by Johan Kalsi
Scot turned from the machine and waved his hand dismissively, “No thanks, Servo. I’ll take my chances.”
The host hurried Scot back through the chambers, but new parties had started up, crowding his exit. The beautiful people in their crystalline fedoras and digitally sculpted bodies stared at Scot with a mix of wonder and titillation. He was mostly clothed, but dirty and disheveled, a novelty of the sort most of them hadn’t previously encountered in person.
As Scot passed through the final room before the warm and isolated confines of the SpiderCat, a young woman wearing nothing more than delicate body cosmetics approached him. Impossibly thin silver strands adorned her neck, waist, ankles and wrists. Two thin, faint tears left streaks on her cheeks. Her hand shook as it pressed flat on her collarbone. She stepped over the unconscious body of one of the revelers, and held her hand out to Scot, palm up.
Scot jerked back as if her hands were crackling with electricity.
“Thank you,” she said. Her accent was soft and low, “My Father would be…I’m so sorry. Thank you.”
“It’s okay,” said Scot. “Maybe you need to find some different friends.”
“Please, take me with you. Thank you.”
“No. I can’t do that. The pilot’s going to get you home. This vessel’s safer than mine. You’ll be fine. Enjoy the tour and the party and the view. Just go home to your family, and never do anything this stupid again. Please.”
Still shaking, she took one timid step toward him. She wrapped her arms around his waist, burying the side of her beautiful face into his chest.
“Thank you,” she said. Through his shirt, he felt the muffled vibrations of her soft voice as if she was breathing on his bare flesh.
Scot uneasily raised his hand to comfort her, but, upon realizing her shoulders were naked, instead patted the back of her head. As she broke the embrace, he took the briefest moment to inhale, smelling her hair. There was no scent of liquor on her, just silk and earth.
Scot hadn’t been that close to a woman in fourteen years. Fourteen years, two months, five days.
He pushed her away.
After boarding the SpiderCat, he began his descent planetside. It was slow, but at least he would get back sooner than if he stayed with the hedonauts and their mad machine kidnapper. He closed his eyes, not wanting to see how bad the damage to the cable looked for fear it would be bad luck.
But the repair held. Once he knew they were safely past the danger point, he relaxed. If only he had thought to liberate a beer or two from the party, he would have been well content.
“Hey Naoleen?”
“Yes, Scot?” said the whirring SpiderCat.
“When we get back down is there any way you can give me a ride back home?”
“Sure, Scot,” she said. “Anything for you.”
A high, creaking whine briefly erupted and then abruptly cut off. The SpiderCat shuddered as a tremendous force shook the space elevator. Lights flashed red on the dashboard as its rear sensors detected something massive – barge-sized – coming rapidly toward them at an increasing rate of speed.
He flicked on the comms. “What are you doing?” he screamed at the machine pilot.
“I am sorry, Mr. Farmerson. The station rejected my docking request and I was unable to penetrate its corrupted security system.”
“Slow down! You’re going to smash right into us!”
“I regret to admit that is going to happen in six point eight seconds, Mr. Farmerson.”
Scot put his head in his hands. Just like that, he and his entire planet were doomed, cut off from the rest of the galaxy. At least for him, it would be quick.
Just over six seconds later, the big passenger barge smashed into the much smaller, slower-moving vehicle. The SpiderCat was violently detached from the collapsing cable by the collision and began its freefall toward the distant ground far below. The vehicle rolled wildly, first flinging Scot against the ceiling, then against the windshield. He was hurled about the cabin like a ragdoll as the SpiderCat tumbled through the atmosphere, until finally, mercifully, he struck his head against the edge of dashboard.
He did not feel the colossal impact. Nor, thankfully, did the chem-addled hedonauts and their dollies when they struck the earth a few seconds later.
“What was that?” exclaimed a technician at the Seismological Institute. He pointed at the screen. The line had jumped up, then, a moment later, gone nearly vertical.
