The Final Wars Begin Read online

  THE FINAL WARS BEGIN

  Final Wars Trilogy, Book 1

  S.A. ASTHANA

  THE FINAL WARS BEGIN Copyright © 2019 by S.A. Asthana

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For Kat

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1: BASTIEN

  CHAPTER 2: CUBE

  CHAPTER 3: BASTIEN

  CHAPTER 4: BELLE

  CHAPTER 5: CUBE

  CHAPTER 6: BASTIEN

  CHAPTER 7: CRONE

  CHAPTER 8: BELLE

  CHAPTER 9: BASTIEN

  CHAPTER 10: CUBE

  CHAPTER 11: BELLE

  CHAPTER 12: CUBE

  CHAPTER 13: BELLE

  CHAPTER 14: BASTIEN

  CHAPTER 15: CRONE

  CHAPTER 16: MARIE

  CHAPTER 17: CRONE

  CHAPTER 18: MARIE

  CHAPTER 19: BELLE

  CHAPTER 20: CUBE

  CHAPTER 21: BASTIEN

  CHAPTER 22: CUBE

  CHAPTER 23: BELLE

  CHAPTER 24: BASTIEN

  CHAPTER 25: MARIE

  CHAPTER 26: BASTIEN

  CHAPTER 27: CRONE

  CHAPTER 28: BASTIEN

  APPENDIX I: THE TRILATERAL TREATY

  APPENDIX II: THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

  APPENDIX III: NEW PARIS (THE SOLAR SYSTEM FACT BOOK)

  APPENDIX IV: PORT SYDNEY MILITARY RANKS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE FINAL WARS RAGE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  CHAPTER 1: BASTIEN

  Bastien Lyons was well on his way to triggering civilization’s collapse. He just didn’t know it yet. Had he seen the danger ahead, he would have stopped running from the law and turned himself in. Had he realized the coming wars would be his doing, he would have cut short his pursuit for safety and let the three bounty hunters tailing him catch up.

  But he did not have such foresight.

  So instead he continued, pushing forward through the sprawling, underground city of New Paris, brushing shoulders with throngs of sweaty people in congested chambers and dark tunnels. Blend in, that’s all he wanted. Blend the hell in. Hide. Disappear. Be a forgotten memory. It was the only way to get the law off his back and avoid execution. But blending in was not easy, even in New Paris City’s chaos.

  The bounty on his head was too large.

  How much was it again? Ah, didn’t matter. The sum was enough to get men onto his tail in overcrowded chambers like this one. A glance over his shoulder revealed the pursuers. They followed at a distance, mixing in with the crowd to not call attention to themselves. The trio didn’t want to alarm Bastien and have him flee. Or worse, tip off another bounty hunter to what was meant to be their target. No, that would disrupt whatever amount of planning they’d put into finding Bastien. So they talked amongst themselves as if men with something other than outlaws and rewards on their minds. But despite the banality of their laughs and head nods, their true intent was obvious. Such men couldn’t mask their greedy glances no matter how hard they tried.

  Bastien hastened his steps.

  A rusted metal sign hung against a brick wall. Marché Bastille. Bastille Market. He hadn’t translated French in a very long time. While English was the official language of the Solar System, New Paris still clung to its native tongue, trying desperately to keep alive the connection with a more glorious past. But no matter the effort, this enclave, the last of its kind on Earth, could never be anything but a decayed caricature of what was once known as The City of Lights. This was, after all, no more than a colony of human-insects crammed together within a sewer system. Tunnels passed as streets for foot traffic. Chambers played home to the people.

  Two large cast iron chandeliers dangled from the curved, brick-laden ceiling, their many candle flames dancing. Close to a hundred brown tents sat illuminated below, packing the square hall from slimy wall to dank wall—makeshift shops, each with its own wares for sale. Animal-skin rugs and ancient books littered their entryways. Bastien caught sight of a paperback titled The Louvre Experience. It was a guidebook for the once famous and still intact museum. The information within would have made for an interesting read were it not for the black mold eating away at the yellowed pages.

