The Only Foe
My livejournal has gone stale over the last few months. I last posted here in October.
At the insistence of my friend Tommy, and given that my workload isn't as heavy this semester, I'm going to try to post here at LEAST once each week. Hold me to that if you like, and berate me about it if you like and if need be.
And so, here's a sci-fi short story I wrote last semester, for Tommy especially. This is also a chance to again experiment with the lj-cut (I will succeed this time!).
The Only Foe
“Hey, Toothy, you got a cigarette I can bum offa ya?”
“Yesth,” he says as he flips open a compartment on his pack and fumbles for the carton. It’s been twenty-three days since we last had supplies dropped, and I’m fresh out of smokes. I don’t usually smoke - it’s a filthy habit - but this waiting around with a constant threat of death is liable to make a guy a little nervous. So here I am, smoking to pass the time and keep my hands busy, half-hoping today will be without incident, half-hoping for a little bit of action.
I can’t really call it action. The war’s a basic stalemate in this area. I don’t think I can really call this war. We’ve got our trenches here (well, not so much “trenches” as dugout porto-outposts and a little research lab that seems not at all interested in anything about this place or the enemy except for what they pull out of core samples, plus the sleeping quarters, ridiculously small mess and showers, but we call this place the trenches for sake of not calling it “Temporary Location of Dispatch Strike Force L2-2386V”), and they’ve got their trenches over on the other side of the wastes. At least I think they do. They could have a town out there, if those creatures have civilized society, God, maybe even a city, and we’d never know because we can’t see that far through the constant dust storms, over the scorched death-land with all of its hills and craters and hungry cracks in the earth. In our first week here, when we were all fresh and shiny-suited and aching for a good fight, before we knew what was good for us, we lost eight guys to no-man’s land and human stupidity. On the second day, we tried to just push right across the waste before they knew we were here; they knew. We lost four of us pulling out and then, later that night, four others decided to do an impromptu raid without telling Local Command. We found Johnston fired to the boots in front of our perimeter defenses that morning, and we haven’t heard from or seen the others. We haven’t looked.
I joined the force because of the posters. Here and there, but very well-placed, they stood out from buildings and train-sides in translucent blues and reds, a lone figure in armor, standing or leaping or kneeling boldly with some great big evil-looking machine exploding behind him, like the superwarrior Grakk from the new epic line of VirtRee’s that take you to new worlds and into these intense plots of war and crime and espionage on alien planets. They’re pretty amazing. My personal favourite was Grakk: Vengeance where he gets a little crazy after he undergoes an experiment where the Galactic Association outfits him with mental implants. The implants give him psychic powers, but they make him go berserk sometimes, so then he goes and tries to kill the guy who set up the project, and then later on you learn that the Doctor - Doctor Sindredd Alkamin, I think his name was - wasn’t actually him, but a Morphic Variant Operative in his form (a new bio-weapon made by the evil Sybtonak race from the Dark Yelsten quadrant) that had killed the Doctor and taken his place, sabotaging the project and removing a critical part of the software in his Mentalist Weapon System in the hopes that Grakk would turn on his allies. That game, and the ads, got me into the idea of joining the IPSDF - the Interplanetary Special Defense Force. I guess invasion and fear-mongering are “special” kinds of defense.
Patriotism had its effect on me, too, I suppose. Actually, I’m pretty certain on that. Everyone knew about the attacks on Vintas III; it was on every public feed not choked up by gaming, blogging and porn. It spawned a whole new branch of Government. It changed the way we looked at aliens. It brought a whole lot of people to Hell.
Three years ago, there was an unexplained explosion on the surface of the planet that looked like a star farting from the next colony planet over. Apparently, the fission reactor that was powering the main city there had something fired at it, or something crashed into it - the first theories were vague, but the energy ripple it made and the total shutdown of the life-support systems were extraordinarily specific. Everything was vaporized for miles and miles around ground zero, vacuum chambers started backfiring, the Septic Grid went out of control and flung disease around like party favours, the oxygen gardens burned up and engulfed half the houses in the surrounding region. Since most of the evacuation equipment and personnel had been damaged and killed by the initial explosion, reserves had to be called from all the other Vintas Colony Planetoids, plus a riot brigade or six from Central Vintas Hub. Science teams were reportedly sent in a few chaotic days later in their yellow bubbles and suits, scanning this and dissecting that. Official reports poured in a week after: the Hynbenets were responsible. It was the first time we had ever been attacked by another life form, another intelligent race, in our own Sector.
