“It had to have been a past life,” Bray joked. “Ria’s too young to have been a soldier and a Comm Officer already.”
My face showed my surprise to Dix’s statement. “Me, a soldier? No way. Just seems rather intuitive.” Something in my mind was working trying to remember why putting armor on felt vaguely familiar. I was hardly a violent or fight-worthy kind of person. I definitely did not remember ever being around anything even close to similar. Still, why did my mind feel like it knew something about armor? Was it a just those defense classes during the academy? “Guess I just remember stuff from the classes way back in academy.”
Bray’s eyes got wide for a moment, “Wish I had that level of training at my place.”
“If we had more like you in the Guard we might have been able to fight off the monsters. Half of them could barely even hold a gun…” Dix was pained by that fact. I bet she probably felt partially responsible for what happened.
I replied, “You are giving me too much credit. It’s not that complicated.”
Dix put her hand on her closed eyes, shaking her head. “Most of the rookies couldn’t even get their armor on straight.”
As we prepared to leave, I became conscious of the fact my weapon was much smaller than the two of theirs. Dix’s powerful rifle was a substantial length of her whole body. Bray’s plasma shotgun – the class of weapons were generally referred to as ‘Plaz-Shots’ – was not long, but a stocky mass of metal that left no doubt to its power. My pistol looked so small, but I was quick to remember the technologic power within its construction.
I practiced hitting the clip discharge, reaching for the next clip on my armor and feeding it into the oversized acceptance slot, which sloped into the receiver. It would craft the rounds out of the block of mass, and only need to be reloaded when it no longer had enough metal to shape into the arrows. Each time the pistol had a reassuring hum, as if to say ‘I’m ready, don’t worry I will protect you’. Just keep it occasionally fed, right? It required less than most relationships, and would always stay true to me.
I pulled my longer hair out from my armor that softly stretched from my gentle pull. If a slash or projectile crashed into the armor, its molecular lattice structure would tighten instantly, repelling the impact. But with such gentle movements, if was no more resistive than thick clothing. I shifted the leg armor slightly so that I was confident in its location, hitting it a few times with my fist as if that was an appropriate test for anything.
“What have you got there?” Bray nodded towards Dix.
“Ha, you will like these, won’t you, dear Bray?” She held out three small bracelets.
Bray made a fast grab at one of them. Though I could not see his face from the angle, his downward head indicated he was studying the bracelet.
He laughed. “These were hardly standard issue. You had some connections, didn’t you, dear Dix?” What was up with the ‘dear’? It almost sounded like they were just making a forced attempt at fake names.
“We both have our secrets I guess.” She smiled at him.
I felt a bit out of their conversation.
A protective device, a strange part of my mind stated. What technologic process does it work on?
“Haha, don’t look too eager there Ria!” Dix came over and handed me one of the two. In response to her comment, I realized my face was indeed very focused on the objects I was unsure about. “I don’t know what their official name is, but everyone calls them force bracelets.”
I held it with two fingers a distance away from my body.
“It’s a shield basically,” Bray said. His was already over his wrist. “Guess our little soldier Ria didn’t have these in her class.”
I pulled it closer to my body, hitting one of the two buttons on it and the oval grew to a substantial size. I pushed it over my left hand, hitting the button again and the oval shrank beyond its original size, grasping my wrist tightly.
“Here to set the field…” Dix stepped towards me, but I had already turned the other dial and rotated it through its settings to the most applicable level. Interesting. A fairly advanced field. I can sense the distortion in my proximity field. “Oh…maybe she did have them.”
“Yeah…” Bray said in a way if I was not enraptured by the technology I would have realized was suspicious towards me.
“By what principle does this work on?” part of me asked. Upon reflection it was a strange thing; I wasn’t sure if I really cared honestly. Some part of me did though.
“That doesn’t really sound like something you’d ask about…” Dix began slowly; I could detect doubt in her voice and realized I needed to abort the topic.
“Comm girl is curious, give her a break.” Bray stepped towards me, lifting his faceplate up. “Though maybe our little Ria is special ops given her familiarity with these things.”
My stomach sank for a bit; did they honestly think I was an agent? I shook my head. “No, I believe I’m about as far away from that as possible.”
“Anyway, I only know the basics,” Dix continued. “It has some sort of field of a combination of magnets and ionic fields. I assume there has to be a sensor of some sort, but I’m not sure. Regardless, the field is capable of absorbing and stopping bullets, and sometimes slashes.”
The slashes of course referred to the fact that recently there had been a preponderance of short range melee weapons that had made a huge resurgence. I wasn’t a fighter, but knew certain melee weapons could break these shields. I, along with most of the unaware populace, was supposed to believe that these shields could not be stopped, or didn’t know any better anyway.
“Interesting,” I said darkly, the smile on my face was likely inappropriate.
“Ria?”
“It was nothing. Just kind of curious.”
“Uh, okay. Let’s go.”
The three of us went to one of the side doors we had never heard any of the aliens ever at. I slowly unbolted the door, nodded to the two of them, and jerked it open, dodging out of the way. My eyes were closed, but no loud retorts from their weapons met my expecting ears.
