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Of Fire and the Void by SeverianofUrth
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Of Fire and the Void: A orphan's introduction to soldiery
Date: 7 May 2004, 11:55 PM
"James, damn it, come on!" Henry yelled at me. I was then trying desperately to hold onto a stolen rifle as I ran, tripping a little in my scavenged boots.
"Come on, James, let's go!" Henry again yelled. He stood in the doorway, his frame illuminated by the bright light outside. I panted, my left boot falling off as I ran as fast as I can, the rifle somehow managing to stay inside the crook of my arm (it being way too big), ammunition falling from my coat-pockets.
Henry ushered me outside the door, where I staggered, more bullets falling out, my breath coming in gasps. I wheezed, lungs bursting; I had never by then ran so far. Henry slapped me in the back.
"Good job, kid. You might make the gang if you keep it up. Let's go before the jarheads come." He ran then, holding in his arm effortlessly three fully-loaded assault rifles. It somehow seemed so strange then, to see this lanky, skinny guy of sixteen in a threadbare coat running like the wind in oversize sandals; I ran after him, tripping and falling, my fat frame bulging in grotesque places, the rifle shaking perilously in my hands, and my sole remaining boot clopping independent of my foot.
By the way, this is the city of Liverpool; I am living with the Red-Keeneedy gang, whose members consist of those who were orphaned because of the ongoing war. My parents are gone; probably dead. I've been living harvesting weapons from abandoned military caches, where we sell them to civilians interested in owning a gun just in case the aliens barge in their door. What we don't tell them is that the guns might just as well as blow up in their as they are to shoot; telling the truth, I found, is bad for business. And my name, as you might know, is James.
Me and Henry reach the house by dusk, the skies full of whirling Pelicans filled with the brave, scared soldiers. My brother is in one, I hope; but he is probably dead. Probably dead. If someone went missing, they went "probably dead." If someone got lost, they were-
"Damn, James, you're daydreaming again." Henry slapped on the back of the head. "I swear, one day you'll trip on some mines and die. It's not like I'll care,
but still-" He didn't finish. I didn't ask him to elaborate; I'd rather not know how much he cared for me. Ignorance, I've found again and again, is a bless. Instead, I asked him:
"So what are we eating today? I thought Peter found us some cans, or whatnot."
"Cans? If there are cans, you know we're not going to eat them. Why-" Suddenly the alarms began ringing; a horrible klaxon sound that tore at my ears. I dropped the rifle I had by then managed to nestle comfortably in my arms, and covered my ears. Henry, similarly affected by the sound, grabbed me by the hem of my coat and pulled me along to safehouse.
"The Covies?" Francis, a boy with rather large ears, asked. Boss nodded.
"Ya didn't hear the warnings? Covies, my little friends. Yonder blue headed-fucknuts." He gesticulated vaguely to show what he meant.
"Well, we got nothing to be afraid about. WE got guns, and hey, we managed to live so far, right?" Henry said, and everyone clapped him on the back. He grinned. He, of course, did not mention the little selling point we 'forgot' to mention to the customers.
"Henry's right, we people got nothin' to be scared about, with nobody." Boss said. Everyone nodded again nervously. Boss continued. "Hell, we got-"
"Freeze!" A helmeted figure burst from the locked door; scoped rifle in hand, light glinting off from his visor, he was... scary. From the suddenly wafting smell I knew that someone had pissed their pants.
More followed the helmeted figure, all armored. They clustered around the doorway, weapons up, until one said, "These are just kids, captain."
"I don't think so, soldier." One of the helmeted figures said. "The scanning showed definite signs of Covenant infiltration here... Shielding, cloaking, re-imaging. One of these kids are not what they seem to be." He motioned one of the men forward. "Caparzo, start energy-scanning. Kids, line up against the wall. If you haven't done anything wrong, none of you have anything to fear." This statement, of course, caused even more fear. I saw Henry lock his hands into a fist. His fingers clutched the back of his neck tightly.
"Alright, kids, line up. Caparze-" Then it happened.
Henry suddenly went still, seemingly frozen; then he melted, like quicksilver, his form wavering and hurting one's eyes, then he suddenly became a alien.
Where stood a lanky sixteen year-old stood now a 8-foot Alien, a elite, I think it was called, filling the room. It dashed aside one of the kids (Bruno, I think) and slammed him against the wall; then it swung the now-limp body into the soldiers, knocking two of them aside.
The soldiers started firing. Their bullets seemed to glance off some invisible armor the Elite seemed to have, and they ricocheted around, until lodging in flesh or metal. The soldiers were all right; but the kids were not.
