Tag: War

Short Story: Break Out

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Panther crouched at the edge of a rise overlooking a large military compound. The place was little more than a sea of tents and heavy vehicles with a lone modular building slapped together at its center. The tents encompassed it on all sides, as if some god-like shrine and they its prostrating disciples. It made her sick to look at; so many were force-fed corporate lies and thanked them for it.

Panther’s optical augments shifted the contrast of the images flowing through her eyes to highlight the compound’s details. Patrols of two trudged along the three, nearest perimeters that formed one half of an overall fence-line. Panther’s heads-up-display highlighted the patrolling guards in opaque red, analyzing each one with minute text-windows of everything from height and weight to their ever-changing trajectory.

Across the wet-gleam of the asphalt grounds, more patrols made perpendicular paths through the tents winding to form a shifting, full-coverage net across the compound. The HUD recorded the paths with faint, red lines overlaid on the terrain. Overhead, drones filled the gaps between patrols with optical sensors and a near-silent whir of electric props. Their dual 10mm cannons sat on standby, ready to spin up and litter soft targets with hell-fire.

The drones would be the easiest part. They were stupid, guided by subroutines and out of combat mode until operators or officers designated otherwise. People were more difficult. Apart from the patrols, Panther knew, a few hundred soldiers were hidden in the tents between her and the modular building. It didn’t change the fact that she had to make it to the building. Ion was waiting, probably under duress, and no doubt weak from torture. Getting out would be hardest, but if forced to stay, Ion would be dead before sun-up.

She and Nix had been caught in a fire-fight while trying to liberate some refugee supplies held hostage by the military. They wanted anyone not touting the corporate line turned in. For refugees coming from a corp war-zone, that was just about everyone; brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons. It wasn’t going to happen. The military knew that, decided to starve the refugees out. Panther and the others had more humane ideas, and sent Nix and Ion to retrieve the supplies while they created a distraction.

Needless to say, things didn’t go as planned– actually, they went completely fucking sideways. The end result was Nix dead and Ion in the hands of the military, receiving the same treatment refugee-dissenters would. Now Panther had no choice but to go in, get her sister, and hope they both got out alive. The alternative was certain torture and a public execution to make an example out of any “resistance.”

With all of the information gathered to her HUD, Panther slipped down the hill-side for the compound’s barriers. Invisible laser-fences had posts every twenty or so feet and were spaced evenly enough that getting to one would be easy. Panther reached one, pried open a few of the sensor-control panels, and began fiddling with the wires. Beside her, the invisible lasers were green on her HUD, crisscrossed and formed like chain-link, but unscalable without the right augs.

She didn’t have the augs required for jumping the fence– nor the more upscale ones that allowed one to walk-straight through without setting them off. She did have razor-sharp, carbon-fiber nails though, and an augged hand willing to use them to strip and splice wires. She shorted the connection on a power distributor, knowing no-one would notice the breach before she was long gone. The fence itself wouldn’t read the failed parts, and only a visual inspection with the right eyes or visor-settings would reveal the sabotage. She slipped past for the shadows of a tent’s rear-sheet. Sounds of a couple of soldiers fuck-grunting emitted from within.

“Great,” Panther thought. “More meat for the grinder– might as well fuck and get it over with now, take advantage of that corp health-plan before it’s gone.”

She followed inactive, red-lines on her HUD toward the front of the compound. Voices of laughter or low conversations marked the sides of each tent as she dodged and weaved to stay hidden. By the time she reached the last set of tents, her heart was racing. Neuro-transmitters were flooding her body with adrenaline, making it hard to think. A mental activation of endorphins and serotonin slowed her heart to a crawl, her mind and body now completely at-ease with the task at hand.

She glanced along the line of tents, then hurried for the door of the modular building. There’d no doubt be surveillance inside– security, drones, all manner of things to contend with. She was ready. It was now or never. Feline agility sped her body into the building. Micro-speakers implanted in her augged arm emitted inaudible, digital noise, jamming audio and visual equipment. Two guards were startled to their feet at her entrance.

A subsonic pistol in Panther’s left-hand dropped one. A razor-sharp sword in her right, cut the other guard’s throat. Her body followed through. Alarms began to scream. Guards poured in from various corridors. The click of the subsonic pistol accented metallic slicing as she moved like a ballerina, painting abstracts of blood and brain matter across the room.

She pirouetted, grande jete, a bladed boot slicing flesh as her arm made plunging motions and the pistol kept time. She came to a stop at the far-side of the entryway, blade wet and pistol empty. Bodies fell this way and that, creating water-falls of blood through the grated floor.

