Legacy Ch9

Legacy of the Guardians

AJ Marks

Chapter 9

He thought back to the day he finally made it to America and to the address on the card that the stranger had given him a year earlier. Now he stood in front of an ordinary white building that did not look like anything he had imaged. Taking a deep breath he walked into the building. Once inside the building he did not know where to go and stood there looking a bit lost.

"Can I help you sir?" A young woman asked him as he stood there.

"Ah." Ahmed said trying to completely understand the words she had said. He had heard the word 'help' and he was assuming that she was seeing if she could help him. Not knowing what else to do he took out the card the stranger had given him and handed it to her. She looked at the card and seemed to scratch her ear.

"Follow me." She whispered in his ear in his own language and Ahmed realized that she was also wearing a transmitter like the stranger who gave him the card.

Ahmed followed the young women into an elevator and watched as she pushed a button and the elevator quickly went up. Ahmed was still a bit overwhelmed at riding elevators but tried not to show it. He noticed that the elevator went all the way up to the top floor. He followed the women out of the elevator and watched as she spoke to the women behind the desk. She showed women behind the desk the card and motioned him over.

"How did you get this card?" The women behind the desk asked as the other young women left.

"I, uh." Ahmed said trying to speak English.

"Please, speak in your native tongue." She said.

"A man gave it to me. He said that I should say the shadow is our nature." Ahmed said and watched as her expression went from guarded to welcoming in seconds.

"Welcome, go in through the doors and the man on the other side will take you to where you need to go." She told him and then watched a confused Ahmed walk through the door.

The other side appeared to be a normal business and a man who only instructed Ahmed to follow him greeted him. They walked to a room and the man motioned him inside. He walked inside and was met by another man sitting behind the desk.

"Greetings, my name is Gary." The man said standing up. "Please have a seat." He said motioning Ahmed to sit down.

Ahmed sat down and was really beginning to wonder at what was happening and if his coming here was a good idea. He had spent most of his visa searching for this address and now he only had a couple of days left to find a job.

"So, your interested in space?" Gary said to him.

"Ah, yes I am." Ahmed replied. "But I will probably never make it there."

"Perhaps you will." Gary said turning around and grabbing a stack of paper and a pencil. "I would like you to fill this out, I take it that this is in the correct language?" He asked giving the stack to Ahmed.

"Yes it is." Ahmed said in amazement. He was fortunate to have learned how to read and Ahmed went to work answering question from his family to his visa to what he thought about space.

There were several more tests and he was left alone in the room for about an hour. Another young women came in and asked him if he was hungry and got him something to eat. It was after he finished that he was taken to another room and Gary told him that he had passed ad welcomed Ahmed to the company.

"When do I start?" Ahmed asked. "And when can I arrange for a stay on my visa?"

"Don't worry about it Ahmed and you can start right now if you want." Gary told him.

"I do need to find a place to live." Ahmed said but before he could continue Gary interrupted him.

"That won't be necessary Ahmed." Gary told him leading him out of the room and toward a back room. "You're about to become part of a very secret organization."

Those words excited Ahmed as he followed Gary down the hallway. They reached the last door and went inside. The room wasn't what Ahmed was expecting at all. There was another elevator, but what got him was the three armed guards.

"Stand here." Gary told him then told the guards that Ahmed was a new recruit and needed to be scanned.

Ahmed watched as a light went from the top of his head to his feet and the process was repeated on Gary. Gary also produced a card and did an eye scan. Ahmed then did the eye scan and he was blinking the light out his eye, and it reminded him of when he looked at the sun directly. They got on the elevator and it seemed that as soon as the doors closed they were opening again, the only difference was Ahmed could feel his ears popping.

They had to go through the scanning process again, this time however there was several more guards and they looked to be heavily armed and armored. Ahmed was just trying to take it all in.

"Welcome to the Earth Defense Force, Ahmed." Gary told him. "It was created to fight the Skartians."

"The Skartians?" Ahmed asked.

"Yep, we look for all types of people, from the nice looking young women, the type that you meet when you first arrived to a common soldier." Gary said.

"So what do you want of me?" Ahmed asked.

"Well, that will be up to you, you can train to be part of the fleet, or part of the fronts that camouflage the real part of the company." Gary told him.

