The Rising Sun: Episode 4 (15 page)

The three last survivors among the
survivors.

The large desk placed in the middle of the
lavish, hall like room had been Garnez’s stationed work spot for
almost a decade now. He was now sitting in elegant comfort with his
back leaning against the chair, his legs locked before him.

The room’s window behind him gave him a
sprawling, magnificent view of the city of Cratonar. Other towers
went soaring up higher than this tower, the official one of the
company Garnez worked for. Here, he was given a room in the two
hundred and eleventh floor. But this was considered close to the
basement – this tower, the tower of their company, was the tallest
one there was in this planet. It rose up to seven hundred storeys,
almost piercing the very first layers of space itself. The
construction of this magnificent tower had invited slight
opposition, for the dangerous height it was meant to peak to. And
after countering the opposition, their company certainly had no
easy time building it…

Reclining against his chair, Garnez swung it
to face the front of his office. His eyes fell over the opposite
wall, where a large glass shelf lay. Inside of it, stored in a
priceless hold, were a spread of guitars. Electric guitars, and a
few acoustic ones too.

Guitars and rock had always been Garnez’s
greatest passion. And driven by this passion for rock, he had
started a wide collection of electric guitars and other rock
instruments. The ones in the glass shelf were a meagre fraction of
his entire collection: he kept a wide variety of the beautiful
instruments in his showroom. And his passionate collection of
guitars was ever keen on extending and giving room for adding newer
ones.

He gazed fondly at the guitars arranged
across the opposite shelf. Then, stifling a bored yawn, he rose and
walked over to the window by his right. As he looked out the
window, his sight met the several other gigantic towers that shot
skyward around his. They were all enveloped by the thinnest layer
of mist, and cloud.

The rest of the towers he saw out the window
reflected the same slender build. With an artistic touch. Most of
them were built to store offices like his, while some were also
residential towers. Balconies extended from the residential towers,
sprawling for a wide arena outside of the flats. Parked with hover
cars and ships. Vehicles went zipping past in well regulated
streams. Hover cars, bikes and small ships.

Hanging in the middle of the sky, a large red
orb could be clearly seen. This was a moon of this planet, and
their closest companion in this state which comprised of seven
planets. Haolo, the red planet seen upon the sky, was the closest
moon there was to them, less than half the distance of the other
two moons.

Garnez had been used to the sight of the deep
red moon tracing its path down his window for years now. Despite
being small, Haolo was the second biggest hub in their state, after
this planet. He looked at the deep red orb frozen in the sky for a
moment. It was perched right opposite to a glowing orange orb,
which was gradually sinking towards the horizon as dusk
approached.

Garnez continued to gaze out the window,
relaxing for a few seconds, before realising that he had work to
do…

As if on cue, his z-com burst into
screeching. An incoming call.

“Yes?” he asked, looking into the holo screen
that formed above the device as he answered the call.

His assistant Crig was staring out of the
screen. “Sir there’s a delivery for you. Seems like the electric
guitar you ordered two weeks back has finally arrived.”

About time.
Thought Garnez,
remembering the order he had placed for his latest guitar, from a
store in a nearing planet. Almost half a month back.

“All right, send him in.” he said, and Crig
nodded.

Cutting the link, he pocketed his z-com, and
waited.

It’s taken them two weeks for it,
he
complained inwardly.
I thought they’d gone dead on the
order.

He sat back and yawned, throwing his hands
out in a wild stretch. Less than a minute later, his Rash-con
guards were carrying into the room a large plastic box shaped
rectangular. They dragged the large guitar container to the end of
his office, and gently laid it before him.

Garnez rose from his seat and walked before
it. The guitar’s casing was grander and larger than those he had
ordered in the past. Something about it made him tingle with
excitement.

And here is the newest member to the
collection.
Heaving a quick breath, he bent down over the large
container and opened the lid.

And inside of the large container lay the
dead body of King Xurin. The man everyone in this planet was now
screaming for.

In all his days as the commissioner chief of
the police forces of Sunatra, Ratino had never before been left so
stricken … so wordless, as he was now.

The office was buzzing with police officers,
with journalists and media representatives bursting to enter it
from the corridor outside. They were all staring, their faces
gaunt, at the coffin lying amidst the room. The coffin holding King
Xurin’s dead body.

Ratino stood facing the desk in the office,
hanging over which was a large holo screen with the defense
secretary’s face. The only man now reliable for what looked like a
scenario fast escalating towards a crisis…

“When did this happen, Ratino?” asked the
defense secretary, looking at Ratino from inside the screen.

Ratino turned to the man owning this office,
Garnez, who looked rattled by what had happened.

“Less than ten minutes.” Garnez answered in a
small voice, looking at the screen.

The defense secretary’s eyes sank to the
coffin by the floor below the desk, a mild frown settling on his
brow.

After the ghastly incident had sprang to the
surface, the authorities had been called in instantly by a
terrified and panic stricken Garnez. At first, when Ratino had
heard Garnez recount what had entered his office, disguised and
hidden in a coffin, he felt his heart stop momentarily. His first
passing thought was that this was some lunatic’s idea of a joke. He
even went to the extent of threatening to throw Garnez into prison
for making what he thought was prank call. But Garnez pressed on,
and Ratino found that the note of trepidation in his voice
unmistakable…

And so, Ratino and his police forces swept
into swept into the place, their hearts pounding. And they realised
that it was no joke. It had all been real. Their King had been
kidnapped by an unknown entity. Murdered. And then sent back in a
guitar shaped coffin…

Twisted as could be.