Flesh tore, limbs ripped; blood gushed forth. But the soldiers didn't seem to see; they kept firing, until at last one bullet tore through the giant's muscles, then another, then a swarm of lead. It fell screaming, the limp, now-headless body of Bruno still in it's grasp.
I had hid then, curled in a fetal position behind the stacked metal boxes. I got up when the screaming ceased; blood was everywhere, most red, a little blue. Only Boss was alive, and he was shuddering. The soldiers were now helping up the ones who had fallen.
"God-damn, sir. The children..." The soldier waved his hand over the chamber. The captain nodded.
"A pity. Take the corpse. We'll leave the kids here until we can get some medics over. Or some babysitters." He motioned for them to leave. The soldiers gave me sympathetic glances. But they left anyways, leaving behind corpses of my former-comrades. They took what used to be Henry.
(Part 2 coming soon.)
Of Fire and the Void:Orphan's Introduction to Soldiery(part 2)
Date: 24 May 2004, 4:42 PM
Nothing much, after the soldiers left. Just Francis, his ears gone, slumped against the wall, Boss, crying madly as he sat in a pool of piss, and just about everyone else either dead or hurt, or maybe just crying and pissing.
The light swayed back and forth from the ceiling, bullet-marks having grazed it's near-indestructible plasteel surface. I got up, found my limbs sticking, struggled up with my right foot still asleep, and limped over to the stairs, climbed up to the door whilst ignoring Boss's staccato cries of despair and fear, and opened the door now slick with alien blood. Henry's blood.
Outside, troops and medics flitted about, setting up a emergency camp. A pair of army nurses were busy setting up medpaks. Their eyes widened dramatically as I stumbled out.
"Help." I squeaked.
"My god! Are they shooting kids now? This witchhunt has been going on enough." A dark, rather tall and imposing man dressed in the standard white lab coat, said. One of the nurses replied.
"Just ricochet fire. You know how those shieldings repel lead. And besides, they actually got one. A Elite, they say."
"Really?" The doctor said, as he began stripping the shirt off of me. "Oh well... I still can't forgive those damn witchhunting squads for putting me in a cell for two damn weeks. Me, A Covenant! Hah!"
"What do you mean?" One of the nurses asked.
"They thought I was one of those Covenant units with the hologuisers. Hmph, put me in a cell for two weeks, all the while petting their goddamn rifles. Ah, here you go." He petted my chest in a comradely fashion.
"As good as new. Well, nothing wrong with it in the first place, but it should do."
"Wish we could say the same for the other kids, though..." Murmered one of the nurses. I grabbed her arm somehow, and she flinched back.
"Lady, please, can you tell me what-"
"No, not now, young man." The doctor ushered me away. "A good night's sleep first."
I spent a restless night, trying to go to sleep but failing utterly to do so. I couldn't rid myself of Henry, the ranky boy who helped through when my parents were gone, was a Covenant...
They never actually told me what happened to the rest of the boys. I think they tried to save some that they could; but they probably failed. "Acceptable casualties of war."
And me? I got sent to military school. That is, they don't really teach you anything. They feed you, give you a roof over your head, and then when your of age send you to die with a little training. A good deal, really.
And so I spent three years there. I was always called James, even though fifty-eight other James there were called Jim, Jimmy, or Jimi. Maybe it was my experiences already with death, but everyone stayed away from me. So I ate alone, ran alone, and played solitaire and a pocket gameplayer. It was better this way. Two of the fifty-eight James turned out to be Covenant.
Now, a little explanation, before I tell you the real story, of Antartica, of Yucatan, and of the war that raged there. A little explanation as to why the Covenant were employing the hologuisers.
After a brief, fierce period of fighting, the Covenant took complete control of the American continents, and of... Antartica. What we had of the satellites showed them building- of what we did not know, as they already had enough power to crush us ten times over.
And hologuisers, Elites under holographic-hallucinatory-refractory disguises, began appearing. The first one was Adam Franks, the now-infamous researcher at the ONI International Headquarters. There appeared to be no sabotage done by him, nor information transmitted to the Covenant bases; only transcripts of human behavior, and the ominous phrase,
"They are ready for the upbringing."
And so, after the accidental discovery of Franks, the witchhunts began. Comprised of elite soldiers, mostly ODSTs, they hunted down Covenants. And they DID catch quite a few; however, the amount of innocents they imprisoned or killed were more numerous in number. Far more numerous.
And after a while, a theory was thought up, of why the Covenant weren't pursuing victory.
