Port Said, Suez Canal
The searing hiss of a rocket passed over her head. Everything was burning. The smell of scorched gasoline and charred flesh hung in her nostrils. The gravity of what it was she had just witnessed sunk in. The first shots of the war. There had been years of posturing and near misses. Now it was here. Her training kicked in. It was time to survive.
Men were falling back. They were covered in soot and blood, the whites of their eyes pristine and wide beneath masks of filth. There was shouting in the chaos, and the wails of the wounded. The Spanish rounds struck the ground like fists, each shot sounding heavier than the last. She was certain that they were getting closer, and that any moment a chance shot would rip through her and kill her. But she sat still. If she ran, they would get her, and this ditch felt safer than any amount of fleeing could.
"We can't fucking fight them with cars." she muttered to herself. She wondered where her partner had went. Elias had been next to her one moment, and gone the next. "We can't fight with..." someone nearby fired a rifle, an its report stung her ears. "Trucks!" That was a stupid plan. Now they were stuck. It occurred to her that this could have been a suicide mission all along. The orders they had been given about how to proceed after this fight could have been nothing more than a comforting ruse to keep them from knowing that they were meant to die here. She heard a pained shriek above the sound of the battle, so sharp that a chill went through her body. They were going to die here.
Thwump. She heard the soft sound of mortars Thwump. She looked to see the mortar team taking their positions, finding any piece of protected flat ground that they could. Their captain, as skeletal and sickly as he looked, was barking orders like a mad dog, though she could not hear what it was that he was saying. She felt the sudden peculiarity of her status. This captain was not Walinzi, not like her, but she felt as if he belonged to some higher class of warrior. It felt strange to think that she was somehow more well trained. She had dined with the Emperor. She had killed a Shah. But this mortar team and their captain, this battlefield was their world, and they knew it better than she did.
"You" he pointed at her with a knuckly finger. "Get the fuck out! Get back!" She didn't argue. She waited for the mortars to fire, and then she ran.
Once out of her ditch, she was much more aware of all the gunfire and where it came from. When the Spanish opened fire with their deck guns, she felt their report reverberate in her chest. Any moment, a stray shot could kill her. She counted to herself as she ran in an effort to maintain her focus, and she was surprised to find it had only taken her twenty two seconds to make it to the next set of buildings. It had felt like ten minutes.
"I'm going to die here." she heard a man rambling. She looked down and saw him. His shoulder had been liquified, only strands of red and pink holding his arm to his body. Blood soaked his shirt, and his skin, and it coagulated in his hair. She realized that he was telling the truth. "What a waste."
"You..." she tried to think of something to say, but this was new to her. "Your country will remember your sacrifice."
He took a long, rattling breath. "Fuck... that." he struggled. He tried to say something else, but the words wouldn't come out. Leyla left him there.
From inside the city, something big exploded. At first, she thought it was the bombs. She looked toward the canal and realized that all of the buildings near it were still intact. Was that Spanish ordinance? It happened again. It was coming from the canal. She held her breath.
A third boom. This one came with a cheer. An Ethiopian cheer. She understood. The Aksum had entered the battle. She wondered if its guns could even reach the Spanish ships. Besides that, it was hardly armed. It had traveled with very little ammunition so that it could carry the explosives that lined the inside of its hull. How many times would it fire? She heard a second salvo.
She heard African mortars and the Aksum. She could hardly hear the Spanish response. For a moment, she thought that maybe they had a chance. Maybe. If they turned the Spanish back here, what a story that would be. A golden page for the history books. Her hope was brief, and it was shattered when Spanish firepower sent hunks of concrete tearing from a building nearby. She ducked her head and prayed.
The mutter of a truck engine made her look up. More men on their way to the fight. Did they think they could repel battleships with automobiles? A turret gunner stood in the back, swaying with the motion of the truck. His hands were wrapped tight around the handles of a long barreled fifty cal. He was stoic. Tense. How many shots would he get out before he died? Would he kill before he was killed?
Leyla took a deep breath, harshened by the petroleum and gunpowder fog. She ran further into the war-marked city. There was, in ditches and foxholes, the mingling bodies of Ethiopians and Egyptians. In places, the ground was slicked with blood. She could smell it, like rot and metal. She needed to link up with Elias, and with the rest of the Walinzi. They would be near the canal. She turned toward it, and toward the sound ofthe Aksum opening her guns.
The Africans were retreating. The sound of small arms fire was petering out. They were rushing the wounded back. Men with less severe injuries limped on their own, or were supported by others. Was this a rout? The subtleties of success and failure blurred in battle. She saw men taking up new positions, but maybe that happened in retreats too? She turned a corner, cautious, expecting to find Spanish soldiers on the ground around the corner. Instead, a hollow thwump. Mortars. Their captain was pointing at a gap in the cityscape, where the hazy steel hulk of a Spanish ship was visible on the murky green sea. She saw a flash of fire come from its deck, followed by the delayed sound of exploding munition in the city. It was like watching lightning and waiting for the thunder.
"Agent Masri" she heard her name shouted. It was faint, but familiarity cut through the gunfire. She turned and seen Elias beckoning for her. He was alive. Thank god for that. Her mind snapped back toward their mission. She sprinted across the road.
"We are ready here." he said, glancing to a six story tenement on the cusp of the canal. "We need to move some of these teams. Hard to tell what will happen here. You know how it works. We want safety on the battlefield."
She nodded. "What do you want me to do?" she asked.
"Keep them from driving through here." he responded, pointing south down the road. "Don't let them argue. You're Walinzi, remind them." He clasped her on the shoulder. "Lets just get this done so we can move on to the next."
She nodded. Focus burned through the chaos. She jogged across the plaza, cutting a line through the smouldering asphalt and stone tiles. The battle was far away, the pounding gunfire and sharp rifle reports on the other side of an invisible wall in her mind. She focused on an armored car. The gunner didn't seem to notice her. He was staring into the distance, his eyes obscured by sunglasses. She thought she saw a cigarette hanging from his mouth, but when she came closer she noticed that it was a stick that he had pulled from a tree. She held her hand out, palm forward and facing the truck. It stopped. The driver clamored out.
"We need to move here, woman." he grouched. "We're going to extract the Aksum's crew."
"This plaza is blocked. She responded calmly. "Walinzi business. You will have to find another route."
"Walinzi..." he muttered. She could see him thinking. She could feel the tension.
He nodded and climbed in the car. As they began to pull away, the gunner looked down at her. He pulled the stick from his mouth and saluted her with it.
"Come now." she heard Elias' voice behind her. "We need to take cover. It's going to happen at any moment now."
The found a spot to hide behind a stone-brick dividing wall. Elias pulled a cigarette from his pocket and offered it to her. She shook her head. He lit it and tucked it into his lips.
"Is your gun loaded?" he asked. She unholstered it and replaced the clip. A Spanish shell whistled through the air before it struck something that Leyla could not see. She watched Elias. He was focused on tenement. His cigarette flickered. Leyla marked the passing of time with each flicker. One. Two. Three. Four.
There was an sudden clap. Several explosions, adding together to create a larger explosion. It felt like the air was being sucked out of her lungs. Dust cascaded from the bottom floors. Small jets of debris shot from the windows. The bottom stories gave in. She could hear the snapping of steel and cracking of cement as it began to fall. Another set of explosions started, small and scattered like the popping on loose-firing ammunition. It was falling to its side. It was falling into the canal.
Elias was grinning. "And..."
Another implosion sounded off. That one surprised her. She knew it had been the plan all along, but the Spanish were moving quicker than she had expected them to. She had thought that they had failed to get a team to the other side. They watched as the second building tumbled into the river. Rubble struck the water with heavy splashes.
"And now we wait for the next set." Elias said.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Through his robes, Yaqob gently rubbed the webbing scar on his chest. It was only a dull ache, but it reminded him of worse pains he had felt. He could see the city outside the painted arch of the turret window. It was calm, palm fronds flitting in the breeze above the thin-spread capital. He rarely came here, to this corner of the palace. He was drawn here now because it faced the northeast, toward the coast of Eritrea where the Spaniards would launch their attack. How long would it be? Months? Weeks? They had never been tested like this before, not here. Not, at least, since Adwa. That had happened in a different century. In many ways, a different Ethiopia. How would it play out this time? Yaqob had little hope that it would end well this time.
The turret-room was small. Dark wood paneling covered the walls, and a darker wood covered the floors. A mahogany end-table stood next to a faded leopard print canvas chair, completing the room's sparse furnishing. Above that hung a traditional painting of a saint done colorfully on animal hide. And then there was Hassan. He stood motionless in the corner, Yaqob's patient General and loyal friend.