Ratino looked back at the defense minister,
ignoring the slight thudding sensation within his chest. “So … the
separatists weren’t involved in this after all?”

He looked out the window as he asked it,
looking beyond the many other towers rising beside theirs, merging
into the clouded skies above. Somehow, for the first time in his
days here, the scenic sight of this high tech city melted from his
mind’s grasp, bearing no amusement or awe that it would have
otherwise. The red orb perched in the middle of the sky, their
closest moon Haolo, seemed to boil in a furied red colour … a veil
of foreboding and horror had risen over the world.

The defense minister nodded gravely.
“Apparently not … so, who, then?”

Ratino kept his grim gaze latched to the
coffin, his hand below his chin. He was quietly grappling with the
impossibility of what had just happened…

Around him, other members of his police squad
were involved in their own grave discussions.

“-but who?”

“-surely they would –”

“- wasn’t the separatists –”

Ratino firmly turned and held up an arm, and
a hushed quiet filled the room instantly. He turned to one of the
cops beside him. “Search the entire coffin.”

The man nodded and bustled forward towards
the coffin. He bent down and searched the large container, trying
to find anything else hidden in it other than the body. And as he
finished, to their utter bewilderment, he found that the lunatics
responsible for this had left something else for them in the
coffin…

A toy doll.

They had found it hidden behind the King’s
body.

A toy doll?!
Ratino felt everything
trickle out of his grasp, out of his understanding.
What the
hell’s going on here?

As the cop who had searched the coffin held
it out to him, Ratino took it very warily. Feeling as though
something was very, very wrong here.

The entire room had frozen in a state of
stunned, slightly edgy silence, as Ratino considered the toy doll
in his hands, twisting and turning her around. All eyes in the room
were widened as they watched the doll, as though convinced that it
wasn’t what it looked like. As Ratino himself was. But as a puzzled
Ratino scanned it closely, he realised that it was exactly what it
looked like – a completely normal toy rag doll.

“What the hell is this?” The defense
minister’s voice broke the stunned silence. He was staring at the
doll through the holo screen, just as perplexed as everyone else in
this room was.

Ratino responded without taking his eyes off
the doll in his hands. “We were all wondering the very same thing,
sir.” He looked up for a second to meet the man’s eyes. “And I have
the feeling we’re about to find out.”

Turning the key sticking from the back of the
doll, Ratino wound the doll and placed it on the floor.

The toy walked about, with some kiddish tune
playing from its speaker at the back … a tune that made Ratino’s
scalp prickle for some reason. In this current scenario.

What’s going on here?

The entire room was fastened in utter
silence, watching the doll. It was the most bizarre few seconds in
the lives of the people in the room. The toy continued to trot
about, the toddler’s tune playing from its speaker.

As a few seconds passed, the doll’s wounding
stopped. The toy came to a halt and the childish tune playing in
its speaker died…

As though on split second cue with the doll’s
stopping, the red planet seen on the skies outside was engulfed in
a bright, orange flare. Their moon Haolo disappeared behind a
violent explosion, a flash of orange that seemed to shoot outwards,
turning white hot. Appearing to illuminate the entire skies for the
briefest span of a second or two. And then the white light then
sucked itself back to the spot it started with, and vanished. But
the red planet was no longer there. Haolo had been destroyed.

Ratino stood rooted to the spot, the entire
room around him struck dumb in silence. Unblinking, he stared at
where Haolo had disappeared – for a moment, everything around
seemed to have swirled into a haze.

The doll standing on the floor swayed and
fell sideways, the thud of its landing seeming to thunder amidst
the silence.

“What is it?” came the tense voice of the
defense minister, who obviously couldn’t see what had happened from
the angle of the screen. “What’s happened?”

As Ratino turned to him, he saw that the
screen was flickering. There seemed to be some disruption and the
minister’s image was being fazed.

“The signal’s –” the minister called through
the flickering signal, before his face was erased fully. And now,
another face was staring out. A face that was as pale as a corpse’s
… with eyeless, blank sockets that gazed out as though seeing.

“Surprise, surprise.” The man’s voice was
sharper than a hiss, seeming to slit the air through the dumbstruck
silence. “I see you might have received our
little
present.”

Ratino quickly pushed away the panic and
dread flooding him. For he knew that the time now was for action.
Focus. They were now facing war.

“You blew up an entire planet?” he said
softly, walking upto the screen so that the man’s face seemed to
grow lifelike before him. “You killed our King, and then blew up
our moon … an
entire planet
? Just
who do you think you
are?”

“I’m the breeze that wafts through your
skies,” replied the man. “slowly rolling into a wind, and gathering
force into a surge … and now finally,” He smiled. “raging forth as
a
storm
.”

Ratino took a step forward, now closer than
an inch to the face in the screen. “What do you want?”

He had to summon every ounce of grit lying in
him to keep from flinching as he stood with eyes locked onto those
blank sockets. As the silence after his question carried on, the
man tilted his head to one side, seeming faintly amused. And a
twisted smile spread across his pale lips.

“I want peace, dear man.” He reached into his
cloak pocket, drawing a small trigger like device. “And my peace …
is your chaos.”

He pressed the button on the device, and a
sudden beeping cut the air in the room, coming from the dead body
of the emperor, which lay inside the coffin.