ARC TWO
THE ASSASSINATION OF TONY SEGERSTROM
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28
Fourteen days.
Two weeks have passed since the battle over San Francisco.
Two weeks since, I had failed to obliterate the quartz and liberate the city.
As the military poured into the area, the quartz expanded the plasma dome over several miles, taking most of the city and a quarter of Oakland hostage and trapping thousands of people. They drew power from the nearby power grid, but fortunately, they had stopped expanding since day three. All attempts to communicate with Captain Iraket fell on deaf ears, and I stopped hailing him that same day.
I lay awake, worried about the beacon since then. Prime did another calculation of its trajectory, narrowing the viable destination to a nearby solar system six light years away called Barnard’s Star, which would reach the red dwarf in one year. I didn’t know much about the system, but Prime detected at least two Neptune-sized gas giants and one terrestrial planet almost twice the size of Earth. Although Prime couldn’t extrapolate if there were any habitable worlds, he recommended I should visit the system.
I chuckled at the thought. Interstellar travel at six light-years away? I couldn’t even fathom the distance, but more worried that the aliens were much closer than I imagined. Is Barnard’s Star their homeworld?
By conventional means, it would take at least hundreds of thousands of years to get there. Every time I thought about the logistics, Prime would intrude upon my thoughts with various calculations for a megastructure to make it feasible and the resources it would take to build one. Every time it happened, I had to sleep off the massive migraine and lessen the nosebleeds. So, Prime learned to feed me bits and pieces about forerunner tech, afraid that it would overload my brain, decrease my immune system, and kill me.
“I know a list of meditation techniques that you can accomplish. Acclimation of forerunner tech is an arduous process where not many organics succeed. But the faster you attune, the more capable you are at harnessing its potential.”
Add that to the long list I should do.
I got out of bed. Yes, a bed with a mattress, pillows, and blankets. Since I now live in this station for the foreseeable future, I could make myself comfortable and make it look as close to home as possible. Except I’m currently building a palace.
The palace’s construction finished two days ago. “The Celestial Palace,” as Jason called it, and the name fucking stuck to everyone’s fancy, shaped like a massive ziggurat of metal (instead of rock) in the middle of the deck, surrounded by a two-mile moat that would become a lake (the dirt was transported from Earth). Plans of more residential complexes between the moat and the ziggurat were proposed, but I had no idea who would live in them. A tenth of the ziggurat was already my family’s “apartment,” where we mostly spent our time.
It didn’t help cut through the mystique when I had the entirety of level 17 to myself, my family, and my staff—another drastic change in this drab place. With thousands of people answering my calls daily (and flying them into the stations), not all of them were fighters and the balls to face the quartz. Some were over their fifties. Several were below the age of seventeen. We had to form a committee to assign these individuals to work, and domestic labor became a number one focus. Most of those who were not combat efficient were given to me.
As my father said, “You need a constant reminder to eat, son.”
Since I’ve been busy lately, it was easy to forget I was hungry. Most of the nanites suppressed the signals into my brain that I needed to eat until I realized I had been unconsciously relegating “eating” as unnecessary for day-to-day activity. The nanites had been feeding me essential nutrients and vitamins to keep my body functioning, which was not a healthy way to live. Within two weeks, I lost twelve pounds. I could see why my father was concerned.
So, I had a personal chef—five of them with their own specialty (French, Italian, Chinese, etc.). But mostly, they all work together, much to their dismay.
I also employed three hundred servants who cleaned, did laundry, managed, and tidied up the palace with their own hierarchy. Amelia recruited a former Private Secretary to some duke from Belgium to manage my household. So far, it was working, and the Celestial Palace had run smoothly since Sir Emile Dumont took office, a strict and posh man in his mid-fifties, who always made a quiet fuss every time I picked up the wrong silverware on the table. He tried to teach me the ways of “polite society” and etiquette, modeling it after the European royals. Though I didn’t know why he wouldn’t follow what the Belgians did, it was all the same.
I also had a hundred household guards to protect me. Tom Hennig worried that due to my growing public profile, someone might get the funny idea of killing me. I had not been a popular guy with the other world leaders lately.
I chuckled at that. Good luck with having to go through Prime first.