"Do you think we can keep them in the Red Sea?" Yaqob asked. He knew the answer, but he hoped for the military brilliance his General had shown in Katanga with the stroke of a hand.
"No." Hassan answered bluntly. There was a caution in his voice, Yaqob noted. Not the caution of a supplicant who didn't know how to talk to an Emperor. No. This was the sound of a man who knew how to choose his words, and knew that obvious confidence often sounded like disrespect. Whether he wanted to be or not, Hassan was a politician. He continued. "I propose to move our navy into the Mandeb Straight. We might catch them being lazy, and they might not move any further than that. That is the only naval strategy we have right now. They know they can do whatever they want. If they decide that taking control of the southern coast simply isn't worth the expense of pushing through the Mandeb, we might be able to keep some ports open. That is my advise, my Emperor."
"They will push through." Yaqob said. "They fear China. Open ports on the eastern coast would threaten them." A part of Yaqob doubted this. African foreign policy had constructed on top of an assurance that China would intervene. But what if it didn't? African politics had adopted the old European desperation for alliance. But what of China? Yaqob had lived there. They had let him exist in exile there during the war that overthrew his brother, but they had not intervened any more directly than that. And Spain? The thought occurred that Sotelo wanted to face China. It would be an enormous gamble for them, but the reward was extreme power."
Hassan was silent for a moment. "That is most likely true." he said, accepting the thought that Yaqob inwardly questioned. "We should move forward under the assumption that we will not have access to the sea."
Yaqob felt his chest throb again. It was an assumption they should make. He knew this. Why did he never hear hope? "We should discuss evacuations then."
"I'm not leaving." Hassan said. "With respect, the battlefield is where I belong. We can't take them down on the sea, but I know I can destroy them on the land. Africa is vast. This land is rough. And... our people do not want them here."
That much was true. His people had little faith in their government, but they had no faith in Europe. Africa still remembered her colonial past, and Ethiopian pride was centered on how they had avoided European hegemony. That same pride had destroyed Sahle. If the Spanish were not cautious, it would destroy them.
"Azima wants the royal family to evacuate." Yaqob said. She was worried about Tewodros most of all, but she wanted them all to go. Yaqob was torn. Would he go back to China defeated? He was no soldier, of course. There was no use for him here. But leaving felt wrong. It felt like abandonment. Taytu had offer to stay behind, to take charge of the guerrilla government while Yaqob rallied for communist support. There was some sense there. Yaqob was known in China, and a living Emperor could be a potent symbol. He knew that she had other intentions, however. She wanted to spite Hassan. Would she work with him? They were repelled by each other. Perhaps he could find somebody else to rule in his stead. Even Hassan himself...
"We should make preparations then." Hassan said. "Before we get news from the Suez. A flight would be best, through Persia to Beijing."
"If I go, could you govern?" Yaqob asked. He turned around to see his General. Hassan looked like he was choking back the honor. It seemed strange, he had never been the humble sort, but Yaqob could tell he was struggling with the thought. "I could, your Imperial Majesty." he said. "But I can't recommend you to leave."
Had he wanted to flee so much that he had been blind to what it meant? His scar ached. "I think I would be more useful in China than I would be on the battlefield." he explained.
"Yes." Hassan replied. "I agree. You aren't a soldier, but you are a symbol."
Yaqob nodded. He understood this. He had thought about it. What did it look like when the Emperor ran?
"I will think about it." the Emperor responded.
Hassan nodded and left Yaqob to his thoughts.
This thing felt like a march into fate. He did not see any options. This would take place, and he would be caught in the middle of it. He thought back to his time in China, and to his military training there. He knew then that he was not made for war. The immediacy, the snap decisions, they did not come to him. He was a thinker, not a soldier. What use would he be? A symbol. That was it. It was imperative for him to stay for no other reason but that they needed his presence. Not for his skill, but just so nobody accused him of running. He shook his head and left the room.
The halls of the palace were decorated with the artifacts and baubles that he loved to collect. They were items of art, and of history. They were swords and shields, statues and idols, paintings and icons. Most were from Africa or China. The rest were from across the world, spanning history as well as geography. To be surrounded by humanity's history was to be submersed in the past itself. When he saw a painting, he wondered about the world that had raised its artist. What had life been like for the man who crafted the early Aksumite Amphora that stood guard in the hall near the door to the turret room? He strolled, moving leisurely through the hall and brushing the artifacts with his hands. He felt the rough chainmail of an old Byzantine hauberk, and the smooth porcelain of Chinese china. How long would this last? Once the Spanish landed, it was inevitable that they would march south and take the capital. They were going to take everything from him. Most likely, his life as well. His collection, and his life.
Despair was the ache in his chest. It felt heavy there. The decor of these halls only reminded him of the flow of history. The same flow he was caught in. He felt like laying down. He passed the war masks, and the mummified cat that stood guard near the phone. When he reached the next room, he was surprised to find he had company.
The priest was an older man, dressed in glittering red cloth over simple white, and a cloth wrap on top of his head. His beard was long and grey, and he had a face that was soft and gentle. One of Yaqob's guards stood watch in the room, and he did not look bothered by the guest. Yaqob wondered. Was he scheduled to meet this man?
"Your Imperial Majesty." he bowed, "I am sorry to come unannounced." He paused, and there was realization in his eyes. "They told me they were going to fetch you."
Yaqob smiled. "I am here." he said. "Sit down."
The old man bowed and found his seat.
"May I ask who it is that you are?" Yaqob inquired, sitting across the table from his guest.
"Zerihun Biruk" he answered politely. Yaqob's eyes wandered to the thick silver cross that hung across his chest. It was geometric - a neat fractal of diamond-shapes branching from themselves. And Ethiopian cross. "I have traveled from Aksum to speak to you."
The formality of the old priest set Yaqob's mind along the ancient processes of conversation. Niceties ruled here, turning the choice of words and actions into a game of chess. Each action had set rules, and each sentence carried centuries of tradition. It cleared his mind, and set it to the task at hand. His next move became clear.
"Would you like coffee?"
The old man nodded. Yaqob snapped his fingers and listened as the guard left the room. This was a delicate moment. If this man was an assassins, this was his chance. Yaqob watched him carefully, looking for any twitch that told of an attack. The old man sat still, wrapped in his own robes. No motion.
"How is it in the north?" Yaqob asked.
Zerihun's smile went flat. There was a flicker of sadness in his expression. "Our people worry, oh my Emperor. I do not leave my place in this world often, but I have seen it. Old men bury their wealth and flee to the south with their wives and daughters. Young men buy guns and machetes and boast about how many Europeans they will slay."
The guard returned to his post. That was a relief. The time had past, and this priest was no assassin.
"What do you come south for, my friend?" Yaqob asked.
"I will tell you." the priest answered. "After we have coffee."
Yaqob nodded. "How have you found the capital?" he asked.
"This is a big place." The priest boasted. "I have not left the country, but could a bigger city be dreamed of? When I was growing up, my people lived in a village. I think one of your apartment housings could have held ten tribes the size of mine." he smiled, revealing crooked white teeth.
"We have grown." Yaqob said politely. Addis Ababa was not a large city by the standards he had seen while traveling the world. It sprawled further than the old towns of Europe, but it was a shadow of the immensity that was Beijing. To a priest from the highlands, however... it was easy for Yaqob to forget how simple his people could be, and how truly mammoth his African Empire looked from their perspective.
A cook wheeled in a cart dressed with everything that would be needed for the coffee ceremony. There were porcelain cups painted with the lion of Judah, and a clay coffee pot shaped like an amphorae. A bowl of green coffee beans sat on the edge of the cart, and on the other end was a kerosene-powered stove. Wordless, the cook began to roast the beans in a steel pan.
"I had my first coffee with my grandmother." the priest said. "In nineteen twenty nine." he began to laugh. "That sounds so long ago! It really isn't, but it sounds like a lot of time!"
Yaqob grinned. The priest's laugh was warm and alive. His joy was contagious. For a moment, Yaqob forgot that there was a war.
The smell of the roasting coffee beans began to fill the room. It was strong and thick, more like a rich meal than a drink. There was so much good about this moment that Yaqob wondered what could be solved by bringing his enemies, and his friends, to experience the coffee ceremony with this priest. Was Sotelo as evil as they said, that he would deny a moment like this one and continue with his war?
Such naive thoughts. This was too horrible of a world for that sort of bucolic simplicity. He felt his old wound tinge numb, but he ignored it.
The cook grabbed the pan full of sizzling coffee beans from the stove and held it in front of them. The priest inhaled deeply and smiled. "Those are good beans that you have, my Emperor." he said. "Very excellent."
