Dedication (The Medicean Stars Saga Book 1) (13 page)

Western Mountains

Abandoned Military Base

Gavitte is now sitting in what was obviously once a military conference room, at one end of a long conference table. The furniture is worn from decades of use—some by the uniforms who originally occupied the space, but more so by the civilians seated there now.

General Lampard breaks from an animated discussion with one of his aides and turns to Gavitte. His gesturing to the walls and empty seats around the table had been clear, but his voice had been pitched too low for Gavitte to make out. As the aide leaves, Lampard begins talking to what Gavitte has deduced is his executive committee, the same group that he had met with the first day he’d arrived and who’d partaken of nearly every strategy session since. One notable absence is the rough ex-rancher, Luke Blancuro, who’d been supportive of Gavitte whenever there had been a disagreement around the table. The rest of the committee is already assembled, settling into their chairs and readying their stacks of paper for this discussion ahead.

Luke’s opposite, a man named Larry Russari, glances up from his folder of papers and gives Gavitte a sly look before winking at him. Gavitte’s first impression had been one of disgust. Larry talks smooth, looks smooth, and acts smooth. It seems like he is always shifting and changing his position both in the discussions they’ve had around this table and physically in his seat. And Gavitte had reacted to him like he would a bucket of writhing eels. Luke on the other hand, who’d seemed to take an instant liking to Gavitte, comes across more as large jagged rock that props up a house: solid, unyielding, and painful if you run into it. The difference between the two men’s dispositions has often led them into disagreement, Luke charging head on like a bull while Larry always tries to outflank him. The arguments are always heated, but there is no ill will between the two. General Lampard is always careful to keep them on topic, which has led to some of their most innovative solutions to the problems facing Gavitte’s guerrilla campaign developing out of their dichotomy.

Today the meeting has not been called for planning purposes. Today the general and the executive committee are going to provide Gavitte with some insight into how they all ended up where they are. General Lampard fiddles with some knobs in a hidden control panel, preparing the room for the upcoming presentation.

“In case you haven’t guessed yet,” the general begins, “the Hub was once a military complex, built to withstand all sorts of warfare. As the government grew more complacent and overwhelmed with paperwork, it was transformed into an archive facility—one of many. In fact, this entire mountain range is laced with these bunkers-turned-libraries. I was placed here as the commanding officer over only about one hundred troops, most of whom had been on discipline for showing revolutionary tendencies. It was a punishment detail in all but name, and we all knew it. We were tasked with maintaining and protecting the tons of paper hidden in this mountain from their biggest threats: moisture and mildew. I’ll put it simply—Command knew I was having second thoughts about my Oath and thought to stick me somewhere that I’d just rot away and then forget about me. Unfortunately for them, I was at least going to be conscientious about my duties, which, at that time, meant working to expand the archive system deeper. Part of the reason I was banished from the capital is I’d managed to step on the wrong toes, and when there was a shift in the ruling families, people who weren’t happy with me suddenly gained a lot more power.”

The general is speaking primarily to Gavitte, the rest of the council is either reviewing the packets before them or staring blankly at the screen at the end of the room.

“That’s when they discovered it. Buried not thirty feet below the existing lowest level was a sphere—roughly ten feet across—made of what I’ve been told by the geologists who were running our excavation is classified as a ‘metalo-ceramic.’ Basically, they have no clue what it is, and they can’t reproduce it, so they made up a name for it.

“Now at the time, all we had here were a bunch of gun-toting glorified janitors with a small mining crew on loan to us, but I knew that I had stumbled upon something extraordinary. Not only was the sphere made of a material we’d never seen before, but it would sometimes cause our equipment to act in weird ways. One of the mining crews was attempting to break the sphere up with an excavator when the machine bucked its driver and then proceeded to chase the poor man up the tunnel.”

