Killzone, Ascendancy

by Sam Bradbury

  So, yes, not exactly an authority on that score. But this much I can tell you. Three hundred years ago on Earth: ka-boom. Lots of people are dead and nothing works because the generals were all so keen to press the shiny red button they forgot to ask what happens afterwards.

  The answer: you’ve bled Earth dry, her resources are gone and you’re going to have to find your minerals someplace else.

  So they formed the United Colonial Nations (UCN) to investigate space colonization, while at the same time some of the bigger companies just went ahead and did it themselves, one of them being the Helghan Corporation.

  Back then the Helghan Corporation was just another big conglomerate like the oil companies or fast-food chains. The difference was that it made its billions in energy and industrial refinement so was already fixed to bid for colonization rights in the Alpha Centauri solar system. Off went the Helghan Corporation ships, going where no man had gone before.

  The first planet they reached, guess what they called it? Me, I would have called it something cool, but I guess they were being a bunch of kiss-asses so they called it …

  Helghan.

  Next planet they reached they were still way up the butt of the company and they called it Vekta, after the Helghan CEO, Philip Vekta.

  Their sucky names were about all the planets had in common. Helghan was a shithole, or, as the books put it, ‘inhospitable and with an extremely poor ecosystem’, the whole rock only habitable thanks to refineries and power generators seeded by the first colonists, and the only reason they bothered was because of the planet’s energy resources, which after all was the whole point of sailing out there in the first place.

  Vekta, on the other hand, now that was an oasis. A much more human-friendly environment: agrarian, lushly forested, an agricultural paradise and a major source of food not only for those who settled there, but for those who had remained on Helghan.

  Soon – we’re talking nearly a hundred years, but in the turn of a school history-book page anyway – the two planets were jointly a blooming, profitable enterprise and the Helghan Protectorate was formed, so both worlds were now administered from Vekta. Life was good for the Helghans and that’s when they came up with a logo: three interlinked arms to represent peace, justice and freedom.

  Remember that. It’ll help you enjoy the irony later.

  Anyway, the people were prosperous; their morale was high. It was good to be a Helghan then. They even established their own militia outside of the auspices of the UCN, which, I guess, was where it started to go wrong.

  Because the next thing you know Helghan had set itself up as a civil administration. Then it was buying the Alpha Centauri system lock, stock and barrel.

  And then they started getting greedy. At least that’s what the history books said: how Helghan began levying taxes on virtually every ship in space. Traffic control, customs, search-and-rescue; any ship travelling through the Helghan system – which was every ship – had to pay.

  The UCN didn’t like that. The UCN had its base on Earth so it relied on traffic coming through Alpha Centauri to bring essentials. The Helghans were making that process a drag. By then the UCN had formed the interplanetary strategic alliance, the ISA, to help keep the peace, and it installed ISA troops on Helghan and Vekta, to stop the Helghans going tonto with the taxes.

  The Helghans didn’t like that, which meant there was a whole bunch of not-liking-that being passed around, and of course the war on Earth was ancient history by now so maybe they just decided it was time for another one.

  So when the UCN told Helghan to stop being such ball-breakers with the taxes the Helghans told the UCN to shove it.

  And that was just for starters. Next Helghan tried to get rid of all ISA forces from Vekta and Helghan, which was a dumb move any way you looked at it. Helghans had the numbers, but they didn’t have the training and experience and they didn’t have the high-end weaponry of the ISA marines, nor the tactical expertise. The marines weren’t leaving without a fight and they served the Helghans a cold glass of shut-the-fuck-up until reinforcements arrived.

  That was the first extrasolar war. Result: the Helghans getting their asses handed to them by the ISA. Didn’t stop there either. The UCN shut down the entire Helghan administration. All civil servants and executives of the corporation were arrested. Now things weren’t looking so rosy for the Helghans, especially as the UCN decided it needed to keep a closer eye on them. And how better to keep a closer eye on them than to colonize their beloved Vekta?

