mwaha.
This is sort of overdue, as it was done a LONG time ago but it took long because it had to go through all the usual channels before "public release." XD
Do tell me what you think, folks. It's the beginning of the science fiction project following Endtimes.
Side note. The characters I <3 get second chances. *points at the link below* You'll see.
03:39:00 hours. March 13, U.E.F.S. Year 097. The Kaiser’s Office, CLOVER Headquarters.
Captain meowed loudly as Aramis Godhand set the cat down from his lap and stood up. The Kaiser walked over to his wine cabinet, drawing out two glasses and a slender-necked bottle of wine as he hummed along to Sonata No. 5, one of the classics of mad musical geniuses that he enjoyed immensely. The door to his office slid open, admitting a man dressed in the colors of the Special Forces. The newcomer strode forward, halted three paces from the desk, and saluted smartly.
“Lieutenant Colonel Yasamu Shinta reporting for duty, sir.”
“At ease, my boy! It’s been a long night for you, I’m sure.”
Sauvignon Blanche, one of his favorite types of white wine. Hardly anything on Eden could have matched the cheeriness of the Godhand’s smile at any given time, especially now in the privacy of his office with fine wine, a twitchy cat with a patch over one eye and a promising young dragoon as his company. Aramis never failed to be a powerful figure; he possessed the physique of one well below his fifty-seven years, and both his hair and his moustache remained as red as they had been the day they had christened him ‘Hellfire of Skullspont’ during the Second Alliance War. It had been thirty years since that day, but it was as if he hadn’t aged at all. Yasamu himself entertained idle thoughts of his Kaiser being immortal - he couldn’t see the Godhand in any other way.
“August mentioned something about Dead Man’s Pass to me earlier today. I’d like to hear some details.”
“Of course, sir.” Yasamu folded his hands behind his back and focused on the horizon, where the lights of CLOVER Headquarters lay spangled over the dark emptiness beyond. “Confederate Alliance carriers have been sighted moving through the pass at night. We have made preparations to intercept them.”
“Any word on what the shipment contains?”
“Yes, sir. With your permission.” At his superior’s gesture, Yasamu drew out a small, hardbound notebook from his coat pocket and flipped to a certain page. “Thirty-four Shrikes, twenty fighters, five unassembled vector cannons and one 8th-caliber rail gun.”
“Hmm,” Aramis rumbled, as his fingers worried the end of his impeccably trimmed beard. “Well, we can’t let them get their hands on that, can we?” He smiled at Yasamu’s questioning look, and took a sip of his wine. “Contact your men at the pass and intercept them immediately, Lt. Colonel. Let’s give them something good to chew on tonight.”
The corridor was the mutinous blank of white sterility and daily cleaning bot services, and were it not for the alternating picture windows and colorful holographic displays lining both sides of the hallway one was likely to go insane standing there for prolonged periods of time. The young man leaning against the right wall paid none of this any heed; his fingers flew over the small virtual keyboard floating in the air before him, generated by the emulator at his wrist, and his eyes remained fixed on the near endless flow of information filling the screen. When Yasamu emerged from the office and walked by, the other moved to follow without missing a beat in his work.
“So… how was it?”
“The Kaiser was really chipper about it.”
“Maybe this kind of stuff gives him a hard-on.”
“No, that’s Atakin.”
“Really?”
“I was kidding.”
Cigarettes would have been good at a moment like that, but his Head of Operations had nicked his one and only pack off of him earlier that day and he wasn’t keen on buying another one - it would already be out of his weekly budget. Yasamu ran one gloved hand through his hair, sweeping back the loose strands from his face in an effort to keep his hands still. He didn’t like being twitchy, but without a nicotine fix he couldn’t do much about it.
“Contact Alistair at Dead Man’s Pass, Hikaru. The Kaiser already gave us the go signal.”
Hikaru Shinta smirked as he typed in a command, generating another screen beside the one he was working on. The word ‘Connecting…’ flashed on it. He handed the emulator over.
“He gets to have all the fun.”
04:01:15 hours. Dead Man’s Pass, Eden.