She didn’t need to survey to carnage to know it was total. Her left hand worked to drop a mag, and slap in a new one. A moment later she speed-walked through a door, body stiff, determined. A few men and women turned, one-by-one. The click of the pistol laid each of them out.

The room was filled with invisible barrier-fences, like the perimeter’s, to contain the various prisoners. The room was empty, save a lone, huddled figure in a corner cell. The poor creature rocked back and forth on his haunches, completely unresponsive to Panther’s approach. She ignored it; Ion didn’t need to do anything more than continue breathing, she’d do the rest.

She punched her way into the barrier’s control panel, shredding faux-skin off her metallic hand, then gripped a handful of wire. Sparks rained from the panel with a whiff of smoke. Panther ignored it, hurried to lift her sister off the floor. Ion’s eyes were glazed over, her face bruised and bloody. She stared vacantly, too drugged and traumatized to comprehend the situation. She opened her mouth to speak, revealed a missing tooth and a few, chipped others.

“Don’t. I’m getting you out.”

She timed her exfil carefully; made it back out the building’s door before anyone knew what had happened inside. Her HUD warned of impending patrols, allowed her to duck back and narrowly avoid a pair of men crossing her path. Moments later, the two were at the downed fence-line. A pair of soldiers examined the pole there, evidently aware it’d been breached.

“Can you walk?” Panther whispered.

Ion gave a noncommittal shrug, found her feet. Two clicks splattered blood across helmet-visors and asphalt. The pair hurried through, Ion limp-sprinting on pure adrenaline. Neither of the sisters was sure how she made it up the hill. At its crest, she fell stumbled, fell, slid the rest of the way down.

A black van waited beside the hill’s terminus, its doors open on familiar faces that forced Ion to tear up. She fell into the arms of Nix’s brother, as Panther hopped in. The doors shut and the van’s electric engine gave a silent start, compelled it forward over the crunch of small twigs and gravel.

In the front seat, Panther’s ex-boyfriend and second in command, Delta, glanced over; “Everything alright?”

“Five-by-Five,” she said with a hint of scorn. “No-one’s going to take my sister from me.”

“Sibling love. Almost as powerful as sibling rivalry.” He glanced over again, “Just not as, you know, bloody.”

She thought of the bodies, “Depends on the siblings.”

Delta gave a laugh and drove on through the darkness.

Short Story: Beta Base

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Stainless steel and ceramic tile drably colored the walls and floors of the Luna-base research outpost. Officially, Luna-base was the first scientific Research exostation in Sol. It was the first time Humanity left Earth and actually stayed put once it landed, officially that is. Unofficially, it was the second, and on Luna at that, but mentioning that fact had become a social faux-pas. Mostly, people didn’t want to admit they’d let their governments and militaries win the space race.

Luna-base Alpha was a series of interconnected modules fused onto a cylindrical spindle that stood upright on the Moon’s surface. It rose over a kilometer at its highest point, modules protruding from it like spines at random angles, each one spinning independently to harness centripetal acceleration and create artificial gravity. When combined with extensive radiation shielding, the place was as near to being on Earth as being millions of kilometers away would allow. On top of that, hydroponics and aeroponics labs grew fresh, organic food in dedicated spines, while weekly deliveries of luxury goods and other necessities kept the 2,000-person staff from wanting for anything.

In the meantime, the various scientists and researchers were free to carry out whatever work they’d been assigned, be it studying their habitat’s effects or others on various subjects. Luna-base Alpha’s people were the cream of the crop. Those not top in their fields, were second only to those that were. That was the compromise made by the world’s nations.

Luna-base Alpha’s long term effects were being studied on its people, and only those that could continue to work and keep in mind their purpose there, were allowed to go. Despite the sign-up sheets overflowing with names, only a specific group were chosen to go. The final 2,000 people had to pass rigorous physical and mental evaluations before being allowed to leave Earth, and were otherwise replaced by runners-up if they failed.

If Luna-base Alpha was the control, Luna-Base Beta was the experiment. The stringent guidelines the nations of scientists were forced to adhere to, on Beta-Base, were entirely absent. Despite still being in peak, physical shape, the military assets sequestered a few kilometers from Alpha-base were little more than laymen, grunts. Aside from the administrative officials and higher-ranked officers, there were no evaluations, no bars to entry.