“Come on, we need to move fast.” Bray grabbed my wrist and pulled me up and we went through the door, closing it behind us. It was no longer bolted, and we had no idea if the aliens were capable of toggling the door open. As soon as we lost sight of the door, in our hearts I think we all assumed that the room we had called home for what felt like so long was now compromised. Infested.
“Go go go!” Dix shouted. I started running, but it felt like reality was falling away from me. I tried blinking, I tried shaking my head. I knew completely what was going on, that I was no longer perceiving reality correctly, but I could not bring myself to recognize what I thought I should be looking at. In desperation I tried biting my tongue hard or gripping my hands but even those things felt dreamlike. Did I even do either?
Soon even my conscious thought of what I should have been looking at fell away and there was nothing.
***
‘Go go go!’ I was running, explosions ripping apart the ground around me. To my right the person next to me was vaporized, the blast wave knocking me to the ground. Can’t give up. I had something important to do. I pressed myself back to standing, and staggered for a bit before I was back into a run.
Forward. Forward. I was not sure what was calling me, but it lay before me. Running, dodging the rended metal and broken bodies, crawling at times. Something struck me right in the chest, the impact knocking me to the ground. I hit hard, coughing, looking with panic down at my chest. Was I hit? Was I hit!? In my armor a long black piece of metal was inserted. With horror I rapidly grabbed the metal. I had to know if I had been hit.
I jerked it out, and no blood or pain resulted. My armor had not been compromised. I rolled forward into a crawl and went forward until I gratefully crawled into a trench. Ours.
I dashed forward through the labyrinthine framework until I came to my commanding officer.
‘I have just heard we hav
e our own air interdiction fighters that will be here shortly. We only need to endure the bombardment for a while longer!’ he yelled to me.
I nodded, when I felt a strange compunction come over me. Everyone around me would soon be dead. I looked at his face, so taut with anxiety and fear. His eyes maybe still a bit boyish. I felt bad that he seemed fairly innocent but was still forced to do these things. The soldiers on the embankment, the fear and terror they were experiencing. Soon everything would be gone. Their lives they had lived so long, everything they had experienced. Gone. Completely.
Down.
I looked down and in the mud a piece of metal caught my eye. Was it a rifle? I knelt down to grab it when something happened. A huge wave suddenly ripped apart the upper part of the entire embankment, and even my lowered position was knocked down into the mud. The pain was unimaginable. I was still alive but did not doubt for a moment either my limbs were gone, or paralyzed for life. I felt the sting of the alien air on my back from a massive hole in my suit. I rolled around once, coming to rest facing up towards the sky.
Upwards in the sky a huge pillar of dust and flame was rising upwards. Unable to move I was forced to watch it climb higher and higher, realizing that everyone anywhere near where I was was probably dead with the power of the bomb that had just detonated. I was only partially saved by my lower position, but I was probably only a delayed death.
The dust began swirling menacingly before it exploded into a spinning pillar of fire; small objects flying through the sky were instantly ignited by the heat. Even through my advanced battle armor I could feel the oppressive heat. Where were my arms? Why could I not feel anything!?
All around me was fire and death. Complete desolation as the ash and flame fell from the sky. I was going to die here. I was going to die!
Not yet.
A strange voice told me calmly. I heard it quite distinctly, but to my shallow body’s screams, it hardly registered compared to the certainty of my near death.
After what seemed like an eternity of watching the dance of flames above me and an aerial battle between aircraft I gained some feeling back. My body slowly began to be able to be moved. I rolled to my side and crawled my way to an uneasy stand. Around me black pieces of ash rained from the sky endlessly.
I had to keep going forward. There was something I had to see.
‘As in life…’ I stated in my mind while in a delirium as I walked forward. ‘As in life…’ I repeated. Why was I saying this? What did it even mean? It seemed the only thing that made sense was to continue repeating the phrase.
***
I blinked my eyes and I was (back?) with Dix and Bray. What was going on? Neither of them had said anything, and we were even running, as if I had never missed a step. With moment after moment passing, I began to doubt what exactly that I just saw. Maybe I had just had a mental breakdown out of fear. Something seemed so familiar, but with each step, my certainty seemed to vanish. I think I might have made the whole thing up. Why did I have the taste of blood in my mouth? I think I must have bit my tongue recently.
“Forward!” yelled Dix. She dropped to her knee and sprayed a pack of rounds around the corner I had not yet arrived at. I kept running forward in time to see Bray lift his Plaz-Shot as its blast caught a leaping alien that had been jumping towards Dix. The Plaz-Shot did not shoot physical rounds, so it did not impart any counter-momentum to the alien; but the plasma bolts still dissolved most of its matter so its remnants splashing into Dix hardly knocked her anywhere.
‘Short bursts…reload when empty or near empty given time during combat,’ my mind quietly rehearsed (did Dix tell me that?). I turned to the left while the other two fought to the right. I lifted my pistol, giving a short squeeze on the trigger while I aimed in the general direction of one of the bipedal black shapes. Its face looked so sad at me. I had the odd feeling that despite its forlorn look it wanted me dead, that I was the one it pitied.