The science teams didn’t find much at all - with the magnitude of the explosion, it’s hard to imagine coming close to finding anything at all - and the aftereffects of the event itself cut short the stay of the teams on the colony. The whole Planetoid had become tectonically unstable, so Vintas Central had to call for geo-restructuring from the Sector’s chief lab on Jelabi. But miraculously, they managed to find some pieces of shrapnel on the safer side of the world. Vintas Central also discovered a tiny hole in the Collective Monitoring Grid’s programming that guarded the colony. Some pixilated images were soon unearthed showing a big purple triangle - a starship of the native Hynbenet design and colour.This was the spark of the war. Accusations started flying, diplomats were trying to reason in the babble of Darlan Commons Houses across the system, voyages were sent to establish some sort of contact with the Hynbenets (their system is only blurrily known by us, and they’re so far away that conventional commtech can’t reach halfway there, and we don’t know much about them, either: only that they exist, really, and have the technology to travel space) and the masses split into three groups: the ohmygodohmygod-our-lives-are-in-jeopardy-someone- save-us-GOD!s, the KILL-THE-BASTARDS!s and the Oh-we’re-so-far-away-from-it-all-it-won’t-affect-us-one-bit-but-it’s-a-real-shame-because-now-the-price- of-fresh-food-is-going-to-go-up-agains. And then the ads for Special Defense started sprouting like the dreaded Fungu parasites in Legends of Grakk: Deep Jungle.
“Fight for Humankind’s Freedom,” they usually said. And so I did. Or so I thought I was doing. I was going to be the big man in armor in front of the exploding machine; I was going to be a hero; I was going to free us from tyranny! But after awhile in the force, after the glow of adventure eked out of the job and the shine wore off my suit and we all figured out there was no alien tyranny, and after that one night in the trench, I finally saw that war isn’t really so great and thrilling and liberating. It’s not like Grakk, jumping over huge crates and walls and destroying everything with lasers and a psychic warhammer to screaming death-hop beats, not like the stories of the one-legged war heroes on the vids that relive battles against alien races won with impossible odds in the face of certain doom, not even like the training VirtRees (not called that by the IPSDF, but they’re essentially just chem-enhanced VirtRees), where your squad-mates are your brothers and you tackle the toughest terrain and have shootouts with slimy, one-eyed cannibal squid-things decorated with enough barbs and spines to make a thistle bush cry. It’s days and weeks of stupid, frightened waiting around in holes and channels. It’s a long, dusty detention. It’s fighting indirectly and dispassionately with something like a dead language. The ads were just inciters to a big personal delusion, and they really, really worked.
My family had no problem with me joining up. In fact, they were downright ecstatic. My dad slapped me on the back and told me that fighting for the freedom of all of us was the best thing I could do, boasting about “my son, the future War Hero!”, and my mom thought it would be nice for me to go and see the other worlds. And that was that. My sister nobody can find, and my friends (striker666B and loln00b93) wouldn’t give my absence a second thought. My job, such as it was, was going nowhere and giving little, and my boss hated me anyway. I signed up fit and patriotic but without wisdom, self-reliance or proper family. Oh, well - I guess the SDF admires those qualities in a guy. My new family until further notice consists of a bunch of other suckers I’ve never met. There are about forty of us here still, and I hang with six or seven of them, the ones whose beds are at the far end of the Cave. There’s massive, barrel-chested Obul (Ham - sometimes Hammer, sometimes Hammy, depending on the mood), “old” Flintlock (he’s one of the youngest here but has this love of the Antique Years), Scrabble, Dump, Rudy (Ruddy), Shark from time to time (he cheats half the platoon at poker every Thursday) and Toothy, whose company I have the pleasure of at the moment.
“Tho,” he says, “wath de news?” He’s a little edgy; I can tell he’s looking for any excuse to get out of the trenches and go crazy. He’s still hoping it’s an actual war.
“Nothin’,” I tell him. It’s kind of disappointing to see Toothy bummed out like that. “Hey.” He looks. “Don’t cry now.” He sticks out what’s left of his tongue at me and sits back against the wall with his gun in his lap, tapping out some crazy rhythm across the muzzle. He lost the missing part of his tongue on that first early strike we tried. When we ran back, he was hollering and whooping like a hacker in the Mint, and he jumped straight down into the trench from the ground. He landed awkwardly and fell on his head, and there was blood all over his face. Luckily for him, he only got a black eye, but he also bit the first inch and a half of his tongue right off, so he had to be fed through a tube for three weeks, and he’s spoken funnily ever since.