Noting Gavitte’s doubting expression, General Lampard smiles. “I know what you’re thinking, what a bunch of nut jobs. I thought the same thing too until I saw the security camera footage. The excavator had just touched the portion of orb that was visible when it froze for several seconds before glowing briefly and booting its driver out of his seat.

“It was pretty obvious to me we were dealing with something that wasn’t natural, and since the geologist told me the rock layer it was buried in had been beneath the mountain for a couple million years, it almost made sense to suggest it wasn’t human in origin. So I reached out to Command to ask for some Science Division back-up. They told me in no polite terms where I could put my request and that I should just do my job and not bother them. Clearly my banishment was to be permanent, and I should stop interrupting their very important golf games.

“Instead of just sitting back and ignoring such an intriguing enigma, I had to figure out what the strange orb was. Assuming that as Command wasn’t even interested in sending anyone from the Science Division they weren’t likely to have bothered assigning someone to review my actions, I reached out to some people I knew from my first wife. They were able to get me in touch with some other academics, and I eventually ended up talking to a few professors at Bay City University. The professors and their staff were interested in moving out here for research, but they feared that the system would at the very least block them, or worse, highjack and corrupt their results. They’d heard rumors before of the other strange and exciting discoveries that, as soon the researchers had gone public, had been proven a hoax. One of the Bay City professors had lost a friend at another university who, after finding out his discovery was flawed, apparently suffered a mental breakdown, killed his family and then himself. Everyone who knew him couldn’t believe the official report, and enough of his peers had already validated his results, but they all had received anonymous letters warning them to remain quiet about their results. It was clear that there was someone who didn’t want discoveries like the orb to be made and was willing to arrange any sort of ‘accident’ to see that they weren’t. The scientists I needed to uncover the truth about this strange object were too scared to join me if I didn’t have the full blessing of Command. We were at an impasse until Larry here had a crazy idea.

“As I mentioned before, this was when the power balance was shifting in the Capital, and it looked like a new family was going to step up and take control. So I decided to do what any self-respecting career officer, such as myself, should do during a time of upheaval: vie for a promotion by making the right people happy.

“We shut up about any interesting findings and finished up the planned expansion and prepared the base for decommissioning ahead of schedule. We even did it with a reduced complement of men, as we allowed those not personally loyal to me to be given reassignment elsewhere. Once we had everything in order, I managed to politic us into a more active role—a first response unit for riots. Essentially, we got promoted to cannon fodder, but it was exactly where we wanted to be.” The general’s eyes twinkle with mischief.

“With the shift in the ruling family’s power, the Resistance, such as it was then, was starting to make itself known. I was able to get into contact with one of the regional heads for the area around the university and tell him that I had a hideout all ready for me and my men. All I needed was a distraction. Rising magnificently to the occasion, this group managed to get almost the entire staff and student body of Bay City to be out and protesting by the time we were deployed. When the bombs went off, our entire squad, and a good portion of the university staff who were rioting, were ‘obliterated,’ leaving no traces. We made our way back here slowly, and that’s when the real work began.”

“So what exactly are you telling me?” a confused Gavitte asks. “Why did you abandon the military?”

“Give me a second, and I’ll get to that. But first, I want to explain how we came to be here. Once everyone ‘killed’ in the riots made it here and was settled in the facility, we began experimenting with the sphere a bit more. As the rest of the sphere was excavated, we found that there were three ports at the bottom. They looked like big power outlets, like the kind in any home, except that they were nearly large enough to stick your head inside. In our zeal to uncover as much of the sphere as we could, we over excavated, resulting in the first mystery. We took too much of the rock out from under the sphere, the entire thing was balanced atop a tiny column of rock that was small enough you could easily wrap your arms around it. One of the scientists had been laying underneath the orb examining its bottom, and being stiff from laying in an awkward position, he pushed off the remaining column to stand up, causing it to collapse. Instead of being crushed by the massive ball that was just above his head, he was shocked to see that it stayed right where it was. No movement, no nothing. It stayed as stationary as if it were still entombed in the mountain.”

