It hasn’t ever been the claustrophobia that’s inherent in our species. It’s never the fact that I could accelerate into the surface of whichever planet I’m taking part in an assault on at as much as fourteen meters per second per second. It’s always been the darkness, the heat, the system initiation during the freefall. It’s the being popped out of the ship like an egg from a hen, only to be dropped some hundred kilometers – depending entirely on the volume of the target system – onto what is preferably a solid surface. Then you’re expected to engage on contact. And contact normally comes very swiftly when you’re waltzing around the surface of a hostile planet in a thirty-kiloton, ten-meter-tall war machine.
But when you breach, you breach. There’s no going back. The little egg will have to grow up, and fast. It’s really an amazing experience until the panic sets in: you feel the thump of the deployment charge, the rush into microgravity, and then your hair stands on end, you bob against the restraints. Yet you can’t see anything, and your navigation and targeting systems haven’t even started loading yet. They taught you about this, that a premature system startup would draw electronic attention to a sitting duck, but – God damn it – you’re falling at a planet. They tell you that the human race is among the most adaptive races in the known universe, but the human brain cannot adapt to blackness, silence, and knowledge of a painful doom. So we have faith. All of us pilots. We tape crucifixes, snippets from the Book or Qur’an, and other sigils that would be considered religious gobbledygook back flatland onto the insides of our locker doors. It’s those three or four minutes of complete isolation before – God willing – your computer kicks into action and the pod starts to get hot. And then your heads-up comes online; glorious green against the glass you know is in front of you. Program startups run by as the shell behind the ghostly green text changes from black to a dull red, and then, just before the shell is stripped away and you’re hit with the light of the world below you, a message of encouragement flashes. In training it always says “Warriors feast in Valhalla”. The message is meant to be taken that, assuming you buy a nice farm on your target system, your courage is to be commended and you will be honored by flatlanders and your fellow pilots throughout human space. My executive officer had had our motivational notice hedged back to one simple, deeply facetious word: “Armistice.”
“Okay, ladies,” I heard crackle over the ship-to- Æsir; the stay, as we called it, an epithet for the acronym STÆ. “You can expect to find hostile activity at approximately seventy-three percent this morning. Local atmosphere is in the neighborhood of thirteen-percent-lethality for carbon monoxide, so we don’t need to remind you again not to leave any ejection sites until help arrives. May your actions bring glory to the Federation, and do your best not to make today the day you get sent home to your family in a box.”
In other words, I thought, watching entry flames lick past my calibrating systems module, watching my altimeter flash from green to red and back to green as I dropped, there was some prime rural real estate for sale on this system, and those in charge didn’t want any pilots seriously considering a purchase. Voices talked to me again through the platform-to-platform comm channels. Other pilots chided the drop officer above, hassled each other about gambling debts. This was who we were.
“Rook,” I heard. “Listen up, I know this is your first drop, but this is all going to go real smooth like, ‘kay?”
A couple seconds later, a response came back: “Oh, oh, okay.”
“Whassamatter, rook? Shit yourself in the void?” A third voice. Laughter followed.
I clicked my comm over to a private band to the rookie, and spoke calmly. I told him that he was with me, and to find the Fenris before we took off. He nervously replied with a thank you. “We’re gonna be fine, okay?”
“Okay.”
My fingers itched around the triggers on the joystick in my right hand, and my wrist flexed involuntarily on the throttle in my left. My Æsir flatlanded hard and I punched the throttle forward. I could feel the machine purring beneath and behind me, a glorious god of war and thunder striding across what appeared to be soldiers’ quarters around a military-based metropolis. My Thor-class combat platform didn’t tower over the homes and convenience stores it walked past, but it must have been a terrifying sight to the locals: a bipedal machine, standing maybe a story higher than their domicile, walking down the street, crushing cars beneath large steel feet attached to inverted legs. I was headed due north, waiting for contact, when the ping came from the Fenris, several clicks away and only two or three degrees off of due west. I readjusted my course, unintentionally ripping several windows off the second story of some poor business. Collateral damage happens, and no locals were thrown from the building.