Yaqob followed, taking a deep whiff. It was a heavy smell - earthy. It smelled like morning in a village, or breakfast with his father in Dessie, looking out toward the brown-stone rises of the mountains and the rich blue sky above them. He nodded. "That is very good." he agreed. "Very good."
"I remember when you were born." the priest said. "I was not a young man. No. I was younger, but I was not a young man. I was an exorcist, and I lived in Adwa. There were a lot of foul things... demons created by the battle there, and buda. That was a strange time. Some of my teachers thought that the Germans were buda, and they would say 'See how the Germans make factories with the men who work with metal? We know the metal workers are buda. Who else would work with them like the Germans do?' "
The smell of coffee mixed with the thick floral tones of incense as the cook began to light sticks of it. The priest began to laugh his cheerful laugh. "I don't know about any of that, now. But there were evil things in the north back then. I think we fought them off, but now they are coming back again."
The cook served the coffee. Yaqob watched as the priest took a sip and closed his eyes. "This is very good. Very good." He gestured his approval.
"They are coming back." Yaqob felt the hot drink with his lip and supped carefully. "The Spanish, you mean."
The priest nodded. "That is what I have came down here to say. I am not an exorcist anymore. Oh no. I am the guardian of the true tabot, the holy thing that my life is devoted to."
Yaqob paused. "You are the guardian of the Ark of the Covenant?" he asked. "I thought you were committed never to leave its temple?"
"This is true. But this is a special circumstance." the priest said. The sun had was now shining through the window and casting yellow light across the table. In it, Yaqob could see incense smoke. "Aksum will fall to the Spanish. We cannot lose the Ark."
"We will protect our relics." Yaqob assured. "If you want, we could have it flown to China."
"No." The priest interrupted. His voice was panicked and abrupt. Yaqob stopped. What was happening here.
"The true tabot, it has a strength we cannot let the evil ones have. I am told that Emperor Menelik had plans to hide it if the Italians had succeeded. There are safe places here, but they are in this country."
"The evil ones." Yaqob repeated. "China has ever been our friend and ally."
"They are foreign ones." the priest argued. He was afraid now - Yaqob could see how worried he looked at the idea that China might hide the ark. "They do not know it. If you do not know it, you do not know the danger. If there is evil in China, they could not see it because they do not believe."
"I don't understand..."
"We wish for your cooperation. If you do not understand, we can fight the danger, but we need your help. There is more to the tabot. To the law. Ahh. Yes. It has qualities you cannot understand unless you have known it. I have known it and I love it."
"We will help." Yaqob said cautiously. "As much as we can. My soldiers will be needed for soldiering. For the war. I cannot promise anything exact, only that we will try."
"Do more than try." the priest replied. "Succeed or we will all suffer.
- Last Seen: 3 yrs ago
- Joined: 12 yrs ago
- Posts: 4839 (1.07 / day)
- VMs: 2
-
Username history
- Vilageidiotx 12 yrs ago
-
Latest 10 profile visitors:
-
Most recent →
Wilted Rose
Status
Recent Statuses
8 yrs ago
Current
I RP for the ladies
4
likes
8 yrs ago
#Diapergate #Hugs2018
2
likes
9 yrs ago
I fucking love catfishing
2
likes
9 yrs ago
Every time I insult a certain coworker, i'll take money from their jar. Saving for beer would never be easier!
4
likes
9 yrs ago
The Jungle Book is good.
3
likes
Bio
Most Recent Posts
"Alsum's inner goddess giggled when the hydraulic poundin' machine started pumping."
And than somehow manage to publish that fanfic and get famous enough to follow it up with a guide on how to write.
Twilight is the exception. Nobody reads books unless they have enough sexy dudes in them for teenage girls to mind-ogle.
Jeddaven said
What is a "buh-ukh"?
Dogpatch
"It is vital to this mission that I concentrate." he said, flicking switches and adjusting the cockpit. "I will be blocking out your sounds. Do not compete for my attention."
He flicked another switch and a smooth blue-green field of energy filled the windows. Their driver was a hulk of a man despite his Asian features. His arms, bared by his corrugate armor-grade plastic cuirass, were bulging to a degree that suggested genetic alteration. They were covered in tattoos. There were dragons, and symbols from the ancient languages of Asia. There were birds, there were daggers. There was a full-colored geisha on one shoulder, her kimono peeled to the waste and her breasts obscured by a unfolded fan. On the other shoulder, there was what looked like the silhouette of a gear tucked behind a banana. Laz had seen the symbol before, but he could not place it. The tattooed man's hair was long and braided so completely that it looked like dread locks.
"He's IU." Laz's nervous companion said. He nodded so rapidly when he talked that looked spastic. "Real IU. Yes. Not the bureaucracy guys. No. From space. From space. From a citadel. Yes."
"A citadel" Laz said. His mouth was dry. He hadn't expected to be taken by land, but the pirates insisted that this was less conspicuous. The attack on the IUSS had been an attack on an IU ship. It was news. The IU would be paying attention to Kartago now. They could keep a close eye on what moved through their spaceports and airports, but they had no eyes in the jungle.
"I bet you on Frankie Pallo's grave." the other prisoner nodded. "I bet you on Mozarts grave. I bet you on Elvis's grave. He is a citadel man. He escaped from a citadel. Yes."
"If you ran from a citadel..." Laz said. "This is the place you would go."
"Yes. Yes. I bet on Tupac's grave. Yes."
Stories about the Citadels belonged, as far a Laz new, in the realm of conspiracy theories and fiction. It was known there were massive battleships patrolling the edge of the system, but so little was known about them that their mystery bred wild stories. Popular knowledge claimed they were warrior cults, the children of the crew trained from birth so that they could replace their parents. Each citadel had its own identity. Some, it was said, built themselves around the image of the chivalric knight's of history. Others the Spartans, or the bushido Samurai. And then there were those who drew from fiction. Soldiers who saw themselves as demons, or as the Einherjar of Nordic myth. There were elf warriors from Tolkien's fantasy and Cazadors from the Precipice cycle. The most outlandish Laz ever heard was of a citadel where everyone dyed their skin green.
"Mhm..." Laz heard the other man still babbling. "...Captain Cornhole's grave."
They began to move, following the craft in front of them. Laz felt the vibration of the repulsors through the cushions. He could hear them too. Hovercars in the city rode smooth, and they hardly made a sound. This thing sputtered and spat. When it had started, Laz thought there was something wrong. He suspected that he was right. No machine in perfect working order should sound like this did. When they moved, it coughed. And when they began to move over the rough surfaces of the Brahman jungle, he felt it.
"Where did they pick you up? Mhm?" the other prisoner asked. He stuck his hand out awkwardly. "Kessler Reyes. Friends call me Kess."
Laz shook his hand. "Lazarus Paladino. Laz. And I was on the Aro."
"Aro." Kess whislted. "Yes. IU ship that one. You are IU?"
"Yes. Airguard. I got transferred to Spaceguard eight months ago."
"Ooh, poor guy you. Poor guy. You people had to kill the monster."
"Yes." Laz looked at him. "You didn't have to do anything?"
"No." he shook his head. "No no. I'm a Bucket Boy, guy. I didn't have to do anything."
"The Bucket. The satellite?" Laz said. "I haven't met one of you. I thought you guys never left?"
"Some do." he replied. "I had to. It wasn't my type of life. I like gravity. I mean, I didn't like gravity when I first got it. The heavy part. Up there, we call the outside world 'Gravity.' I like the stuff to do, and all the people you get to see. It was hard having weight at first. We take the shots, we have the bodies to survive it, but it is hard to get used to."
They hit a bump. Laz umphed. "You are all like monks up there, right? Living for the music..."
"No no." Kess replied. "There is not as much work as you'd think. We clean disks. Mix tracks. The rest of the time was like a slow party." he paused for a moment. "And we had girls up there, you know. We did. We do. We had sex."
"I know." Laz said. They hit a bump.
"We used to call it 'The Satellite of Love' " Kess snorted. Laz forced a grin.
"Did you listen?" Kess asked.
"Yes. Of course. I think most people do."
"The sacred tunes of old earth." Kess inhaled. "I swear on Louis Armstrong's grave, we did the most important work in the universe."
"Do you miss it?" Laz asked.
"Yes." Kess nodded. "Yes. It was better than being a prisoner. Yes. I shouldn't have left."
