Free The Phoenix Project by Kris Powers Page A

another card from the deck. He placed a six on
top of his cards. “I’m over.”
         “You should have alternated
with that first ten.”
         “I thought I could handle it.”
         “You’re too cautious.”
         “Another game?”
         “Do you have any money left?”
Ranik asked with a feline smile.
         “Some.”
         “It’s my turn to deal the
cards,” Ranik said. Lathiel handed him the deck and he began to shuffle the
cards for another round.

 
 
 
         “No Ma’am,” a soldier repeated
as a small woman attempted to enter into a hatchway on the bottom deck of the
AWS Endeavour . Now even the warships of the orbiting battle groups had
been ordered into transport duty as more and more people became desperate to
leave the prairie states. “You can take one suitcase with you, not two.”
         “I’ve got everything in my
life in these two bags!” the woman exclaimed.
         “I’m just following the rules,
Ma’am.”
         “I’ll pay the baggage fee,”
the woman said, nonchalantly. Maria stifled a laugh while she watched from a
terrace overlooking their boarding guests.
         “This isn’t a Space—Liner,
Ma’am. Please leave the bag behind or leave the line.”
         The woman looked at the
officer, incredulous at the perceived lower class treatment of her presence.
She huffed at the stern response and threw one of the bags to the metal deck
with a loud smack.
         “Thank—you, Ma’am. Welcome
aboard,” the soldier said. He motioned for her to advance into an interior room
as more clamoured to board the ship behind her.
         “I’ll write to my Senator,”
she shouted over her shoulder. “My tax dollars pay your wages, you know.”
         Maria admired the Petty
Officer’s patience as he ignored the remark and moved on to the next person in
front of him. Long lines of people entered the ship which sat on a large
farmer’s field in the state of Nebraska.
The central prairie states were nearly abandoned. The government had
subsequently turned all of its focus on the outer states. The other ships of
the Second Battle Group were spread out across some hundred square miles of
land. Frantic people were rushing in from the nearby city of Omaha to board the makeshift transports.
         Maria left the scene and
travelled to the top of the ship by elevator. She didn’t go to the Officer’s
Lounge, which had become a temporary hostel, but instead found an outer hatch
to the sunshine outside. She walked out onto the hull and looked out around
her. To the east and west, Maria saw the silhouettes of the Trafalgar and the Destiny . She discerned rising smoke in the Omaha skyline where protests to the
evacuation had become riots. The decision to let the fires burn seemed to have
sobered the resisting population’s belief that this was some sort of conspiracy.
         The protests began the night of
the announcement for the mass evacuation. Mobs grabbed large three foot square
links and stuck them to what ever stick or post they could find and marched
across every city and town hall in the Midwest.
The angry crowds turned to rioting once the ships arrived to take them away
from their homes. Police and the Military clashed with the protestors while the
sensible half of the population grabbed what they could and boarded the
evacuation craft.
         Some of the dissenters decided
to leave once the fires continued to burn and more ships took off with their
friends and neighbours aboard. However, of the ten or so thousand that gave up
and left, several hundred thousand stayed despite the threat of what was
coming. Politicians were dumbfounded when decades of telling their supporters
that their rivals had an “agenda” backfired. Many of their most ardent
believers actually dug in expecting a secret army to come in and take their
homes away from them.
         All of the local stations went
dark, one by one,