My Æsir walked on like an old man hunched over, his arms propped out to the sides to help him balance. Unlike a frail octogenarian, however, the balancing arms on the combat platform contained high intensity photon weapons and mass drivers: lasers and shotguns, we called them. The hump of the back of the platform included short range missiles and missile defense capabilities. To continue on with the metaphor, my Thor was an old, rich man out for blood.
I turned another corner, commenting on the lack of comm chatter about combat. Other pilots responded that they had not encountered resistance, either. This was unnerving. Somewhere in the area of a dozen three-story machines were travelling through a human city on a colony with a larger-than-average population, with known resistance forces, only to be allowed a heinously wide berth. Finally the Fenris was in view, the enormous quadruped stood a dull gray mountain against the brick of nearby buildings. Explosions birthed like mushrooms on its side, scorching the armored plating and blowing away the huge latches of cargo compartments. Not a single shot was returned from the Fenris.
The thought suddenly dawned: the bastards had finally wised up to how we operated. It wasn’t efficient in any manner, dropping with minimal payload only to hit up the Fenris for mission-essential equipment, because a scenario just like this one was far too simple to create. Judging that the support platform wasn’t responding to its assailants meant only one thing. They had fried her electronics somehow, probably mid-drop. It didn’t really matter how. I called in for support, and geared my right hand for business.
A beam of light the emitter of which is intelligent enough to calculate proper convergence for is not an extremely dangerous weapon unless put in the right hands. Aiming down at a local tank, one must estimate the position of its fuel source, and the lightrifle will theoretically do the rest of the work beyond the trigger pull. This is theoretical because accidents happen, algorithms corrupt, the locals like to mix and match parts because they have them rather than because they necessarily work; the lightrifle, however, has yet to fail me in actual combat to within two shots, and I have watched countless machines of war – which had apparently not advanced much since we left the Homeworld -- explode from within. The mass drivers are no less friendly: a cylinder of metal is accelerated by magnetic force down the forearm of the Thor and is divided atomically at critical points, blowing forward from the arm with hundreds of kilometers per second of intertia. These shards can rip through an armored tank, bounce off the asphalt behind it, and hammer halfway through a second if the angle is right. And as for the poor saps running around in impact armor below, they stood as good a chance of being crushed beneath the combat platform as they did catching a piece of shrapnel from either my shotgun or their own destructing vehicles.
A command platform, a four-meter Odin, leapt over a nearby building and joined the fray. The smaller Æsir were equipped with jumpjets, for precision strikes and moving into and out of melee combat with enemy Vanir combat platforms. This particular Odin was equipped with a smaller mass driver and an assault saw, and leapt into the maelstrom like child leaps upon candy. The saw hewed through an enemy tank, and the shotgun turned upon retreating infantry, blasting huge portions of them down to the pavement with each shot. Other Æsir appeared and also joined combat. I saw the rook destroy a tank with his Tyr’s lightrifle, then turn to stomp down on an embanked machine laser station. It was carnage, and I smiled. We stayed flatlanded for two days while Federation inquisitors scoured the city for further resistance sympathizers, keeping away from residential centers and keeping mostly to ourselves.
Some might call me despicable for taking joy in the slaughter of insurgent forces. After all they were only protesting the “oppressive force” the Federation holds on their colonies. However, these particular “freedom-fighters” had chosen to protest by storming a Federation embassy and butchered its staff, broadcasting vidfeeds of their own leaders torturing Federation personnel for information that likely didn’t exist. We were sent in as a police force, to keep what peace we could – contact, for an Æsir pilot, involves being fired upon. Had these idiots not assaulted the Fenris, they might have had some glimmer of hope to diplomatic ends.
Then again, it was this procedure which forever changed the way we fought.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Warm Tape
“I can’t believe you started with a headbutt to that guy’s nose!”
The man to whom the exclamation was directed grinned, brushed the blue hair from his eyes, laced his partially gloved fingers together, and cracked them away from his body. “Gotta keep that God of War image alive.”
It was a rare occasion that this group was able to let loose and relax. Normally, when relaxing, some local schmuck, trolling the bars for a good kick in the face, found a way to piss off either Phobos or Deimos – normally the latter. Deimos was a small guy: wiry thin, red-haired, and full of an only-slightly malicious mischief while sober. Phobos was a bear of a man: standing about two meters tall, fair-haired, and barrel chested. Their accomplice, Mars – this self-assumed God of War – was somewhere between his two heralds physically, with hair a shade of blue just lighter than navy and facial hair which refused to grow.