  “Moldy cheese!” a scrawny shopkeeper announced nearby. “Eat to yer heart’s content! Come get yourself some moldy cheese.” Two women scurried over like starving rodents and started haggling on price. They were sniffing out bargains that might help them survive yet another miserable day here, or at the very least, help them forget their dirty environment, even if for a few moments. The stench of their sweat mixed with the market’s underlying smell—human feces. Marché Bastille didn’t have bathrooms, didn’t need them when the market itself served as one large latrine. Bastien shook his head, sorry for the Parisians’ condition. God-awful.

  Another glance back showed the three men to be slowly closing the gap. They were trailing by only a few meters, confident their mark wasn’t onto them. A decision needed making—fight or flight. An all-out brawl would only bring attention. Flight made more sense.

  “Damn, I wish I was yer lover.” The voice snapped him from his thoughts. It sounded as if burnt with a thousand cigarettes. Three spindly women walked by, their unclothed bodies giving away their profession. They were ribs and bones. One smiled at Bastien. “I wouldn’t charge ya nothin’, pretty boy.” She’d be attractive if not for rotten front teeth and gaunt cheeks.

  The other shouted into his back, “Ooohhh, you got two suns for eyes – I’d fuck you, then marry you.” This wasn’t the first time Bastien’s unique irises, both a fiery yellow, caught the attention of others. Not a day went by when his eyes weren’t noticed. Inferno and Sunny were some of the nicknames he’d garnered throughout his childhood. Back then the attention was much appreciated. These days, not so much. Hard to blend in when you stood out. Bastien pulled his jacket’s hood over his head even further. Why couldn’t I just have regular blue or black eyes?

  Over his shoulder the largest of the three hunters, a muscle-bound man seven feet tall and wide as a stall, was only a few feet behind. His heavy brow cast a shadow down over his eyes and nose, allowing only snarling lips to remain visible. If ogres were real, he’d be their poster boy. The pursuit was about to end.

  Flight it is. Bastien bolted through the crowd and the three men followed. Like a gazelle outrunning cheetahs, he deftly maneuvered around a gaggle of children, twisting his body with the experience of one who’d given pursuers the slip many times before. He dove sideways into a tent and the trio rushed past seconds later. The slop, slap, slop of their boots in the mud waned, overtaken by the market’s beehive buzz. Only announcements of moldy cheese persisted.

  Bastien loosened himself, one muscle at a time. Safe—for now at least. He took a deep breath to calm the nerves. A bitter smell, one different than the stink of feces outside, occupied the tent. Its source was a row of five shelves, each stocked with pill bottles. This was an apothecary tent. Most of the medicines were foreign, their contents the products of the other two more advanced, human colonies—Nippon One and Port Sydney. Some, given their simple cloth pouch packaging, appeared local. There were lots of self-proclaimed medicine men in New Paris. Scamming was a solid career here. Salt tablets could be masked as remedies for almost any ailment, after all.

  No one manned the tent, so Bastien started examining the shelves. Sifting through dusty bottle after grimy container, he spo
tted a green flask of interest.

  Skin regenerator paste was a commodity in Nippon One and Port Sydney, but in New Paris it was a rare and expensive treat. Given the expiration date in the future printed across its label, the medicine was deemed usable. “Forgive me for stealing,” he said to a memory of himself. He scooped the yellow substance with a forefinger and carefully applied it over a small open wound on his right forearm. A bulb of pus quickly dried and fell to the floor. Where there had been a throbbing pain just moments back, now there was relief. The wound closed, and the green hue that mottled the arm disappeared. The skin was back to its natural white. It was as if Bastien had never dug a knife into the epidermis and carved out a tiny tracking device two days back.

  Replacing the bottle, he slid to the floor. It had been an action-packed week full of running, hiding, and then more running. His mind was battered clay. He hadn’t eaten anything in days. And he was pretty sure he’d drunk more germs than water when guzzling from a public tap an hour back.

  A sigh escaped him, and for the first time in five days he could sit and let his mind wander. When would this madness end? How could life get back to normal?

  And why the hell did I choose to come back here again?

  He’d spent the last ten years trying to forget this city—vowed never to return. Yet here he was, bruised and chided by the outside world. If you were from New Paris, it never really let go of you. What was the saying again? Parisians were like boomerangs—no matter how far they went out into the Solar System they always came back. Sometimes the outside world shunned them; sometimes they simply missed what they’d left behind. Either way, they came back. Bastien shook his head. A strange, bitter homecoming, one filled with haunting memories.