Beta-Base’s personnel were chosen randomly, by lottery, from each of the UN nations. On the order of five-thousand soldiers and accompanying faculty were plucked from their homes and lives planet-side. They were cast into space, forced to sleep in bunks five-high, and pass their time outside maneuvers with little more than the few, meager possessions they’d crafted to engage themselves. It would eventually be their downfall. The civilians on Luna-base-Alpha knew it. The officers and admins on Beta-base knew it. The soldiers and faculty knew it.

Most of all, I knew it.

Only so much could be done each day to prepare us for life or battle in Zero-G. Invariably that meant running us even more ragged than if we’d been planet-side. Maneuvers were carried out both in the ground-based facility and in the large, centrifuge ring towering Kilometers above it. We were often forced out into the desolate fields of ice and vacuum beyond Beta’s airlocks to carry out war-games– grand-scale laser-tag in the vastness of space with little more than air-tight cloth, rubber, and glass separating us from certain, grisly death.

One might find it hard to see how this led to total anarchy. After all, mental stagnation at some points was a given, but so too were intensive work and some fun– if the games could be called that. None of that changes facts, or history. History has, in fact, shown that Beta-Base was a powder-keg and needed only the fuse to be lit to set it off. I would know, I was there.

Our days were simple, wake at the ass-crack of Earth-dawn, P-T until chow, chow until classwork, classwork until chow, then more P-T, in one form or another. The only variations were the days we went out to the fields to run our war-games.

At first, it was great. Being in zero-G was fun, playing laser tag in space was fun. Even if the officers and admins did their best to take the fun away, they couldn’t. No one could take away the fact that we were in space, playing gun-games there. We were all kids again, especially those of us who’d grown up dreaming of going into space. There was something sacred about those first few months, for us at least. Not even the hard-ass militaries could take away the joy of bouncing in a space-suit pointing toy-guns at one another. Male or female, it didn’t matter, everyone loved it.

Then, they pitted us against each other in competition. I don’t know when, or why even, but the admins and officers got together and decided the nations would be split into teams. Tournaments would determine the nation’s teams individually, creating all-star crews to represent them. Then, in a similar style tournament, each nation would fight each other in the fields to battle for first place rewards. In this case, that a few months of shore-leave, planet-side. Some incentive, especially considering none of us were supposed to leave the station for upwards of four years.

But Human nature is fickle. People get pissy when they lose. Even if they’re best of friends, a defeat at one anothers’ hands can turn two people into throat-goring savages. You can imagine where things went. Believe me too when I say, when they went, they went quick. Rivalries were always anticipated, encouraged even, but that all changed when politics planet-side went tits-up.

Earth was teetering on the brink of another world-war. The UN was barely functioning. The people representing them in space were feeling it. Most of the time, it was racism, or nationalism. That’s the problem with putting 5,000 people “serving their country” together. Turns out, when their countries are assholes to one another, the people are too. The only way anyone could get any frustration out was in the games. When they became competitive, all of that sacred catharsis disappeared.

However healthy competition might be for evolution, it was the catalyst to catastrophe for Beta-Base. What began with an on-the-field spat between two nations, (one feeling they’d unfairly lost) turned into a mess-hall melee the next afternoon. The fuse had been lit, and there was no putting it out. The best we could do was run, try to get clear of the blast before getting blown to gibs.

I remember reading of “the shot heard ’round the world.” This wasn’t that. There were no weapons on Beta-Base outside the laser-tag rifles. Truth was though, we didn’t need weapons. We were the weapons. Another problem with cramming thousands of soldiers together in one place; someone wants someone dead, someone’s going to do die– or the person starting it will.

Some of us tried to keep our heads in the resulting madness, and were knocked out or killed for it. I’m not ashamed to say I kept myself alive. That was all that mattered. Over four-thousand people rioted all at once. Anarchy splattered blood across the walls. Fires decimated our O2. Entire spines were overridden by nationalists that had gotten the upper-hand on control rooms. They turned against their fellow humans, opened airlocks, spaced people, or asphyxiated them by cutting O2 off entirely.

Someone tried to retaliate and blew open a power cell, hoping to cut power to some of the control rooms. It took a third of the station with it. The second-third went up from secondary explosions. I’m still not sure how the other third survived.

I was in my suit, blown out an airlock from some Australian asshole with a grudge against the Americans. I don’t know why. It might’ve been the game. It might’ve been something personal. Maybe some yank boned his Aussie wife, or jerked off on her picture. Whatever. What’s it matter? It doesn’t. All I know’s I went out before I’d meant to, cracked my regulator on a beam, and had to murder someone to steal their oxygen… someone I knew. I’m not the only one.

