. She still couldn’t forgive herself for the way she’d treated him at the end. She feared it might have scared him off. He had not even come to see her off when she was leaving the base.
There was an area in her memory, however, she still could not quite put her finger on, even though the island and its surroundings seemed somehow related to that very part of her past. She often felt a sort of a déjà vu when, for example, she would suddenly recognise a certain street or back alley, but nothing definitive had yet broken through. Even here, on this beautiful island, she still felt displaced and confused. She subconsciously believed it to be a form of punishment for her decision to undergo the memory wipe in the first place. She still felt remorse for getting the commodore involved in all this. He’d always been almost like a father to her.
As she sat there, gazing at the starry sky, pondering on a thousand questions swelling in her head, she did not realise that all those dilemmas were soon to be answered.

* * * *