“…And then she just looked at me, you know? Looked at me! Thought I’d piss in my pants or something!”
“You’re a wimp.”
“Shut up, man, it was scary!”
Alistair Mordechai flicked the ash off the ends of his cigarette and leaned back against the railings, eyes searching then finding Eden’s three moons on the horizon; the metal beneath and behind him was the kind of cold that struck like a bad heat wave, seeping past clothing and biting beneath the skin. He wondered how the other soldiers could afford to be so noisy on a night like this.
The Pariah loomed in the launch cage beside him, taking up an impossible amount of space. For all its armor and edges, the rymer looked like an ink stain against the horizon, killing the stars with its shadow. Most others might have hushed up at the sight of it - the Pariah’s presence on the battlefield had, on many occasions, been the decisive factor in sorties. It was almost an assurance of total victory. No one could have guessed, however, that its own pilot was the one person who was constantly dissatisfied with its performance.
“No fucking way do I wanna get near Major Serghov again. She can strip a rabbit with her gaze.”
“Heh. Nothing but a frigid bitch, that one… needs to get laid.”
“…Dude. Shut up.”
“Why should I?”
“Don’t you realize who we’re with?”
One level below the lift that he was hanging out in, the three technicians he had been forced to take along that evening had lapsed into an uncomfortable period of silence around the bonfire. Idly, Alistair considered taking his gun and shooting into their circle, just to see what they would do about it. Then he figured it would be a waste of a good bullet. The communicator strapped to his belt rang at that moment as though it agreed with him.
“Have you killed any of our men yet?”
“I wish.”
Yasamu Shinta chuckled on the other end of the line. “Anyway, the Godhand has acknowledged your long and boring wait at Dead Man’s Pass. You can go blow some Shrikes out of the air now.”
“Hmm.”
“Seen anything worth your time out there?”
The sound of afterburners firing up the air echoed from a distance, coming up quick from beyond the canyon’s curve. Alistair stood up in time to see an escort of Shrikes - the Confederate Alliance’s aerial mech unit - zoom past their position, accompanying two carriers. By the time they passed, the technicians on his team were running around the bonfire like headless chickens.
“Yes,” he murmured into the receiver. “I think I have.”
Systems online. Link-ups at points 000-579 established. Network resolved.
Generator online. Primary through tertiary conduits released - input at 250%.
Weapons online. First through sixth missile chambers ready. Cannons online.
Times like this made him remember his first taste of the sky. He had been young then, too small fill in the uniform they had tossed in his direction and too scrawny to look good even though he was at the peak of health. His platoon leader - the closest figure he had to a father in the Confederate Alliance - had shoved him out of bed, dragged him into his jet and strapped him in. When they had taken off, it was as if he had never lived until that moment. CLOVER, however, had given him something he valued even more than the feel of clouds cut apart against metal wings. It was in the symphony of mechanics, the vague smell of pulse generators at work like burnt paper, the hum of computer systems as infinitely complex as the human mind.
The Pariah rose up from slumber at his fingertips, stepping away from its cage just as the doors opened in a hiss of hydraulics. Alistair tapped away at the controls with half an eye on the coloroid displays all around him as his rymer moved out into the canyon, black and gray as the night around it. The psychobabble from the technicians stationed in the outpost fed through the com-link as he put on his gloves and pulled his helmet down from its compartment somewhere above him.
“We’ve just received orders from topside, sir. They want the Shrikes out and the carriers intact.”
“Yeah, I heard you.”
In the roar of an engine and the afterglow of massive boosters, the Pariah zoomed off.
The first carrier went down in an instant, its wings clipped by a dual vector cannon blast fired at pinpoint precision to leave the body of the plane untouched. The Shrikes spun around the moment they heard it, but when one attempted to go back around and survey the damage a laser beam pierced it through the cockpit like a lance.
“What the HELL was that?”
The remaining Shrikes spun away from the wreckage, their pilots scanning the whole area for the enemy; it didn’t take them too long to spot the CLOVER rymer standing around 5,000 feet away from them, with the cannons mounted on its shoulders still smoking from the heat of the blasts they had fired. These cannons slid upward as they looked on, shifting off the mech’s shoulders and unto its back just as missile chambers opened up all over its body.
