"You feel that?" he asked. The Bevy room had started to empty out, as had the rest of the tavern. It was a little over an hour until the tavern officially closed and it had started to quieten down as people left or fell asleep or started to lose interest or track of conversation. The music continued to play in the dance hall though, the soft vibrations humming occasionally throughout the rest of the building. Which is what made the distant explosion even harder to detect.
"What?" Marina responded. She looked up at the rest of the table: Holden was asleep, Garvey was nursing a final tankard of mead, and Graves was toying with her datapad.
"That rumble," Travis said. He looked around, and Marina followed his eyeline; a handful of people had paused briefly, unsure if they'd felt the same thing. Most continued on as normal.
"I thought I felt something," Marina responded. "It's the music. Isn't it?"
Suddenly a commotion started out in the main bar. Raised voices, screams, footsteps hurrying to the exit.
"I assume not," Travis said, and he was up. Marina, Graves and Garvey followed. Holden remained slumped in an armchair, fast asleep.
Marina and her companions pushed their way through the slowly thickening crowd, she could already feel the adrenaline sobering her up, it was incredible what the possible threat of conflict could do to one's body chemistry. She finally hit the night air, looking through the panicked crowd until she spotted the great plume of smoke and fire in the distance.
"What is that?" she demanded of a young man with his arm around a girl.
"We don't know, people are saying it's the Court."
Marina looked around and saw various hoppers and comrades dotted around the crowd.
"Travis!" she yelled as the big man approached her. "Is that the Court?"
"I think that's the barracks," Travis replied, all colour draining from his face.
A knot like a lead weight dropped in Marina's stomach. She felt sick, and not from alcohol. It couldn't be...could it?
Kal!
She shoved her way through the rabble towards the entrance host.
"You!" she demanded of the man.
"Ma'am?" the host said, fear in his voice. Despite the pillar of fire in the distance and the collective of scared and concerned citizens surrounding him, the man had maintained his formal and upright position in the exact spot he was stationed. A flare of anger flashed through Marina, for what reason she couldn't be completely sure.
The sounds of distant sirens gradually appeared, barely carried by the gentle wind.
"You have carts here?" Marina demanded.
"Yes, Ma'am."
"We'll need as many as you can spare."
"Ma'am -"
"I'm Commander Marina O'Reilly, Equatorial District Hopper Force. Me, and my troops here need to get to the source of that explosion now, so give me every vehicle you have. Now!"
The flustered host pulled out his datapad and began frantically speaking into it. Marina was already turning away back to the crowd.
"Hoppers! To me!" she yelled, waving them all to the thoroughfare. She tried not to think about Kal, and what she may find when she inevitably arrived at her lodge. Where was Kal tonight? Would he be at home after their fight? Or would he be out drinking like her, ignoring their disagreement in the hope it would wash away. There was a chance that the explosion might not be the barracks, and if it was it might not even be anywhere near her sector.
She pulled out her datapad and tried calling him. No answer. The connection didn't even go through. That knot dropped again, she ignored it and tried to swallow the bile that had risen in her mouth.
"Can anyone contact anyone at the barracks?" she yelled to no one in particular. A couple of hoppers were fiddling with their datapads. Graves came to her, holding her own device limply at her side and shook her head.
"I'm not getting anything, Ma'am" she said.
Before Marina could respond, her own datapad started blinking, a small alarm pinging out of it periodically. Graves' pad matched her own. They slowly heard various other pings chiming around them. Marina looked around as the handful of hoppers in the crowd examined their devices, their expressions grave. Marina couldn't bring himself to look at her own, as she knew what she'd see. A fresh wave of nausea washed over her.
Graves held her datapad up to Marina, revealing the Capital Coat of Arms on the screen pulsating with a red light in sync with every ping. A priority one alert. The Outer Court was indeed compromised. However, whether through attack or malfunction would not yet have been determined.
"What do we do, Ma'am?" she asked.
The first of a line of carts pulled up alongside them on the thoroughfare. More quickly arrived in succession.
"Get everyone in them, now! We need to get back to the Court."
Marina ran to the first available cart and jumped inside. She had to get to Kal. She had to know he was okay. If he wasn't, she would never forgive himself.
"Commander, wait!" Graves shouted.
"Go." Marina said simply to the nav control. "And ignore the speed limits."
She frantically thumbed through the information on her datapad. The movement from the auto and the alcohol in her system made focusing on the glowing screen difficult, so she increased the font size before linking to the secure military channel and entering her access codes. The media outlets were already ablaze with speculation and conflicting information. But Marina needed facts - up to the minute facts - and thus the emergency military channel updates were exactly where she needed to look. According to the scrolling intel the explosion had originated somewhere in the South quadrant of the barracks complex, caused by an as-yet-undetermined source. It had spread outwards, most likely through the power and service grid, ripping all the way through to the western quadrant and obliterating all of the south. The West, where her own lodge was. She quickly tried to mentally map the geography. Her courtyard was in sector eight, the middle most area of the west quadrant. Depending how far the damage had reached there was a fifty-percent chance that her lodge had escaped the destruction. Of course there was also a fifty-percent chance it had not. Apparently over a quarter of the barracks square mileage was in ruins. With every update and statistic she read, it looked more and more likely that she should expect the worst. She tried not to think about it and instead focus her mind on the facts, the threat assessment and the state of the field. Two of the Capitals defence turrets, which would have been positioned in the west and south of the Outer Court - in the perimeter of the barracks complex, were confirmed to have been destroyed - and her mind kept oscillating between the attack at First Province and the destruction she was believing more and more likely to encounter at home..
There's a chance. Even if we've been hit, there's a chance he wasn't there. There's a chance that he's okay.
Yet her mind refused to let her believe it.
"Drive faster, damn you!" he screamed at the cart.
But of course, the automated vehicle maintained a safe and steady speed within legal city limits.
I'm coming Kal. I'm coming. Hold on!