“Looks like someone dropped an orbital bomb,” said one of his colleagues, looking over his shoulder. “Anyone start any wars lately that we don’t know about?”
“It’s not a bomb. The signature is more akin to a really big asteroid, except we didn’t get any warnings from the orbital stations.” The technician, tapped a few icons, looked puzzled, then tapped them again. “That’s odd.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re not getting any signal through the nets.”
The second technician shrugged. “Give it a few minutes. It’s probably just a temporary outage.”
BOOK THREE: Century 200
Chapter 9: Canon War One
Universal 278
The Ouffland Invasion which began Canon War One was the first and most successful off-world invasion of Ouffland during its second colonial era. Due to a number of interplanetary conflicts, the industry surrounding various Canon Archive activities had drawn the attention of a military coalition of allied planetary systems that viewed the resources of Noegenetic processes as a potential solution to their own domestic and international decline
—Infogalactic Entry: History (Ouffland)
Prying out the liver of his thrashing victim, Randolph Hoarfyr held the warm, dripping mass aloft, and turned it to ice. He plunged the frozen organ like a cinder block onto his victim's face.
His partner in the attack, a shadowy hulk draped head to toe in a gently flowing ghillie suit, turned from his own pair of corpses. He swept a few errant synthetic leaves and twigs from his invisible face with the butt of his machete.
“Geez, man, what are you, a vampire?”
“Nope. A volunteer.” Hoarfyr brought the frozen liver down a third time, cracking it in half, finally killing his man.
He wiped his hands, blood flecking away in cool crystals that liquefied on the hot forest floor. The campsite was a shambles: bright red tents, an overturned, charred Hozata truck, lingering smoke from an exploded ammo box, a broad patina of blood and body parts on the ground. He brushed back his black bangs and sighed.
“Thank the devil you're on our side,” said his faceless friend.
“Nah, Charlie. Thank God instead. We're the good guys.”
“You keep telling yourself that,” said Charlie, as he clenched his jaw, hacked off the heads, and displayed them neatly on a large log near the trampled fire pit. His outfit of faux twigs, camouflage draping and feature-fitting green mask had gore on it.
“Terror works both ways,” said Hoarfyr. “Dying doesn't scare these fanatics. Dying poorly does.”
He checked his satchel. “Got any spanchbands? I'm out.”
After some shuffling, Charlie held up a handful of brown strips.
The small leathery bands were their calling cards. They strapped at least one on each victim at every site for this latest round of enemies. It had started as a joke: a morbid joke about their own planet’s descent into chaos. Randolph took three and bound them over the eyes of the dead, knotting them at the back.
Hoarfyr dusted his hands off again and admired his handiwork. The stench filled his mouth, tugging at his gag reflex, but he folded his arms and smirked; an artist.
“Oh nuts,” whispered Charlie, holding his hand up.
“What?” said Hoarfyr, hearing nothing. “Whelks?”
Charlie shook his head.
Randolph winced. “Marine Avats.”
“No, dummy. You forgot our location again. Are you glitching? Those freaking guardsmen again. Ouffs.”
Hoarfyr rolled his
eyes, his shoulders relaxing. “Fine. Let's waste them.”
He looked down at his hands and felt them grow cold again. Then his vision stalled and skipped, like a fritzing computer screen. Hoarfyr grunted with exasperation and cursed.
“Never mind. I am glitching. Hold on.”
Hoarfyr’s virtual environment overlay (VEO) gave way to reality. The tents were in fact camouflaged, not bright red. The heavy duty truck he thought they had destroyed was in fact a small off-road open wheel thing, and they had not blown it up, but only slashed its tires. The only real asset they had taken down at all was a pair of shattered drones that lay in sprayed chunks in the center of the fake camp. Charlie had fired his only two seeker missiles at them. At the time, Hoarfyr had yelled at Charlie, thinking the targets had been harmless bats.
“Nuts. Charlie? Our kills. Look at them. Look at what they are. All of them.”
