Ohhhh, baby.
Spoiler (click to show/hide):
Action 8 [reunion]
[begin trans]
[begin audio playback]
[on foot]
Water moved in a silent rush across the steel lip of the hangar doors, pooling and eddying around my feet as I tried to find someway to jump the few meters down to the ground. I was abnormally calm then. In the sullen dark of the cavernous hangar were the bodies of the men I’d just killed. The blood and filth of their deaths washed away by the water that now ran around my boots. I’d killed people before, animals. Lots of things. It was hard the first time, to point a gun and pull the trigger on someone. The old cliché was that it got easier, and it did. Then after a while it got harder to get over how meaningless each successive kill was. Names came and went. Faces. Numbers. At that moment the only thing I’d feel when I made a kill was a bit of disdain for an improper execution, reproaching myself for a lack of accuracy or an ineffective grapple.
At some point in my career I’d become mechanical, efficient, and bored. That was my last mission on that little planet so far from the core. I’d let men inside me. Killed unflinchingly. All for a mission I couldn’t define or understand. The outcome didn’t even matter. I just kept moving forward and saying fuck you to anything that stood in my way.
I’d found a service ladder at the far end of the doors. It was cut into the rock face of the cliff or whatever that the hangar had been cut into, and ringed with red and orange stripes. Pressian warning colors were the same as human, I thought, marking the information as strange and tucking it away. I took care descending the wet rungs of the ladder and a few seconds later I was on the ground. Runoff had made it marshy and water pooled up to my ankles. I don’t know why to this day, but I jumped as high as I could as splashed, sending waves across the pool and covering the nearby wall with soupy mud.
Then I did it again and again, jumping up and down like a lunatic and covering myself with grimy dirt. I jumped until my breathing went ragged, playing in the mud like a little girl and laughing my ass off before finally skipping my way out of the boggy runoff to a hill that ran up and out of the water’s path. I fell to my knees almost immediately they were shaking so bad. I looked up at the sky. It was empty, blue. Clear of any imperfections. I took it in, letting the heat from the local star wash over me. Then I leaned to the side and puked and dry heaved until tears came from my eyes. I crawled away shaky and somehow embarrassed, letting myself rest a moment before rolling over on my back and looking up at the sky again.
“I’m fucked for life,” I said to myself before beginning another fit of stupid laughter. Something in the sky caught my eye and a second later I was up and running for cover, my heart racing. A second sun hung in the Pressian sky. I hit the ground and dug myself as deep as I could into the sand. A second later the sky ripped and the atmosphere screamed as it was being devoured.
[playback interrupted]
[signal net intact]
[finding next source]
[trace found]
[observation point found]
[subject located]
[team black infmod battlenet]
[begin trans]
Jon “Black Main” Jonson
Transit Drop Unit, Pericles, Over Pressia
The pods are tight and hot, despite the conditioned air circulating through his mask and armor. Despite the meters of steel and distance between him and his boys he could still feel them out there, spread throughout the drop hangar, clenching their fists in terrified anticipation. The Pericles comms guy comes in over the net in his earpiece.
“Black Main, we’ve hit a snag, may have to delay the mission.” He shifts in his suit, an unconscious reflex that does nothing to quell the pre-fight itch in the middle of his spine.
“Roger, details?” He responds, sending a command through his C-2 linkup to the rest of the squad to listen up. They respond quietly, the sensation of the response like a few quick flicks to the nape of his neck.
“The Communications Officer upstairs went crazy and shut down the primary comms hub, then shot himself, and we’ve only got that from some yeoman sending Morse code signals to us through a viewport.” Jon stifles a laugh at the mental image of two yeomen peering through the depths of space, flickering flashlights back and forth at each other from window to window.
“Will there be any significant change in the mission?” Jonson asks. He flicks the carbon fiber “fingernails” of his gloves against the metal hull of the pod. Some half forgotten tune that he always repeated when he was bored. Tink-ta-tink-tink-ta-tink-tink-tink.
“Affirmative Black Main, suppressive fire will be limited and you will have to visibly mark targets. Marking wavelength will be blue, does your kit support?”
“Affirmative, and are we capable of plurality?”
“That’s a negative Black Main. With the main communications hub offline the relay satellites won’t be able to position for reflect. The extermination mission has to be scrubbed.”