Now, here I am, drifting on fading oxygen, watching the silent explosions. These god awful fireballs just appear and then disintegrate, propelling massive swaths of debris out into oblivion. I almost pity us, but then, we did it to ourselves. Human nature is fallible that way, I guess.

O2‘s running low. Don’t know if this will ever be found. I know Beta-base was the test grouup. Tesst failed… or succeeded. If it meanntt to test whether or not we’d kill ourselves. I knnow Lunebasealfa hwas rescueee podzz ttro retreeiieve usss, byut tgheyt arent supppposeddto ibnrterfereee ssoo iii dfooiubbbbbbbt tyhgeyll…

[Text message ends]

Bonus Poem: Ground State

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

I can feel electricity in the air.
It clings to surfaces as electrons to their shell.
While sweat glistens on the brow,
of the back-breaker with the stained blue-collar.

There are no more heroes anymore.
We left them behind with our youth and prosperity.
Tumult is our new currency, fear our inflation,
cold death and iron hate our tax.

I wanted green fields and plains full of wild flowers.
But all that’s left are concrete jungles and steel deserts.

What is this life we live?
Fading Earth and Sun with no Moon.
The birds don’t sing anymore and the plants have all died.
Their corpses are swarmed by flies while stale excrement taints the air.

Beneath it is the electricity that charges with each moment.
If you wait long enough you can feel it upend hairs on your neck,
and in the distance, a cry of mourning.

It was our dream to sow this land as explorers.
But our arrival was greeted with strange, old faces.
The dead had long been buried so we added to them,
and in the cool, night air, we waged warfare in virulent form.

A toxic nightmare became the reality of millions.

Wives.
Mothers.
Children.
Found death in the world’s cruel embrace

And so we danced and drank beneath the moonlight,
to forget our troubles and forgive us our sorrows.
But night is the time of the raven-call and the black-winged devils.

So we sang to forgive us our trespasses,
and to emerge once more into morning,
with hope and the calculus of reason,
whose ways disintegrate existence’s illusory nature,
to wed science with metaphysics and reveal our true path.

But fate is no more a sickness than a virtue.
Change is constant; quantum flux relentless.

And so we bow our heads in prayer,
that we might forget what we know to be true,
to carry on blissful, ignorant.

But electricity still clings to the air,
and excites.

It invigorates,
energizes,
cries out for discharge
so that it, like we, may return to ground-state.

Short Story: A Lost Cause?

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 3 Comments

The Paris Incident… what more can be said that hasn’t been already? Everyone knows how it started, everyone knows why it went to shit, and everyone knows how the Americans– the biggest bulls of them all– were silently and willingly castrated. Jesus Christ, we were so stupid.

To understand why Lemaire’s death had such little effect on us, you have to understand where we’d come from. Then, once knowing that, you’d have to understand why we did what we did.

When Lemaire died, and Paris went up in flames, we watched with the rest of the world, petrified just like them. The difference was, we could mount no revolution of our own. Funny thing about being the one with the biggest stick– when its turned on you, you’re pretty well fucked. Blue-collar, white collar; didn’t matter your shirt-color, if you’d found a place to bitch about things, you were jailed before the broader ‘net heard your complaints.

But like I said, you have to understand where we came from. It started decades ago with the first, foreign terrorist attack this country had seen. It wasn’t just a tragic occurrence for us. Other places in the world were used to that sort of thing. Not us. Between the IRA, the middle eastern sects, and the average, everyday nut-jobs Europe was rife with those attacks. Paris, London, Berlin, hell even Belgium and Sweden had felt their fair share of the dirt being kicked up by those fucking jihadists to the south.

Us though? We weren’t like them. We had security, sanctity, sovereignty, and in them, peace of mind.

So when that first attack hit, it was more than just a pin-prick in our overblown ego, it was a god damn gaping hole in the balloon. Unfortunately, that balloon was also our heads and what we did after, even if for the best of reasons, made sure of it. When the time finally came for us to face our demons, we realized we’d left ourselves powerless.

For decades we’d heard from ultra-leftists about the “erosion of freedoms,” while the right pitched its agenda as the “protection of rights.” It was all just rhetoric meant to hide what people were really afraid to say; we were becoming slaves– either to our government, or the corps that eventually took over. We were all chained to 9-to-5s, rising taxes, and crippling debt. Not even the best and brightest of us could escape after college tuition went through the roof. For the first time in history, we started seeing cities– literal cities– go belly up from outrageous debt and unyielding corruption.