The convoy moved into the wild. Here, their Tkrai could guide them over the thick trunks that webbed across the understory of jungle. He could see glimpses of them, skipping across the canopy as elegantly as men walked on the ground. This place was not like the Mango groves that grew outside of Nai Kolkata. The plantlife here could be strong in ways that were almost geological. The largest were the bulbous fungi growths. They looked like exaggerated coral, branching out so far and growing so tall that one could dominate entire square kilometers of jungle. They were white, and beige, and pink and blue. Some arms reached into the ground, and they began to knitted together near the core so that they created a wicker wall around their main trunk. Others were stubby and round, but they were as thick as rock formations. In their centers, their flesh was long dead and petrified.
The layers of jungle intertwined and wove together, contrasting vegetation twisting and melding with one another. There were leaves and vines and puffy growths, and though their colors varied the gestalt seemed to vary between turquoise and lilac. Patches of phosphorescence grew on fungal trunks and twinkled in the shadows. Laz could still feel the life here. It was a force on its own, and it felt heavy. It felt dangerous.
Most of the hovercars were armed. Some had turrets mounted on top of the crude frames outlining their bodies. Others had sonic-dishes. There was a mix of models in the convoy, some old enough that they could have been manufactured on earth. They looked like platforms with makeshift cabins constructed on top, and they had been dented and dinged from years of use. Laz recognized a several of the models. Most of them weren't made for combat. There were joyriders, and delivery skiffs and food rafts, and they all had been converted by the pirates.
Laz watched the landscape go by. He watched the Tkrai nervously. They were armed. It was not just the ankle and wrist mounted medieval weapons that he had seen them with before. Some of them had railguns strapped to their backs. Others had rocket launchers and plasma throwers. It was strange, seeing armed Tkrai. Laz wondered where they had got their weapons. Was Kartago arming the Tkrai? The IU would surely know about that. What did it mean? The fear caught up with him. He was a prisoner. How did they treat their captives? He was being shanghaied, forced into their military. Would he get away? Would he escape? It felt like his stomach was trying to come up through his neck. This was no use. He had to calm down. He had to think.
Eury. Where was she? He had vowed to make that his singular mission here. He would find this out. Everything else was secondary.
Laz heard a familiar sound. It was like the air near his ears had taken a massive gulp. An ultrasonic cannon. He looked behind and saw the bowls swivel on their mounts. Another pulse. He was prepared for this one. He could see that they were tracking something through the sky, and he looked up to see what it was.
A shadow passed over, blotting out the sun like a cloud. The jungle obscured the light. Laz saw it. A black shape through gaps in the canopy. A Mayura.
"Shit, man!" Kess shouted. "What by Yeezy's grave is that?"
"Mayura." Laz mouthed. He watched it intently, looking for any sign that it would swoop, but he couldn't see it in any detail. Did they behave differently down here? Were these a different species all together?
"It can't get us through the woods. It can't." Kess chanted. His voice shook, more now than it had before.
"Yes." Laz said. He was intent on the bird. If it came down, if it could rip through the canopy, it would easily take a hovercar with it. He suddenly realized that the pirates had not sounded off against it for a few minutes, and he knew what they were doing. They had seen signs. They knew it was going to come down.
The Mayura roared. Its voice shook them and caused their sound-blocking field to flicker. Laz looked at their driver's face. He was serene. Calm. His eyes were fixed on the sky, braids hanging around his face. No movement. He looked like a predator waiting to pounce.
There was another roar, and then a whirlwind. Cracking, splintering, exploding. It all happened at once. Laz realized where they were, on a thickened branch several dozen feet from the ground. Delicately balanced and ready to fall. To one side, the jungle was in cataclysm. It was coming closer, and like a tornado it was creating a cloud of debris behind it. Instinctively, Laz prepared himself for impact. And then the volley.
It ended all at once. Not in a hail of gunfire, but rather in a sound like thunder drowned in a deep cenote. The attack ended. Roaring destruction swept out of the jungle. The Mayura had retreated. Laz realized very suddenly that his head was in his lap. He was trembling. It was one thing to fight a Mayura with your hand on the trigger. It was another to have no control.
The silence was potent. Laz looked at Kess, the Bucket Brother curled into himself in the corner of his seat. He had never seen a Mayura before. As far as Laz could tell, he hadn't been able to see it this time either. Laz never did. Laz looked at the pilot. He sat in the same position he had been in when the attack started. He had not moved. Laz believed what Kess had said before. This man had escaped from a Citadel. He was exactly what Laz expected a Citadel warrior to look like.
They continued through the jungle quietly. As evening came, the glow of Brahmapura brightened the northern sky like a second sun. When they were high enough in the canopy of the forest, Laz could see it poking over the wilderness. Laz was unsure what they would do that night, but that question answered itself. They came over a rise created by a wall of solid rock following the landscape like a titanic snake. Once over its spine, he saw it. A white tower stood above the jungle. Parts of it were in disrepair, an the plant-life within were overspilling their bounds. It was a skyscrape that opened to the world, its structure like the tapering mouths of conch-shells stacked one on top of the other so that each level had one side entirely in the open air. Laz recognized what he was looking at instantly. It was a sanctuary to the people of the Edenic cult. An Edenite spiritual site. And it had been abandoned.
The caravan wormed down from the arms of the forest, following branches that looked as if they had been trained to reach down like some sort of biological infrastructure. They were soon in a valley cut by a small stream. Water trickled down from the walls, cutting rivulets across the land. Some of them flowed with liquids other than water. They carried instead the sweat and waste of the jungle's fungal colonies. In the rising dominance of Brahmapura's pink light, those ones caught a rainbow sheen and glittered.
As the cliffs rose, Laz saw that something geometric about the rock. He struggled to focus in the dark. As he made out where lines connected and what shapes they formed, he held his breath. There were forms carve out of the stone. They were deliberate, and they were not human. Standing dozens of feet tall and popping from the rock in complex detail, there were several Tkrai forms. They all held up a single pelt from some creature Laz could not identify. The monument, it seemed, was honoring a successful hunt. He reached over to show it to Kess, but the Bucket Brother was asleep. He left him be.
The Edenite tower came into view when they turned a corner. It was framed by the semi-circle rise of Brahmapura peaking over the horizon and dominating the night sky. The caravan began to slow, and he realized that this is where they were stopping for the night.
"It is vital to this mission that I concentrate." he said, flicking switches and adjusting the cockpit. "I will be blocking out your sounds. Do not compete for my attention."
He flicked another switch and a smooth blue-green field of energy filled the windows. Their driver was a hulk of a man despite his Asian features. His arms, bared by his corrugate armor-grade plastic cuirass, were bulging to a degree that suggested genetic alteration. They were covered in tattoos. There were dragons, and symbols from the ancient languages of Asia. There were birds, there were daggers. There was a full-colored geisha on one shoulder, her kimono peeled to the waste and her breasts obscured by a unfolded fan. On the other shoulder, there was what looked like the silhouette of a gear tucked behind a banana. Laz had seen the symbol before, but he could not place it. The tattooed man's hair was long and braided so completely that it looked like dread locks.
"He's IU." Laz's nervous companion said. He nodded so rapidly when he talked that looked spastic. "Real IU. Yes. Not the bureaucracy guys. No. From space. From space. From a citadel. Yes."
"A citadel" Laz said. His mouth was dry. He hadn't expected to be taken by land, but the pirates insisted that this was less conspicuous. The attack on the IUSS had been an attack on an IU ship. It was news. The IU would be paying attention to Kartago now. They could keep a close eye on what moved through their spaceports and airports, but they had no eyes in the jungle.
"I bet you on Frankie Pallo's grave." the other prisoner nodded. "I bet you on Mozarts grave. I bet you on Elvis's grave. He is a citadel man. He escaped from a citadel. Yes."
"If you ran from a citadel..." Laz said. "This is the place you would go."
"Yes. Yes. I bet on Tupac's grave. Yes."
Stories about the Citadels belonged, as far a Laz new, in the realm of conspiracy theories and fiction. It was known there were massive battleships patrolling the edge of the system, but so little was known about them that their mystery bred wild stories. Popular knowledge claimed they were warrior cults, the children of the crew trained from birth so that they could replace their parents. Each citadel had its own identity. Some, it was said, built themselves around the image of the chivalric knight's of history. Others the Spartans, or the bushido Samurai. And then there were those who drew from fiction. Soldiers who saw themselves as demons, or as the Einherjar of Nordic myth. There were elf warriors from Tolkien's fantasy and Cazadors from the Precipice cycle. The most outlandish Laz ever heard was of a citadel where everyone dyed their skin green.
"Mhm..." Laz heard the other man still babbling. "...Captain Cornhole's grave."
They began to move, following the craft in front of them. Laz felt the vibration of the repulsors through the cushions. He could hear them too. Hovercars in the city rode smooth, and they hardly made a sound. This thing sputtered and spat. When it had started, Laz thought there was something wrong. He suspected that he was right. No machine in perfect working order should sound like this did. When they moved, it coughed. And when they began to move over the rough surfaces of the Brahman jungle, he felt it.