“Roger, not our problem anyway,” responds Jonson, continuing his rhythm on the hull.
“Be advised, drop in five,” comes a steely synthetic voice from the inside of the pod.
“Ready up boys,” yells Jonson over his headpiece. “We are about to fuck some shit up.”
“GET SOME,” comes the unified response over the net.
Tink-ta-tink-tink-ta-tink-tink-tink.
Tink-ta-tink-tink-ta-tink-tink-tink.
Tink-ta-tink-tink-ta-tink-tink-tink.
Minutes pass and the synthetic voice comes over his headset, telling them to prepare for drop, and he can feel the pressure build in his chest when they hit atmo a second later. The ship is burning through the sky now, six times the speed of sound and slowing and slowing while a great envelope of fire burns around it. Alien fucking invasion, he thinks to himself, gritting his teeth and preparing for the lurching, stomach-twisting drop of the pods as they’re jettisoned like missiles from the bottom of the 548 into the enemy’s back garden.
Tink-ta-tink-tink-ta-tink-tink-tink.
Tink-ta-tink-tink-ta-tink-tink-tink.
“Release!” Cries the synthetic voice one last time and there it is, terminal velocity clawing at his guts. The old ecstatic joy of throwing a big fuck-you to a primal fear and letting every milliliter of adrenaline soak into his blood. A digital display pops to life in his mind, ticking down the meters-to-impact with frenetic speed, a brilliant green blur that at once flashes red and the pod pops away around him, flying only few feet before bursting into flame and disintegrating seconds later. Then he’s flying free, the counter still madly cycling closer to zero, but he can see the ground rushing at him and he ignores it for an insane second to just suck up the thrill of acceleration. The warning light starts blinking in sets of three and his Infantry Collar sends a shrill “tone” into his auditory nerve and he obeys, pulling his harness and activating the quintet of jets on his knees, stomach, and forearms. They burn hot and blue, nearly invisible in the daylight, and he can feel the pressure as they slow his descent.
His HUD slowly returns to green as his descent slows to an acceptable speed, and little blue dots begin to form up on his map as his team finds him in atmo. Eventually he hits a rooftop twenty meters from his intended position, soundlessly touching down on the smooth brownstone surface. The others land within the next two seconds, and before the end of the minute, they’ve stripped off their landing gear and activated the burn buttons. Black 4 watches the pile of thrusters disintegrate and returns to the group. They turn to face the enemy base and slave their collars to Jonson’s. Not a word is spoken, and the plan is disseminated within seconds. They have their orders and move away silently. Jonson jumps down from the two-story building, rolling and bringing his weapon up at the same time. He adjusts the sling to a comfortable length.
Black 4, no contact, in position.
Black 2, no contact, in position.
Black 3, two down, in position.
Jonson sees two shadows moving near the garden wall of the building. He slips his laser rifle back over his back and pulls his side arm. Never fire light-based weapons and expect not to be noticed, he thinks, readying the silenced pistol. Four shots at six meters, stone dead and not a sound.
Black Main, two down, in position.
Black 5, six down, broken finger right hand, in position.
Roger all Black, thinks Jonson over the comms line. Standby for flash down, then we move in. A unanimous “roger” comes over the line while he settles into the fat sand embankment that gives him the best physical view of the base’s back wall. He feels the other team members slaving and un-slaving their collars to his, seeing the world through his eyes and ensuring that they miss nothing. Completely in tune.
The goggles of his mask go black the second the interplanetary laser fires to block out the insanely bright beam of light. It eats the air around as it passes into atmo, sucking it in an ear-breaking screech. Black 5 has never been dirtside for a light show and can’t suppress a fit of laughter.
Holy shit, she thinks over the comms, fuck-ing-be-u-T-ful. Jonson agrees, they were always awesome to watch when you were far enough away. They looked blue from the ground and red from shipside, something you couldn’t explain to people who’ve never seen them.
His goggles fade back to ambient light and the team starts moving towards the base, staying low to the craggy, sandy ground. The base has lit up like a firehouse, all red lights and sirens. Thirty two meters to his left, Black 2 hits the ground and starts dropping rounds into the personnel on the roof. The rifle is silenced and shoots sub-sonic ballistic rounds, inaccurate at long ranges, but Jonson slaves her collar and sees bodies hitting the deck one after another, little poofs of liquid popping out of their skulls at each impact.
