Gunpowder

Four more, four more. The words had haunted Axis all day long. Four more of what? They wouldn’t be discussing something in such a secret meeting unless it was important. If there were four more, there had to be some at first. There couldn’t be more if there weren’t any in the first place, right? And if there was a threat, the soldiers would be notified.

She knew it was probably a frivolous discussion, but it was all she could think about. She was quite delighted when she was assigned to a crowd control job with her two teammates. Well, they weren’t really a team in every respect, but they worked well together, and thus were assigned to jobs together quite often.

Axis left her room, equipped once more in her armor, though this time she lacked a helmet. She picked up her transport cube off her dresser, which had been delivered overnight, and set off down the hallway.

The walk seemed far shorter than the dawn before. Most likely because her mind was caught up with thinking and pondering about what she’d heard the night before. She tried to forget about it; She didn’t want such idiotic thoughts to interfere with her work.

When she reached the plaza outside the castle-like building, she saw that the crowds had very much thinned. The gates were closed, showing that she had slept for a while. Axis threw her transport cube at the ground and watched as the palm-sized object transformed into a full sized robotic mount. As she mounted, she thought about how the transport cube worked, as a way to occupy her mind. She was never the tech-genius type, but how things worked interested her.

She hardly felt the mount start to move as she thought about it. All she knew was that the horses disappeared into the ground, and returned minutes later in the form of tiny little metal cubes. The technology of the city astounded her. She just couldn’t comprehend it all.

Axis looked up at the sky, seeing that it was about noon. Most citizens and soldiers alike were hard at work, either in the city or outside its walls.

She felt her mount move steadily beneath her, occasionally turning sharply, as its programming demanded. The robot seemed unphased by the time she reached her designated assignment: A sports game. Axis had never been too into sports herself, and as they became less and less common, most others lost interest as well.

But, this sports game still gathered a crowd. The sport was quite straightforward; It was simply a game where two armored fighters battled in an arena with glowing sabers. The object was to hit a serious of certain points on the enemy’s body. Occasionally the athletes would be mounted, on a horse or some other vehicle. But, at this game, they were on foot.

The game was taking place in a stadium built right into a large plaza. The fight occurred in a large pit beneath the earth, which was covered with a thick layer of glass. Various screens showed the fight from different angles. All this happened in a center point of one of the cities districts.

When Axis arrived, she saw that her two other coworkers, Cella and Jelt, were already there. They both wore the same armor as her, and rode the exact same robot as her. If their helmets were on, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.

The other two seemed to simply be circling the outskirts of the crowd, making sure everything was going peacefully. Cella saw her and waved, to which Axis simply nodded in response. Cella seemed to be overexcited by everyone and everything. Jelt was about the exact opposite. He hardly ever spoke, and, when he did, he simply seemed bored.

Their faces reflected their personalities quite well. Cella was a younger African American girl with a button nose and freckles covering her whole face, while Jelt was a slightly older Mexican man, maybe around 27, whose eyebrows were curved in such a way that he always looked angry.

Cella appeared to be calling out to her, but Axis couldn’t decipher her words through all the cheers and whoops of the crowd. She took the robotic horse’s reins in her hands and steered it over to Cella. Cella and Jelt were walking different directions around the crowd: Cella going right, Jelt going left.

“Hey Axis! Excited about the game today?” Cella greeted her, her face lighting up with glee.

“I’m not much into sports Cella,” Axis replied with her normal, monotone, accent.

“But it’s so exciting! See, look, that guy just hit a prime Xat!”

“And what is that exactly?”

“You know, the little spots they got to hit!”

“There’s a name for them?”

“Yeah! Xats!

“I, Ur, didn’t know that. It is, interesting information.”

“Come on! Just watch the game! We’ve got a great view of the screens out here on the sidelines! Oh, did you see that! Xekran just hit the shoulder Xat! And Yilvan counters with a blow to his back! This is getting intense!”

Cella’s mount, sensing her emotions, picked up its pace, almost dancing. Axis kicked her mount so that she could keep up with her. Though neither of them heard it, another group of hoof-steps trotted up behind them.

“Did you hear?” came a deep voice, just loud enough for Axis to make it out.

“Hear what, Zelt?” Axis asked, recognizing the voice instantly. Her theory was proven correct when Zelt rode into sight, right between Cella and Axis.

“There’s a rumor spreading around,”

“Oh?”

Cella seemed to have completely drifted off by this point and was now staring in awe at one of the screens above.

“The rumor states that there’s loyals in our territory,”

“Oh, pshaw, such rumors are always passed around,”

“Yes, but this time we have proof,”

“Proof? What kind of proof?”

“Closed circuit television cameras picked up video of a car driving in a no-go zone,”

Axis knew exactly what one of these zones was, but wasn’t so sure what the big deal about it was. The zones were simply areas that are too radiated for humans to go into them safely. Nomads went into them all the time, and normally suffered the consequences.

“Sure it wasn’t some nomad? Some teenager on a joyride?”

“No. It had the symbol on its side,”

“The symbol of the loyal eagle?”

Jelt only nodded.

“And no one told the higher ups? No one did a video analysis?”

“We told them all right. They just nervously said it was nothing to worry about and hurried back to their discussion rooms,”

“Well, it’s obvious then. They’re hiding something,”

“But what?”

“Okay, okay. Say there are loyals in our territory. What’s the big deal?”

“One of them hacked a system,”

Axis’s grip on the reins grew so tight that her knuckles turned white.

“And no one did anything?”

“Well, no one knew what to do. We can’t go out into the no-go zones, we’ll die for sure!”

“Are you deft or something! There’s such a thing as radiation suits! If no one was smart enough to figure that out, then I must be a genius or something,”

“Then go do it yourself!”

“I’m a soldier, not a specialist. Such a thing is not my domain,”

“So you’re basically saying you’re too scared?”

“No! I’m saying it wouldn’t be logical for me to do such a job!”

“Don’t matter if it’s logical or not, what matters is that it could be a danger. And a soldiers job is to keep the citizens safe, right?”

“So you’re saying I should go on a dangerous mission, by myself, go into an irradiated area, and take on what could be a whole task force of enemy soldiers? Yeah, sounds safe,”

“Wear your oh-so-precious radiation gear and go in guns-a-blazing. If you die, you die in glory,”

“If I die like that. I’ll be regarded as an idiot! Going against orders and the very law!”

“You just want to wait till our whole system goes down?”

The crowd was starting to notice the two officers bickering. Many heads turned to look at them angrily yelling at one another.

“You know what? Fine! I’ll look into it. No promises that I’m doing anything about it though,”

Axis trotted ahead until she caught up with Cella. She looked back and saw Jelt’s smirk.