The Silence and the Light by Kevin McCormick

Author:Kevin McCormick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Fiction Works
Published: 2013-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Terra Incognita

There is precisely one man on the surface of this planet, and he is the most powerful man alive.

A stranger to this place might have mistaken it for a nature preserve, and in fact they would not be far off. For that one man able to go there whenever he pleased, it served as a private hunting ground.

It teemed with life of every conceivable earthly biome, and some which would not have been conceivable on earth, but the landscape remained entirely undeveloped. Those who knew it existed numbered fewer than a hundred. Many more had been brought to the planet to meet with its owner, but always such meetings were arranged under the strictest codes of secrecy. With remarkably few exceptions, those brought to it had no idea where they were.

Such was the case with the woman who arrived there that morning.

The small ship came skimming silently through the silver light of the dawn, a blackbird cutting a wake in the glassy sea surface just beneath it. The shoreline which the ship approached was covered in an odd unearthly mixture of conifers and rainforest. Billows of fog hung so thick over the forested mountains it was difficult to tell where fog ended and clouds began.

On the shore the man stood waiting, dressed in hunting fatigues and an outback hat, rifle on his hip. The ship landed in front of him, the gusts from its engines pushing at the edges of his coat.

The hatch opened. Flanked by security guards, the woman stepped off the ship and stood before him. She wore spectacles and a long black coat buttoned against the cold, and her shoulder-length blond hair was streaked with gray. Substantially more gray than there had been a few months ago. The man grinned at her and handed his hunting rifle to one of the guards. The security officers took the weapon with them when they turned and got back on the ship, taking off a moment later, leaving two of the most powerful human beings alive behind on that deserted planet.

At last, they were alone.

“Governor Warren.”

“Mister Bramhall,” she replied.

They set off walking together up the coastline, in the direction of the densely forested mountains. Bramhall had fearlessly given up his gun for good reason—this world held a great many natural dangers, but nearly all of them were in the sea, or in the upper reaches of the mountains. And while they were at that moment keeping their distance, a hundred currently airborne guards could be at their side within seconds.

“Miss Warren, my tolerance and patience for formalities was never what you would call formidable, and it is today a regrettable shadow of what it once was,” said Bramhall. “What little I did and still do possess finds itself devoured—and then some—by the… exactitudes, of my office. Bearing that in mind, would you object terribly to us being Peter and Sara to each other, as opposed to our titles?”

“You and I, sir, are bonded now to each other by the blood of millions,” she said.

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