High up Government tower, overlooking the execution down in the grand central courtyard, stood a solitary figure in black. Her hair flapped about in the strong winds. It was always windy in the upper city. She never quite got why the city’s elite insisted on living up here in the skyway spires. The air was thin due to the high altitude and it was almost permanently windy and cold. The city’s climate was way more pleasant at the lower levels. Probably it was a price the elites were willing to pay to keep out the commoners.
Salpetersburg was built around Government tower. A monstrosity taller than Fosfat’s highest mountain which housed the entire world government in its lower levels and housed Fosfat’s elite of the elite in the upper levels. The highest levels were so high up, they had to be completely air sealed and kept pressurized. Otherwise the air would have been too thin to breathe.
Halfway up Government tower was the skyway. A gargantuan loop supported by the city’s three tallest towers. The skyway ran over more than a third of Salpeterburg’s inner city. It was so big that housed over a million and cast a permanent shadow over large parts of the city. The place where Government tower and the skyway intersected was where the supreme court was located. The court’s marble adorned main gate overlooked the grand central courtyard. It was carefully designed to radiate importance and grandeur, reminding citizens of where this world’s power truly lay. The supreme court was reserved only for the most important of cases. Regular courtrooms down below in the city handled the ordinary ones. The first murder of a class four citizen in well over fifty years was definitely the kind of case that would be handled here.
Stolen story; please report.
She had never been a fan of this place. Sure, the views were magnificent. You could see the entire city, including the outer fringes, from here. On clear days you could even see the sea in one direction and the Opal mountains in the other. But the view was the only good thing about this place for a class one citizen such as herself. The only thing that made the elites tolerate her presence was her uniform. She’d have to make colonel before she could get the class three citizenship she needed before she’d be allowed to come this high up whenever she wished. For any regular class one or two citizen, the skyway was the highest they were allowed to go.
Still, she’d rather be up here, than stuck in the crowd below. Crowds had never been her thing. Too exposed, too unpredictable. She didn’t like what crowds did to people either. Within the frantic microcosm of the crowd, moderates turned fanatic, the thoughtful turned mindless, and the peaceful turned into monsters. ‘Only fools enter crowds’ she thought to herself.
She didn’t care much for executions either. What must be done, must be done. The spectacle surrounding though.. it was too vulgar for her tastes. Cowards screaming for blood whilst hidden by the safety of anonymity. A man’s life, reduced to cheap amusement. An innocent man too, probably. These were the people she had sworn to protect. This was what was supposed to be the best their planet had to offer. A saddening thought that left her feeling repulsed.
One can never let a good crisis go to waste though. Especially not one that presented her with a potentially perfect pawn for what was to come. The fate of the planet, perhaps even of the galaxy, was at stake. More importantly, the fate of her career and personal ambitions hung in the balance. Surely that was worth sacrificing one man’s life over?