We sit in the quiet for a while - well, relative quiet. The wind’s always howling up past the trenches, and the perimeter defense cannons buzz like the cities back home, except all the light they’re giving off is green. There’s also Toothy’s tapping. “Hey,” I say, “you ever get the feeling that we’re not really here for a reason? That we’re just here to - to sit and do nothing?”
Toothy smiles that smile he usually reserves to put the commander back on his heels. “Adthulutely! We’re in Hell, man, hell. No fire and brimthone, jutht waiting for nuthing. Thath’s what Hell ith, man: all it ith ith justht waiting an waiting an waiting for nuthing, for a thlow death. We’re jutht here waithting ammo on Tins, thothe little sthpidery things that couldn’t thkin a cat! Sthupid crawlies, why does the enemy even bother? Maybe they made a million ov’em before finding out we’re not cavemen with sthicks, huh?”
He’s a pretty smart guy, Toothy. It’s what makes mostly everyone nervous around him: he’s smart and seems prone to violence. In fact, he looks a lot like a caveman - the tangled spray of dry, fiery hair, the twisted goatee they let him grow back, the crooked nose and sandy cheeks, his thin, triangular features that are so rare to have naturally these days. Honestly, the only differences are the vocabulary, the singed suit of React class SDF armor and the Shock-XLV he incessantly taps on.
“The Only Foe wasn’t a waste of ammo.”
The tapping stops. “You’re right. Only was worth every shot and more.”
I don’t now how long it was after we landed, but it was long enough for everyone to stop asking questions. That one night, when just Toothy and I were on duty, before I really got to know him, we saw something shuffling around by the lip of the trench. We slipped on our helmets and opened the plexi-hatch, and we just unloaded on it. We weren’t sure how it got past the perimeter, but it wasn’t getting past us. We shot at it right up until it lunged between us and flopped into the trench below us, hitting the floor like a stone, cold and dead. It had a suit looking not so different from ours, without weapon and, when we closed the hatch and flipped the lights back on, we pried off its helmet and got a good look at its face.
He was the only Hynbenet we’d ever seen; we named him so. He had smallish ears and a kind of flattish nose, dry skin with a pale, almost purple tinge - or maybe it was the lights. We snuck out a few hours later and buried him back in the rocks where these tall reeds stood in respect of him. He was the only sign ever that we were here for anything at all.
And he looked almost exactly like us.
At the insistence of my friend Tommy, and given that my workload isn't as heavy this semester, I'm going to try to post here at LEAST once each week. Hold me to that if you like, and berate me about it if you like and if need be.
And so, here's a sci-fi short story I wrote last semester, for Tommy especially. This is also a chance to again experiment with the lj-cut (I will succeed this time!).
The Only Foe
“Hey, Toothy, you got a cigarette I can bum offa ya?”
“Yesth,” he says as he flips open a compartment on his pack and fumbles for the carton. It’s been twenty-three days since we last had supplies dropped, and I’m fresh out of smokes. I don’t usually smoke - it’s a filthy habit - but this waiting around with a constant threat of death is liable to make a guy a little nervous. So here I am, smoking to pass the time and keep my hands busy, half-hoping today will be without incident, half-hoping for a little bit of action.
I can’t really call it action. The war’s a basic stalemate in this area. I don’t think I can really call this war. We’ve got our trenches here (well, not so much “trenches” as dugout porto-outposts and a little research lab that seems not at all interested in anything about this place or the enemy except for what they pull out of core samples, plus the sleeping quarters, ridiculously small mess and showers, but we call this place the trenches for sake of not calling it “Temporary Location of Dispatch Strike Force L2-2386V”), and they’ve got their trenches over on the other side of the wastes. At least I think they do. They could have a town out there, if those creatures have civilized society, God, maybe even a city, and we’d never know because we can’t see that far through the constant dust storms, over the scorched death-land with all of its hills and craters and hungry cracks in the earth. In our first week here, when we were all fresh and shiny-suited and aching for a good fight, before we knew what was good for us, we lost eight guys to no-man’s land and human stupidity. On the second day, we tried to just push right across the waste before they knew we were here; they knew. We lost four of us pulling out and then, later that night, four others decided to do an impromptu raid without telling Local Command. We found Johnston fired to the boots in front of our perimeter defenses that morning, and we haven’t heard from or seen the others. We haven’t looked.