Both levels 17 and 18, which I dubbed the government sector, would be the center of my new organization. It’s safer this way, too. The palace would be closed off to the rest of the public, isolated from the civilian sector starting at level 21, where a city was being constructed from the ground up. Any invading force would have to go through three levels of heavily fortified and militarized zones to get to us.
To get to me.
When I parted the curtains, I saw drones and swarms of nanites fleeted in and out, flying in different directions while carrying alloys, metal, and stone across level 17. They’re still busy constructing the ostentatious behemoth, which would become the main palace grounds. Jason, Meredith, and my father wanted something grand, something to reflect upon my status as a forerunner, but Prime and the others delivered a thousand times what we asked for.
“Dude, he made you look expensive,” Jason commented once. “If I turn around, do you shit gold?”
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“God, I hope not. That’s horrifying,” I said, hoping it wouldn’t come true.
The artificial sky was almost complete, casting half the station in dim shadows. A hover car waited outside the palace entrance. These vehicles didn’t require wheels but hovered three feet off the ground with repulsive plates and an anti-gravity lift train. I had to thank my father for coming up with it and working with Prime on a prototype model, using his knowledge of cars to his advantage. Now, we had two hundred “forerunner-made” vehicles across the station, thirty-six of which were “ten-wheeler” transporting goods from dock three to the civilian and agriculture sectors.
For the past two weeks, I assigned fifteen factories to learn and then create various household products like toothbrushes and soap, a refrigerator, couches, TV, plates, kitchen utensils, and a microwave oven, among many things. Working around a facility without a functioning toilet was frustrating, and I have installed multiple of them across the habitable levels so that no one had to piss at a corner again.
“Good morning, forerunner,” Prime One entered my bedroom and automatically opened the blinds for the other windows. More light filled the room, coming from the functional artificial skylight above. I set the days to follow the Eastern Standard Time from the US. Usually, Sir Dumont would barge into my room and wake me up while I'm half-naked (I stopped him from doing it), and now Prime was the only one allowed to enter my room.
Sometimes Sir Dumont when he needed some of the household staff to clean my room and change the sheets. Apparently, I live like a slob.
“Morning, Prime. What’s new today?” I asked, stretching my arms.
“The quartz has not expanded for eleven days and remains within San Francisco. I estimated the death toll at thirty thousand losses and three hundred thousand injured. Three million people are currently displaced from the siege.”
This wasn’t the first time Prime had told me about these statistics. I decided not to stop him so that it would always remind me why I was there and what I had to do. I had spoken extensively with Prime about the Quartz people, but they were hidden behind more red tape. Prime agreed that he or the Architects might have encountered the quartz’s ancestral civilization before. Still, he had no records if they had been considered for the Forerunner Directive or treated by the Architects as allies. With succinct records, he continued to classify the quartz as a hostile civilization and barred them from using forerunner tech. An alliance was not recommended. As always, I considered his judgment with a grain of salt. Prime wanted the quartz dead, but there might still be a chance to salvage a diplomatic solution with their civilization now that I might have to face an armada.
Five quartz ships were trouble enough, but hundreds of them? I shuddered. I didn’t realize Prime had stopped talking.
“Continue,” I said as I walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Ten days ago, we had no running water until I sent drones to collect and transport millions of gallons of saltwater from the Pacific Ocean to the station for desalination and recycling. The process was exhausting and expensive, and I made a note to build other expedient ways to collect them in the future. The ice in the Asteroid Belt was tempting, but with another quartz ship hiding there, extracting them would be dangerous.
“You have scheduled a meeting with the other world leaders. Minister Navarro has already released a statement for them to await your call. Most gave a sound and courteous answer, but a few demanded answers.”
“As always.”
“President Howell will be attending.” Prime paused. “I extrapolate that his behavior will remain the same.”
The governments on Earth had caught on by now that I was controlling the alien vessel that aided the Navy in two separate battles. Heck, I called half of them individually and told them so. They hailed me over the comms day and night, but I didn’t answer. I knew what they would ask, and my answer remained the same.
