The Far Bank of the Rubicon (The Pax Imperium Wars: Volume 1) (2 page)

“Yes. Ma’am.” Summers felt a bead of sweat appear on his brow. He was struggling to keep his Avatar from suddenly moving. He thought about recalling it. He could always send it back across the street later.

“Keep up the great work.”

“Thank you, Ma’am.”

The window on the vehicle closed as the car started to pull through the gate. Summers allowed his focus to snap back across the street. He was grateful the garage for the home behind him lay at a right angle to his position. Within about four seconds of entering the gate, the vehicle would be out of sight, and he could move forward.

Soon after the car disappeared, his AI codebreakers signaled their success. The electronic protections on the driver’s-side door went down. Summers looked down at his index finger, sorting through various fingerprints to make sure he had the correct one activated. Then he reached through the door of the vehicle and used the print to open the window.

A network of defense satellites now took over some of his motor functions in the physical world, using their precision to improve his accuracy beyond what had been thought possible for human beings. With one fluid motion, he removed the weapon from his pocket, aimed, and fired a single, high-tech flechette round. The thin, needle-shaped round, constructed from millions of nanites, flew in near silence before hitting the driver in the side of the temple, just as he was beginning to turn to see what had happened with the window. The round maneuvered toward the brain circuitry that controlled consciousness, causing as little damage as possible to the other functions of the mind. The driver effectively passed out. However, because the wound did little damage to the other systems of his body, it would take some time before his biosensors recognized what had taken place.

From his position, Summers looked across the street at the two remaining guards. Neither yet seemed alerted to any problem. Both idly looked at the house. Keeping his eye trained on the guards, Summers left the safety of the shadows and sprinted into the light. As he did so, one of the guards turned toward the street. Summers aimed a second shot. The guard crumpled to the ground.

“Shit!” he heard the third guard exclaim.

By this time, Summers was already across the street, having signaled the gate to open. Hearing the creak of the gate, the final guard turned, trying to take cover behind the vehicle. As the guard moved, Summers’ avatar forced open the passenger’s side window. His shot passed through and out the widening crack in the passenger’s side. It hit its target just below the chin, turned upwards through the roof of the target’s mouth, and knocked him out.

Summers checked the time. One minute and thirty seconds before his boss arrived. He was thirty seconds behind schedule, but that could be accounted for by his clients arriving home early.

A quick check with his heads-up told him that things were reaching their finale upstairs. The target would be down in about six minutes. Summers turned on the safety and holstered his weapon underneath his overcoat and suit jacket.

When the black, executive-class, utility vehicle drifted to a stop at the end of the drive, Summers already had two bodies in the trunk of the limousine. He finished putting the driver in with his companions and turned to greet his boss.

Serene as always, Timothy Randall walked quietly up the drive, keeping his hands in the pockets of his black overcoat and wrapping it around himself to keep warm. Six foot two, with a handsome jawline that exuded strength and prowess, Randall appeared to be the textbook definition of a politician. His salt and pepper hair lay coiffed to one side. Summers could just see the tip of his red, white, and blue tie poking out from the top of his overcoat. If not for the two uber-serious bodyguards on either side of him, he looked like he could be a middle manager returning home from a late evening at the office. His looks and manner endeared him to many.

He wore the perpetual smile of someone who had never really lost anything. In so many politicians, the corners of the mouth and the eyes gave away their insecurities and fears. Randall’s eyes contained no fear. People were attracted to that. His piercing blues radiated confidence. Summers couldn’t remember a time when he had seen him ruffled—although there were tales of one bloody tirade just after the Aetna disaster.

Randall smiled genially as he approached. He seemed to appreciate Summers’ efficiency. It was Randall who had first given him the nickname “Katana.” Speaking quietly, he asked, “K, I trust there wasn’t any trouble?”

“No, sir.”

“Excellent. And our target?”

“Just saying his ‘good nights’ now, sir. He should be coming down in about four minutes.”

“Well, then, there’s nothing for it but to get ready, is there?”

“No, sir.” Summers’ avatar opened the back door to the limousine on the near side.

Timothy Randall climbed in.

In meatspace, Summers gently closed the door.

He used the heads-up device to silently communicate with the other two agents who had arrived with Randall.
Gentlemen, the grenade has been unpinned. Suit up.

Summers pulled a pocket knife out of his jacket and opened one of the small blades. He then twisted it to the left. The knife melted into a lump of gel in his hand. As Summers rubbed the gel over his face, he felt the familiar tugging sensation of his face changing shape. At the same moment, his shoes raised him up about an inch and a half. Ten seconds later, his face had morphed into a surprisingly accurate double of guard number two. The other two agents morphed into the driver and guard number three, respectively.

Two minutes later, the CEO of the Unity Corporation exited the house of his lover. Summers kept his eyes on guard number four as he opened the door to the vehicle. As expected, the CEO balked once he saw who was inside. With one fluid motion, Summers shoved the portly man in while his fellow agent took care of the guard with a shot to the temple. Summers quickly closed the door and helped his fellow agent get the fourth body in the trunk.

As Summers opened the door to get in, he took the gun from his holster and aimed it at Cowhill’s head. Cowhill, who had just seated himself in the center of the back bench, whispered, “Son of a bitch,” under his breath, as the color drained from his face. He shook his head. “Son of a bitch,” he said again.

Summers kept the weapon trained on Cowhill as he sent a signal to the driver using the heads-up. The vehicle started its ascent.

For a few seconds, Cowhill and Randall sat placidly looking at one another.

Finally, the CEO spoke. “Why?”

Randall answered, “You’re a dinosaur, Gerald. You have no will, no courage.”

“This war you want is folly.”