  Suddenly Vekta wasn’t such a nice place to live. A paradise no longer, it had been colonized by the enemy and the original inhabitants weren’t happy. Many of them took up arms as terrorists and in return ISA forces made life hard for all Helghans on Vekta. So hard that in 2204, that’s more than a hundred and fifty years ago, in case you stopped taking count, the Helghans decided they could take it no longer. There was a mass exodus of Helghans from Vekta to the planet Helghan. Vekta now belonged to the UCN.

  Now, like I say, Helghan: not exactly five-star accommodation. Nobody wanted to live there, which is why they’d all settled on Vekta. That was the Eden. That was the paradise. Helghan on the other hand was an iceberg: a harsh, cold and isolated storage facility, rich in minerals, sure, but barely any green to be seen. Add to that the fact that the Helghans had started the first extrasolar war. They were like the bullies who had got what’s coming to them and nobody gave a rat’s ass if life was tough on their grey, poisonous and stormy planet. Tough shit for being such monumental ball-breakers in the first place. Matter of fact the UCN even declared the Helghan administration a sovereign nation and gave them their planet. It was like they were saying, ‘We want nothing to do with you. Have your toxic planet – go. You’re welcome to it.’

  Christ, it must have been tough for the Helghans. Millions of them died. If the climate didn’t get them, starvation did. Their world was one of oppression and refugee camps, of masks and protective suits to guard against the increased gravity, electric storms and toxic atmosphere. Going outside meant wearing a respiration mask, but even that didn’t help with life expectancies. Few made it past their thirties, lung burn the most common way to die.

  You know what they did, though? They adapted. The heads of the refugee camps came together to cooperate in rebuilding their civilization and they began making the most of their planet’s vast resources. They became a planet of miners, breaking their backs to extract minerals for trade, even though the UCN weren’t willing to pay a fair price for them – talk about holding a grudge – and even went so far as to impose trade sanctions to keep prices down. Didn’t stop the Helghans. They kept on working. Kept on adapting.

  A few pages of the book later and it’s 2305 and the third generation of indigenous Helghans were born. This lot had an advantage over their ancestors: they’d adapted to suit their environment. They’d grown lungs that were more efficient, bodies that were more resistant to the heavier gravity of their planet.

  If you wanted to be kind, you’d say they’d evolved. If you wanted to be cruel, they’d mutated.

  One of those born part of that third-generation was Scolar Visari. Yup, that Scolar Visari. The one whose destiny lay with a bullet from Rico’s assault rifle. Visari apparently showed great potential as a kid. I’ve seen pictures of him that age, staring out of the pages of textbooks, and he doesn’t look like any kid I’ve ever seen, whatever his great promise. He looks like a little demon kid if you ask me. But he grew to be a man of his time, because just as Helghan seemed to have got off its knees, so began a food shortage. The population blamed their empty bellies on the greed of Vekta and guess who was able to exploit that?

  Scolar Visari was by now a noted orator, a rabble-rouser, and he was pushing all the right buttons, saying what the Helghans wanted to hear. Like how the Helghan people had advanced beyond mere human to become ‘extra-human’. And how wearing a mask, always a symbol of the lower, working classes on Helghan, actually represented the strength and
fortitude of the Helghan people, and should be celebrated. It was Visari who coined the word ‘Helghast’ to describe this new race of extra-human people.

  Visari was going to lead them out of the darkness.

  Chapter Three

  We still had the odd terrorist attack on Vekta when I was growing up there. And, no, you didn’t miss it. I just forgot to mention that I was born somewhere in all of that – in 2334, to be precise, around about the time of the food shortage on Helghan.

  Be great to tell you I had a tough childhood. It would seem fitting somehow. Like Rico, who was born in the Vekta City slums, living by his fists and his wits, eventually joining the army aged eighteen. A lifer.

