E.I.G.H.T

To say I was surprised to see the base that Zephyr was operating from, would be an understatement. It was a pretty big cabin. It had two sinister looking turrets aimed out in front of the cabin. The turrets must have had some sort of tracking system to them for they moved and followed us as if they had a mind of their own.

Once inside the tent I was even more surprised. There was a massive map of the moon of Rho complete with all the known territories: Rho Prime to the North West, Rhodes to the North East, Rhodasia to the west, the Ides of Rho just north of here and even the Rhoatian forest was labeled on this map of the moon.

There were also territories I did not recognize to the far north of the moon. One was marked off as “Rhonin”. I looked a bit confused about this territory. Although there were smaller territories to the north of Rho Prime, I did not have any information of any territory known as Rhonin. The furthest North Territory I knew was called Rhonoceres, so called because of the lake up there had a shape to it that was like that of a horn.

It could be that my programming just did not have Rhonin as a known territory due to it being new. However, this was not the only peculiarity of Rhonin, it had all these red lines drawn out to different people in different territories of Rho. One such line lead to the name “Maxwell Marcellus.” I knew this man through my father, he was a scientist much like my father and was currently working on a virus that he had named the M-virus, it was quite the ingenious creation which combined a virus with a parasite, though instead of damaging the host it enhanced the host.

Maxwell’s name was in the territory of Rhodes to the North of the Ides of Rho. It was underlined a couple of times along with a note card that had a description of what was labeled as crimes.

“Experimentation of weaponized bioagents.

Experimentation of bioagents on ally soldiers

Experimentation of bioagents on innocent civilians

Kidnapping and subjecting children to horrendous experimentations.

Unlawful seizures of innocent people.”

The list went on. I found this hard to believe the man seemed to nice when I had met him. To the east of Rhodes was another red line that lead to the small territory of Rhone, there was the name “Cynthia Cassandra Da Jaune aka Cicada.” I knew of this woman she had apparently been charged with helping the Zhiran during the Zhiran War, however what she was doing in Rhone was something I was not certain of.

Amongst her crimes listed were:

“Betrayal of race to the Zhiran

Seducing and extorting males in power

Seducing and extorting females

Seducing and extorting of children

Gross sexual deviation.”

Amongst others.

It was then I realized that all these lines went back to a name that was underlined four times. I looked carefully and saw with great shock the name:

NORMAN HUNRAKEN

I froze, I didn’t know what to think. Yes, Maxwell Marcellus was a friend of my father but that didn’t prove anything. Among the other names that the lines went out to not one had I ever known about before. With the exception of Cicada they were just people that I never seen or even heard of before, and yet all the lines traced back to my father, but what did it all mean?

“Ah ther’ be the bastard running this moon,” the Bear said.

I had become so shocked that I had forgotten that the Bear was even there. I tried to maintain my composure surely, they had only named my father as corrupt because of fault information. Perhaps one of the others had tried to divert the rebel’s attention by accusing my father.

“I told Zephyr that ’e ’ad to be part of this corruption,” the Bear said. “’e is in allegiance with the enemies, there be no record of him before a few years ago. Back to when the FREE first showed up all them years ago, that was the first time anyone ever knew of Norman Hunraken.”

I thought of that for a moment and scanned my own records that I had stored in my internal files. Sure enough I had concluded this was true, there was no records of my father before the FREE had appeared.

“Plus, the surname Hunraken isn’t exactly a Golordian name is it?” a voice said as he entered the tent behind us. I turned and was greeted with a relatively young man with short brown hair and platinum eyes. I instantly recognized him as who he was Zephyr Ezekiel Platinumus.

With a mental side note I tried to annotate that target one “Locate Zephyr Ezekiel Platinumus was now complete. However, it was hard to focus what sort of evidence did the rebels have against my father.

“What sort of evidence do you have against him?” I asked Zephyr who looked at me and he walked over to a desk to the right of the room and pulled out a file.

Zephyr walked over to a table in the middle of the room and threw a file down. I walked over to the table and looked down at the file. It looked like copies of conversations between my father and the other members that were shown on the map. Including with Cicada as recent as yesterday.

“These could be forged,” I said.

“No, they are the real deal I am afraid,” Zephyr said.

“How did you come about them?” I said.

“I have a mole on the inside,” Zephyr said.

“A mole?” I repeated.

“Yes, Hunraken would never suspect this person,” Zephyr said.

I immediately began to think who in the world could have been spying on my father? I could not think of anybody.

“Hunraken is one of the reasons the Zhiran showed up when they did.” Zephyr said. “His corruption lies deep, he experimented with the Zhiran gas on many Golordians including those labeled as threats to the empire.”

“How do you know it’s not just someone who is out to frame him?” I asked, and Zephyr laughed.

“I was once skeptical like you. Norman Hunraken is a well-known hero of the Golordian Empire, but all that seems to be a tall tale invented to over-embellish his worth to the common people. In truth Hunraken is as corrupt as he comes, he even performed experiments on his daughter…his own flesh and blood.” Zephyr said

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Aye lass, this man performed diabolical experiments with his daughter.” The Bear said as he pulled another file from the desk off to the right and walked over to the desk.

“’e killed ’er,” The Bear said as he threw a picture of a half-mutated Persephone Hunraken on the table in front of us. I remained speechless, this could not be I had just seen Persephone before I came here. It had to be all lies, a phony picture perhaps.

The scans of the picture, however, revealed it was real. The scan of the picture of the woman in the picture revealed it to be matching exactly to Persephone Hunraken. I double and tripled checked it several times before I recognized that the picture was real. Persephone was dead, killed by her own father.