Enraged by the surprise attack, the two pilots broke away again, juking their machines wildly in an attempt to dodge the missile salvo fired in their direction; one of them took a blast to one booster, sending it crashing to the ground. The other successfully dodged the volley and zipped forward, brandishing a beam sword with the certainty of getting a hit in; much to the enemy pilot’s shock, the rymer, in a fit of impossible dexterity given its size, caught the Shrike’s arm in mid-slash and tore it from the rest of the mech’s body. Then it fired a rail gun bullet into its torso.
In the safety of his cockpit, Alistair turned his eyes away from the resulting blast as the Shrike he had just destroyed blew up in the Pariah’s face; the rymer, with its triple-layered armor, emerged from it completely unscathed. With a quick check to the vector cannons to see if they had cooled off, Alistair turned the rymer about again, bringing the cannons back online as he lined up the second carrier in his sights. That one went down faster than the first.
Barely ten minutes after its initial launch, the Pariah stood among the smoldering ruins of its enemies, a demonic knight of the future reflecting the fires in the dark plating of its armor. Even the small novelty of taking the Pariah out for a spin wasn’t enough to get rid of the funny state of ennui his mind drowned in, and Alistair felt the bitter taste of boredom rise beneath his tongue as he sat back in his cockpit, watching the salvaging crew roll into the area from the outpost with apathetic eyes. He let the com-link blip with the request for a transmission for a few moments before bringing himself to answer it.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound like a man who’s just done the Godhand another favor.”
“It was hardly worth the Pariah’s ammunition.”
Five hundred years ago, in a bid to explore the endless bounds of outer space, the United Earth Federation had send out a fleet of over two thousand ships and one fourth of the planet’s resources into the skies. After crossing a wide expanse of space now known as the Parvonis Sector, the fleet came across the Eden Star System; with its four planets and its central star Assiah, it was a system much like that of Sol and Earth. The fleet immediately moved to colonize it, and within the next century CLOVER was born.
After Eden Colonization Year 206. What started out as a terse debate over the mastership of Deep Space and territorial dispute blew over into full-out war. AEC 206 became UEFS 001, as the United Earth Federation broke into different factions. The largest groups were the CLOVER Alliance in the Eden Star System and the Confederate Alliance in the Sol Star System. By the records two Alliance Wars had already come to pass, with the current dispute escalating into something that would soon be marked as the third the moment the leaders of both sides were pushed into calling it another war after the peace groups would quit flapping their mouths. In Alistair’s opinion, the fighting had never really ended, and the treaties in between had been nothing but jokes fabricated by the media to keep the harpers for peace in line.
“Hey. Did Yasamu tell you already? Your younger brother’s been promoted.”
Alistair sipped the nicotine from his cigarette and didn’t answer. Names and numbers came to mind, back dropped by the headquarters that he hadn’t really returned to in almost six years. He wasn’t the type to get attached to places, but if there was one thing he missed it was the booze. Crates were hard to come by on the battlefield.
“He’s the adjutant of SFU-010 now, and Professor Morgan’s given him a rymer. Said it was an early birthday gift. Yasamu’s really happy.”
“He should be.” He knew that Natalia Serghov was expecting a reaction of any sort, but he wasn’t about to indulge her. The woman had been his friend for too long to get him to trust that particular side of her.
“Anyway, it’ll be good to have you back, you bastard. Bed’s been cold without you, and the drills aren’t the same when there’s no Pariah on standby. Bring back some souvenirs, all right?”
“A jar full of sand with a Gila lizard should be fine.”
Natalia merely laughed. Alistair reached over and ended the transmission. The sun was starting to creep over the top canyon, sending tentative fingers of light over wasteland and ruin. He took another drag of his cigarette and watched that light fill his eyes.
“...Found a reason to go on yet, boy?” said the first voice that floated up from memory.
That morning, like every other morning, offered him no answers.
transmission terminated.