  He saw a child, translucent and ghost-like, drift into the tent as if on a breeze. The boy hid behind one of the shelves. A breath later, he looked over at Bastien and put a forefinger up to his lips. Bastien nodded at this specter and played along. A few other children, apparitions from a childhood long gone, floated in soon afterward. They giggled among themselves. The ringing of their laughter was still fresh even after all these years.

  Bastien smiled and whispered to the specters, “Watch out, here it comes.”

  The boy hopped out from behind the shelf and yelled, “Boo!”

  One of the girls, no more than eight, jumped in fear and yelled back, “No fair, Sunny! You’re too good at runnin’ and hidin’.”

  They all laughed. A break from daily suffering. Hours spent playing hide and seek in a most dismal playground. The orphans, the family of Bastien’s youth, had never made it out of their teenage years. They’d succumbed to drugs, pedophiles, or gangs. But he’d managed to escape the same fate. He’d been too good at running and hiding.

  Guess some things never change.

  He’d run and hid then and was still running and hiding. A lost soul. Hopeless. A familiar feeling swept over him. His muscles tightened one by one again. It was like the air around him was flexing. The phantasms turned to stare, their eyes a ghostly white. This was bad. Acute anxiety, his childhood nemesis, still managed to dig its teeth into him from time to time. It constantly circled as if a rabid dog. Just like the black pit bull he’d faced off against as a six-year old. Couldn’t have happened too far from here. A lingering trauma that never seemed to dissipate.

  Bastien shut his eyes as if doing so would drive away the anxiety. There was blackness. But some movement could be made out. An apparition taking form. A boy no more than six sat illuminated at the center as if spotlit by a stage light. He was struggling. But why?

  A pit bull came into view. It was as big as the child. The canine’s jaws tugged at the boy’s sleeve, ripping the fabric. Bastien remembered thinking his arm was next. As a boy he had kicked with his right foot. But the animal didn’t budge. It found skin. Blood poured from the boy’s wrist.

  He stopped struggling all of a sudden. Bastien wanted to shout at the memory, “Keep fighting! Why did you stop?”

  The boy had grabbed a rock. He pounced on the dog, and in the next few seconds bludgeoned it. A final whine spat out of the animal, signaling its death. Fur and blood trailed away. Scratched, with black and blue marks all over, the boy slumped to the side. His round face was flat. No emotions. Completely numb. Bastien wanted to tell the boy that it’d be okay. His heart pounded. A shadow swept away the scene.

  A tall priest in a dark tunic, his dreads white, stepped into the light. The spotlight expanded swiftly until there was no darkness left. They were within a brightly lit sewer tunnel. The man knelt and asked, “Are you all right? What is your name?”

  The boy didn’t speak. He was trembling, his eyes staring off into nothing.

  “Oh, my dear child.” The man held the boy, then inspected his wrist. “You must be so scared. Where are your parents?”

  The boy managed to shrug.

  “Oh, sweet boy.” The priest undid a knot in the boy’s matted hair. “I am Father Paul, and Christ and I will take care of you. I am so sorry you had to go through what you did. But now you may live in my orphanage.”

  The boy’s mouth curled into a frown. He shut his eyes, and a few tears fell. The old man said, “Onward and upward.”

  The trembling slowed.

  “Onward. And upward, my child.”

  The tears stopped. So did the shaking. The boy opened his eyes.

  Father Paul cracked a smile. “You are a survivor, my boy. A lion.”

  Bastien whispered through gritted teeth, “Onward and upward.” Muscles relaxed. Breathing became easier. He blinked open his eyes.

  Onward and upward, the words erecting a fence to keep that pit bull at bay. Father Paul’s “Onward and upward” still had a positive effect, even after his death. The orphanage’s caretaker used to have his children repeat the words every morning to drown away the previous night’s nightmares. There were always nightmares, never just dreams. Growing up an orphan in this settlement traumatized children in ways most outsiders could never understand. The things they saw and experienced here were wounds that littered Bastien’s soul. And his skin. A scar, left behind by the pit bull, circled his left wrist. One of the many painful events that plagued his life story. But there was a silver lining through it all—Father Paul.