Risky shooting 2, but good work.
Tango Yankee Main.
4 and 3 reach the back wall first. They spread out their kit and have a shaped charge ready in less than a second. It goes off as he and 5 make it to the wall and then they’re inside, cutting and shooting and stabbing anything that doesn’t have the right kind of nose. The room is clear in a minute and four bodies are on the ground. 2 comes through the entrance, and pulls a canister out of his kit. He pops the top and holds it next to the wooden bottom of the room’s only door. A thousand tiny metal fruit flies crawl out and under the door to fly through the building. A minute later the team has a full 3D layout of the building thanks to the tiny robots. They also pick up sound, but the enemies in the base aren't concerned about anything other than some burning god and divine light from the heavens. Richboy is a floor down, and there are only seven guards in their way along the shortest path.
Quick and quiet, all the way, Jonson thinks. The team replies in kind.
They circle through the floor, dropping three guards in quick succession in the first hallway. One of them has a second to get out a pained wheeze despite the holes in his lung, but Jonson puts another bullet in his left eye socket and he slumps to the ground beside his friends. They make their way around to the concrete staircase that leads to the basement and 5 takes point. She’s spotted when she kicks a bit of gravel half way down and jumps the rest of the way, landing with her knees in the chest of the guard at the bottom and slamming him repeatedly with her fist until he goes limp. 5 finishes the job with her knife, cleans it on his uniform blouse, and sheaths it while 4 moves past and puts the remaining two guards down with his rifle. Loud and messy, but effective.
Jonson curses out loud when he gets to the bottom of the stairs. Richboy has been kept in a ten-square-meter observation room, tied with rope to the ceiling by his wrists, but they put his hands behind his back before they tied him up. His arms are dislocated, and black from loss of circulation. His eyes are gone, along with most of the skin on his forehead. Purple-white bone glistens in the bright overhead light, and the room must be at least 38 centigrade. 3 draws his knife and cuts away the bindings while 2 lowers him steadily to the ground. 4 and 5 open their kits and begin binding his wounds, scanning his arms for clotted blood before finally cutting off the ropes on his wrists. He manages to gurgle a few words.
Pulse is low Main, thinks 4 over the line.
Roger, responds Jonson, before twisting the volume knob to the right of his jaw and saying: “I’m Ensign Jonson, Special Forces Black Detachment, are you Captain Rick Tanner of the Orion?” Tanner shivers on the ground when Jonson says his name, and a white tongue snakes out to moisten his chapped and broken lips. He coughs.
“I can’t see,” he responds, his voice is a cracked whisper. In the shadows in the corner of the room is a piece of soft metal pipe that has been flattened. Half of it has been cut into fibrous strips that lie in a pool of now dried blood.
“Are you Rick Tanner?” Jonson asks again gently.
“My dad… just calls me Junior.” He coughs out the last bit in a few pitiful wheezes.
“Good enough,” responds Jonson, twisting the volume knob back to the off position, then radioing up to the Pericles: “We’ve got Richboy. He’s wounded, condition: routine. Need exfil at Pos 1 Mark 1 immediately.”
“Roger that Black Main, we have air on station.”
“Roger, Black Out.”
The team has the stretcher out and Richboy strapped to it before the conversation is over. 4 and 5 attach it to the swivel harnesses just above their hips. 5 takes the lead at his feet, the stretcher behind her and her gun forward. Behind her, at Richboy’s head, 4 carries his pistol and a readout box with leads attached to Richboy’s chest and neck. 2 takes point up the staircase.
We are fully hot on the way out, thinks Jonson over the line. Every one of these fuckers you see gets it and hard, roger?
ROGER!
Then they’re up the staircase and in the hall. The pigs have already started finding bodies but they haven’t put two and two together yet. Jonson and 2 are on point and help them figure it out, gunning down seven in the hallway before any of them can move. Walking over the bodies only slows them down a bit and soon they’re moving into a large hall area. Black Team floods into the room, pounding down the pigs even as ballistic rounds and twinkling laser light cascades around them. Jonson’s armor absorbs two small-caliber rifle rounds and he can feel one of his ribs breaking, but he swears and presses on, burning a canal through the offending shooter’s skull. The Pressian’s armor is substandard and doesn’t hold up to the heat of Black Team’s high-output weaponry. Several of the pigmen drop their rifles and run for the exit, but they don’t make it far.