"...It can be assumed, that the Covenant certainly had the means, and the power to destroy the planet of Earth utterly without any serious consequences... It was only their mysterius agendas, propagated by their Prophets, the ruling caste, that stayed their hand. After two years of fighting, it was assumed that for some reason the Covenant needed the planet relatively undamaged; and after they claimed the Americas and the Antartica, and fortified them (especially the Yucatan), we began to guess that they were after something there, some mysterious artifact from the elusive Forerunners, of whom we have no guesses but the ONI may do..."
(part 3 coming.) (my hand hurts.)
Orphan's Introduction to Soldiery (part 3)
Date: 29 June 2004, 10:10 PM
I took cover behind a hill of trash, twisted piles of molten glass and polychrome glittering like some earthly star beneath the night sky.
Except that the piles of polychrome reeked of blood and corpses, redolent of rusted steel and urine. Except that the night sky wasn't so dark or black- it was rather brightly lit, streaked with blue fire and white flares.
And even if it was beautiful, some refuge from the artistic times so bygone from my own war-torn age, I probably wouldn't have noticed it. I was too busy trying to live.
And in my struggle for survival, and for the sake of my survival, I ran from my unconcealed refuge behind the glowing trash and into the bright night, calling into the comm channel my position, telling anyone that I was here, hello, hello, I'm live and on fire, asshole!, all the while scattering fire all over and dropping fragmentation grenades behind me every so often.
I ran, jumped over a corpse, dived for cover behind a overturned warthog, and made it behind a unmanned machine gun nest taking a refuge with yet another corpse. His eyes were open to the sky, dry and dead.
You have to wonder at what I was doing over there. But I wouldn't be able to tell you; only that whatever we were doing were paramount to the survival of humanity. Soldiers rarely know the whole situation.
We were, incidentally, in the ruined streets of New Maya, in the once-green jungles of Yucatan. We were, supposedly, liberating the hapless human captives of the Covenant. We were, hopefully, free them all the while killing all the Covies there, liberate the whole goddamn city while fireworks lit up the happy sky and people cried "La viva Revolucion!"
And like all incidental, supposed and hopeful things, it didn't turn out like that.
"James!" Jogen called me, ten meters off to the right, and I tried to tell him about the mexican raising a hatchet above his head. But Jogen was deaf. He died abruptly with very painful wounds to the head.
I got the beaner, the Mexican falling like a fly with a hole in his chest, and I ran to Jogen, picked up some grenades, threw one in the derelict building in the front, and ran off while trying to contact again anyone who might have ideas on how to get out of here. I found no one.
I kept the rifle up, running the whole time, and turned a corner when a group of brown-skinned kids ran straight into me. I fired- ripped a swath across them, bursting heads and ripping limbs- and ran through, throwing a grenade behind me for a good measure. Some shots rang off my armor, but none got through.
Blue light still lit up the night sky. Mortars fell willy-nilly, crashing into outhouses and restaurants alike.
We were there in the Yucatan for actually one clear and present reason: the Covenant were setting up some big-time archaelogical expeditions there. We needed info- besides a little victory- and so they shipped around 50 companies, along with a battalion of ODST. We grunts came on Pelicans and warthogs, on rammers and Achilles- the ODST, always showing off, dropped from the sky on the HEVs.
Of course, the Covenant wrecked havoc from the start with the holo-guisers. A woman a man thought he was fucking with turned out to be one of them Jedi-Elite, and soon he found a plasma sword stuck in his gut. He died, rumor said.
So amongst witchhunts for some hidden Covenant, we set out for the outpost city of New Maya. We expected downtrodden masses of Latinos under a genocidal pogrom. We found a contented and a homicidal mass of quislings instead.
A brownie popped out- I almost shot him, when I realized that it was Cordoza. He waved merrily, and said, "Pretty good back home."
"You're the first one I've seen that wasn't trying to shoot me, you know." I said to him.
"Well, we've always been a passionate people." He said, leaning against what remained of a wall, fiddling with his battle rifle. "Besides, I'm guessing they didn't want to go under another pogrom like what the Israelis got when the Covies landed there."
I had to acknowledge the logic of that. "Seen anyone else?"
"I don't want to. Only latino on the squad, don't want the rest of the boot to shoot me on sight, on basis of racial selection." He gestured at himself self-deprecatingly. "I'm safe here."
"Well, I'm going. You sure you wanna stay here?"
He nodded, and I went my way.
I've found Cordoza only so far, since Jogen was dead. From my squad of six only one I've found- shit. Cordoza was from Squad Two, Bravo, and I'm Alpha. So four others- find them all, formulate a plan of strategic survival meaning a something that needs a shitload of luck, and get the hell out of here. Right. Like that's easy.