So we did what any first world nation would, printed more money and gave it out by the bucketfuls to people whom promised to protect our economy. Ha, yeah, bullshit. What most did was take the money and run. Turns out ol’ Steve Miller was right after all, but our Billy-Joe and Bobby-Sue were Wall Street and the Financial industry. The difference? They didn’t so much shoot a man after robbing his castle as knock us down and trample our faces in mud as they ran roughshod over our country and economy.

So what we eventually had was a whole country of people terrified from a blow to their ego, scraping to get by after a near-totally collapsed economy. Understanding that makes it easier to understand what came next, and led us to our… current, predicament.

It became obvious about a decade after the first attack– the only attack, really– that our freedoms were eroding. Even as the politicians called for increased security, safety, and freedom, they forced laws past that tightened their grip around our throats and our own belts. They bludgeoned rights and freedoms with repeated attempts to pass harsher and more ambiguous laws, gave total power to acronym and police agencies. The shit storm that hit the fan when we later found out– shockingly– that power was used for all the most malicious purposes, was too little too late.

Whod’ve thought, right?

All kidding aside, what we had was a country of pissed off, desperate people too poor, hungry, and terrified to lift themselves up. More importantly, they clutched for anything and everything that even remotely resembled security– you know, that bygone illusory thing we’d always thought we’d had. So when the corps came in to downsize the police force, clean-up the borders, and take-over the already-corrupt justice system, who’d have thought it could get any worse?

No-one. Why? Because we’d never seen such atrocities committed by our own people, let alone against our own people. We were simply naive; a country too young and juvenile in mind to realize we should be careful of the silver spoon fed to us, lest it contain arsenic and cyanide. Instead, we swallowed it whole, gorged ourselves on lies, empty promises, and rhetoric and propaganda that would have shamed the Nazis. All of that, in the hopes that everything would “get better soon.”

The eternal why is simple really, we are naïve, both as a country and as a culture. The English empire has spanned millennia. Even most, legal orders of European countries were hundreds of years older before they fell. Comparatively, we were short-lived. It made us that much easier to conquer. Hearts and minds were a hell of a lot more effective than guns and bombs, and most of corp execs knew that. We didn’t. So they promised everything our hearts desired, and the return of peace of mind through it, and we didn’t hesitate.

In a matter of months, the US police forces were eliminated by various sects of corporate security. The Military went with them. Soldiers were given a choice to stay on with one of various corporations or leave without a second consideration. The Navy was outright eliminated, air superiority a given from the Warhound-Raptors patrolling the skies and coasts in flocks. More to the point, we relinquished any hopes of self-defense in a bid to keep foreign execs happy.

The State and Federal Governments stuck around a little while longer than most civil services to “ease the transition.” More bullshit. What they did was pass a whole slew of laws all that pretty much eliminated the bill of rights and nullified the constitution. Why? They were all bought and paid for. Every last one of them held positions in corps, received weekly checks from their payroll. We learned that the hard way when the last of the governments dissolved– and we clapped and hooted and hollared about it.

And then there was silence.

Fucking deafening silence.

Media outlets went off the air, the ‘net went down, and all but a few vehicles were banned from the streets and skies. Conventional vehicles were outlawed to fatten the corps’ bottom lines through public transport and electric vehicles. The only thing we really owned anymore was our debt– hell from what I hear, even our sperm and eggs aren’t really ours anymore. It belongs to the corps now. Everything. All of it’s just waiting for some reason to be cut off and sold off to lower our life-debts.

I can’t even really be angry. Not really. I’m just disappointed. Our country had so much potential, such an unbelievable beauty and spirit. It seemed nothing could crush it except us. Then we did. Our streets turned into mostly dilapidated, abandoned memories outside inner-cities. Homes are gone too, everyone stuck in corp-owned buildings, prisons, or risking the elements hiding on the cities’ outskirts. None of those is a viable option to me, not really, but I take what I can get.

So, just like yesterday, I’ll slip into my boots, strap on my armor, grab my rifle and go to work. Maybe today someone will stand against us. Maybe I’ll be forced to gun them down. Then again, maybe not. Maybe we’ll be faced with another person standing beside them. Then another, and another until the whole damned country’s ready to die to take back what’s been stolen.

If not, I’ll just go lick the hand that feeds me again. I’d rather bite it, but I’m not gonna’ let it beat me into submission like the other inmates and homeless unless I’ve got a damned good reason. I may have a gun, but really, I’m just another wage-slave with armor in place of a suit.

I don’t know if it matters, or if it really could– you know, to be one who stands up. All I know’s the older I get, the more I start to wonder; are we really a lost cause?