After The Wars

He could get used to this! Sleeping in a real room and waking on a soft bed. Aleon stretched his limbs lazily as he gets his six-foot-four-inch bulk out of bed. His room is twenty-two floors up from the streets of Levita-17, one of the twenty-two sky-cities in the stratosphere of what remained of Earth. The floating structures were first designed and deployed as military installations to shoot interplanetary ballistic missiles into space, during World War 4. Unfortunately, nobody thought to use them as second level defense systems to support the satellite shields. The weapons of the Marsenes proved more powerful, and took out almost seventy-eight percent of Earth’s population – and about a quarter of the Moon! Now, if the rays of the Sun leak through the dense debris in space, you can see the chipped Moon in orbit, like a worn battle-shield of some ancient warrior, and a large chunk of its dismembered part floating after it some miles away as though it was trying to play catch-up. A nuke from Mars did that! Scientists say it was a miracle that the Moon did not fall out of its orbital circuit.

Today is a special day for Aleon! His first free day on Levita-17. He had been on the floating city for nine days, competing in the trials for the Intergalactic Olympics – the fifth one, but the very first one since the end of World War 7. All his life, he had been trained by Ysildor to be an athlete, specifically for the Olympics. Yesterday, at the finals of the sprint trials, the training paid off. Aleon had won both the 100 meters dash and the 200 meters sprint, to emerge as one of Earth’s three representatives at the Olympics short distance events. The celebration went into the night, and the only dampener was that Ysildor was not present to savor the victory with him. He is marooned in Mina Subterra – Earth’s only remaining underground mining city that is both home and prison to eleven million, six hundred and forty three thousand, two hundred and five unfortunate souls that are not rich enough to buy a good life on any of the twenty two sky-cities, or found guilty of an offence, and sentenced to work in the mines. Of course, there is also a small population of undocumented inhabitants of Mina Subterra hiding away from Interpol. Ysildor is one of them.

Aleon unscrews his metal left arm and disengages the liquid tubes that feed nano-neurons into the stump that remains of his appendage, picks up his towel and heads into the shower box. It feels good to sleep, and walk around the room, without any cloths on, for a change. All his life, he has had to sleep with one eye open and fully clothed in readiness to flee, whenever the need arose. He hangs his towel on the edge of the shower door and removes his medallion from his neck, then hangs it on the shower faucet. The cold, clean water from the shower is another refreshing revelation. Down in Mina Subterra, the coldest water is always tepid, and ‘clean’ depends on your definition of ‘dirty’. Aleon hates that he cannot spend as much time under the shower as he wants. The past eight days were a flurry of fast-paced trainings and contests spent in the spartanly furnished arena booths, with barely enough time to luxuriate in the magnificent opulence of Levita-17. Right now, he wishes he could forget all his worries, fears and myriads of unanswered questions, but he has to hurry out of the shower. He knows Ylrike will be knocking on his door any minute, and he still needs a few minutes to fix back his metal arm.

Ylrike is many things to him. She is as tough as steel nails! She has to be, being Ysildor’s daughter and living on the edge of danger with a fugitive father. Ylrike is also Ysildor’s assistant in whatever he does – fixing machines, making automatons, forging documents, scuffling, or training athletes. Two years older than Aleon, Ylrike was at a time his nanny, baby-sitter, instructor, trainer and now his lover. Her fierce penchant for survival and compartmentalizing her life is uncanny! Aleon has been dating her since he was seventeen and half years old, and still cannot figure her out. Ysildor once ran his strong fingers through the woolly hair of a very bemused Aleon, and admonished: “don’t waste your life trying to figure out specie of the alien sex. Just be satisfied that you’re the one she has chosen to love, and would kill for”. Her rough life somehow did not touch her five-foot-eleven-inch feminine beauty. Aleon was used to seeing her get the better of brutes who mistook her for a delicate flower. Ylrike’s mother had died along with Aleon’s parents, when they escaped Levita-3 – the hub of Earth’s scientific researches, and its most sophisticated military base. Aleon was only a baby and has no recollection of his parents, other than the little information Ysildor volunteered – and the heart-shaped locket handed to him when he was twelve years old. Ysildor used to tell him about how his parents were revered scientists on Levita-3, where they were colleagues, but he would say no more. His only constant, stern words were “never let go of this gift from your parents. It is yours to treasure and keep safe. Never give it to anyone – not even Ylrike! One day, this trinket will save, not just your life, but the whole world. For now, just keep it hidden and safe.” Aleon has heard these same words for seven years, but Ysildor never for once explained what he meant. All Aleon knows is that the medallion is all that is left of the memories of his parents.