For some reason I remembered Henry again. I always relied on him- that is, before he turned into a Elite.
Of Fire and the Void: Part Four
Date: 2 February 2005, 4:45 PM
Of Fire and the Void: Mithra
A small, fat boy lies on the ground. His eyes are red from crying, and tears have made tracks across his grimy cheeks. The boy is hungry, also, for he has not been able to find food for two days now.
He is curled up in a fetal position. His shirt, one of those collared ones with the label "Helljumpers" emblazoned upon it, is dirty and reeks of sweat. He shivers; the day is cold, for the clouds have covered the sun and a chill wind blows through the streets of Liverpool, a ruin it might be now.
The boy's name is James. His brother is gone, off for some war he can't understand. His parents are missing; his hands are bloody from clawing through concrete rubbles in a futile search for them. He wants them here, with him, to take care of him. But no one comes. So he is alone, lying on the ground.
And he can't dream. James wants too; he wants desperately to sleep, to forget, wants the Sandman to come and sprinkle sleep over him. But every sense of his seems to be hyper-alert. He can hear the wind blowing through the ruins, and can smell the scent of burning and charred flesh, and he can feel every mote of the chill air that he breathes, stabbing into his lungs and throat.
He hears something. Footsteps. James gets up, weakly; he looks over to the sound of the intruder's footsteps, the sound of rubber sandals flip-flopping against the hard ground.
"Hey, kid." The intruder says. He is tall, and skinny.
James does not answer. For a moment, he had thought that his brother, or his parents, had come to get him.
"Hey, kid. Get up- you're gonna die there." The intruder comes closer. James does not answer. He curls up even tighter.
The sound of footsteps, coming closer. Then-
"Ow!"
"Well, you aren't dead after all." The intruder kicks James again, this time on the buttocks. "Come on. Get up."
James stands weakly, but falls again when the intruder pushes him back to the ground with his foot. "Faster, kid. You gotta be faster, if you wanna hang with me."
James wants to protest. He doesn't want to hang with the stranger. But he does not say anything, and simply tries to get up again.
Again, he is pushed back to the ground. "Faster, kid."
James tries to roll away from the stranger's foot. He is too slow. Kicks thud into his body. "Hey, lardass, get up! I've got no patience for this kind of shit. I've got some food for you, if y'want it."
Food. The word echoes in James' mind. Food.
This time, he gets up, while grabbing the stranger's incoming foot with both hands.
The stranger laughs. "Good, kid. You're learning."
James stands. He is as tall as the stranger's chest. The stranger motions for James to follow as he walks away. "Let's go, kid."
James follows, one word echoing through his mind: food. The stranger walks in long, swift strides. James can't keep up with him, unless his jogs. Soon, James' breath is ragged and gasping, as he jogs limpidly alongside the stranger.
The stranger halts. James stops beside him, feeling like he was about to collapse. Two days' worth of starvation has sapped his strength.
"What's your name, anyhow?" The stranger asks, disinterestedly.
James can't answer the question for some time, as he waits to catch his breath. When he finally feels that his chest won't collapse inwards from the exercise, he answers, "James."
The stranger laughs. "Thought you'd hi-fur-van-tee-lated, James. Well, the names Henry." The stranger, or Henry, thrusts his hand out towards James. The boy grabs it, and shakes; Henry's hand is oddly smooth, and snake-skin dry.
"Well, let's get on with it, shall we?" Henry says. "I got some cans back at the place, kid. Ravioli."
Ravioli. Saliva begins to form in James' mouth. Ravioli. Chef Boyardee was still up and running.
As Henry takes off, so does James, dreaming of raviolis.
The food was good. Really good. The first time I ate over at Henry's, the canned Italian cuisine pretty much melted inside my mouth, and it was sweet, very sweet. Although Henry stopped me from eating too much, saying that stuffing myself like that after two days of eating nothing would kill me, I ate on anyways, stuffing watery sauce and limp raviolis into my mouth.
Of course, I threw it all up afterwards, and Henry beat me up saying that I was an idiot and that he was an idiot for bringing me here with him. I tried to clean it up, but the basement Henry was 'refugeeing' in always stank of vomit after that, until at last we got used to the smell.
Even though Henry, as I know now, was a Covenant, he was... nice. Human. More human than most people I met later, or would hear about; many little kids orphaned were taken in by pedophiles and brothels, and used. I was lucky, in a way.
That question still bumps around in my mind: what was Henry? Just another Elite? He stayed with me for years. I think he became human.
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