Charlie slid his hand under his face mask, turning off a switch near his jaw and examined the piles of dead.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Scarecrows!”
The Oufflandic Defense Militia Northern Point Observation Spire stood three long “looks” from the edge of the mildly terraformed forest that marked the habitable boundary of the small nation of Ouffland. Two technicians and two men in field officer uniforms watched a set of ancient-style hardwired viewing screens.
“So damn hard to see. That isn't one of ours down, is it?” said Major Mauk a tall muscleman who seemed born for a much larger, more professional military career.
“No sir,” said the focus tech, his voice cracking. “It’s one of our full false camps. Just dummies, some tents and that junked open-wheeler.”
“These optics are rough. Good though. Did Holocrone invade us with an insane asylum? What are those two lunatics doing?”
His fellow officer, Major Naven Kollodis shuffled through some steel sheets.
“Yeah it looks like these are Holocronian Unified.”
Mauk nodded to the first technician. “Tell the squad that. They still have the go to shoot on sight if they cross paths, but I want them double-timing it back here. Those other two squads should be coordinating the counterattack at the campsite as soon as we have air support.”
To the second, he said, “What's the ETA on those drones?”
“Sorry sir, they haven't sent them yet.”
Mauk's eyes widened. “Did you tell them that ours are disabled?”
“Yes, sir. They want us to attempt to repair them.”
Mauk clinched his jaw. “Hop me on.”
He punched his fist into his opposite palm and held it there. He began to speak into the air.
“This is Major Thawn Mauk. Northern Point Spire Eleven. Commanding. Request immediate drone support. Live attack in our sector.”
The voice filled the room. “Request pending, Major Mauk. Our marks show two drones in the area.”
“They are disabled.”
“We do not show that. Have you attempted to reboot?”
“Each drone is in no fewer than ten separate pieces at the moment, and the enemy just decorated them with what appear to be strips of spanch.”
“Please attempt reboot.”
Mauk cleared his throat. “Reboot not possible. I need two drones. Now.”
“Uh. Protocol, sir?”
“Son, what's your name?”
“First Private M-melfrick, Private. I mean First Class, Sir.”
The voice's nervous response was enough for him to figure out the type of soldier he was dealing with.
“Married, then.” First Class was basically an automatic pay incentive to soldiers who married young. Even after a hundred years of terraforming and civilization, population growth was still considered to be of paramount social importance. “Good for you. Let me speak with your CO.”
“Sir?”
“Your commanding officer. I would like to speak with him.”
Meanwhile, the enemy unknown had wandered off all the interior screens. The Corona Squad had done a good job with interior and perimeter camera set-up at the camp, so the two attackers showed up at the periphery on the southern camera. They were either going to head back into the wastes or were strategizing in their own mad way to plunge deeper into the forest, likely in the direction of the spire. Mauk checked the tower screens showing camera views from the Spire top. Corona Camp was too far away and too wooded for even extreme focus to see anything. It was trained on a clearing and thaw-river bend that was a likely crossing spot if the enemy made it that far. The screen showed no one yet.
“This is Colonel Graff, Air Services. With whom am I speaking?”
“Major Thawn Mauk. Requesting immediate drone support for a live action.”
“Oh! Hi Mauk. Really? What's going on?”
“This is an urgent request sir. Our Corona Camp has been overrun. Urgently requesting drone support.”
The communications technician alerted Major Kollodis that squads Barnun and Astro had taken the positions, and awaited orders.
“Overrun? By what? Desert flies? Isn’t Corona Camp a fake?”
“Sir! That status is classified!” said Mauk.
“How many drones do you need? We show two in the area.”
“Sir. This is a live military action. Our drones have been disabled. We have two enemy fighting men and I need air support.”
“Well, have you tried to reboot one yet?”
“Send the bunch-backed drones. Now, damn you!”