"Where did they pick you up? Mhm?" the other prisoner asked. He stuck his hand out awkwardly. "Kessler Reyes. Friends call me Kess."
Laz shook his hand. "Lazarus Paladino. Laz. And I was on the Aro."
"Aro." Kess whislted. "Yes. IU ship that one. You are IU?"
"Yes. Airguard. I got transferred to Spaceguard eight months ago."
"Ooh, poor guy you. Poor guy. You people had to kill the monster."
"Yes." Laz looked at him. "You didn't have to do anything?"
"No." he shook his head. "No no. I'm a Bucket Boy, guy. I didn't have to do anything."
"The Bucket. The satellite?" Laz said. "I haven't met one of you. I thought you guys never left?"
"Some do." he replied. "I had to. It wasn't my type of life. I like gravity. I mean, I didn't like gravity when I first got it. The heavy part. Up there, we call the outside world 'Gravity.' I like the stuff to do, and all the people you get to see. It was hard having weight at first. We take the shots, we have the bodies to survive it, but it is hard to get used to."
They hit a bump. Laz umphed. "You are all like monks up there, right? Living for the music..."
"No no." Kess replied. "There is not as much work as you'd think. We clean disks. Mix tracks. The rest of the time was like a slow party." he paused for a moment. "And we had girls up there, you know. We did. We do. We had sex."
"I know." Laz said. They hit a bump.
"We used to call it 'The Satellite of Love' " Kess snorted. Laz forced a grin.
"Did you listen?" Kess asked.
"Yes. Of course. I think most people do."
"The sacred tunes of old earth." Kess inhaled. "I swear on Louis Armstrong's grave, we did the most important work in the universe."
"Do you miss it?" Laz asked.
"Yes." Kess nodded. "Yes. It was better than being a prisoner. Yes. I shouldn't have left."
The convoy moved into the wild. Here, their Tkrai could guide them over the thick trunks that webbed across the understory of jungle. He could see glimpses of them, skipping across the canopy as elegantly as men walked on the ground. This place was not like the Mango groves that grew outside of Nai Kolkata. The plantlife here could be strong in ways that were almost geological. The largest were the bulbous fungi growths. They looked like exaggerated coral, branching out so far and growing so tall that one could dominate entire square kilometers of jungle. They were white, and beige, and pink and blue. Some arms reached into the ground, and they began to knitted together near the core so that they created a wicker wall around their main trunk. Others were stubby and round, but they were as thick as rock formations. In their centers, their flesh was long dead and petrified.
The layers of jungle intertwined and wove together, contrasting vegetation twisting and melding with one another. There were leaves and vines and puffy growths, and though their colors varied the gestalt seemed to vary between turquoise and lilac. Patches of phosphorescence grew on fungal trunks and twinkled in the shadows. Laz could still feel the life here. It was a force on its own, and it felt heavy. It felt dangerous.
Most of the hovercars were armed. Some had turrets mounted on top of the crude frames outlining their bodies. Others had sonic-dishes. There was a mix of models in the convoy, some old enough that they could have been manufactured on earth. They looked like platforms with makeshift cabins constructed on top, and they had been dented and dinged from years of use. Laz recognized a several of the models. Most of them weren't made for combat. There were joyriders, and delivery skiffs and food rafts, and they all had been converted by the pirates.
Laz watched the landscape go by. He watched the Tkrai nervously. They were armed. It was not just the ankle and wrist mounted medieval weapons that he had seen them with before. Some of them had railguns strapped to their backs. Others had rocket launchers and plasma throwers. It was strange, seeing armed Tkrai. Laz wondered where they had got their weapons. Was Kartago arming the Tkrai? The IU would surely know about that. What did it mean? The fear caught up with him. He was a prisoner. How did they treat their captives? He was being shanghaied, forced into their military. Would he get away? Would he escape? It felt like his stomach was trying to come up through his neck. This was no use. He had to calm down. He had to think.
Eury. Where was she? He had vowed to make that his singular mission here. He would find this out. Everything else was secondary.
Laz heard a familiar sound. It was like the air near his ears had taken a massive gulp. An ultrasonic cannon. He looked behind and saw the bowls swivel on their mounts. Another pulse. He was prepared for this one. He could see that they were tracking something through the sky, and he looked up to see what it was.
A shadow passed over, blotting out the sun like a cloud. The jungle obscured the light. Laz saw it. A black shape through gaps in the canopy. A Mayura.
"Shit, man!" Kess shouted. "What by Yeezy's grave is that?"
"Mayura." Laz mouthed. He watched it intently, looking for any sign that it would swoop, but he couldn't see it in any detail. Did they behave differently down here? Were these a different species all together?
"It can't get us through the woods. It can't." Kess chanted. His voice shook, more now than it had before.
"Yes." Laz said. He was intent on the bird. If it came down, if it could rip through the canopy, it would easily take a hovercar with it. He suddenly realized that the pirates had not sounded off against it for a few minutes, and he knew what they were doing. They had seen signs. They knew it was going to come down.
The Mayura roared. Its voice shook them and caused their sound-blocking field to flicker. Laz looked at their driver's face. He was serene. Calm. His eyes were fixed on the sky, braids hanging around his face. No movement. He looked like a predator waiting to pounce.
There was another roar, and then a whirlwind. Cracking, splintering, exploding. It all happened at once. Laz realized where they were, on a thickened branch several dozen feet from the ground. Delicately balanced and ready to fall. To one side, the jungle was in cataclysm. It was coming closer, and like a tornado it was creating a cloud of debris behind it. Instinctively, Laz prepared himself for impact. And then the volley.
It ended all at once. Not in a hail of gunfire, but rather in a sound like thunder drowned in a deep cenote. The attack ended. Roaring destruction swept out of the jungle. The Mayura had retreated. Laz realized very suddenly that his head was in his lap. He was trembling. It was one thing to fight a Mayura with your hand on the trigger. It was another to have no control.
The silence was potent. Laz looked at Kess, the Bucket Brother curled into himself in the corner of his seat. He had never seen a Mayura before. As far as Laz could tell, he hadn't been able to see it this time either. Laz never did. Laz looked at the pilot. He sat in the same position he had been in when the attack started. He had not moved. Laz believed what Kess had said before. This man had escaped from a Citadel. He was exactly what Laz expected a Citadel warrior to look like.
They continued through the jungle quietly. As evening came, the glow of Brahmapura brightened the northern sky like a second sun. When they were high enough in the canopy of the forest, Laz could see it poking over the wilderness. Laz was unsure what they would do that night, but that question answered itself. They came over a rise created by a wall of solid rock following the landscape like a titanic snake. Once over its spine, he saw it. A white tower stood above the jungle. Parts of it were in disrepair, an the plant-life within were overspilling their bounds. It was a skyscrape that opened to the world, its structure like the tapering mouths of conch-shells stacked one on top of the other so that each level had one side entirely in the open air. Laz recognized what he was looking at instantly. It was a sanctuary to the people of the Edenic cult. An Edenite spiritual site. And it had been abandoned.
The caravan wormed down from the arms of the forest, following branches that looked as if they had been trained to reach down like some sort of biological infrastructure. They were soon in a valley cut by a small stream. Water trickled down from the walls, cutting rivulets across the land. Some of them flowed with liquids other than water. They carried instead the sweat and waste of the jungle's fungal colonies. In the rising dominance of Brahmapura's pink light, those ones caught a rainbow sheen and glittered.
As the cliffs rose, Laz saw that something geometric about the rock. He struggled to focus in the dark. As he made out where lines connected and what shapes they formed, he held his breath. There were forms carve out of the stone. They were deliberate, and they were not human. Standing dozens of feet tall and popping from the rock in complex detail, there were several Tkrai forms. They all held up a single pelt from some creature Laz could not identify. The monument, it seemed, was honoring a successful hunt. He reached over to show it to Kess, but the Bucket Brother was asleep. He left him be.
The Edenite tower came into view when they turned a corner. It was framed by the semi-circle rise of Brahmapura peaking over the horizon and dominating the night sky. The caravan began to slow, and he realized that this is where they were stopping for the night.
The 6-Hour Energy had kicked in and the Awesomesauce was pulsing through him. Alsum's mind had reached peak consciousness. He hid seeking eyes behind a pair of custom-designed Ray-Bans. He saw the coach - an unusually shaped zombie of a man who held nearly all of his body-fat on his stomach. The skin in his arms stretched tightly around his muscles. When he tensed, his muscles pulled visibly under his skin. When he loosened, his muscles expanded. Sickly veins stuck out under the skin, purple and blue and bruised red, and needle scars left tracks in his skin. His legs looked too thin, and the outline of his skull was apparent, but he still wore that belly. It looked more like a tumor than blubber.