The smoking wreckage of the big room behind them, they make their way to a four-way entrance foyer, the flies on the walls show three enemies tucked in tight just behind the doors in ambush. 2 and 5 gun them down through the cheap stucco, leaving sweltering melt-holes smoking on both sides of the double-doors. They’re almost to the exit when one of the Pressians, eviscerating and gurgling blood, drops a grenade next to 3. He punts it back into the big room but it explodes in mid-air, ripping off his foot and calf and showering his chest with shrapnel. He goes down hard, but pumping rounds into grenadier. 4 and 5 switch places automatically and 4 flips her rifle over her back, grabs 3 by the collar and drags him the rest of the way outside. She draws her pistol as she does so to cover the rear.
The Pressians outside think they have the upper hand for only a moment before the 548’s main cannons open up and turn the courtyard into black smoke and rubble. A twitching, booted foot lands next to Jonson as he and Black Team move as fast as possible to the now landing 48’s opening cargo door. Gunfire erupts and Jonson feels a tingling sensation and falls to his face. The gnarled remains of his right foot hang loosely from his ankle. He shrugs it off and hobbles to his feet, 4 coming up and getting him in a side carry. A second later they are on the bird and lifting off. The rest of the team gets 3 and Richboy strapped in while he rummages through his kit for a dazzler. He sets it to 475 and shines the blue light on the front of the building as it gets smaller in the distance, then his goggles go black as it’s wiped from existence by they intense heat of the stellar bombardment. When the light fades all he can see is a blackened speck.
“Hey Main,” says 3 from his stretcher as the cargo door hums closed. His mask and helmet are off and Jonson says a quiet prayer in his head that the little bastard can still talk. He points at the bloody stump on his leg that the medic is cleaning and wrapping. “Looks like we’re gonna match now.” Jonson pulls his mask and helmet off, then runs a hand through his sweaty black curls.
“Yeah 3, guess we are,” he responds with a laugh. Jonson raises his leg up and cuts away the burnt utilities with his knife, then unlocks and twists off the ruined metal prosthetic. “Welcome to the club.”
[playback interrupted]
[trace found]
[observation point found]
[subject located]
[begin trans]
San Paral
Unknown Life Form, Sporangium, Pressia
Light is unnecessary, and unwelcome. The gentle dark soothes in its coolness. Waves of soft water break around her eyes and neck, filling her pores and receding, leaving only glittering jewels of water that reflect her mother’s song through every trembling fiber of her being. She is one among many, numbers that need no qualification in their counting, but that all run together as the one. Her heart touches mother’s and mother touches all. Light is unwelcome.
Fire comes with the great scream that shakes her timorous womb-mates, the children raising their hands as one and crying for the pain that mother feels. Light comes too, and with it pain for the children as well. They see themselves for the first time since their birth and cannot understand the blessings they’ve been given. Heat builds as flames lick the faces of her closest neighbors and fear builds her budding heart. Her hands have become clear, she now sees, crystalline in the blue light. A form that shared her animal body with mother’s essence, divine in its unison.
Fear not my child, whispers mother. You will not share this pain for long. Prepare to fly free and far from me.
Mother’s voice floats into her mind as a bed sheet settles over lovers. Calm and cool, gently clinging as she cuddled closer to each tongued syllable, every purse of the lips. Mother would keep safe her precious children. Her very words were a satisfying caress in a life of tortuous individuality. She did not want to leave mother, here she was so much more. One of many. Inseparable. Necessary. But mother’s wishes must be obeyed, and if her expulsion was needed.
A great, unfathomable pressure builds, clenching around her. Her neighbors, charred and faceless are pushed closer. If only she could shut her unblinking eyes to the horror of their ruin. Another scream. The pressure gives. Another scream. It returns.
A final grand push.