I joined the force because of the posters. Here and there, but very well-placed, they stood out from buildings and train-sides in translucent blues and reds, a lone figure in armor, standing or leaping or kneeling boldly with some great big evil-looking machine exploding behind him, like the superwarrior Grakk from the new epic line of VirtRee’s that take you to new worlds and into these intense plots of war and crime and espionage on alien planets. They’re pretty amazing. My personal favourite was Grakk: Vengeance where he gets a little crazy after he undergoes an experiment where the Galactic Association outfits him with mental implants. The implants give him psychic powers, but they make him go berserk sometimes, so then he goes and tries to kill the guy who set up the project, and then later on you learn that the Doctor - Doctor Sindredd Alkamin, I think his name was - wasn’t actually him, but a Morphic Variant Operative in his form (a new bio-weapon made by the evil Sybtonak race from the Dark Yelsten quadrant) that had killed the Doctor and taken his place, sabotaging the project and removing a critical part of the software in his Mentalist Weapon System in the hopes that Grakk would turn on his allies. That game, and the ads, got me into the idea of joining the IPSDF - the Interplanetary Special Defense Force. I guess invasion and fear-mongering are “special” kinds of defense.
Patriotism had its effect on me, too, I suppose. Actually, I’m pretty certain on that. Everyone knew about the attacks on Vintas III; it was on every public feed not choked up by gaming, blogging and porn. It spawned a whole new branch of Government. It changed the way we looked at aliens. It brought a whole lot of people to Hell.
Three years ago, there was an unexplained explosion on the surface of the planet that looked like a star farting from the next colony planet over. Apparently, the fission reactor that was powering the main city there had something fired at it, or something crashed into it - the first theories were vague, but the energy ripple it made and the total shutdown of the life-support systems were extraordinarily specific. Everything was vaporized for miles and miles around ground zero, vacuum chambers started backfiring, the Septic Grid went out of control and flung disease around like party favours, the oxygen gardens burned up and engulfed half the houses in the surrounding region. Since most of the evacuation equipment and personnel had been damaged and killed by the initial explosion, reserves had to be called from all the other Vintas Colony Planetoids, plus a riot brigade or six from Central Vintas Hub. Science teams were reportedly sent in a few chaotic days later in their yellow bubbles and suits, scanning this and dissecting that. Official reports poured in a week after: the Hynbenets were responsible. It was the first time we had ever been attacked by another life form, another intelligent race, in our own Sector.
The science teams didn’t find much at all - with the magnitude of the explosion, it’s hard to imagine coming close to finding anything at all - and the aftereffects of the event itself cut short the stay of the teams on the colony. The whole Planetoid had become tectonically unstable, so Vintas Central had to call for geo-restructuring from the Sector’s chief lab on Jelabi. But miraculously, they managed to find some pieces of shrapnel on the safer side of the world. Vintas Central also discovered a tiny hole in the Collective Monitoring Grid’s programming that guarded the colony. Some pixilated images were soon unearthed showing a big purple triangle - a starship of the native Hynbenet design and colour.This was the spark of the war. Accusations started flying, diplomats were trying to reason in the babble of Darlan Commons Houses across the system, voyages were sent to establish some sort of contact with the Hynbenets (their system is only blurrily known by us, and they’re so far away that conventional commtech can’t reach halfway there, and we don’t know much about them, either: only that they exist, really, and have the technology to travel space) and the masses split into three groups: the ohmygodohmygod-our-lives-are-in-jeopardy-someone- save-us-GOD!s, the KILL-THE-BASTARDS!s and the Oh-we’re-so-far-away-from-it-all-it-won’t-affect-us-one-bit-but-it’s-a-real-shame-because-now-the-price- of-fresh-food-is-going-to-go-up-agains. And then the ads for Special Defense started sprouting like the dreaded Fungu parasites in Legends of Grakk: Deep Jungle.
“Fight for Humankind’s Freedom,” they usually said. And so I did. Or so I thought I was doing. I was going to be the big man in armor in front of the exploding machine; I was going to be a hero; I was going to free us from tyranny! But after awhile in the force, after the glow of adventure eked out of the job and the shine wore off my suit and we all figured out there was no alien tyranny, and after that one night in the trench, I finally saw that war isn’t really so great and thrilling and liberating. It’s not like Grakk, jumping over huge crates and walls and destroying everything with lasers and a psychic warhammer to screaming death-hop beats, not like the stories of the one-legged war heroes on the vids that relive battles against alien races won with impossible odds in the face of certain doom, not even like the training VirtRees (not called that by the IPSDF, but they’re essentially just chem-enhanced VirtRees), where your squad-mates are your brothers and you tackle the toughest terrain and have shootouts with slimy, one-eyed cannibal squid-things decorated with enough barbs and spines to make a thistle bush cry. It’s days and weeks of stupid, frightened waiting around in holes and channels. It’s a long, dusty detention. It’s fighting indirectly and dispassionately with something like a dead language. The ads were just inciters to a big personal delusion, and they really, really worked.