Wind whispered through the corn. The fields stretched on for miles, growing against the judgement of the dry Oklahoma soil. There was something dark in those fields. His sect had been assigned here for that reason. Something old, and something hateful. It used bland simplicity of this land to cover itself. Would it ever be revealed? Alsum did not know. He kept a watch on the edge, where the fields met the schoolyard. It was instinctive. Someday, he expected to catch a glimpse.
"Top'o da mwernin' to yee Ladeo." He heard the awkward strains of a familar voice. He looked to his side and saw Janeway Jugelstein, the senior member of the Irish-American club. She had been a member since she entered high school four years ago, and she might have been president if it weren't for her inability to stay awake during their meetings. She had the same problem with classes as well. According to here, she was diagnosed narcoleptic, but in his subtleties of her behavior and scent Alsum could tell otherwise. Janeway's problem was that she had been babied sense she was a child, and that she had no true understanding of what effort was. It was because of the arm she had been robbed of at birth.
That was the other point of contention in Miss Jugelstein's story. She claimed to have been born without a left arm, and that she had been robbed of it by nature. A congenital defect. Alsum suspected otherwise. There were markers that suggested a hatchet job on the part of the doctor who delivered her. It was peculier.
"Top of the mornin'" Alsum replied with a sharpened smile. His voice was awash in honest empathy. He put his hand on her shoulder (the good one) and took a deep breath. "Is that Corned Beef?" he asked.
Janeway squealed like a helium-breathing bobby-soxer at a personalized Elvis concert. "Yes" she said, her voice threatening to become a dog-whistle. She talked fast. "I and DeSelfown made invented it with my grandmas lye soap kit. It is a deodorant."
That was weird, but Alsum expertly feigned acceptance. He also had caught a whiff of cabbage, but suspected that it had nothing to do with the deodorant.
Janeway wandered off, leaving Alsum to think about the challenge. It was well thought out. Using one spool for all of the students was a recipe for a violent clusterfuck. Alsum accepted that it would be necessary for him to circumvent that fate. There were other problems, though. The structure was unsound. Clusters of half-hammered nails tangled together where there should have only been one. The was a suspicious lack of support beams, whereas other beams looked like they had been glued. The stones themselves were also questionable. It was early yet, and dew still slickened some of them. It looked as if they had been pulled from a creekbed, some sharper than they should be and others most likely clay. He knew that poor safety precautions had caused trouble in the past. One year, the school had chose Five-Finger-Fillet as the game. It ended when a particularly rambunctious student managed to get so excited while stabbing the knife between his fingers that he passed out and slammed his head onto the table, forcing a pencil up his nose and lobotomizing himself in the process. After that, the school banned pencils from the playground and suggested students use pens instead.
Still, Alsum was a leader. He had nothing to fear. Years of conditioning, both physical and mental, made this task a simple one for him. It was what this task meant to his persona that worried him. He knew that he should focus on guiding the game to a safe conclusion, but there were other truths that had to be considered. Where would he end up? He decided second place, or third place if his focus on safety distracted him enough. To achieve first place would be folly - that would inspire jealousy, and a jealous student body would not do.
"Ayy, principal. Safe me a spot." he shouted. "Let's get our game on!"
Wind whispered through the corn. The fields stretched on for miles, growing against the judgement of the dry Oklahoma soil. There was something dark in those fields. His sect had been assigned here for that reason. Something old, and something hateful. It used bland simplicity of this land to cover itself. Would it ever be revealed? Alsum did not know. He kept a watch on the edge, where the fields met the schoolyard. It was instinctive. Someday, he expected to catch a glimpse.
"Top'o da mwernin' to yee Ladeo." He heard the awkward strains of a familar voice. He looked to his side and saw Janeway Jugelstein, the senior member of the Irish-American club. She had been a member since she entered high school four years ago, and she might have been president if it weren't for her inability to stay awake during their meetings. She had the same problem with classes as well. According to here, she was diagnosed narcoleptic, but in his subtleties of her behavior and scent Alsum could tell otherwise. Janeway's problem was that she had been babied sense she was a child, and that she had no true understanding of what effort was. It was because of the arm she had been robbed of at birth.
That was the other point of contention in Miss Jugelstein's story. She claimed to have been born without a left arm, and that she had been robbed of it by nature. A congenital defect. Alsum suspected otherwise. There were markers that suggested a hatchet job on the part of the doctor who delivered her. It was peculier.
"Top of the mornin'" Alsum replied with a sharpened smile. His voice was awash in honest empathy. He put his hand on her shoulder (the good one) and took a deep breath. "Is that Corned Beef?" he asked.
Janeway squealed like a helium-breathing bobby-soxer at a personalized Elvis concert. "Yes" she said, her voice threatening to become a dog-whistle. She talked fast. "I and DeSelfown made invented it with my grandmas lye soap kit. It is a deodorant."
That was weird, but Alsum expertly feigned acceptance. He also had caught a whiff of cabbage, but suspected that it had nothing to do with the deodorant.
Janeway wandered off, leaving Alsum to think about the challenge. It was well thought out. Using one spool for all of the students was a recipe for a violent clusterfuck. Alsum accepted that it would be necessary for him to circumvent that fate. There were other problems, though. The structure was unsound. Clusters of half-hammered nails tangled together where there should have only been one. The was a suspicious lack of support beams, whereas other beams looked like they had been glued. The stones themselves were also questionable. It was early yet, and dew still slickened some of them. It looked as if they had been pulled from a creekbed, some sharper than they should be and others most likely clay. He knew that poor safety precautions had caused trouble in the past. One year, the school had chose Five-Finger-Fillet as the game. It ended when a particularly rambunctious student managed to get so excited while stabbing the knife between his fingers that he passed out and slammed his head onto the table, forcing a pencil up his nose and lobotomizing himself in the process. After that, the school banned pencils from the playground and suggested students use pens instead.
Still, Alsum was a leader. He had nothing to fear. Years of conditioning, both physical and mental, made this task a simple one for him. It was what this task meant to his persona that worried him. He knew that he should focus on guiding the game to a safe conclusion, but there were other truths that had to be considered. Where would he end up? He decided second place, or third place if his focus on safety distracted him enough. To achieve first place would be folly - that would inspire jealousy, and a jealous student body would not do.
"Ayy, principal. Safe me a spot." he shouted. "Let's get our game on!"
I am Marcel Payne. They call my Bronze Payne. They call me this because I wear a bronze helmet into battle, and because of the color of my skin. I am a warrior, and I am a goddamned man.
When we pillaged California's sunny coasts, I was the first off the boat. I remember roaring as I killed, and I remember seeing fear in their eyes as we drove them into the hills and looted their homes. I was there when we swarmed onto the beaches of Hawaii, where we plundered their old resorts and fueled our taste for the honest violence of the raid. When we struck Hakodate in far away Japan, in a time before we befriend the eastern world, our success was nearly immediate. The Pacific was ours. We owned it, riding on the backs of abandoned commercial liners and adapted fishing trawlers. We needed no navy. It did not take battleships to subdue the sea. It was ours.
We did not fear the land either. We brought the cattlemen of Montana into our new nation by force. I have seen the plains of Alberta, and I have taken what I could from their homeland. I even fought in Alaska. There was no glory there, but I must be honest about what I saw. In the burning tundra, in the sludge of the north, I gasped fire. I drank its ash and ate it in my food for months. And I saw it, the unholy fire. I saw it dancing in the air, and in the eyes of those children. They taught us who ruled the north. I see no shame in having been bested by them.
I have survived all of that, and I have stood amongst the leaders of Cascadia.
The smell of the fir, the spruce, and the pine filled the air around the capital. It was inescapable. This was the birthplace of Retched Bill, the greatest of their number and the man they called their leader. He was a man of few words, but when he did speak his meaning cut through a conversation like the axe he carrier strapped to his back at all times. He was a tall man, and his shoulders were as broad as a bull's. Other politicians dressed up, but Bill never did. He wore the same denim and flannel outdoorsman's clothes he had for most of his life. His hair had turned grey, as had the bushy mustache he wore on his lip, but age had not broken him.