“Good night, Mauk, I'm sorry! Look, I would if I could, but our eastern spires have a request in as well. They called in earlier. We just don't have the resources available to deploy everything at once.”
“You are out...of...drones? At Air Support?”
“No. No. Not exactly. It's an organizational thing. We haven't drilled two events like this for a long time. We actually haven't drilled beyond simulations for a long time, frankly. We're a bit rusty.”
Mauk nodded quickly to his counterpart, who ordered the two squads to retake the camp.
“Expedite,” said Mauk. “Sir. Please. I have an operation. Over and out.”
Mauk turned to the Corona monitors, to see, with no little pleasure, his men taking the camp from two sides, hemming in any possible enemies in a professional and coordinated exercise.
The two enemies, however, were nowhere to be seen.
Hoarfyr and Charlie flew over the desert wastes outside the forest of Ouffland, still digitally cloaked in the tandem strafing light craft. The High Below Zero, a beautiful tower overtly inspired by an Ensed sketch, at turns looked like an enormous multi-hued antique glass thermometer or a marble carved house of stairs running in random directions. The stairs encircling it often ended at a solid wall, or, precipitously, in space.
Hoarfyr hated it. Of course, he was seeing the VEO version – the fake version – of what in reality was a basic steel “plunge-rocket” Holocronian off-world base. It was the only one of the invasion force of three rockets that had survived impact sufficiently to serve as a military base. The second one had provided some salvage and a few survivors, and the third had disintegrated upon atmospheric entry, presumably due to full-blown systemic AlgoDecay.
He shut off the VEO again so he could see the simple shell of home base, but the vision flickered, and he was quickly stuck on the gaudy, phony, glittering “High Below” again.
Their dronecraft landed on the helipad, neatly, gently among a line of fighter planes as far as the eye could see. These, of course were mostly an illusion as well. The Holocronian United Alliance had air supremacy over the Oufflandic Air Support, but not by that much. Mostly better drones and remote vehicles, a half dozen old fighter planes that had survived as transport supplies during the rocket crash-landing, nine new battlecopters that all suffered from serious bouts of AlgoDecay.
Charlie, along with most of the other soldiers entering the High, took its odd illusions in stride. They seemed to enjoy the dissociative violence of living in a virtual reality vi
deo game most of the time.
That’s why it had been implemented in the first place. With so few viable conscripts to send, the joint Allied Psychological Operations Division had developed the VEO as a sort of digital drug for the soldiers. By dissasociating from reality, and learning to quickly interpret the symbolic cues provided, an individual soldier could function at higher speed, greater accuracy, and less hesitation. A tandem was as good as a squad. A squad as good as two squads, and so on.
That was the theory, at least. Of course, like all cybernetic enhancements, it was subject to an array of challenges. Hoarfyr himself had almost died during the surgical operation to digitize his eyesight in the left eye, and his mechanical hand installation had caused an infection that took a hospitalization to recover from. That was just the start. VEO, like every other thing on Holocrone, was subject to severe AlgoDecay. A year earlier, an entire batch of VEO conscripts went full-zuvembi following a massed surgery. Hoarfyr had been there, for clean up by way of flamethrower.
Hoarfyr often wondered why he, more than most, seemed to notice the real world at times. He always figured it had something to do with being a part of the early cohort of VEO soldiers, and that the technology just wasn’t as consistent then. He’d been upgraded several times since then, however, so he thought it instead might have something to do with being a volunteer.
In any case, while Charlie took the invisible stairs as if he were skating up them, Hoarfyr stumbled and wobbled and fought bouts of vertigo.
“I need a drink.”
“What we both really need,” said Charlie, opening the door to their bunk, “is sleep.”
They didn't get any. They entered the tiny quarters, only to be met by Purvis Chance, a bespectacled, balding man in a tie with notebook in his breast pocket. Stacks of muscles rippled beneath his shirt and his lavender and tiger-stripe prehensile tail held a mobile device that he tapped at distractedly with his left hand.
