“Is there anything going on?” Hail asked Dallas Stone, the head of his ship’s security center.
Dallas rubbed his three-day beard. He was either starting to grow something new or he was simply too lazy to shave it off. Dallas glanced at his monitors for a moment.
“No, all quiet on the sea today,” Dallas confirmed. “Prince is secured to the blimp above us, floating at two-thousand feet. Her radar and video screens are clear. No potential threats in the immediate area.”
Dallas was in his early twenties, medium in every way; height, weight, looks and dress. The only thing that was above medium was his brain and his ability to analyze and react quickly to threats on the Nucleus. Hail’s father had known Dallas Stone’s father, Mark Stone. Mark Stone had been a young officer on several of the ships Hail’s dad had commanded. Dallas had been through the ROTC and wanted to fly jets. Mark Stone had heard about the little circus Hail was running and asked Hail for a favor. Instead of his son joining the Air Force, Mark Stone asked Hail if his son could join his menagerie. No father wants to see their son in danger. And Mark Stone knew that flying Hail’s drones was a lot safer than running midnight sorties in an F-35 over Libya.
Hail looked over Dallas Stone sitting there, concentrating on his screens and he realized that this young man might be the only person on the Nucleus with any type of military training, however minor that training happened to be.
Without turning to look at her, Hail asked the woman sitting next to Stone, “Tayler, what does Queen see?”
The nineteen-year-old attractive blond, sitting at the station to the left of Dallas, zoomed out on her main monitor and reported, “Queen has been doing a three-hundred and sixty-degree flight pattern at a fifty-kilometer distance from the Nucleus. She is currently flying at an altitude of fifty-two hundred feet. Radar shows three tankers, two cargo ships, four fishing boats and two pleasure craft in our vicinity. The video feed that is being streamed from Queen shows no unusual activity taking place on the decks of any of those vessels. The vessels’ registrations are all clean and all check out.”
Tayler was a refugee of sorts. Hail had discovered her living near the docks in the Port of Charleston. Tayler had tried to steal some food that was waiting to be loaded onto the Nucleus. The girl had been busted and then delivered to Hail by the port authority officers. Hail was asked if he wanted to press charges. Instead, Hail had brought Shana Tran into the room. She had a friendly demeanor that women liked. He then asked the officers to leave them alone so Hail and Shana could have a talk with Tayler. After about an hour, it was apparent to both Hail and Tran that all Tayler needed to turn her life around was a purpose. At that time, Tayler had only been seventeen years old. And in the last two years, since the young woman had decided to stay on the ship, Tayler had never told Hail her last name. But Hail knew it. Before they had even left Charleston that day, he had Tayler’s background investigated. Hail knew what had happened to her parents ― well, parent. Her father was unknown and her mother was deceased. Tayler was their only kid. But she was not a unique personality on the ship. Most of the crew on the Nucleus had a gloomy history and had some issues to work out.
“So much for what’s on the water,” Hail responded, “but what about the air?”
A soldier-looking young man to Hail’s right answered, “We have two commercial aircraft within a two-hundred-mile radius and five smaller aircraft on the scope. None of their paths are vectored in our direction, but of course we will watch them closely.”
Hail nodded his head at Lex Vaughn, comforted that the Nucleus and its contents were safe for the time being. Lex Vaughn acted military, but Hail figured he had picked all that up from movies he had watched. Some of his crew used military terms such as ‘Roger, that’ and ‘Affirmative’ as well as sometimes referring to distance in miles and at other times in kilometers. With no military training, Hail was always surprised how much movie-talk his crew brought to the job.
“Thanks people,” he said, already turning to exit the door.
“Thank you, Sir,” his staff responded.
His security staff was wound a little tighter than his mission crew and he liked it that way.
“If we don’t see you, have a good night,” Hail heard Stone say just before the door clanked shut.
Hail turned to his right and began walking down the hall toward his stateroom.
Have a good night; he had heard Dallas tell him. I haven’t had a good night in two years, he thought, and a wave of depression passed through him that was so intense that it almost took him down to his knees. It happened that way sometimes. Depression jumped on him fast. Like a wild animal. He could go for days pretending that nothing was wrong, that nothing had happened; that the world had not really changed all that much, but it had. To Marshall Hail, his entire world had been altered. All the people in it were different. Every one of them appeared more animalistic in some way. He understood that he had changed as well. He was different all the way down to his core. At one point in time, Hail would have considered himself a passive person. But now, he recognized that he had become more barbaric in the last two years. He had developed a savage side that he didn’t have before. He also possessed a new ability to be cruel. He fully realized that he had turned away from the light and was walking slowly into darkness. And making it all that much more detestable was that it had been a conscious decision on his part. Before, he had been put on the earth to help people. Now, two years later, he had been reborn as a predator and had been left on the earth to kill people. But in a strange way, he felt that the people he killed; that their deaths would still help people in some way. He could reconcile his actions in a number of ways. But when it came down to it, a prominent group of individuals were putting up large sums of money to make sure that nasty people were removed from the planet. Hail didn’t feel it was up to him to judge. Other people had already taken on that task. He was simply there as the executioner; an exterminator of vermin that fed off the fear of others.
Hail arrived at his stateroom and held up his prox-card and entered his oasis. This was home. Well, this was one of his homes, but they were all identical. He had an identical stateroom on the Hail Atom, the Hail Electron, the Hail Proton and the rest of his full size cargo ships. Each of his cargo vessels were exactly the same. Same mission center, same security center, same armaments, same everything. If one of his ships was upgraded in some manner, then all of his ships would receive the same upgrade. The design of his ships was perfection and even Hail, with his many flaws, knew not to mess with perfection. If one was perfect, then they all needed to be perfect.
The living room he entered was stark and minimalist. There was a leather couch and end table, a matching reclining chair and a coffee table placed on a hardwood floor. He crossed through the living room and entered his bedroom. His bedroom could have been mistaken for that of a hotel. There was almost nothing in the room that personalized the space. No photos or curios or knickknacks or paintings.
On his way to the shower, Hail caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He stopped and looked more closely, but he wasn’t looking at himself. Stuck in the corner of the mirror was a photo of his wife and two girls. Maybe the only item that personalized the space. He allowed his hand to reach out and touch the small piece of colorful parchment. He then glanced back up at the mirror in time to see a single tear form in his left eye and then streak down his cheek, leaving a thin glimmering trail of sorrow down his tired face. Hail rubbed the tear away and then squashed his face together between both of his large hands. There was a pressure forming in his head and massaging his face provided a little relief. He was under a great deal of stress. Tomorrow would be an important day, maybe the most important day of his life, and that was saying a lot. The billions that he had made during his lifetime were earned with a number of lifetime achievements; many great accomplishments to be proud of, but all of those didn’t mean anything to him now.