He leaves the door ajar while he fixes on his metal arm, and Okon and Ylrike burst in with excitement. Aleon is always intrigued to see the wide-eyed, girly side of his girlfriend. “Hey! Tin-knuckle”, she quipped, “we’re late for the city tour. Let’s go!” Aleon smiles as she kisses him and throws his shirt at him. He takes a quick glance at the time – or Levita-17’s version of it. Nobody knew the exact time since space debris filled the solar system, after the colonies of Mars and Jupiter waged the wars of independence against Earth. In the wake of World War 6, electromagnetic pulse bombs targeted at Earth’s digitalized military installations wiped out all of Earth’s digital devices, including clocks. That meant nobody could tell the time accurately, since space debris from previous 2 world wars made it impossible for anyone to use a sun-dial to tell the time. It is just as well that the ancient Republic of China had invented artificial sun; else life on Earth would have ended. Since the digicalypse, every sky-city had to decide on their own time. Levita-22 was even rumored to have come up with a twenty-six-hour clock, but nobody can tell for sure, since the sky-city was sold off to the richest man on Earth, and nobody goes to, or leaves, there anymore.

Aleon saunters towards the door, hugging Okon’s big frame.

“Aleon!” Ylrike startles him. There is that usual mean, killer grimace!

“Where’s your medallion?” She asks with a hollow, threatening voice. For three seconds, Aleon is perturbed and lost as he looks down on his bare chest. Then, he remembers! He dashes to the shower, takes the heart-shaped locket from the faucet, and hangs it on his neck, carefully tucking the little colorful trinket inside his shirt.

“Are you crazy? D’you wanna lose the only thing your ma ever gave you?”

“I’m sorry, Yee. I forgot it in the shower when I had my bath”.

“Never do that again! Dad told you countless times”.

“I said I’m sorry”.

As the three friends leave the room, Aleon thinks to himself for the umpteenth time, “What’s the big deal with this trinket?”

The gun battle has raged on for four days in Sector 19. Now, with heavy artillery and firepower, the Interpol Strike-team engages what appears to be the final resistance on the corner of Sixth and Forbes. Intelligence reports gathered over months of investigations may prove to be correct, after all. This is the enclave of the criminal masterminds on the agency’s most wanted list, and by the time there is a cease-fire Mina Subterra’s documented population would be one hundred and nineteen less, while the undocumented population that makes up most of the resistance would take months to identify. Four blocks down Forbes Street, bullets fly around as Ysildor and the remnant of his group dig in for one last stand. As rehearsed in battle drills, everyone takes position in a lose arrowhead formation that shields Ysildor. As he wraps a crepe bandage around his wounded hand, Ysildor thinks to himself that this might just be the end he has prepared for. Interpol has spent two decades looking for him, and that search ends today.

Frechelle runs in limping, with one leg looking like a pin-cushion for shrapnel.

“Yzee, Breach in Block Three. We need to go!” She blurts out.

Ysildor picks himself up, his side hurting with the sting of a bullet wound, and makes his way into the kitchen of the small bistro that has served as his control headquarters for over ten years. As he opens the basement door, a loud explosion throws him down the stairs. With ears ringing deaf, he opens his eyes and sees Frechelle’s lifeless, mangled body a few feet away from him. He picks himself up as he says a little prayer for the trio. It is just good timing that the Intergalactic League of Nations decided to end all hostilities, and re-organize the Olympic Games. He has not received any news about the trial games on Levita-17, and the finals held yesterday, but he is confident that Aleon should make the final selection for the games to be hosted on Jupiter next month. Everything now depends on the heart-shaped locket safely reaching Jupiter. Unknown to Aleon, the medallion carries hundreds of thousands of terabytes of research data – enough information, in the right hands, to fix and heal the worlds. Aleon’s parents decided it was not to be entrusted to politicians, and devised a way to transfer the information to others across the solar system. They got killed for this, leaving him with a three-year old daughter and a ten-month old boy to raise.

Ysildor pulls himself up to lean on a lever by the power box, electrical wires dangling all around him, as he waits for the smoke to recede, and the inevitable end he had planned. Clad in leather trench-coat and wielding a semi-automatic rifle, an Interpol agent walks down the stairs followed by his heavily armed goons. In his other hand, he holds a retina-scanner to Ysildor’s bloodied face and grins at the tell-tale beeps.

“Affirmative! We have the rogue Agent 5”.

“And who are you?” Ysildor asks feebly.

“The new Agent 5. I’m honored to finally make your acquaintance”. He puts the scanner in the pocket of his trench-coat and brings out a cigar from his inner pocket. One of his goons flashes a lighter to his face and he puffs at the cigar. He blows the smoke in Ysildor’s face.

“So, Old School. How d’you wanna play this? I can either take you in, or if you wanna go easier, you can hand me the info I’m after an’ I’ll give you a quick an’ easy death”.

Ysildor smiles wryly as he coughs out spurts of blood. He remembers an ancient fictional literature he read while he was in high school, about a magical evil trinket that got a king killed. They sure do not make stories like that anymore.

“What’s so funny, Old School?” Agent 5 asks, with teeth clenching his cigar.

“Ysildor’s bane!” whispers the dying quinquagenarian... and he pulls down the detonator switch!