I had shot a laser pistol once from a guy who was trying to date me. I remember how easily it cut through physical matter at a distance. My flechette pistol was the same way if the target was biological in nature. I pulled the trigger and let loose the rounds loaded earlier. Faster than I could see, the weapon fabricated the arrows off of the specialized metal block to launch downrange. There was a loud set of ‘tings’ as the rounds hit the wall before my spray was swung into the creature’s body, severing it from the lower left to upper right.
Somewhere my body was panicking, screaming at trying to not die. Somewhere else there was a calm persona switching from one target to the next, repulsed perhaps at what it was doing, but doing a very skillful job nonetheless. It was so methodical: one target, a spray, the next target, another spray, a dodge, a reload, another spray. The battle felt so real, but distant. I knew the sounds should have been loud, but I could only grasp on the fact it all felt very out-of-body. The dull metal of the halls, the uncaring light above, the vibration of the pistol all happening somewhere else, to someone else.
“Clear,” I stated in a voice a bit colder than I usually spoke with. A burst later, Dix responded to continue forward.
Walking forward towards the Comm room I was again conscious of a different feeling. This time I noticed that the presence that had somewhat taken over me during the battle was gone, and I felt like I was before – panicked, doubting, and unready. What was with me?
The two of them went through a door, and I had just about followed when I caught something in the last room.
“Hey look…” From a corner of this hallway a mist of a neon blue gas rose out, going upwards and disappearing into a different corner. Was it going straight through the wall? There were flowers growing right on the metal, their roots wrapping around exposed pipes. I reached my hand out to touch it.
“Get back.” Bray’s strong hand pulled me backwards off the soft flowers.
“It was warm,” I stated.
“Is that what you were talking about?” asked Dix. “The stuff leaking out of the mine?”
“Yeah…” He said the single word, but his tone left the impression there was so much more to be said.
I picked my hand up to look at it, as if any moment it would reveal some sort of poison that it had been inflicted with. Was it really that bad? The plants looked fine. It actually felt kind of holy.
Bray was obviously conflicted with what he wanted to do. His face was a bit pained, and after a few moments began speaking. “I am not certain, but I am almost positive this is some sort of essence.”
Of course my mind was wild with ‘what…’ questions, but I gave him time as he evidently knew something vital to this. I still was scared my hand would fall off or something.
“I am not sure if this is some manifestation of this planet, or of some spiritual, or higher reality…” His words came slowly, thinking of them carefully before he spit that final part out rapidly. “But in small doses, whatever this is, is amazingly beneficial to living organisms, as evidenced by those plants. However in higher doses it is poisonous. From what I have studied, the poison does not have any overt negatives. The organism functions completely fine, enhanced actually, right up until its extremely accelerated death.”
This did not sound like a ‘miner’ talking. I met Dix’s eyes for a moment before we both looked back at him.
He continued, “In reality the ‘poison’ is rather interesting. It imbues the subject with more nutrients and energy, but the cost of the bounty is the early death. These plants right in the stream possess extreme vitality, but they will not live long. Essentially trading a longer life for a better life.”
I frowned with the revelation. Was a single touch enough to trigger the death reaction? “Can you tell if you’ve been poisoned?”
“I think you know by now, Ria.” He pointed to his hair and lowered his hand, but it was not relaxed; in fact it was gripped in a fist. Something about it was odd, then he reluctantly lifted his hand and pointed to my hair that had a few strands falling out from th
e ribbon that was still attached. My stomach dropped, and my rapid heartbeat was the only sensation I felt. “Looks like you are finally showing some signs too. I wondered how long it would take. There was a smaller stream that was found under the other living quarters as well…”
***
It had taken some time to power up backup stations in the Comm Room. In that regard we were really fortunate as it seemed the room was oddly targeted for some destruction even though it was not blocking anything. It suggested a level of intelligence that was disturbing. The two of them had listened carefully as I gave them instructions on rigging a backup system together. Despite the fact that I was aware of the two bodies massacred in the room, it did not seem to bother me anymore. There had been way too many deaths for these to take any significance.
At this point, I had entered many of the necessary keys and codes to ensure our message would go out and be heard by as many people and races as possible but stopped a few steps from the end. I looked up off the console and looked right at the two of them.
In only the few short times periods this whole event has occurred, I had started noticing a lot of changes in my persona, and perhaps my perception of reality. Was I starting to lose my grip on reality, or was something different? I felt a lot ‘darker’; not so much ‘evil’, but more a new view of perceiving things. I suddenly felt that a lot of typical Solarian morality was woefully insufficient… I felt as though some of my decisions which I would hardly think twice about their practicality would get me labeled as ‘harsh’. I actually started feeling like it was the true me.
“So are you two going to tell me what is really going on here? Or who you two really are?” I lifted up my hand off the console, as if to suggest their game was up.
“What are you talking about? Hurry up and send out the distress call.” Bray looked at me for a moment then went back to looking out the hallway.
“No,” I stated firmly. The word hung for a long time, and everyone knew something had changed.
AilAid (VayneLine) Page 3