Feedback appreciated. Then I might post up Chapter 1. >_
Do tell me what you think, folks. It's the beginning of the science fiction project following Endtimes.
Side note. The characters I <3 get second chances. *points at the link below* You'll see.
03:39:00 hours. March 13, U.E.F.S. Year 097. The Kaiser’s Office, CLOVER Headquarters.
Captain meowed loudly as Aramis Godhand set the cat down from his lap and stood up. The Kaiser walked over to his wine cabinet, drawing out two glasses and a slender-necked bottle of wine as he hummed along to Sonata No. 5, one of the classics of mad musical geniuses that he enjoyed immensely. The door to his office slid open, admitting a man dressed in the colors of the Special Forces. The newcomer strode forward, halted three paces from the desk, and saluted smartly.
“Lieutenant Colonel Yasamu Shinta reporting for duty, sir.”
“At ease, my boy! It’s been a long night for you, I’m sure.”
Sauvignon Blanche, one of his favorite types of white wine. Hardly anything on Eden could have matched the cheeriness of the Godhand’s smile at any given time, especially now in the privacy of his office with fine wine, a twitchy cat with a patch over one eye and a promising young dragoon as his company. Aramis never failed to be a powerful figure; he possessed the physique of one well below his fifty-seven years, and both his hair and his moustache remained as red as they had been the day they had christened him ‘Hellfire of Skullspont’ during the Second Alliance War. It had been thirty years since that day, but it was as if he hadn’t aged at all. Yasamu himself entertained idle thoughts of his Kaiser being immortal - he couldn’t see the Godhand in any other way.
“August mentioned something about Dead Man’s Pass to me earlier today. I’d like to hear some details.”
“Of course, sir.” Yasamu folded his hands behind his back and focused on the horizon, where the lights of CLOVER Headquarters lay spangled over the dark emptiness beyond. “Confederate Alliance carriers have been sighted moving through the pass at night. We have made preparations to intercept them.”
“Any word on what the shipment contains?”
“Yes, sir. With your permission.” At his superior’s gesture, Yasamu drew out a small, hardbound notebook from his coat pocket and flipped to a certain page. “Thirty-four Shrikes, twenty fighters, five unassembled vector cannons and one 8th-caliber rail gun.”
“Hmm,” Aramis rumbled, as his fingers worried the end of his impeccably trimmed beard. “Well, we can’t let them get their hands on that, can we?” He smiled at Yasamu’s questioning look, and took a sip of his wine. “Contact your men at the pass and intercept them immediately, Lt. Colonel. Let’s give them something good to chew on tonight.”
The corridor was the mutinous blank of white sterility and daily cleaning bot services, and were it not for the alternating picture windows and colorful holographic displays lining both sides of the hallway one was likely to go insane standing there for prolonged periods of time. The young man leaning against the right wall paid none of this any heed; his fingers flew over the small virtual keyboard floating in the air before him, generated by the emulator at his wrist, and his eyes remained fixed on the near endless flow of information filling the screen. When Yasamu emerged from the office and walked by, the other moved to follow without missing a beat in his work.
“So… how was it?”
“The Kaiser was really chipper about it.”
“Maybe this kind of stuff gives him a hard-on.”
“No, that’s Atakin.”
“Really?”
“I was kidding.”
Cigarettes would have been good at a moment like that, but his Head of Operations had nicked his one and only pack off of him earlier that day and he wasn’t keen on buying another one - it would already be out of his weekly budget. Yasamu ran one gloved hand through his hair, sweeping back the loose strands from his face in an effort to keep his hands still. He didn’t like being twitchy, but without a nicotine fix he couldn’t do much about it.
“Contact Alistair at Dead Man’s Pass, Hikaru. The Kaiser already gave us the go signal.”
Hikaru Shinta smirked as he typed in a command, generating another screen beside the one he was working on. The word ‘Connecting…’ flashed on it. He handed the emulator over.
“He gets to have all the fun.”
04:01:15 hours. Dead Man’s Pass, Eden.
“…And then she just looked at me, you know? Looked at me! Thought I’d piss in my pants or something!”
