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Page 8.
 As Tonsonby came to the end of the dizzying walkway above West Gotha City, the first tendrils of daylight streaked the horizon from black to gray. Glad to get back into shelter, he entered the far half of the administration building.
He entered a wood-paneled lobby where uniformed figures with hard mouths and suspiciously swiveling glances stood smoking and exchanging conspiracies. Up Tonsonby went, two steps at a time on a wood staircase with blood-red carpet runners. He dodged between streamlined staff officers, and one-armed or one-legged infantry officers retired to administrative duties.
Hugging his tan leather briefcase under one arm, and holding his cap in his teeth while he pulled his black gloves off, Tonsonby came to the third floor. As he hurried along the mezzanines overlooking the grand hall. The passages up here seemed claustrophobic and overpopulated. They smelled of paper and ink, of wet coats and soggy leather boots, of harsh coffee and thick cigarette smoke that cast a pall resembling that of the battlefield. Tonsonby had both arms and legs intact, a fact of which he was exquisitely aware in this retirement farm of blinded, limping, amputated combat veterans.
Tonsonby, however, was not a paper pusher. He was an important cog in the Strategic Information Group (SIG), a central intelligence service attached directly to the Leader's offices. He was also a distant Moss cousin, which explained much to anyone who cared or dared to ask.
As he hurried into the increasingly plush, quiet, and sparsely populated mahogany row area, male and female desk clerks rose and snapped to attention like a series of dominoes rising rather than falling, and each held a telephone receiver to one ear to announce his arrival. For that reason, the double padded doors of Chancellor Moss' office suite seemed to swing open without need of a knock.
"Come in!" said the round-faced man in brown suit. He had a harp of thin black hairs combed meticulously over a round skull gleaming like aged cheese in yellow wax. "Just in time." He offered a cigar from a silver etui.
As custom required, Tonsonby politely refused. This was Leader Moss, a grandson of the Original Leader.
Leader Moss did not look happy as he stuck the huge brown rod in his thin mouth. Immediately an aide snapped forth with a lighter.
"Did you bring the device?" Leader Moss said as he puffed on the cigar, and dry acrid smoke filled the air.
Dawn was breaking, and its harsh light etched itself on the already harsh figures of Leader Moss.
The office was wide, with oriental carpeting and rich antique furniture. The windows were framed in dark wood, and part of an edge-down orange-slice effect running across six irregularly shaped double panes of heavy glass.
From here, Leader Moss had a panoramic view.
The city, with its domes and rectangles under gunmetal-gray roofs, glowered under charcoal clouds that looked smokier than Leader Moss's cigar smoke.
"Bring in the detector dock," Leader Moss ordered.
On command, within minutes, three corpsmen in drab fatigues wheeled the refrigerator-sized electronic unit across the thickly piled carpets.
Moss asked Tonsonby: "Is the latest upgrade fully functional?"
"Yes, Leader." Tonsonby addressed his cousin in the prescribed manner.
Laying the briefcase open on the glass-topped desk by the window, Tonsonby donned clean white gloves. He extracted a flat, rectangular container of creamy factory porcelain from the briefcase.
Opening this, he carefully removed from its padding a wide green circuit board etched with myriad gleaming silver patterns.
Gingerly, he lifted this into the cold gray light so that its silver lines glowed like molten, flowing chrome.
Tonsonby wondered if the day would become any brighter than this as morning wore on.
The dozen or so orderlies in the room, hovering in the shadows until bidden to light a cigar or fetch a brandy, let out a barely audible gasp.
Tonsonby stepped up to the tall, rectangular electronics closet and offered the circuit board to a wide mouth-slot.
He heard whirring inside the unit, and felt the circuit board pulled away from his fingers and into the maw of the machine.
It would travel on rails through a sort of digestive system until it came to rest in the unit's functioning core brain area.
The newly added component would raise the unit's artificial intelligence by several exponential factors.
"Readings are normal," said a technician nearby after a moment of silence.
"Good," Moss said. "Now we wait. Brandy?"
It was too early in the morning, but Tonsonby nodded. Nervously licking his lips, and feeling his hands suddenly cold and trembling, he stepped beside Leader Moss. Brandies arrived (smooth, sweet, tangy, nutty—not the cheap, harsh fluid of average little citizens).
Out in the distance, a rocket nose cone stood out like a needle above a forest of supporting gear.
Gantries hemmed it in on either side, and many lights glared with a harsh bluish-white intensity almost like arc welders.
Tonsonby saw the first major sign of activity before launch: a vast white cloud of steam grew over the launch area, so that only the nose cone and a few bluish-harsh lights were visible anymore.
"Launch time is minus 35 minutes and the clock is running," a female technician's crisp voice announced in the office where Tonsonby and Leader Moss stood looking out over the city.
"Patch into the tower chatter for us," Leader Moss commanded with quiet authority.
A minute later, there was a constant chain of quiet, efficient conversation as the launch engineers talked among each other and the final countdown sequences began.
Tonsonby stole a glance sidelong at his cousin.
The older Moss had a veiled, unreadable look as he smoked quietly and regarded the city with slightly red, smoke-rasped eyes.
Far off in the distance, past a faintly shimmering force field, Tonsonby could see mountains in East Gotha, in enemy territory.
Far away, when the clouds shifted, one could see the defensive domes and turrets of the massive fortress that was the equal and the deadly enemy of Tonsonby's motherland.
The nose cone atop the rocket contained sixteen MIRVed antimatter warheads. Each Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle could dig a crater a mile deep.
One such warhead would impact the central headquarters of East Gotha within the hour.
Leader looked so proud of himself.
Hopefully, this great weapon of the Fatherland would end the generations-long war of the sister states once and for all, with total defeat for the Eastern upstarts, and a great victory for the glorious West.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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