They say that Retched Bill was most at home when he was clearing timber. There was no doubt about this. There they had gathered, the Governor-Presidents of the Cascadian nation, and the strange, delicate creature that was the ambassador to East Asia's mystical government. They had gathered in the wild outdoors, on a tarmac on the outskirts of town where a firefighting helicopter had once been stationed. Retched Bill was at work in the treeline just beyond the cement, and his axe was grinding at the wood. Chop. Chop. In the scent of an evergreen tree taking an axe, nature cleared your head. It was as refreshing as sleep. It reminded us why we went to battle wearing used air-fresheners around our necks. When a tree went down, he shouted 'timber!', and everyone watched the top of the tree do the shaking dance it did before it hit the ground. The creaking, the cracking... it was part of the potency that the evergreen symbol conveyed. It made a man proud to serve under the evergreen flag.
These politicians had not gathered to watch Retched Bill in his wilderness, though to see Bill bring down a tree was to finally understand what the emotions of the word 'Triumph' were supposed to be. They had came to watch a fight, and to discuss the political trade.
In the middle of cracked cement tarmac, where pine needles and dirt had been blown over a fading red H painted in the center, two men did the dance of the swing-saw. The Swing-Saw was a weapon of the true berserker - a thing dangerous not only to the wielder and his target, but to any who surrounded them. It was a simple weapon.. There was chain. At one end of it, two grips made from lacquered pinewood allowed the wielder to hold the weapon confidently. On the other end were two gas powered circular saws. They buzzed alive, and when they were swung the sound they left behind sounded like a monstrous bee buzzing through the air. When you heard it coming toward you, you bent back to dodge. It was part of the dance. When two men came together to show off their skills with the swing-saw, those that watched them were a part of the fight. Spectators did not stand idly. They watched the saw blades, and when it looked like the blades might cut in their direction, they made sure to get out of the way.
The warriors little protection. They had a metal guard attached to the front of their neck by a leather strap, and below that was a cotton padded guard that protected the front of their torso. Patches of fluff leaked from the guard where cuts had been made. Their heads were not protected, and neither were their faces. These were men of the woods, and they would have you see them when they fought. Even my helmet was open at its front so my face was never hidden.
One man was a man of the First Nations - a Carrier by birth, his hair was long and braided, and it whipped behind him as he did the warrior's dance. His opponent was a white man, and he wore a bushy red mustache that partially covered the heavy scar on his lip.
Dylan DeComte, the Governor-President of Oregon, hovered over the small Chinese Ambassador, Yu Pandi, like a wood louse to the bottom of a rock. He had the same soft, cowardly ways of the louse. The Portlanders hid in their city while the men of the nation went warring across the Pacific. Dylan was a small man, so thin that it was apparent that he didn't even lift. His skin was pampered, his eyes were shielded by a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, and he wore a fluffy scarf around his neck so thick and long that reached his hip and formed a cashmere toga.
Yu Pandi was a small flower of a woman. Her old-world business suit looked too big for her, her skirt brushing against her feet. She watched the battle of men cautiously. Bronze Payne wondered what was going through her mind. Was she intimidated? Scared of the danger that this battle included for all those around it? Or was something awakening inside of her, some womanly urge to know the warrior's as sexual beings? It was hard to tell. From her eyes, she just looked timid.
The other Governor-Presidents watched as well. There was Leon Scusswede of Vancouver, a decadent old man with no taste for the outdoors. His oversized flannel coat and longer-eared trapper hat made him look more like a boy who was dressed for the cold by his mother rather than a man in his right habitat. He stood next to Carl Elkhart, the GP of Washington state. He had been a local sheriff before everything had went crazy with the world. Even now, he still wore the stained brown uniform and stiff brimmed hat of his office. He was a good man. Bronze Payne had fought alongside him in Hakodate, and again on the Dalton Highway during that dark war. He was not a big man, but he was a good warrior.
Standing on her own was Janet Husks, the GP of Alaska. She was the only woman GP, but she was just as formidable as any man. She weighed two hundred pounds, and her eyes had went beady behind her puffy discolored flesh. You could accuse her of being well fed, but never of being lazy. In her time, she had raised five kids. It was a known secret that there had been a sixth. Nobody said what had happened to it, but everyone knew. It was alleged that she still had contact with the child, that the abduction was part of a deal made with those revenants of the artic circle. There was some sense there. How else had the Alaskans managed to feed the Cascadian nation so much oil?
Stands-With-Gun was the GP of Montana. He was the tallest of them all, nearing seven foot and as broad as a tank. He had fought them when they invaded his lands, and he had joined them when he saw what they could do. He was a member of the Blackfoot, and he had supporters in Alberta. How long would it be before their neighbor was brought into the fold?
Nearby brooded Miles Juarez, the GP of Idaho. The Juarez Clan ruled Idaho with a heavy fist. They had been ranchers at first, and they had all learned how to shoot from the back of a galloping horse. It was a skill they had learned before the world went crazy, when they used it to fight off rustlers and poachers. After the collapse, the Juarez's used their money and competence to build a small state of their own, only joining Cascadia for the protection. Even now, they were largely independent. They were known to launch raids on the east, coming on horseback and disappearing just as quickly. Miles was dressed as a cattle man. He was a hispanic man, with a thick mustache above his lip and greasy hair poking from under his hat.
And finally there was Jack Burns, the GP of the Yukon. He was truly a man of the north. He had a wind-burnt face and burnside whiskers. In truth, there was little known about the man. Yukon was a quiet province, and Jack Burns a quiet man.
The warriors danced, their saws whining as they ducked and dodged away from each other. In the rhythm of their fight, watching the choreographic beauty of the thing, with the promise of violence so close to the surface, Bronze Payne felt the heat of life pulsing through his flesh. It reminded him of the thrill of combat. He thought about the rush he felt when his axe cleaved the body of his enemy after a hard fight in the uncertain smoke of battle. He remembered the weighty bass sound of sharpened heat-treated logs impaling a church steeple in Hakodate, and the asymmetrical sound the church-bell made in response.
"Timber!" Retched Bill called out, and they all paused to watch as another tree struck the ground. The warriors, too, had stopped their dance. Pine needles, caught by the wind, fell on them like rough rain. The tree snapped and heaved, then it fell down with a roar.
Dylan DeComte clapped like a nancy.
The warriors looked to Bill to bid them continue, but he did not. He slung his axe over his shoulder and came trudging down the hill. His eyes were on Yu Pandi. There was uncertainty in her eyes. Bill scared her. He did give her reason, with serious eyes and a tried axe in hand. He was approaching her, almost at a charge. When he came to her, it looked like she was going to run. Bill thrust out his arm. For a second, she was uncertain what to do, than it slowly came to her. She still looked confused as she shook his hand.
"I am mighty fine pleased to be friends with your people." he boomed. She smiled and nodded. "We are happy to the heavens." she answered timidly.
He waved for the warriors to take their leave. They nodded and trudged off. Now it was only the politicians. Bronze Payne felt annoyed. He hated talk; he was a man of action.
"We are thinking about taking Vladivostok." Bill said. Bronze Payne smiled. The Russians - that would be a battle.
"Taking..." Pandi processed. "A raid on Vladivostok would would not be worth much." she warned. "They poor people. Very poor people."
"Not raiding, taking." Bill replied. He spat to his left. "We should do more than raiding. I want to see a colony. I think Vladivostok would be a good location."
Bronze Payne did not know where this was, besides that it was in Russia. That was far away, but there would be opportunity there. There was plenty of land for the taking.
"I do not understand." Pandi said. "Wouldn't such a thing be expensive?"
"Yes." Bill said. "But who gives a shit? If we can't do it, we don't have any right to call ourselves men."
Bronze Payne felt his heart fistbump itself.
When we pillaged California's sunny coasts, I was the first off the boat. I remember roaring as I killed, and I remember seeing fear in their eyes as we drove them into the hills and looted their homes. I was there when we swarmed onto the beaches of Hawaii, where we plundered their old resorts and fueled our taste for the honest violence of the raid. When we struck Hakodate in far away Japan, in a time before we befriend the eastern world, our success was nearly immediate. The Pacific was ours. We owned it, riding on the backs of abandoned commercial liners and adapted fishing trawlers. We needed no navy. It did not take battleships to subdue the sea. It was ours.
We did not fear the land either. We brought the cattlemen of Montana into our new nation by force. I have seen the plains of Alberta, and I have taken what I could from their homeland. I even fought in Alaska. There was no glory there, but I must be honest about what I saw. In the burning tundra, in the sludge of the north, I gasped fire. I drank its ash and ate it in my food for months. And I saw it, the unholy fire. I saw it dancing in the air, and in the eyes of those children. They taught us who ruled the north. I see no shame in having been bested by them.
I have survived all of that, and I have stood amongst the leaders of Cascadia.