“Oh, I think not, Gerald. It’s what the Unity was designed to do.”

The tone of the CEO’s voice changed slightly as he let some of his frustration show. “It’s too expensive, in both lives and money. We can barely feed our population as it is.”

For the barest of seconds, Summers felt the heat of anger rise up in Randall. “It’s what we were meant to do, Gerald. It is the essence of our greatness as a corporation and as an empire. We are meant to expand our boundaries, to grow, and compete with others. For three hundred years, we have been forced to bow the knee to the weak and toothless Pax Imperium—forced to join an empire we never wanted—and so the Unity has fallen into petty squabbles with itself—brother killing brother. Nine Unity factions all vying for the same CEO’s chair but never once accomplishing anything more than an internal game of king of the hill. It’s untenable. If Aetna taught me anything, it’s that our people need a vision outside themselves. They need something to unite them, to inspire them. They need a mission. They need a destiny.”

Cowhill couldn’t hide his scorn. “And you’re the one to lead us there, to this destiny?”

“I am.”

The CEO shook his head, his voice a barely audible whisper. “Timothy, you’ll be the ruin of us all.”

Randall held out his hand. Summers hesitated for half a beat before he put his gun in the hand of his boss. He wasn’t used to being without a weapon.

“No, Gerald. I will take us to places you can’t go. I will make us great again.”

"Jonas?"

Squatting in the warm afternoon light, sixteen-year-old Jonas recognized the warmth in his father's voice. His father used neither a concerned nor a corrective tenor, so Jonas continued to squat without acknowledging him. Instead, he adjusted the dial on his monocle style microscope and observed the whooping ant in front of him as it held in its fingertips a fragment of the sandwich Jonas had been eating for lunch. The two-centimeter-long "ant" pulled the offered food toward its front mouth with its forward facing hands. Since he had started his studies of ecology with his tutor at the age of five, the whooping ant had always fascinated Jonas. The individual ant in question seemed particularly adept with its use of the thumb. It was able to grasp the edge of the offered ham and cheese sandwich, and with a twisting motion, pull the food toward its mouth. The ant had the smallest opposable thumb in the known galaxy.

Jonas' father squatted down beside him. “What have you found?”

“A whooping ant.” If he could have acknowledged it to himself, Jonas would have admitted that his heart beat a little faster having his father this close to him. He could feel the warmth radiating from the man’s tall muscular frame and smell the scent of the palace laundry on his clothing.

Jonas’ father fished in several pockets on his hiking shirt before he found an identical microscope and put it in his eye. “What’s its technical name?”

“The microscope said either Athenian extra-small scavenger thirty-two K point forty-five or forty-six, but that depended upon whether or not it consumed animal protein. Apparently, it’s forty-six because it’s eating the ham.”

Jonas couldn’t remember a moment in which he had possessed as much of his father’s attention as he did at this precious instant in time. The trip itself was unique. He and his father had traveled by themselves—without attendants or advisers—along with sixty normal families and the court bishop to a remote part of their homeworld, Athena. Only the bare minimum of security had come with them, but if Jonas were honest, he wanted even fewer people. He wished they were alone.

If he had spoken his wish aloud, he knew that his father would have said that being alone would have wrecked the point. His father would have said the Pilgrimage of the Sun had always been done as a group on Athena on Midsummer’s Day. Jonas knew this because they had discussed the matter several times prior to the pilgrimage, and his father had said those words or something similar each time, but it didn’t mean Jonas wanted time alone with his father any less.

“Hmmm.” Jonas’ father put the microscope in his eye, and they both silently watched the whooping ant.

At the palace, whole days would pass in which each step, every bow, and all the words of both the King and his second son had to be negotiated in advance. A misstep here or an indiscreet word there and an interstellar incident might result. Most people had no idea that the news clips broadcast on the nets were so highly scripted.

Wanting this moment to go on forever, Jonas asked a question. “Dmitri is always going on and on about the fact that on the ancient world, ‘ant’ didn’t mean the same thing as it does on Athena today. It never made sense to me. What was he talking about?”

“Well, it’s been a long time since I studied historical ecology, but I remember learning something about that,” the king said. Much to Jonas’ chagrin, his father stood up. He stretched out his back and rubbed his fingers on the side of his temple before looking back down at Jonas and saying, “If memory serves me, ants on the ancient world were a group of small scavengers. They lived in a hive and had a queen much like the whooping ant. When the first colonists arrived on Athena, they used the word ‘ant’ to describe this creature because it seemed so familiar, at least until the colony gave out that collective ‘whoop’ sound like they do when they feel threatened. The two together got them the name ‘whooping ant.’”

Jonas took the monocle out of his eye and stood up beside his father. People often told him that he looked like his dad. He had the same tall muscular build, chocolate-colored skin with mixed brown and blond hair. The only difference was his father’s blonde goatee. Jonas put his hands on his hips and surveyed the scene before him. He could see the royal shuttle and its companion shuttle parked nearby. Their crews leaned against the common shuttle in a relaxed fashion, talking with each other.

In front of the ships stood thirty pairs of fathers and sons mixed in various sized groups. Jonas watched a group of boys huddled together in serious contemplation of a tablet. They laughed, and Jonas experienced a recurring longing to be with them, even though the thought terrified him. As a prince, he had little experience with other children and no friends other than his older brother. He inhabited a world of adults and, if honest with himself, he was much more comfortable around them. Jonas instinctively took a step closer to his father.

Even from this distance, he could tell from their body language that lunch was over. The group politely waited for the King and his son to return. Since birth, a merciless sense of duty had dictated the course of Jonas’ life. At sixteen, it owned him wholly. “We better get going, Dad. The bishop is starting to sigh.”