A Flight of Broken Wings: Aeriel Trilogy #1

Chapter 7

Subhas Kinoh, the Senior Secretary of the Department of Defence, was a tall, well-built man in his mid-forties. He had the brown hair and sharp brown eyes that seemed to be a trademark feature of the Kinoh family, and a face that was all broad planes and sharp angles. A strong, rather arrogant jawline was softened by the numerous laugh lines around his eyes, which made him look rather more innocuous than his reputation warranted. As a field agent and active Aeriel Hunter, before accepting the more mundane position of a high-ranking bureaucrat, his record in killing and capturing Aeriels had been second only to Ruban's own. Twenty years ago, he could easily have been mistaken for Ruban's light-haired twin.

"Hello my dears!" Subhas greeted them with a broad grin, shaking Simani's hand and patting his nephew heartily on the back, much to the latter's consternation. "I hope I'm not disturbing you terribly on such a special day."

"Are you kidding me?" Ruban threw himself into one of the chairs around Subhas's gigantic mahogany desk. The chamber was luxurious in a subtle sort of way, expensive but sturdy furniture littered sparsely throughout the expansive space, the floor heavily carpeted in muted but tasteful colours. "I finished an entire bottle of aspirin in the first hour of last year's ceremony. Can't someone tell those brain-dead knuckleheads they're babbling nonsense?"

"Ah, but every government needs a certain amount of nonsense to function smoothly, my boy." Subhas smiled indulgently, "Perhaps you'll understand that once you're as old and grizzled as your poor uncle."

"Oh please," scoffed Ruban, glancing out the large window at the beautiful cityscape outside. Desk jobs certainly had their perks, boring though they tended to be. "We both know you could think circles around every one of those idiots if you wanted to. You should run for Prime Minister next time, uncle."

Subhas laughed. "Well, that'd certainly be something, wouldn't it? Although I must say, I've grown rather attached to this office. Which reminds me; there's a reason I wanted to see you two today."

"Yeah we figured." Ruban glanced at Simani, who nodded grimly in agreement.

"Since you called the both of us together, we thought something might be the matter," she said.

"Oh something's the matter alright," Subhas sighed, pushing his chair back to pull out two identical files from a locked drawer under his desk. "Lots of things are the matter. But first things first. Read these." He handed the files to the Hunters.

Ruban looked down curiously at the thin brown folder in his hand. It was bare except for the word 'CONFIDENTIAL' stamped in large black letters across the top. Flipping it open, he started reading through the first document inside, also stamped 'confidential' in red ink across the margins.

"A new sifblade formula?" Simani asked, her eyes wide, having finished her perusal of the file before her partner. "How come we never heard anything about this?"

Ruban's heart was hammering wildly in his breast. This was...revolutionary! If what he had just read in the file was true, it could mean a whole new dawn for humanity. A way to finally get rid of the Aeriel menace once and for all.

"It's a highly confidential project," said Subhas. "Has been until now, anyway. It was started almost two decades ago by the former Secretary of the Department of Defence. Back then none of us was sure that it would work, that it was even possible."

"But it did work, didn't it?" asked Simani with uncharacteristic excitement, waving the file in her hand. "It says here that by the end of last year, almost ninety-eight percent of the experiments were successful."

"It did indeed," Subhas smiled, steepling his fingers before him as he spoke, his elbows resting on his desk. "Better than any of us could have predicted. This formula could be...a game changer. It could herald a new era for humanity, an era free of the terror and constant strife we know now. Just the experimental prototypes of the reinforced sifblades have in multiple simulations, killed over five Aeriels at once. You don't even need to stab them, really; the blade just needs to touch their skin and it sucks out every last drop of energy from their veins until they're nothing more than a wrung-out carcass. If everything goes according to plan, we could maybe even make bullets out of the enhanced sif-ores. Hunting fatalities would go down dramatically; success rates of Hunts would sky-rocket. This country, hell, the whole world would be safer than it has ever been before!"

"What's the problem then?" Ruban asked.

Subhassighed. "We had kept this project a closely-guarded secret, obviously, for fearof an Aeriel retaliation against vulnerable civilian targets within the countryif news of it got out. For the longest time, we were successful. However, inrecent weeks it seems there has been a leak."