Last Skyscraper

Chapter 1 — Bad Start, of a Good Day

9 o’clock. The sky outside is covered by a thick layer of clouds; just dark enough for the outside to look dull and uninviting while still being bright enough to wake you up. The scattered light from the overcast feels even brighter than looking directly at the sun. It’s Saturday, by the sound from the window you can tell that the morning is at its peak. The park square outside is filled with royal cadets starting their morning routine. Ryan Taker, is asleep on the 94th floor, 14 storeys away from the synchronized shouts of the cadets. There are 60 of them, just two platoons, all wearing grey cadet sweaters with matching grey cargo pants, air masks and green berets. There is also one orange beret, the lieutenant in charge of the cadets.

The rules were simple; at eighteen you voluntarily joined the cadets. After two years of vigorous training you were given two options; you could either join the fleet of the United Federation of the Three Planets or try to make it on your own. Joining the fleet wasn’t mandatory but it was the only option which didn’t make you an enemy of the state and allowed you to live anything close to a normal life . Enemies of the state were either burned alive and used as fertiliser or sent off to Venus into the pyrite mines. Life expectancy on lower levels in those hellholes was around five years. If you were still alive by you twentieth birthday you were offered a “generous” option to transfer into one of those cannon fodder battalions. They called them Deadmen, and most of them wished they were. By all means and purposes that was outright slavery. If you lived through that for two more years you could transfer to regular forces infantry as a lieutenant. There were about three dozen cases of that ever happening.

Dirty air was seeping through an old air filter that had to be replaced a week ago. Ryan was quite lucky to live not too far away from an oxygen park, otherwise his lungs wouldn’t last long without a functioning air filter. Sticky from sweat, a radi-blanket, was shielding him from the cold air in his room. Ryan was never keen on spending money, especially on heating.

Military started their day at 600, so Ryan wasn’t really asleep past that, he just wallowed in bed for hours, reluctant to get up, but at the same time dreading the thought of any more sleep. Ryan was one week into his two month leave, and he didn’t have anywhere to be. But the feeling of being late was still there. He planned to get up and go for a jog in the dome, one of the few perks of being a colonel was 5 hours in the glass dome a week. Quite a prestigious thing to be able to afford if you weren’t military. Most visitors of the Dome were either Venus Mine owners or affluent Martians. Ryan hasn’t used a minute of his time in the dome since the start of his leave, but the plan for a run was set and all he had to do is follow through. Despite being in Engineering, all military personnel were expected to be able to fight if necessary. On a good day running 15 clicks wasn’t a problem. Today wasn’t looking good, Ryan was cold, tired and late.

Sudden ringing made Ryan jump up from the bed trying to figure out where it started from. That wasn’t smart. He had to sit back down on the bed and wait for the head rush to dissipate. His ears were still ringing. No, it weren’t his ears that were ringing, it was his phone. Quickly scouting the bed, Ryan found little piece of plastic and glass and put it to his ear. His eyes still closed after the standing up incident;

“Hello?”

he grumbled into the phone. But there was no answer, only more ringing. The fact that instead of the phone he picked up a deck of cards crossed his mind only after the phone rang again and it wasn’t in his hand. What a deck of cards was doing on Ryan’s bed was beyond him, and almost as if blaming the deck for being in the wrong place he threw it at the bedside table which sent cards flying all over the place.

Another ring brought his thoughts back to the phone. Taking a deep breath, he opened one eye. It has to be said, that was a big gamble and took considerable effort on Ryan’s part, but he has gone too far to give up now. Locating the phone wasn’t a hard task since he could see now, so he quickly picked it up before apparently the most patient person on the other side hanged up.

“Hello.” Ryan said again only this time it came out with rather annoyed tone. Its not like it was someone else’s fault he couldn’t find the phone. None the less, he had every reason to be annoyed, in the end, the caller almost killed him by making him stand up, and look for the phone. “Hello? I am listening!” he said again, but got nothing in return. Checking the caller’s number was next on the list of things to do. To his surprise nobody actually called him; the ringing was from an alarm that he didn’t remember setting. How he could forget setting the alarm was beyond him, so it was accepted as a fact.

Ryan was too tired and angry to remember if he had set an alarm or not. He finally got up from the bed, but he was yet to wake up. Slowly calculating every step, Ryan waddled to the kitchen to make some coffee. His flatmate Kyle was reading news at the kitchen table.

Chapter 2 — Broken Routine

“Kettle broke.” he said.

“What, again? Let me see.”

“I threw it away. There wasn’t much left anyway.”

“What did you do?”

Kyle put down his tablet and looked at me with this spine chilling look of his. “It shorted and burned a hole in itself. It wasn’t my fault this time, ok?” he went back to reading the news.

“Its alright, it was old and stank anyway, I will get a new one.”

Kyle didn’t reply, he just sort of grumbled affirmatively and went back to the news.

This guy, Kyle. He was a real piece of work; I can’t even fathom how he is still functioning. Let me put this into perspective. When I and my mates would go out for a drink, he would stay home and drink by himself. He would go for a “quick jog” and turn up after a couple of days looking like he was running all that time. He probably was as well. One time I walked in on him sitting by the table smoking , with pulped fists and blood marks on the wall. He went through a lot so it is understandable. During the invasion, his family was wiped before humanity realized a war was declared on us. He was on the patrol duty at his outpost when he got radioed in back to base. All he heard was:

“Mars is gone”

I still remember when we got the news. I was knee deep in flux-drive coolant fixing this lousy old frigate “Spiculum”. It was an old ship, from around the second era of federation. I was about to dive in for another pass around the core when I got the message from the Chief Engineer

“Staff Meeting in Canteen. Now.”

“Five minutes and I am done!” — I said.

“Five minutes ago.” — was all I heard in response. Your superiors always want things done, “ten minutes ago” or even better, yesterday. I got out, cleaned my hands off and took four elevators to the canteen. The mass of people standing there wasn’t that surprising. We would get called into canteen all the time because some idiot would forget to charge his thermal suit and drown in liquid coolant. Or somebody would leave the upper deck exhaust port closed after the maintenance, and force the whole deck to evacuate. Commanders really liked treating us like idiots and not for the lack of a good reason as well. But by the time I got to the canteen I knew something wasn’t right, there was no usual chatter or noise in the canteen. It was quite like on a funeral. We came to a funeral not knowing it was one. There was no speech or obituary. There were no flowers and we were all in the coffin. The message said “Mars is gone. We are at war.”

That short message like a spark starting a wildfire spread through the stations. There were those who thought it was a joke, there were those who got scared, there were those that got excited, but there were also those got angry. Because of people like Kyle we managed to survive as species. I met one of his superiors once, the nasty type that never really left the comfort of the Tera-Fortress, the type that saw battles and losses as numbers on a computer screen through a thick layer of smoke. For him the invasion probably just looked like a drop in numbers. There weren’t that many of them left after the first wave. The shiny generals that were unlucky, or lucky enough, depends on who you ask, to be caught in the first wave, perished just like the world we knew. But those that survived, stayed in the bunkers until the very end. And we were stuck topside, with no air to breathe and no place to hide.

So this General I met, he said that if they knew what happens to humans when they lose everything in a split second, if they saw the anger and desperation in his eyes alone, they wouldn’t have attacked. I think this is a boatload of propaganda and nothing more. We were angry, but were also scared, lost and hopeless. We were brought up shooting static mannequins. We weren’t ready to have to use what we learned.

Kyle, wasn’t even at the top of his division. He was one of the guys that wasn’t cut out for war, so he just served his duty and stayed on the outskirts of the System, earning his pay check, sending most of it, back home.