“You’re a wimp.”
“Shut up, man, it was scary!”
Alistair Mordechai flicked the ash off the ends of his cigarette and leaned back against the railings, eyes searching then finding Eden’s three moons on the horizon; the metal beneath and behind him was the kind of cold that struck like a bad heat wave, seeping past clothing and biting beneath the skin. He wondered how the other soldiers could afford to be so noisy on a night like this.
The Pariah loomed in the launch cage beside him, taking up an impossible amount of space. For all its armor and edges, the rymer looked like an ink stain against the horizon, killing the stars with its shadow. Most others might have hushed up at the sight of it - the Pariah’s presence on the battlefield had, on many occasions, been the decisive factor in sorties. It was almost an assurance of total victory. No one could have guessed, however, that its own pilot was the one person who was constantly dissatisfied with its performance.
“No fucking way do I wanna get near Major Serghov again. She can strip a rabbit with her gaze.”
“Heh. Nothing but a frigid bitch, that one… needs to get laid.”
“…Dude. Shut up.”
“Why should I?”
“Don’t you realize who we’re with?”
One level below the lift that he was hanging out in, the three technicians he had been forced to take along that evening had lapsed into an uncomfortable period of silence around the bonfire. Idly, Alistair considered taking his gun and shooting into their circle, just to see what they would do about it. Then he figured it would be a waste of a good bullet. The communicator strapped to his belt rang at that moment as though it agreed with him.
“Have you killed any of our men yet?”
“I wish.”
Yasamu Shinta chuckled on the other end of the line. “Anyway, the Godhand has acknowledged your long and boring wait at Dead Man’s Pass. You can go blow some Shrikes out of the air now.”
“Hmm.”
“Seen anything worth your time out there?”
The sound of afterburners firing up the air echoed from a distance, coming up quick from beyond the canyon’s curve. Alistair stood up in time to see an escort of Shrikes - the Confederate Alliance’s aerial mech unit - zoom past their position, accompanying two carriers. By the time they passed, the technicians on his team were running around the bonfire like headless chickens.
“Yes,” he murmured into the receiver. “I think I have.”
Systems online. Link-ups at points 000-579 established. Network resolved.
Generator online. Primary through tertiary conduits released - input at 250%.
Weapons online. First through sixth missile chambers ready. Cannons online.
Times like this made him remember his first taste of the sky. He had been young then, too small fill in the uniform they had tossed in his direction and too scrawny to look good even though he was at the peak of health. His platoon leader - the closest figure he had to a father in the Confederate Alliance - had shoved him out of bed, dragged him into his jet and strapped him in. When they had taken off, it was as if he had never lived until that moment. CLOVER, however, had given him something he valued even more than the feel of clouds cut apart against metal wings. It was in the symphony of mechanics, the vague smell of pulse generators at work like burnt paper, the hum of computer systems as infinitely complex as the human mind.
The Pariah rose up from slumber at his fingertips, stepping away from its cage just as the doors opened in a hiss of hydraulics. Alistair tapped away at the controls with half an eye on the coloroid displays all around him as his rymer moved out into the canyon, black and gray as the night around it. The psychobabble from the technicians stationed in the outpost fed through the com-link as he put on his gloves and pulled his helmet down from its compartment somewhere above him.
“We’ve just received orders from topside, sir. They want the Shrikes out and the carriers intact.”
“Yeah, I heard you.”
In the roar of an engine and the afterglow of massive boosters, the Pariah zoomed off.
The first carrier went down in an instant, its wings clipped by a dual vector cannon blast fired at pinpoint precision to leave the body of the plane untouched. The Shrikes spun around the moment they heard it, but when one attempted to go back around and survey the damage a laser beam pierced it through the cockpit like a lance.
“What the HELL was that?”
The remaining Shrikes spun away from the wreckage, their pilots scanning the whole area for the enemy; it didn’t take them too long to spot the CLOVER rymer standing around 5,000 feet away from them, with the cannons mounted on its shoulders still smoking from the heat of the blasts they had fired. These cannons slid upward as they looked on, shifting off the mech’s shoulders and unto its back just as missile chambers opened up all over its body.