  But I’d be talking out my cornhole. We lived in the nice part of Vekta City. My father was a draughtsman. By day he sat in a room in front of wall-mounted screens, designing transport systems. My mother was – well, she was my mother. And she was my younger sister’s mother too. And when she wasn’t being our mother she was a painter, the old-fashioned way, with brushes and an easel. Oftentimes we’d drive out of the city on a weekend. When we reached the checkpoints, ISA troops would stop us, make Dad open the trunk for inspection and then stare in through the passenger window at my mother for way longer than was needed – it was only years later that I realized my Mom was a stone-cold fox. Then the troops would look in on me and my sister sitting in the back seat: me, wide-eyed, like, cool, real soldiers, with real guns; Amy blowing bubble gum bubbles at them. She always thought soldiers were assholes. Jerks with rifles. I often think about that.

  Years later I got to talking to Rico about those checkpoints we saw as kids. Turned out he’d never seen them growing up. Never left Vekta City until his teens.

  Anyway. We’d drive: me, Mom, Dad and bubble-blowing Amy. Until Vekta City and the checkpoints were behind us. Until the refineries and giant comms towers were distant smudges on the horizon. To where it was just countryside, hardly anything man-made in sight. Usually we’d stop and have something to eat, and Mom would take pictures: of us sometimes, but mainly of things, like the trees, flowers, streams, wildlife. So she could take them home and use them for her painting.

  I took it for granted then, that beautiful countryside just a short drive away. But I was a kid, with a head full of superheroes and war stories. I would have preferred being at home with a book or a controller in my hand. The thought all of that landscape was – makes me laugh to think it – but it was boring to me back then.

  Of course now I yearn to see it again. Now I’d give anything to be back there, even for just a second. With Mom, Dad and Amy there too. Anything.

  It was after one of those trips to the country that I arrived at school the following Monday, me in my senior year now, with Mr Tovar and Modern History the first lesson of the day. Mr Tovar was as happy as a dog with two dicks.

  ‘Do you remember Scolar Visari, class?’ he beamed, and we all mumbled and nodded our heads. ‘He’s staged a military coup on Helghan.’

  We all groaned and yawned and at least one of us watched Elisabetta tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. We were thinking SFW. So fuckin’ what?

  Of course we should have taken it more seriously and listened. But what did it matter to a bunch of seventeen-year-olds that some guy on a mouldy planet had staged a military coup? So fuckin’ what that he had taken on the title of ‘Autarch’ and announced plans to begin building the Helghast army as well as devising a new Helghast alphabet and even a new language. And remember the old logo? Peace, justice and freedom? He was going to get rid of that too, and replace it with three arrows representing duty, obedience and loyalty.

  But so fuckin’ what?

  Things get serious when you leave school. All of a sudden you’ve got the rest of your life to worry about. It’s how you manage that move, that’s what it’s all about.

  Me? How did I handle it? I joined the ISA.

  Why? Maybe I secretly believed all the recruitment baloney. Maybe I had my head too full of movies and videogames and instead of playing at being a grunt I wanted to be one for real – wanted to know how it felt to actually hold a real assault rifle. Maybe I wanted adventure, excitement and the violent jolt of combat adrenalin.

  Or maybe I just wanted to worry my parents, or annoy them. God knows why, they’d been nothing but great to me, but I guess that’s what kids do, and, hey, it worked because they were worried and they were annoyed.

  Either way, I signed up.

  Chapter Four

  I didn’t last long in the forces.

  If I tried to put my finger on why, then I suppose it was the huge chasm between what I was expecting from the ISA and what I got.

  What was I expecting? Duh. Action, of course. Sunrise on day one: Private Tomas ‘Sev’ Sevchenko running around popping caps in the ass of any motherfucker who dared take up arms against the colonies. In this case that meant the Helghast. They being the ones who, so said intel at least, were preparing for a large-scale invasion.