She feels pain, only for a moment, as mother wishes her a tearful goodbye. They shall now, and forever, be separate. Her ears are gone, there is no sound as she is flung up and away into the light. Her eyes adjust, and she can feel the rushing of the wind against her flesh. She has become a feather on the breeze, fluttering through the blue. Beneath her mother grows smaller, a black and green smudge soon replaced by the brown and red blocks of a place she finds so familiar that as she gets closer she can almost make out—
She hits the roof a small apartment block and her arm is ripped from its socket by the force of impact, a piece of see-through blue-red jelly glimpsed only for a minute before she smacks wetly into the base of a building a block away. The impact shatters, or rather, mushes the parts of her brain case that haven’t yet turned from bone into the jelly that the process turned her into. Her brain is severely damaged, and her last moments are spent in confused, happy agony. The cracked, twisted fingers of her remaining hand slip off as she hold them up to the sun and plop to the ground. Inside her torso, the gnarled red surface of the seed mother gave her cracks, and the newborn crawls out to sip at its host’s liquefied form.
San smiles at it, thinking it quite beautiful, and reaches out her fingerless palm to run down its chitinous red exoskeleton. It slurps at her face, sucking in her jaw and parts of her shoulder. She remains happy for it as it eats away her eyes and then starts on her mind. Then every thought that ever was San Paral is sucked away, consumed by the unrelenting child.
[connection terminated]
[initiate audio playback]
When the heat from the light started to dissipate around me, I raised my eyes from my hole in the sand. There was another Presidium Class ship in orbit, there had to be. Only Presidium’s had stellar bombardment capabilities, and only one thing in the universe caused second sun when fired. There was a chance for me, to finally get off this rock and go home. I was downright giddy, but I stowed it away and sprinted up the closest embankment. I had an idea of what they were targeting and I was right. A glowing orange track of melted dirt, stone, and steel ran through the city and into the center of the monstrosity on the coast. It was burning too, an ethereal green flame that flickered wickedly, sending up red and purple smoke that formed vortex rings around the laser’s impact sight. Columns of gray and white rings stacked atop them, as high as I could see, and a little black hole where the atmosphere could no longer reflect light from the surface above all that.
Still, the thing could barely be injured. I could see seawater rushing into the kilometer wide wound channel in its front side, but the damaged area was hardly a tenth of its entire body mass. I shudder to think what alien mechanisms kept the behemoth going. I realized a second later that the thing wasn’t being filled by the ocean, but actually drinking it, the great expanse of it’s “back” rippled and sunk and rose in like some perverse balloon, quivering as it filled unseen hollows with billions of gallons water. Then, it shuddered one last time, and with a tremor that shook the ground it tore open from its distant back to its mammoth front and exploded almost noiselessly, scattering a million black flecks into the sky. I could almost swear they were people as I peered into the distance. There was a scratch on rock behind me, leather on stone. I spun around and raised my rifle instinctually, and froze with the gun halfway to my shoulder. It was the woman from the hospital. Her green shawl and red eyes were unmistakable.
“Every step you’ve taken on this planet has been soaked in the blood of its native life,” she said to me, her voice as toneless as the dead. She pointed at my stomach. “Do you intend to sow what you’ve reaped?” I grimaced.
“No, and what the fuck is your deal?” I responded, dropping the rifle to my side, but keeping my hand on the grip. She walked past me and gestured to the falling cloud of black specks around the behemoth, her brown palm was flat and seamless as it swept out toward the coast.
“The Matron has begun the first seeding. Her young will cross the oceans and fields of this planet, bringing her gift to our people around the sphere. They will prosper if her second coming isn’t interrupted, and this world will become a garden of life, chaotic and ever changing. Unbound by the pettiness of intellectual pursuits, a perfect balance of life and death where the cycle cannot be interrupted by those able to take more than their share.”
“I cannot,” I replied, “in any certain terms, convey how few shits I give about your planet and what happens to it. There are some nice people here, I’m sure, and your giant rape god’s plan to turn this ball into some crazy porno jungle sounds great, but the last word I got before your people knocked my ship out of the air was that this rock was going to get incinerated, and I’m just trying to get clear before I get vaporized by concentrated starlight. I suggest you try and do the same.”
“My people did knock your ship out of the air, but,” she replied, reaching up and pulling down the side of her scarf. “As you can see, my people are your people, and this is not my planet.” She wraps the scarf around the back of her head and when her arm is out of the way I can see her nose, a little brown button of thing and obviously human. The plot fucking thickens, I thought to myself.