"Well, I've always been a warrior, I guess I won't quite that path now." Ahmed said.

"That's what I thought, instead this time, you're fighting for something different, something more important." Gary told him. "You're fighting for the survival for everyone you've ever know and people you will never know."

Ahmed stretched as much as the limits on his bound hands and feet would let him. He had seen and done things that his brother could only imagine of, and he would never know. Even now he knew that at the press of a button he could be out of this prison they had put him in.

Ahmed did not feel like his life was in danger yet, that would occur when, and if, he met bin Laden. The guards had started talking to each other and Ahmed managed to catch snippets of the conversation. So, Ahmed thought, they knew about the terrorist attacks in the USA, but the common person on the street was ignorant of it. A pretty good plan, and it smelled of a Skartian.

Jack Cave sat at his desk, it had been several days since he had sent Captain Ahmed down to Afghanistan. So far neither Ahmed nor the others that had been sent down had made any progress. The only thing that had been sent was a request by Captain Ahmed to rescue his parents from Afghanistan and for them to be set up in Canada, where they thought Ahmed lived.

"So what do you think?" Steve asked Jack.

"Sorry, what were you saying?" Jack replied. "I wasn't paying attention."

"I know. What I was asking was what about Ahmed's parents."

"He sounded like he was worried about them?" Jack said recalling the message they received. They had not heard anything since then.

"I would be to." Steve replied watching as Jack rubbed his bald head.

"I want a team on standby just in case, I have the feeling that Ahmed will be the one to locate Osama bin Laden." Jack replied. "And if he does, his parents might be in danger."

"Do you want me to get a fix on them?" Steve asked.

"Yeah, so we don't have to waste time on that." Jack said. "It shouldn't be too much of a problem since Ahmed put a tracker on them."

"So, what do you want for lunch today?" Steve asked knowing that until something happened there was not a lot to do.

Ahmed was beginning to wonder about what was happening as no one had been the room for what felt like a couple of hours. He had studied the room ad had not noticed a thing out of the ordinary. Just a small room with no windows and only one door. The only piece of furniture was the cot that he was lying on and there was nothing on the off-white walls. The room itself seemed to be in good condition and looked like it was built for the specific purpose to hold hostages.

He began to wonder if his mission would be a failure. If it was a failure then he needed to contact the base for a pick up. Something inside him, however, told him that if he was just patient then he would be rewarded. He decided to wait for another day or so before making up his mind about the pick up.

He turned his head at the sound of the door opening and watched as his brother and another man walked into the room

"I hear that you have a message for Osama bin Laden?" The other man said and Ahmed narrowed his eyes at the man.

"Yes and its for him alone." Ahmed said to the man. He needed a better look at the man so he twisted a bit to gain a better look. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the man, but that was just it, nothing out of the ordinary.

"I'm sure you can tell me." The man said. "I'm one of his right hands, I report directly to him."

"And why should I trust you?" Ahmed said, wondering if he was now treading on thin ice. 'I've got to be careful here.' He thought to himself.

"Because, I could have you and your parents killed with just one command." The man said and Ahmed looked at his brother at the statement and watched, as he did not appear to be affected by the statement. Ahmed knew then that his brother did not care for their parents.

"I'll give you five minutes to decide." The man said and left the room leaving the two brothers alone in the room.

Ahmed watched him closely as the man walked out, and then he realized that the man was not human, but Skartian.

"Well brother dear, it looks like I was right." His brother said smugly, then continued at Ahmed's confused look. "I always told them that you would end up killing them because of your stubborn thinking."

"That's not true, you see my friends have already evacuated them out of the country." Ahmed said confidently as he activated a signal and watched the smug look on his brother's face disappear.

"You lie." His brother said almost yelling at him.

"No, I'm afraid you still don't know who your dealing with, my people are very powerful." Ahmed said almost with a bit of sorrow in his voice.

"We'll see when our parents are brought here, then they'll see that you are a traitor to our people, just like I always told them you were." He said, his smugness creeping back into his voice as he walked out.

Ahmed quickly sent out a message saying that he had encountered a Skartian, but he was beginning to believe that there was more than one Skartian in the area. He could only hope that they got his parents in time.

End Chapter 9

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