The smell of the fir, the spruce, and the pine filled the air around the capital. It was inescapable. This was the birthplace of Retched Bill, the greatest of their number and the man they called their leader. He was a man of few words, but when he did speak his meaning cut through a conversation like the axe he carrier strapped to his back at all times. He was a tall man, and his shoulders were as broad as a bull's. Other politicians dressed up, but Bill never did. He wore the same denim and flannel outdoorsman's clothes he had for most of his life. His hair had turned grey, as had the bushy mustache he wore on his lip, but age had not broken him.
They say that Retched Bill was most at home when he was clearing timber. There was no doubt about this. There they had gathered, the Governor-Presidents of the Cascadian nation, and the strange, delicate creature that was the ambassador to East Asia's mystical government. They had gathered in the wild outdoors, on a tarmac on the outskirts of town where a firefighting helicopter had once been stationed. Retched Bill was at work in the treeline just beyond the cement, and his axe was grinding at the wood. Chop. Chop. In the scent of an evergreen tree taking an axe, nature cleared your head. It was as refreshing as sleep. It reminded us why we went to battle wearing used air-fresheners around our necks. When a tree went down, he shouted 'timber!', and everyone watched the top of the tree do the shaking dance it did before it hit the ground. The creaking, the cracking... it was part of the potency that the evergreen symbol conveyed. It made a man proud to serve under the evergreen flag.
These politicians had not gathered to watch Retched Bill in his wilderness, though to see Bill bring down a tree was to finally understand what the emotions of the word 'Triumph' were supposed to be. They had came to watch a fight, and to discuss the political trade.
In the middle of cracked cement tarmac, where pine needles and dirt had been blown over a fading red H painted in the center, two men did the dance of the swing-saw. The Swing-Saw was a weapon of the true berserker - a thing dangerous not only to the wielder and his target, but to any who surrounded them. It was a simple weapon.. There was chain. At one end of it, two grips made from lacquered pinewood allowed the wielder to hold the weapon confidently. On the other end were two gas powered circular saws. They buzzed alive, and when they were swung the sound they left behind sounded like a monstrous bee buzzing through the air. When you heard it coming toward you, you bent back to dodge. It was part of the dance. When two men came together to show off their skills with the swing-saw, those that watched them were a part of the fight. Spectators did not stand idly. They watched the saw blades, and when it looked like the blades might cut in their direction, they made sure to get out of the way.
The warriors little protection. They had a metal guard attached to the front of their neck by a leather strap, and below that was a cotton padded guard that protected the front of their torso. Patches of fluff leaked from the guard where cuts had been made. Their heads were not protected, and neither were their faces. These were men of the woods, and they would have you see them when they fought. Even my helmet was open at its front so my face was never hidden.
One man was a man of the First Nations - a Carrier by birth, his hair was long and braided, and it whipped behind him as he did the warrior's dance. His opponent was a white man, and he wore a bushy red mustache that partially covered the heavy scar on his lip.
Dylan DeComte, the Governor-President of Oregon, hovered over the small Chinese Ambassador, Yu Pandi, like a wood louse to the bottom of a rock. He had the same soft, cowardly ways of the louse. The Portlanders hid in their city while the men of the nation went warring across the Pacific. Dylan was a small man, so thin that it was apparent that he didn't even lift. His skin was pampered, his eyes were shielded by a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, and he wore a fluffy scarf around his neck so thick and long that reached his hip and formed a cashmere toga.
Yu Pandi was a small flower of a woman. Her old-world business suit looked too big for her, her skirt brushing against her feet. She watched the battle of men cautiously. Bronze Payne wondered what was going through her mind. Was she intimidated? Scared of the danger that this battle included for all those around it? Or was something awakening inside of her, some womanly urge to know the warrior's as sexual beings? It was hard to tell. From her eyes, she just looked timid.
The other Governor-Presidents watched as well. There was Leon Scusswede of Vancouver, a decadent old man with no taste for the outdoors. His oversized flannel coat and longer-eared trapper hat made him look more like a boy who was dressed for the cold by his mother rather than a man in his right habitat. He stood next to Carl Elkhart, the GP of Washington state. He had been a local sheriff before everything had went crazy with the world. Even now, he still wore the stained brown uniform and stiff brimmed hat of his office. He was a good man. Bronze Payne had fought alongside him in Hakodate, and again on the Dalton Highway during that dark war. He was not a big man, but he was a good warrior.
Standing on her own was Janet Husks, the GP of Alaska. She was the only woman GP, but she was just as formidable as any man. She weighed two hundred pounds, and her eyes had went beady behind her puffy discolored flesh. You could accuse her of being well fed, but never of being lazy. In her time, she had raised five kids. It was a known secret that there had been a sixth. Nobody said what had happened to it, but everyone knew. It was alleged that she still had contact with the child, that the abduction was part of a deal made with those revenants of the artic circle. There was some sense there. How else had the Alaskans managed to feed the Cascadian nation so much oil?
Stands-With-Gun was the GP of Montana. He was the tallest of them all, nearing seven foot and as broad as a tank. He had fought them when they invaded his lands, and he had joined them when he saw what they could do. He was a member of the Blackfoot, and he had supporters in Alberta. How long would it be before their neighbor was brought into the fold?
Nearby brooded Miles Juarez, the GP of Idaho. The Juarez Clan ruled Idaho with a heavy fist. They had been ranchers at first, and they had all learned how to shoot from the back of a galloping horse. It was a skill they had learned before the world went crazy, when they used it to fight off rustlers and poachers. After the collapse, the Juarez's used their money and competence to build a small state of their own, only joining Cascadia for the protection. Even now, they were largely independent. They were known to launch raids on the east, coming on horseback and disappearing just as quickly. Miles was dressed as a cattle man. He was a hispanic man, with a thick mustache above his lip and greasy hair poking from under his hat.
And finally there was Jack Burns, the GP of the Yukon. He was truly a man of the north. He had a wind-burnt face and burnside whiskers. In truth, there was little known about the man. Yukon was a quiet province, and Jack Burns a quiet man.
The warriors danced, their saws whining as they ducked and dodged away from each other. In the rhythm of their fight, watching the choreographic beauty of the thing, with the promise of violence so close to the surface, Bronze Payne felt the heat of life pulsing through his flesh. It reminded him of the thrill of combat. He thought about the rush he felt when his axe cleaved the body of his enemy after a hard fight in the uncertain smoke of battle. He remembered the weighty bass sound of sharpened heat-treated logs impaling a church steeple in Hakodate, and the asymmetrical sound the church-bell made in response.
"Timber!" Retched Bill called out, and they all paused to watch as another tree struck the ground. The warriors, too, had stopped their dance. Pine needles, caught by the wind, fell on them like rough rain. The tree snapped and heaved, then it fell down with a roar.
Dylan DeComte clapped like a nancy.
The warriors looked to Bill to bid them continue, but he did not. He slung his axe over his shoulder and came trudging down the hill. His eyes were on Yu Pandi. There was uncertainty in her eyes. Bill scared her. He did give her reason, with serious eyes and a tried axe in hand. He was approaching her, almost at a charge. When he came to her, it looked like she was going to run. Bill thrust out his arm. For a second, she was uncertain what to do, than it slowly came to her. She still looked confused as she shook his hand.
"I am mighty fine pleased to be friends with your people." he boomed. She smiled and nodded. "We are happy to the heavens." she answered timidly.
He waved for the warriors to take their leave. They nodded and trudged off. Now it was only the politicians. Bronze Payne felt annoyed. He hated talk; he was a man of action.
"We are thinking about taking Vladivostok." Bill said. Bronze Payne smiled. The Russians - that would be a battle.
"Taking..." Pandi processed. "A raid on Vladivostok would would not be worth much." she warned. "They poor people. Very poor people."
"Not raiding, taking." Bill replied. He spat to his left. "We should do more than raiding. I want to see a colony. I think Vladivostok would be a good location."
Bronze Payne did not know where this was, besides that it was in Russia. That was far away, but there would be opportunity there. There was plenty of land for the taking.
"I do not understand." Pandi said. "Wouldn't such a thing be expensive?"
"Yes." Bill said. "But who gives a shit? If we can't do it, we don't have any right to call ourselves men."
Bronze Payne felt his heart fistbump itself.
It shouldn't be too big of a deal if it is entirely internal. No nasty footprints.
MS-24H said
GDP:?
Gross Domestic Product. To put it very simply, it is the yearly income of that nation before they pay their bills. I assume the numbers most people are putting down are "Billion", because having a GDP of $250 would be horribly sad. Individuals on welfare have a higher gross income than that.
For reference, the United States has a GDP of 14 trillion, as does China. Spain has a GDP of 1.5 Trillion. Ethiopia has a GDP of 41 Billion. You get the idea.
© 2007-2026