My life changed drastically in two weeks. What change would I see next? A whistleblower within the US government leaked to the media about my unusual situation. It caused an uproar that plastered my face online and on TV as the alien’s lackey, fueling the fire of the various memes, commentary videos, and (mostly) false discussions about me online. Everyone knew who I was, although many doubted it; a plethora of theories abound if I was a threat or a friendly one. As these rumors persisted, I was forced to address them sooner rather than later.
My speech to humanity became the most popular video across the globe. What was it now, 55.6 billion views on YouTube? The majority of those were repeat views.
I had such high hopes that the Americans’ storming of the beaches moment on San Francisco would turn the tide against the quartz’s hold on the city, but they ended up getting massacred; most of their conventional weapons were ineffective against the plasma shields. Instead, the soldiers became meat bags for the quartz as target practice. I bet they learned how to neutralize humans that way.
President Howell quickly turned the blame game on me. If I hadn’t given him the tech he needed to equip his troops, ten thousand Americans wouldn’t have died. The public took that to heart, and images of my decapitated head with President Howell standing over my dead body gained traction. The word: TRAITOR written all over my corpse. If this animosity continued, it would further entrench my position in the opposite direction when I should be gaining allies.
Hey. At least the artwork looks nice.
I hopped into the shower, letting the warmth against my skin take me somewhere nicer, away from my problems. “Anything else?”
“The first forerunner fleet is sixty percent complete. The fully-constructed frigates await you in the shipyards for inspection. Three hundred twenty-two star-fighters have also finished construction and are now waiting in the hangar. The sixteen corvettes have executed your orders at one hundred percent accuracy.”
I couldn’t handle the quartz with just one ship. The frigates I ordered would take almost six days each to finish. Fortunately, two frigates were done (a third was being constructed), and one-third of the star-fighters were complete, but I had not tested them extensively yet. However, the data from Nick and Ben’s dogfight above San Francisco with the quartz attack aircraft was a boon in tweaking their capabilities. Version two was promising.
I’ll need to recruit pilots soon enough.
This was a numbers and strength game (quantity and quality), and with my first vessel fully repaired from the damages it received in San Francisco, I had more time to lengthen it to about four hundred feet—the standard length of all my corvette-class ships. This way, I could carry more crew, cargo, and armaments, including a hanger for three star-fighters and a small, ten-person shuttle.
It only took Prime twelve hours to build the original model, and with this new design, it took him an entire day to produce two vessels with the help of all the factories from Station Three, Four, and Five. I now had sixteen corvette-class ships, small compared to the quartz’s, and all auto-piloted by Prime. I sent five on patrol around Earth’s orbit just in case the other quartz from Mars and the Asteroid Belt decided to pay us a visit (So far, they had not dared come close to the hub or the planet). The other five were above San Francisco, keeping a close watch on the plasma dome while the last six guarded the hub.
It was a productive fourteen-day grind, but the weeks ahead would be tough.
“The patrolling corvettes reported no movement changes from the other quartz vessels,” Prime said. “Construction of the new factory decks in all eight stations is well underway at forty percent completion. Level 18, 19, 20, and 21’s infrastructure are also at forty-three percent completed, following Minister Hansen’s designs and models. That is all I have to report.”
“Thank you, Prime.” I hopped off the shower.
I opened the closet where the uniform that Jason made for the crew and I hung on hooks: black ankle-high leather boots, jackets, and pants made with a mesh of blue, brass, white, and trims of gold, which everyone in the station had started wearing.
But today was a big day. I would have a civil conversation with the other world leaders, which was why Jason created a special outfit for me: an ivory-white double-breasted jacket with golden buttons and shoulder loops, secured by a black waist belt with a brass buckle depicting the forerunner insignia, made and designed by me—the silver outline of the three forerunner stations juxtaposed upon a royal blue background over a crescent-shaped Earth, the sun peering from the horizon. The jacket’s high bib collar and the thick cuffs were also embossed in gold. Underneath, I wore a light blue shirt, white pants, and black leather ankle-high boots. I looked quite presentable, but I didn’t know about the white gloves and the knee-length cape sleeve he insisted I wear.
“Leaders wear capes in space,” Jason said like it was from some holy text.
I did not wear the gloves and the cape for breakfast with my family, mostly because I didn’t want to trip down the stairs.