As he tries to absorb this last piece of information, Gavitte sits and stares at the general, looking dumb, not really comprehending what exactly this means, and, more importantly, why it is being told to him. He is after all just a politician, really just a figurehead and salesman combination. He’s been so absorbed in trying to build a campaign that he’d never given any thought to why so many people are inside the mountain hideout. To say that it had only been the campaign absorbing his thoughts would be a lie, he thinks with an inward smile that leaks out to his lips. Thoughts of Angelina might have also played a role in his distraction; he wishes she was in this meeting just so he could possibly catch her eye and get another of the those half smiles she sneaks him sometimes when no one is looking.

“Stay with me it a bit longer,” Lampard says, sensing that he is losing Gavitte. “I’ll get you as confused as the rest of us in a second. So once we realized that the ball was suspended by some other means than the ground under it, we started looking for what that might be. This is when we found the plugs that went into the sockets. Just below that fatefully stiff researcher, under a thin layer of rock, lay three plugs. The plugs were connected to cables that continued deeper into the mountain.

“Of course, everyone in the mountain was full of theories as to where the cables went, and for three years, we dug deeper and deeper until we finally found their end points. People had almost lost their enthusiasm for the dig and had begun making noises that maybe we should begin focusing more on the Resistance’s original mission to bring down the government. But in the end, stubbornness won out, and we were rewarded for our perseverance. Let me show you what we found.”

The general fiddles with the panel in front of him again, and a whirring noise fills the room, as cooling fans engage. Projectors mounted in the ceiling turn on, and the beige walls fall away, replaced by an image of the base. Their vantage point zooms out until they can see what must be the entire mountain. It is as if the conference table is hovering above the mountain, and they can see through the rock and dirt to the outlines of the many tunnels that riddle it. Ignoring the seemingly infinite precipice at the edge of the oatmeal-colored carpet, the general walks to where the wall used to be.

“This is where we are,” he says, indicating a warren of structures near the north side of the mountain, relatively close to the surface.

“We are in what used to be the old archive complex, of which I was commander before we decommissioned it. Where your rooms are is down here,” he says, pointing to the south side of the mountain at a significantly lower elevation near a river valley. “Right there is the entrance to the abandoned mine, through which you entered the complex. And here is the sphere.”

Pointing directly to the middle of the mountain, beneath some large galleries labeled ‘archive,’ the general indicates a red ball with three red lines running out from it. Each line extends down and away from the sphere, forming a sort of pyramid, around which, it seems, the mountain was shaped, with each line laying under a ridge. The vertices of the pyramid end in a cluster of red boxes. One of these clusters is very close to the location of the mine shaft that was Gavitte’s port of entry. He recalls his earlier encounter in the chamber with the strange humming machines and the even stranger scientists and realizes that he must have stumbled upon this area.

Lampard pauses, waiting for Gavitte’s pondering expression to pass, before continuing. “So once we found where the cables terminated and the generator-like machines they were attached to, we were faced with more questions, no more of which we could answer. We performed as many tests as we knew, but eventually the only real option left was to plug them into the orb and see what happened. We held a vote, and it was unanimous: We were going to plug it in.

“We made a big deal out if it, with all of us holding our breath during the countdown and all. But when all the plugs were connected, nothing happened. We took them out, blew on them to make sure there was no dust in the connections, and tried again. Still nothing. Honestly, after a few tries, most of us lost interest in it. A few who had been grabbed by the mystery stayed on and tried to make sense of it. But nothing had come of it for the past year or so, while were setting up and executing the plan intended to get you out...” he pauses, then continues, looking a little sheepish, “well, that’s not entirely the truth. It was initially an assassination plan. We were going to use you to catalyze another shift in the ruling families, giving us a chance to slip in some higher-level agents. But it would seem that someone disobeyed orders and thought you’d be more useful alive.” The general’s coldly scolding tone is betrayed by the faint twinkle in his eye as he looks towards Angelina’s empty seat.