My family had no problem with me joining up. In fact, they were downright ecstatic. My dad slapped me on the back and told me that fighting for the freedom of all of us was the best thing I could do, boasting about “my son, the future War Hero!”, and my mom thought it would be nice for me to go and see the other worlds. And that was that. My sister nobody can find, and my friends (striker666B and loln00b93) wouldn’t give my absence a second thought. My job, such as it was, was going nowhere and giving little, and my boss hated me anyway. I signed up fit and patriotic but without wisdom, self-reliance or proper family. Oh, well - I guess the SDF admires those qualities in a guy. My new family until further notice consists of a bunch of other suckers I’ve never met. There are about forty of us here still, and I hang with six or seven of them, the ones whose beds are at the far end of the Cave. There’s massive, barrel-chested Obul (Ham - sometimes Hammer, sometimes Hammy, depending on the mood), “old” Flintlock (he’s one of the youngest here but has this love of the Antique Years), Scrabble, Dump, Rudy (Ruddy), Shark from time to time (he cheats half the platoon at poker every Thursday) and Toothy, whose company I have the pleasure of at the moment.
“Tho,” he says, “wath de news?” He’s a little edgy; I can tell he’s looking for any excuse to get out of the trenches and go crazy. He’s still hoping it’s an actual war.
“Nothin’,” I tell him. It’s kind of disappointing to see Toothy bummed out like that. “Hey.” He looks. “Don’t cry now.” He sticks out what’s left of his tongue at me and sits back against the wall with his gun in his lap, tapping out some crazy rhythm across the muzzle. He lost the missing part of his tongue on that first early strike we tried. When we ran back, he was hollering and whooping like a hacker in the Mint, and he jumped straight down into the trench from the ground. He landed awkwardly and fell on his head, and there was blood all over his face. Luckily for him, he only got a black eye, but he also bit the first inch and a half of his tongue right off, so he had to be fed through a tube for three weeks, and he’s spoken funnily ever since.
We sit in the quiet for a while - well, relative quiet. The wind’s always howling up past the trenches, and the perimeter defense cannons buzz like the cities back home, except all the light they’re giving off is green. There’s also Toothy’s tapping. “Hey,” I say, “you ever get the feeling that we’re not really here for a reason? That we’re just here to - to sit and do nothing?”
Toothy smiles that smile he usually reserves to put the commander back on his heels. “Adthulutely! We’re in Hell, man, hell. No fire and brimthone, jutht waiting for nuthing. Thath’s what Hell ith, man: all it ith ith justht waiting an waiting an waiting for nuthing, for a thlow death. We’re jutht here waithting ammo on Tins, thothe little sthpidery things that couldn’t thkin a cat! Sthupid crawlies, why does the enemy even bother? Maybe they made a million ov’em before finding out we’re not cavemen with sthicks, huh?”
He’s a pretty smart guy, Toothy. It’s what makes mostly everyone nervous around him: he’s smart and seems prone to violence. In fact, he looks a lot like a caveman - the tangled spray of dry, fiery hair, the twisted goatee they let him grow back, the crooked nose and sandy cheeks, his thin, triangular features that are so rare to have naturally these days. Honestly, the only differences are the vocabulary, the singed suit of React class SDF armor and the Shock-XLV he incessantly taps on.
“The Only Foe wasn’t a waste of ammo.”
The tapping stops. “You’re right. Only was worth every shot and more.”
I don’t now how long it was after we landed, but it was long enough for everyone to stop asking questions. That one night, when just Toothy and I were on duty, before I really got to know him, we saw something shuffling around by the lip of the trench. We slipped on our helmets and opened the plexi-hatch, and we just unloaded on it. We weren’t sure how it got past the perimeter, but it wasn’t getting past us. We shot at it right up until it lunged between us and flopped into the trench below us, hitting the floor like a stone, cold and dead. It had a suit looking not so different from ours, without weapon and, when we closed the hatch and flipped the lights back on, we pried off its helmet and got a good look at its face.
He was the only Hynbenet we’d ever seen; we named him so. He had smallish ears and a kind of flattish nose, dry skin with a pale, almost purple tinge - or maybe it was the lights. We snuck out a few hours later and buried him back in the rocks where these tall reeds stood in respect of him. He was the only sign ever that we were here for anything at all.
And he looked almost exactly like us.