“What the hell?” I asked, trying to repress a bit of surprise. A thousand questions popped into my mind, but they all felt too stupid to ask. Her uncovered face was younger than I expected, mid-thirties at the latest. A hairline scar ran down from the thick black hair over her right ear, pale pink against her brown skin.
“Your surprise isn’t unexpected, I’m a fish out of water so to say.” She gestures again in her sweeping, graceful way to group of flat stones a few meters away. “We should sit a moment, and I will speak and you listen. When the light burns your eyes, I will be gone.” I look around and shrug, then sit. She begins: “Green sits the Counter Weight, red lies the Stone, a Weight cannot balance, when it sits alone. You are familiar with the nonsense rhyme of the Church, are you not?” I nod and she continues. “Remember it. Your eyes show the Matron has touched you, and her gifts burn within. You may become a matron too, in time, and when you do you will see as I do.”
I scoff and she continues.
“My order is small and as old as life on this planet. A millennia of isolation have caused the people to turn their noses up,” the faintest hint of a smile. “At their human roots. A god made by man sent me here as a young woman to put in words what I learned of the Matron, but when I touched her back I lost my cynicism and fell into her embrace. In my love of her I bore her a guardian then came to the mainland and found the order, to whom I passed her message.”
“A guardian?” I asked. Echoes of gunfire rolled across the hill from a great distance away. I glanced over trying to make out the location, but it was too far.
“The beasts that tended the Matron as she made her lonely pilgrimage across the seas, you slew one. An ancient servant you rebuked through violence, though your peer was not as unkind.”
“You boned one of those spiders?”
“No, I gave my blessing to another. It is of little consequence. Death floats over all our heads, and he wears a black cloak and spits with a silver tongue. He will purge the Matron, if he is able, and all hope of unyielding life from this planet. Inside you sit the keys to undoing his plan. Give yourself, your gift, to Matron’s second coming. Wash the blood from your hands in the river of life, and bear her holy child. Allow her influence to reclaim the stars as it is meant to be.”
“Are you fu—“
The sky behind her filled with light and I heard myself scream as the pain made me reel back from my seat and fall to the ground behind me. There’s no way she knew where the next blast would hit, I thought, scrambling to my feet and trying to get a bead on her through the blurry gaps in fingers. The screech of air being consumed by the petaliter deafened me and between that and the sudden blindness, I found myself horribly off balance and waving my gun around like an idiot. A few seconds later I was fine and she was gone, the stony ground leaving no trace of her exit.
Things made less sense than ever after that conversation, and I wonder if her entire purpose was just to confuse me. To give me just enough information to make stupid decisions and dig myself into a deeper whole. What she said at the beginning, our people scuttling the Orion even made a sick bit of sense. I’d just been in a major hanger that didn’t have anything except for atom birds, and there just wasn’t any way they wouldn’t have surface to star capability in such an important town. Who brought us down? I asked myself, turning to look at the behemoth on the beach as it sadly began to burn and deflate into nothing. Far behind the burn mark in the dead center of it something was wriggling around. Probably another “seed burst” or whatever, likely something worse. I hated that fucking planet so god damned bad right then.
I got up and started walking west. A little progress was always better than no progress and I didn’t have anything to go on. I moved quick and calmly through the craggy rocks of the overlook, trying to get some distance between the hangar bay and myself before I started walking with my back toward. Safe and sorry, right? When I heard the atmo drives on the 48’s I almost started crying. They’re distinct if you’ve been around them enough. It’s a metallic sound, like someone running their fingernail in circles around a cymbal while someone snaps two decks of playing cards together in the same room. Home, heaven, and fucking hot food.
I found them in the sky in a couple of seconds, and lacking a radio, began firing an SOS call in code in front of them. I hoped like hell they wouldn’t miss the code and burn me to a cinder, and thankfully they didn’t. The formation spread out and two ships broke off and circled me. I dropped the rifle and raised my hands in the air, waving them palms out. They wouldn’t be able to see my face from that distance, but they’d recognize the enemy uniform sure enough. They tightened their circle and the 548 gunship stayed airborne with its guns trained on me while the 48 landed cargo side forward, kicking up a big cloud of dust and cycling down its engines to a safe speed. The heat from the engines was a hard contrast to the cooling ambient temperature. The sun had begun to finally sink down on the far side of the ocean. Another day coming to an end on Pressia, but one that would end with me on the right side of the line for once.