Enraged by the surprise attack, the two pilots broke away again, juking their machines wildly in an attempt to dodge the missile salvo fired in their direction; one of them took a blast to one booster, sending it crashing to the ground. The other successfully dodged the volley and zipped forward, brandishing a beam sword with the certainty of getting a hit in; much to the enemy pilot’s shock, the rymer, in a fit of impossible dexterity given its size, caught the Shrike’s arm in mid-slash and tore it from the rest of the mech’s body. Then it fired a rail gun bullet into its torso.
In the safety of his cockpit, Alistair turned his eyes away from the resulting blast as the Shrike he had just destroyed blew up in the Pariah’s face; the rymer, with its triple-layered armor, emerged from it completely unscathed. With a quick check to the vector cannons to see if they had cooled off, Alistair turned the rymer about again, bringing the cannons back online as he lined up the second carrier in his sights. That one went down faster than the first.
Barely ten minutes after its initial launch, the Pariah stood among the smoldering ruins of its enemies, a demonic knight of the future reflecting the fires in the dark plating of its armor. Even the small novelty of taking the Pariah out for a spin wasn’t enough to get rid of the funny state of ennui his mind drowned in, and Alistair felt the bitter taste of boredom rise beneath his tongue as he sat back in his cockpit, watching the salvaging crew roll into the area from the outpost with apathetic eyes. He let the com-link blip with the request for a transmission for a few moments before bringing himself to answer it.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound like a man who’s just done the Godhand another favor.”
“It was hardly worth the Pariah’s ammunition.”
Five hundred years ago, in a bid to explore the endless bounds of outer space, the United Earth Federation had send out a fleet of over two thousand ships and one fourth of the planet’s resources into the skies. After crossing a wide expanse of space now known as the Parvonis Sector, the fleet came across the Eden Star System; with its four planets and its central star Assiah, it was a system much like that of Sol and Earth. The fleet immediately moved to colonize it, and within the next century CLOVER was born.
After Eden Colonization Year 206. What started out as a terse debate over the mastership of Deep Space and territorial dispute blew over into full-out war. AEC 206 became UEFS 001, as the United Earth Federation broke into different factions. The largest groups were the CLOVER Alliance in the Eden Star System and the Confederate Alliance in the Sol Star System. By the records two Alliance Wars had already come to pass, with the current dispute escalating into something that would soon be marked as the third the moment the leaders of both sides were pushed into calling it another war after the peace groups would quit flapping their mouths. In Alistair’s opinion, the fighting had never really ended, and the treaties in between had been nothing but jokes fabricated by the media to keep the harpers for peace in line.
“Hey. Did Yasamu tell you already? Your younger brother’s been promoted.”
Alistair sipped the nicotine from his cigarette and didn’t answer. Names and numbers came to mind, back dropped by the headquarters that he hadn’t really returned to in almost six years. He wasn’t the type to get attached to places, but if there was one thing he missed it was the booze. Crates were hard to come by on the battlefield.
“He’s the adjutant of SFU-010 now, and Professor Morgan’s given him a rymer. Said it was an early birthday gift. Yasamu’s really happy.”
“He should be.” He knew that Natalia Serghov was expecting a reaction of any sort, but he wasn’t about to indulge her. The woman had been his friend for too long to get him to trust that particular side of her.
“Anyway, it’ll be good to have you back, you bastard. Bed’s been cold without you, and the drills aren’t the same when there’s no Pariah on standby. Bring back some souvenirs, all right?”
“A jar full of sand with a Gila lizard should be fine.”
Natalia merely laughed. Alistair reached over and ended the transmission. The sun was starting to creep over the top canyon, sending tentative fingers of light over wasteland and ruin. He took another drag of his cigarette and watched that light fill his eyes.
“...Found a reason to go on yet, boy?” said the first voice that floated up from memory.
That morning, like every other morning, offered him no answers.
transmission terminated.
Feedback appreciated. Then I might post up Chapter 1. >_