Colony Wars 1: War Never Ends

Chapter Nine - Ichiro's Rebellion

6th March 2076 – 1st Galactic Step

Ichiro's quarters – Himitsu Facility

Asia

Earth

Solar System

Ichiro's alarm rang loudly, he woke up coughing violently, and splatters of blood fell onto his bed sheets, like sick raindrops. He quickly reached over for the pain meds and a glass of water from his bedside cabinet.  One by one, he popped the pills in his mouth and swallowed them with a large gulp of water.

Another coughing fit started just as he was trying to down his sixth pill, the little round yellow tablet was launched across the room, with yet more globules of bright red blood. The damage that the chip inside his head had caused was inoperable and thanks to his nasty emperor's childlike tantrums, Ichiro was now at deaths door.

Ichiro was no doctor, but he had plugged himself into one of the medical bay coffins, which had diagnosed him with terminal brain damage. He had dosed himself up on as many drugs as he could find within the hospital complex so that he might stay alive and mobile for just a few days more while he planned his revenge upon his tormentor.

Xu Sing had been furious about the loss of his satellite, mainly because it had not been destroyed, but captured instead. At first Xu had been worried that his enemies would use the Hemel Tref against him, until he learned from an automated spy unit within the station that, they were dismantling the satellite instead. This caused Xu to go into another maddening fit of insatiable anger, which he turned on Ichiro, leaving him quivering on the ground for well over ten minutes.

Ichiro had been very pleased that the remaining humans had been able to disable the weapon; he had tried to help, by slowing down the countdown as much as he could without Xu noticing. He smirked slightly as he remembered that he had managed to get the facility computer to think that there was in fact seventy-five seconds in a minute instead of sixty.

Now however, it was time to make his final act of defiance against his cruel oppressor, he planned to sneak down into the depths of the Himitsu complex and deactivate the computer core. This would hopefully trap Xu down here forever, with no means of hurting anybody else ever again.

He pulled on a thick Kevlar plated soldiers' helmet, in which he had inserted a small dampening device, to help shield his movements and block out Xu's awful pain inducing signal. He picked up his satchel of small devices that he had constructed secretly whilst supposedly building Xu's command robots.

The emperor's desperation to have those units finished quickly grew voraciously when he discovered that Ichiro was dying. His methods of persuasion however took on a strangely sentimental tone, promising Ichiro that he would let him go once he had finished making the new thinking androids. Ichiro had ignored the emperor, knowing that he would not dare hurt him again or risk terminating his top scientist prematurely. He had scoffed loudly, when Xu had offered to have his brain extracted so that Ichiro could live forever in a glass tank next to his own, that sort of offer had made him feel very sick. Luckily, Ichiro was the only one that could perform the operation, so there was no way that Xu could force him into living that sort of a life.

Ichiro pulled the satchel over his shoulder and crept out into the hallway, carefully avoiding being anywhere near the spinning digital cameras that were stationed on long spindly struts at the end of each cross section. He looked at his watch and waited until the display said that it was exactly midnight, and then he flicked a button on his computer-pad, which initiated a level six diagnostic of the camera systems, causing the surveillance recorders to power down for the next two and a half minutes. He looked up, saw the lithe swinging arms slowly stop and sag towards the ground.