The cargo door depressurized with a soft pop and hissed down on its greasy chrome guides. Green and red track lighting leaked out onto the flat golden stones of the hardpack that stretched out from the overhang where I’d spoken with the red-eyed woman. I wondered if she was still up there in the hills, secreted away behind some rock peering at me with her scarlet eyes and knowing things she shouldn’t know. Maybe she wasn’t even real, just some specter I’d imagined shattered to dust and floating noiselessly away through the craggy rocks of the Pressian landscape. Black button induced insanity that forced me to see things in a way they weren’t, my growing madness made flesh by my damaged psyche. All that I’d seen and experienced was getting to me bad, the little episode in the mud by the ladder had shown me that and I’d have to accept it sooner or later that I wasn’t going to be ok for long. Where was Rick? Did I care? I made casualties, never prevented them except by circumstance. I was never a fucking medic.
The door hit the ground and kicked up a sad little cloud of sand that settled as soon as it rose. The door’s hinges squeaked as a small cadre of heavily armored soldiers descended, guns up and their faces wrapped in bug-eyed black masks. The cloth not covered by their armor shimmered like the desert wind. The same kind of material I’d have been wearing if I’d gotten to my room after my shower on the Orion. They were a Special Operations wearing optic camouflage. You’ll find your people in the western desert, the woman had said. These were my people more than anyone in the universe, the only human beings who could cut me down right then and there and there wasn’t shit I’d be able to do about it.
“Are you Ensign Katie Teuschle?” Asked the one closest to me, a man by the sound of his voice. Behind him on the ship a dark skinned man leaned back in his seat by the door, trying to get a better view. I kept my hands in the air.
“Yeah, who’s asking?” I responded.
“Black 4, Special Forces Black Detachment.”
“Awesome, can I get a lift?”
“Yes, but I’m going to need you to comply.”
“Comply?” I ask, my eyes darted around their team. The two behind Black 4 hadn’t lowered their weapons yet, and were spreading out to get a better angle of fire on me. “I’m not armed, mostly. I’m not going to fuck with you guys, but what’s going on?”
“We have orders to detain you on sight. By order of the Metatron himself, we’re placing you under arrest.”
The Metatron? I asked myself, getting slightly more worried. Questions piled on questions. What the fuck was going on? “Fine,” I say to him, somewhat resigned to take my second flight as a prisoner within days. “Lets just get this over with. Can I walk to the ship on my own?”
“That’s fine, but if you resist…”
“You shoot me in the head and everyone has a bad day, yeah.” I walk to the ship and the two to my sides keep perfect cover on me, never flagging the third member of their party or getting hemmed up by the ship. God my people made the Pressians look like amateurs. There were two bodies in the ship when I get on board, badly wounded but alive. One of them had a face that was mostly blood soaked bandages, and the other watched me sit down with a bemused clarity most people didn’t possess after an obviously recent amputation surgery.
The hold closes with a hissing snap and the dark-skinned guy looks at me and bluntly asks: “Where is your collar?”
I lean my head against the headrest and look up at the patterned black cushioning on the ceiling, and the various chrome studs and hooks that hang down from it. Little details that most people overlooked, things that small were always important.
Warum würden sie bist da? I could hear my mother saying, her finger waging at me while I picked through the grass behind our house after a tiny spring from dad’s old handgun. The local stars were both in the New Prussian sky, and that meant little more than hot, dark, and a deep pale blue light that reflected poorly of ancient dingy steel. Diese kleine Dinge. Kleine ist nicht unwichtig. Der Teufel sind in den Detail. It took me four hours to find that stupid guide spring. I look back at him.
“It’s a long fucking story.”
[end trans]
END ACTION 8: [reunion]
BEHOLD THE GLORY OF THE MATRON, FOR SHE IS RISEN, AND ALL WHO BOW BEFORE HER SHALL BASK IN THE GLORY OF LIFE ETERNAL
by axmanjack » Sun Aug 12, 2012 6:22 pm 
