Gun Run

Chapter Four: The Session

Hokkaido, Japan.

If cities in the south spread all over the regions around them merging everything into their seamless cityscapes, the Citadel was a majestic design of extraterrestrial construction, that rose high up into the sky like a massive castle not bound by the laws of gravity. In its heart was a center of modern orbital transportation, the space elevator. A massive tube of rings floating in the air, that extended far out of the atmosphere of the Earth, connecting to an in-orbit station, that people called the space port. It was all held together by an advanced engineering no man yet understood.

Built on the shore of a lake inside Manshü caldera on the northern inlands of Hokkaido over a thousand years ago, it was originally a facility that harnessed the power of an active volcano for the Creators. Since then the volcanic activity had distinguished, and this Citadel become an interesting mixture of sophisticated Creator architecture and classic Japanese expertise, that had changed significantly over time as this establishment grew.

The Central Citadel looked like something out of this world, extending its reach upwards with constructs that grew higher the closer they got to the space elevator. Coming further from its core the buildings were more man-made, until in the outskirts they were all constructed by Japanese wanting or needing to live in the vicinity of this monument of coexistence. From afar it looked like the Citadel was fused to the surface of the Earth by this manmade concrete mass.

A hub for all air transportation in and out of the Citadel was built around the body of the space elevator. It looked like a thick metal and composite shell protecting it. Traffic there was always busy. With all those passenger and cargo shuttles zooming everywhere, it reminded of an agitated, gigantic beehive on a full alert mode.

The shuttle that was carrying Annie, Gabrielle and Thomas glided silently between all the other traffic towards a landing platform designated to them at the lower section of the hub facility by the overseeing flight command program. Here the long distance crowd transports landed and took off on the Citadel, and it was much more crowded than upper parts where cargo terminals were located at.

Annie followed the chaotic traffic around them through the shuttle window. Seeing other shuttles fly past and around, and right at them missing only slightly from every direction. It twisted her guts even though she knew that every plane, shuttle, ship or pieces of scrap metal had a trajectory that was carefully calculated by several overseeing A.I. units, to prevent any incidents from happening and seizing the traffic operation around the Citadel.

Gabrielle had fallen asleep in her own seat, still holding up hugging her legs in her lap. Her head hung to the side, only kept up by the wall she leaned against. Thomas was laying back on his own seat that was adjusted back down as far as it went. He was almost lied down, his hands crossed over his chest and he breathed slowly, but Annie had a slight suspicion that he wasn't dozed off at all but rather in a meditation of some sort. Whatever the case might had been, he was missing the incredible site of approaching the Citadel.

Although she had been on all of them many times and lived in the center of the main Citadel, she was still mesmerized by the overwhelming size of these alien fortresses that had discreetly been masked as a mega city and modern centers of everything imaginable. She tried to recollect the previous times she had been there at the Citadel of Hokkaido. She didn't remember, yet she was still convinced that the place wasn't this busy back then, however none of those times were on board a shuttle heading straight into the very core of all the traffic.

As they approached their landing pad and came closer and closer to the transit hub and the space elevator, Annie was dumbstruck by the imposing size of the thing. Spanning over her field of view the round walls of the construct curved behind itself, forming a vertical horizon that couldn't be seen beyond. She felt humbled and insignificant comparing herself with such a construction.