  The man, wrinkled with a slim, dark face always draped by a curtain of white dreads, had seldom been without a smile. His features, those deep-set eyes and flat nose, they hadn’t faded with time. Sometimes Bastien could smell the candles the man had lit routinely around the orphanage’s metal shacks—vanilla and lemongrass. Inside the tent Bastien took a deep breath as if hoping to smell those sweet scents once more, but instead the smell of pungent body odor assailed his nostrils. His nose crinkled in disgust. It had been a week since the last shower.

  He discarded the sweat-soaked hooded jacket in the corner. If his skin could talk, it would sing praises. Sweaters and coats didn’t belong here. New Paris was an oven, after all. His black t-shirt would suffice. There was still a need to conceal the face though.

  A white shawl lay heaped alongside a shelf. “Forgive me for stealing again, good father, but I must sin.” Bastien wrapped the cloth around his neck, covering much of his face. The stench of vomit clung to the fibers, but it’d have to do. Beggars can’t be choosers. Nor squatters. He couldn’t just stay in the tent thinking about the past. That meant waiting around to be found by either the bounty hunters or the apothecary who owned the tent.

  No, chances would have to be taken outside.

  He poked his head out the tent, uncertain of the bounty hunters’ whereabouts. Hurried glances revealed no sign of them. Bastien stepped out with clenched fists.

  The dense crowd oozed past like a single mass of sludge, and portions of it seeped into three large tunnels. These conduits connected the bazaar to the remaining city. New Paris had been restructured in the past ten years into four arrondissements municipaux, or administrative districts: West, East, North, and South, which included Marché Bastille
.

  When Bastien lived here, it had all been one giant mess packed together within unmarked passages and indistinguishable chambers. But the Queen had carved it into distinct neighborhoods since then and forced its quarter-million residents into this current configuration. New Paris was now organized suffering.

  “Hail, Queen Marie Dubois.” A young man, gangly and dressed in a white robe, hurried past with hands clasped together in prayer. “She is our one true God. Worship her, and you shall see all that is good in life. Disobey her and you shall be deemed a traitor and killed.”

  He was right—at least about the being deemed a traitor and killed part. A human corpse was nailed to the leftmost wall by its wrists and ankles. A pool of blood collected below. Graffiti had been sprayed alongside, “Méfiez-vous des traîtres!”

  Things had gotten worse in the sewer city. That was a feat, given the already decrepit conditions. Queen Marie Dubois’ takeover of the throne had dragged the city down into a nightmarish hellhole. Bastien remembered the day of her coronation like it was just yesterday, not ten years ago. All healthy Parisian males had been conscripted forcefully. Marie’s loyalists had slain those who’d refused by unleashing a macabre circus of guillotines, hangings, and public floggings. The tunnels had flooded with rivers of blood. Bastien would have lost his life as well had it not been for a daring escape from Earth. Survival prevailed all other considerations and he was damn good at it by then. Running and hiding.

  Finding his way to Port Sydney, he had enlisted in the Martian colony’s Military Academy. They gave anyone a chance but only kept the best. It was a commitment that was something to be proud of. The red planet’s armed forces were an entirely different beast altogether, every bit honorable to Marie’s wickedness. The Solar System’s peacekeepers ensured stability not only on Mars but also in space around the three colonies. True discipline and a real code of ethics. Unmatched technology served their mission. There had been so much to learn.

  Time proved his enlistment a prudent decision. He rose through the ranks fast—a golden boy. A Parisian who actually had his shit together. And not just physically, but also mentally. When other recruits fell apart during sleep deprivation exercises he clapped and encouraged them to stay awake with him. It was the same encouragement he’d offered to his fellow orphans during the times when food was scarce. Such resilience had propelled him to the top of his graduating class. The harshness of his previous life fueled a stellar military career, one which gave Bastien both purpose and ability to be a savior, not merely a survivor. To protect those weaker than him. It was a natural extension of his days with Father Paul—onward and upward became more than an idiom Bastien reserved for himself. He could share it and lift others. For the first time in his life he had the tools to continue his savior’s legacy. He could make a difference to others in the way the good father had with him. This newfound confidence offered reprieve from the helplessness of watching fellow orphans die one by one and Parisians succumb to Queen Marie’s terror. Father Paul would have been proud had he not succumbed to cancer by then.