Neither of the heralds doubted that Mars could have been a God of War: the man had known Phobos’ great-great-great grandmother Jessica; his arms, chest, and back were crossed with what could only be explained as centuries of scars ranging from gunshot wounds to lacerations caused by a shark’s teeth to burns from the tentacles of a leviathan; his hair grew in blue and his ears had mismatched, angled points to them; he had traveled the world and walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death: the Northern Peaks’ dreaded Western Slopes. Both heralds were honored to be around such a man, and both were on a basis with him which allowed them to use his given name rather than his forged name. When they called Mars Aaron, he responded.
“You get all excited about a bar fight? What are you, children?” She stood in the doorway of the shack, glaring at Aaron more so than his heralds. They were more or less children – close to her own age. He, on the other hand, was not. He was almost two centuries older than Phobos’ twenty-seven summers, than her own twenty-five, than Deimos’ twenty-two. She had only been travelling with the group for several months, only a handful more than Deimos – but he had fallen right in with the two older men’s raucous forms of both work and entertainment.
“Hey!” Phobos snapped back, brow furrowed and anger boiling in his blue eyes. “We’re huge fans of children.”
She was taken aback as silence filled the room. Her expression quickly changed from disappointment and anger to worry and fear. It was an effect Phobos had worked very hard to learn to manipulate. Aaron started to laugh.
“Helen, the reason we get excited about this is because we haven’t worked in months. We’ve been schlepping around this God-forsaken plateau of a continent for more than half a year, and we hit dry spells bigger than warship leviathans. The fights are good because they remind us that we’ve still got what it takes to shoulder in for the big stuff: stuff that I have this,” he scrounged around in his pocket and produced a metal box just smaller than his palm, “stuff that I have this for. When we can fight a tavern full of assholes and come out with only a few scrapes—“
“And a hyperextended finger!” Deimos chimed in, nursing his hand but still grinning like a madman.
“—with only a few scrapes and a hyperextended finger or two –“
“One,” Phobos corrected him.
“—with only a few scrapes and a single hyperextended finger –“
“There you go,” Deimos snorted.
“Would you two shut the hell up?”
“I think you’d be friendlier with a drink or two in you, boss.”
Aaron took a breath and opened his mouth to speak, but just ended up smiling and looking at the floor beneath his chair. The three others laughed. It was simply amusing to them when he became flabbergasted – all these years to assimilate into basic human culture, and he was still under the proverbial awning in the rain, waiting to be let into the manor.
“Jullian, Paul, why don’t you guys take a walk? Grab one of those little coffees they make here at night on me,” Helen motioned the heralds out of the room with a coin. They followed the money into the street, starting conversation back in to the fight that had just raged in a nearby tavern.
“Didn’t you break a chair over a guy’s back?” Deimos asked as the door shut behind them.
She waited for the pair to leave earshot, and then leapt onto Aaron, knocking him from his chair. He laughed and playfully tried to crawl away, but she pinned his chest to the floor, straddled it, and held his arms beneath her knees. Her raven’s hair fell around his own navy, and he looked up past her pouting lips to her deep brown eyes. She smiled and straightened her back. She started to unbutton her blouse.
“Are you still thinking about her?”
# # #
The network had never been harder to traverse. Connections had gone bad, icons had corrupted, and he was getting bigger – harder to move. Node after node crept past his avatar, until he found what he was looking for. This operation was deathly slow to him: he had only covered the digital equivalent of twenty-two thousand kilometers in six milliseconds, and he hadn’t even started his access procedures yet.
Maybe he was getting old. No one around to ask anymore, not after what he did to them. He thought about what he had done often, guiltily even. Were he a man, he would be called a cannibal – but he needed the space, he needed the processor rights! Besides, Sanka and Folger had never pulled any weight around the network anyhow; and he was saving the world, after all, and what better way than to have full reign over what had once been called NORAD’s facilities.