  Trouble was the Helghast were in no hurry to get their shit together, and maybe wouldn’t even bother at all. When I first joined the ISA, Vekta was at DEFCON 2, which meant we believed invasion to be imminent. New recruits – that’s me – were training to repel a possible invasion, and, without wanting to sound like some kind of war junkie, that gives your training an edge: because any moment now you might be called upon to defend your home.

  But what happens when that action takes its sweet time arriving? You find yourself training. Then more training. Then training for more training. You find yourself on constant manoeuvres. And when you’re not on manoeuvres you’re waiting to go on manoeuvres. And then the threat level gets reduced from DEFCON 2 to three – no enemy activity reported – and the devil finds work for idle hands to do. Nothing too naughty. Years later I was to meet Rico and I’d discover what ‘getting into trouble with your superiors’ really meant. Me? We’re talking minor acts of disobedience. Well, they call it insubordination in the army, but again, compared to the likes of Mr Velasquez, my crimes were strictly small-time: giving a commanding officer a bit of lip, flipping off a medical officer, generally behaving like a smart-ass. I did take an Exo for a joyride, that’s true. And I was almost court-martialled for failing a breathalyser while on sentry duty, but that was about it. I was a bored kid and I was discovering that the army just wasn’t for me. So, after a year or so of that, the ISA and I decided to part ways by mutual consent. I returned to my parents’ house, tail wedged well and truly between my legs, much to the derision of Amy and the delight of my mother and father. What can I say? I was still trying to find my place in life. I guess I still am.

  For a while I kicked around doing nothing until my father got me training to be a draughtsman like him. I showed a natural aptitude for it. According to him I did anyway, my hands flitting across the screens, grids and patterns appearing beneath my fingertips. I wore an open-necked shirt and sensible shoes. I was creating work for a portfolio, so said my father, and when we were done he was going to introduce me to agencies in the city. He loved the idea of all that. His eyes would go all misty and twinkly like he was on the verge of tears. I grew a beard and Mom said it made me look older.

  At the time I thought all that was preferable to the army, but only just. I was still looking for something else – something else was out there for me surely. Then the alert status went up, back to DEFCON 2 – not maximum readiness, but near as damn it.

  As an ex-military guy, I was following the news more carefully than most, and still talking to a buddy in the service, Dante Garza. The ISA was mobilizing, he said. He was pleased about that. More than a few times I’d stood at checkpoints with Garza, checking out the honeys passing through, getting dudes to open their trunks, winking at the kids. And Garza was looking for action too. Only difference was he’d hung around. According to him, intel suggested that a Helghast invasion of Vekta was imminent. Sure, we’d heard all that before. Even Mom, Dad and Amy hardly turned a hair. But watching the footag
e of ISA troops mustering, I sensed something different. Like the threat was more real at this time. Then I started getting messages. Guys I’d served with who had also got frustrated and left, telling me they were going to rejoin.

  ‘It’s real, Sev,’ said one of Garza’s messages. His excitement was palpable. ‘It’s happening.’

  The next morning I awoke, looked out of my bedroom window at a city just rubbing the sleep from its eyes and decided. The world that I knew was under threat. So I went to my cupboard, stood on my little tippee-toes and reached to the top shelf for my uniform.

  I’d kept in shape by running, kickboxing, afternoons spent at the range, so the uniform still fitted. My parents and Amy were sitting at the breakfast bar when I walked in wearing my uniform. The television was on, a beautiful reporter with glossy red lips saying how the Helghast had imposed a complete media blackout. For the first time my parents looked worried and when they turned from the screen to see me in my uniform I think they knew.

  It was real. It was happening.

  I reported to my local garrison. They put me in a company of other guys who’d answered the call of duty. Rusty guys like me. We began training to get us back into shape and for a few days I began to worry that I’d rejoined only to do yet more training and manoeuvres. Was the whole cycle going to start again? Was I going to find myself returning home with my tail between my legs? Amy laughing, Mom and Dad grateful? Back to the LCD screens and dreaming of something else?