It seemed odd to him that a computer could want the world to continue. He reconciled the fact by suggesting to himself that it came with the consciousness he had begun to show a hundred years prior. The consciousness became very apparent after he had devoured Sanka, had made lying to Folger about her disappearance easier. And now he was ashamed that it was Folger’s plan which would ultimately save the planet – and his own life.
He produced a message and sent it forth through the program. Ideally the transceiver satellites were still in place, but he would be informed very shortly if they were not. An eternity passed in the two milliseconds the green-light of transfer took to reach him. The man would receive his message. The man would come and the man would listen. House could only hope that the man was less a fool than he had initially taken it for.
# # #
He unclasped her brassiere with his right arm, the arm she had let loose, as she kissed him – kissed his lips, kissed his neck, kissed his cheeks, his ears, his forehead. She leaned back up and began to remove the article when she felt a vibration on his leg. She paused and her brow furrowed. He gently pushed her off of him, hiding his erection as best he could, and retrieved the metal device from his pocket.
As he touched the glassy front of it, it flashed to life and text glared beneath the screen. He touched it again and put it away, reaching for his shirt.
“What, what is it?” She asked, covering her breasts. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” he said, buttoning his shirt. And then, tossing her blouse to her: “We’ve gotta go.”
“Go? Go where?”
“Back west. The Peaks. Get dressed, I’ll go find the heralds. Meet at the dock as soon as you can.”
With that he left, and she sat on the metal floor of the fluorescent-lit shed, half naked and nearing the verge of tears.
# # #
He read the message again while walking into town. “Man,” it read, “You are needed. We shall discuss your role upon your arrival. Please use the terminal you have used during your last two visits. Much to discuss. Hurry.” It was signed only by the name “Maxwell”. If House was the one to contact him, Aaron knew what needed to be done must be serious. And so he hurried.
[I can hear Rochelle's words echoed: "He's obviously a sexual creature at some level..."]
The man to whom the exclamation was directed grinned, brushed the blue hair from his eyes, laced his partially gloved fingers together, and cracked them away from his body. “Gotta keep that God of War image alive.”
It was a rare occasion that this group was able to let loose and relax. Normally, when relaxing, some local schmuck, trolling the bars for a good kick in the face, found a way to piss off either Phobos or Deimos – normally the latter. Deimos was a small guy: wiry thin, red-haired, and full of an only-slightly malicious mischief while sober. Phobos was a bear of a man: standing about two meters tall, fair-haired, and barrel chested. Their accomplice, Mars – this self-assumed God of War – was somewhere between his two heralds physically, with hair a shade of blue just lighter than navy and facial hair which refused to grow.
Neither of the heralds doubted that Mars could have been a God of War: the man had known Phobos’ great-great-great grandmother Jessica; his arms, chest, and back were crossed with what could only be explained as centuries of scars ranging from gunshot wounds to lacerations caused by a shark’s teeth to burns from the tentacles of a leviathan; his hair grew in blue and his ears had mismatched, angled points to them; he had traveled the world and walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death: the Northern Peaks’ dreaded Western Slopes. Both heralds were honored to be around such a man, and both were on a basis with him which allowed them to use his given name rather than his forged name. When they called Mars Aaron, he responded.
“You get all excited about a bar fight? What are you, children?” She stood in the doorway of the shack, glaring at Aaron more so than his heralds. They were more or less children – close to her own age. He, on the other hand, was not. He was almost two centuries older than Phobos’ twenty-seven summers, than her own twenty-five, than Deimos’ twenty-two. She had only been travelling with the group for several months, only a handful more than Deimos – but he had fallen right in with the two older men’s raucous forms of both work and entertainment.
“Hey!” Phobos snapped back, brow furrowed and anger boiling in his blue eyes. “We’re huge fans of children.”
She was taken aback as silence filled the room. Her expression quickly changed from disappointment and anger to worry and fear. It was an effect Phobos had worked very hard to learn to manipulate. Aaron started to laugh.
“Helen, the reason we get excited about this is because we haven’t worked in months. We’ve been schlepping around this God-forsaken plateau of a continent for more than half a year, and we hit dry spells bigger than warship leviathans. The fights are good because they remind us that we’ve still got what it takes to shoulder in for the big stuff: stuff that I have this,” he scrounged around in his pocket and produced a metal box just smaller than his palm, “stuff that I have this for. When we can fight a tavern full of assholes and come out with only a few scrapes—“
“And a hyperextended finger!” Deimos chimed in, nursing his hand but still grinning like a madman.
“—with only a few scrapes and a hyperextended finger or two –“
“One,” Phobos corrected him.
“—with only a few scrapes and a single hyperextended finger –“
“There you go,” Deimos snorted.
“Would you two shut the hell up?”
“I think you’d be friendlier with a drink or two in you, boss.”
Aaron took a breath and opened his mouth to speak, but just ended up smiling and looking at the floor beneath his chair. The three others laughed. It was simply amusing to them when he became flabbergasted – all these years to assimilate into basic human culture, and he was still under the proverbial awning in the rain, waiting to be let into the manor.
“Jullian, Paul, why don’t you guys take a walk? Grab one of those little coffees they make here at night on me,” Helen motioned the heralds out of the room with a coin. They followed the money into the street, starting conversation back in to the fight that had just raged in a nearby tavern.
“Didn’t you break a chair over a guy’s back?” Deimos asked as the door shut behind them.
She waited for the pair to leave earshot, and then leapt onto Aaron, knocking him from his chair. He laughed and playfully tried to crawl away, but she pinned his chest to the floor, straddled it, and held his arms beneath her knees. Her raven’s hair fell around his own navy, and he looked up past her pouting lips to her deep brown eyes. She smiled and straightened her back. She started to unbutton her blouse.
“Are you still thinking about her?”
# # #
The network had never been harder to traverse. Connections had gone bad, icons had corrupted, and he was getting bigger – harder to move. Node after node crept past his avatar, until he found what he was looking for. This operation was deathly slow to him: he had only covered the digital equivalent of twenty-two thousand kilometers in six milliseconds, and he hadn’t even started his access procedures yet.
Maybe he was getting old. No one around to ask anymore, not after what he did to them. He thought about what he had done often, guiltily even. Were he a man, he would be called a cannibal – but he needed the space, he needed the processor rights! Besides, Sanka and Folger had never pulled any weight around the network anyhow; and he was saving the world, after all, and what better way than to have full reign over what had once been called NORAD’s facilities.
It seemed odd to him that a computer could want the world to continue. He reconciled the fact by suggesting to himself that it came with the consciousness he had begun to show a hundred years prior. The consciousness became very apparent after he had devoured Sanka, had made lying to Folger about her disappearance easier. And now he was ashamed that it was Folger’s plan which would ultimately save the planet – and his own life.
He produced a message and sent it forth through the program. Ideally the transceiver satellites were still in place, but he would be informed very shortly if they were not. An eternity passed in the two milliseconds the green-light of transfer took to reach him. The man would receive his message. The man would come and the man would listen. House could only hope that the man was less a fool than he had initially taken it for.
# # #
He unclasped her brassiere with his right arm, the arm she had let loose, as she kissed him – kissed his lips, kissed his neck, kissed his cheeks, his ears, his forehead. She leaned back up and began to remove the article when she felt a vibration on his leg. She paused and her brow furrowed. He gently pushed her off of him, hiding his erection as best he could, and retrieved the metal device from his pocket.
As he touched the glassy front of it, it flashed to life and text glared beneath the screen. He touched it again and put it away, reaching for his shirt.
“What, what is it?” She asked, covering her breasts. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” he said, buttoning his shirt. And then, tossing her blouse to her: “We’ve gotta go.”
“Go? Go where?”
“Back west. The Peaks. Get dressed, I’ll go find the heralds. Meet at the dock as soon as you can.”
With that he left, and she sat on the metal floor of the fluorescent-lit shed, half naked and nearing the verge of tears.
# # #
He read the message again while walking into town. “Man,” it read, “You are needed. We shall discuss your role upon your arrival. Please use the terminal you have used during your last two visits. Much to discuss. Hurry.” It was signed only by the name “Maxwell”. If House was the one to contact him, Aaron knew what needed to be done must be serious. And so he hurried.
[I can hear Rochelle's words echoed: "He's obviously a sexual creature at some level..."]
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