Ember of War

by Stephan Morse

  Ember of War

  Stephan Morse

  Ember of War

  Copyright © 2017 by Stephan Morse

  For more about this author please visit http://www.frustratedego.com/

  All characters and events in this eBook, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Events portrayed are based on alternate reality fiction.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at: http://www.frustratedego.com/

  First Publishing, 2017

  Created with Vellum

  Contact Stephan Morse

  You can visit me at:

  www.frustratedego.com

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  Contents

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Part V

  Part VI

  Part VII

  Part VIII

  Part IX

  Part X

  Part XI

  Part XII

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Connect with Stephan Morse

  Also by Stephan Morse

  Part I

  Darkness swallowed the landscape, defied by three illuminations, the brightest one coming from a nearby motorbike. It sat stationary and served as the greatest defense against a long damp night. Another light close by was held in the hands of a young girl with three missing teeth and a perpetual yawn. Every few seconds it would dip before a gruff voice uttered complaints and the light leveled again.

  The final ember came from a man’s cigar and it was constantly on the move.

  “Stupid machine. I hate you!” the man yelled and slammed one heavy arm down onto the contraption in front of him.

  “Two hours, two!” He spun around and tossed a screwdriver into the distance while kicking wet clods of dirt. “You can’t break down in the middle of the day, no! God forbid something goes wrong when it’s convenient!”

  “Lee, I’m tired,” the young girl said.

  “I know, Bell, just a bit longer. We’ll have it fixed soon.”

  “That’s what you said an hour ago.” Bell dragged the words out in complaint.

  “It’s this stupid machine’s fault!” Lee exploded again.

  He danced, twisted and flailed at the air in complaint. Scars could be seen on the side of his face from where a laser burn hadn’t finished the job. Three fingers on his left hand looked truncated. His right leg didn’t move naturally and weighed too much to be flesh and blood.

  “Just leave it until morning.” Bell yawned, showing all her missing baby teeth. Another one in the back was wiggling loose and would soon be gone.

  “I can’t!”

  “But you threw away all your tools and it’s dark.” She clicked off the light and headed toward the bike. The sidecar on it was perfect for a sleepy child. It was her intent to leave Lee to fend for himself.

  A flurry of additional kicks ensued before Lee’s shoulders drooped. He sucked down most of his cigar and pulled another one out of a pouch on his jacket. With a flare of light the new cigar self-started and Lee ground the old embers with his foot.

  “Stupid TRANs Union. Stupid third rate equipment. Let’s cut corners. It’s cheaper. We can afford more acreage on the outpost drop pods. Clopshit.” Lee didn’t believe in holding in his complaints. He wasn’t a Happy Patch addict like most of the colony. No, Lee had fought in the Outer Ring Independence Wars. He stopped holding punches back decades ago. That inability to restrain himself was how he ended up on an outpost instead of the comfortable home planets.

  “Two thirds the price for a quarter the quality! Makes perfect sense. Until you have to fix it in the middle of the night, when it’s raining!” He kicked again, then made his way out toward the area where he’d tossed his tools.

  An army of large creatures roamed the vicinity. Even half asleep they tore at branches and plants. Giant meaty arms dragged the offending vegetation to their faces and they absently chewed. They resembled cows given ape like arms and legs. Their strangest feature was a single eye that had been modified to detect spectrums outside the human range. This allowed them to pick out healthy vegetation on habitable planets.

  “Stupid beefclops.” Beefclops were the large creatures. “Stupid machine. Stupid TRANs Union machines,” Lee continued, complaining around his mouthful of cigar.

  “Wake me when you’re done, Lee!” Bell said with a yawn.

  Lee gathered up an armful of tools and staggered back to the broken device. He’d spent hours trying to repair a H.E.R.D unit. The machine’s purpose was to keep watch and herd the beefclops. Lee and Bell both belonged to a frontier outpost that had been able to afford three of the machines. Naturally, the other two were broken and in need of replacement parts.

  “Bell!” Lee yelled and clanked around a second armload of parts.

  “Bell, I need a light!” The little girl didn’t answer Lee’s yells. “Goddammit, girl, what good are you?” Lee threw the latest armload of parts onto a growing pile then stomped to the sidecar of his motorcycle.

  “Bell?” He was a bit quieter now. Once he was close enough to peer inside it became obvious the little girl had passed out. Lee grumbled, chewed on the end of his cigar then heaved a tired sigh. She had spent the entire day working and here Lee was keeping her awake even longer. No one else had been available, though. He gave up, went back to the broken machine and tinkered for another hour.

  This planet had no moons. The closest thing available was a ring of asteroids which somehow landed in an ideal orbit and occasionally shimmered. Lee’s only real assistance came from the motorcycle’s headlight. He couldn’t even turn on the brighter bulb or it would spook the beefclops into a rampage.

  “Stupid, stupid machine!” For the umpteenth time he resorted to kicking it in hopes that pieces would mystically start working.

  His senses had been honed over two decades of campaigns in space and on the ground. Something in the air made the cranky ex-soldier look up. One good eye scanned the horizon for the source of his sudden agitation. The cigar swished back and forth as he wiggled his cheeks and studied. The mountain’s pass looked clear. The tree tops were okay. No sign of starships trailing across the sky. Not even an out of place speck that might hint at a camouflage system on active.

  He snorted and surveyed again. Something large winged overhead almost silently from a blind spot on his wounded side.

  “Maggots! Goddamn…” He dodged away as a talon grasped for him. The cursing continued while Lee crawled arm over arm back to his motorcycle.

  “Bell. Bell! Wake up!”

  The sleepy girl was rubbing one eye as Lee came screaming over. He reached inside the motorcycle’s rear storage and yanked out an absurdly sized gun. One truncated finger flipped the ignition switch and a miniature reactor came to life with a whine.

  “Lee?”

  “Bell, child, you put the rig into defensive and stay down!” he shouted and slammed the hood onto the sidecar.

  Lee lined up a shot aimed toward the large creatures flying overhead and fired. He missed as nearly invisible forms caused small rippling distortions against the night sky. Wings twice the size of beefclops became easier
to see as they drew closer. An entire pack of creatures was swarming above. On their backs were small white creatures that looked more like ribbons than people.

  “Not in my house you don’t!” Lee shouted and fired another stream of plasma into the sky. A hissing bolt of liquefied metal soared past flapping wings.

  “Come down here and fight like men!”

  “Lee!” Bell screamed from inside the swiftly shifting motorcycle. The machine was transforming into a small bunker and sent bolts into the earth to anchor.

  “Gonna kill you all this time!” His obscenities were only broken up by a constant stream of hatred. Lee kept pulling the trigger and managed to hit a few of the wings. His plasma bolts sent two spiraling down.

  Spears hurled down from above and smacked into the ground next to the grumpy ex-soldier. He spared them a glance and shifted his cigar around before firing another blast. In the distance was a giant creature that swept down and grabbed two beefclops, one in each claw, before winging into the distance. An entire army of white ribbon shaped creatures were hoisting dull spears from the winged monster’s back.

  “No! Damn you, stay away from my cattle!” Most of the shots were going wild now. Lee was running on empty and had been awake for far too long. He wasn’t in his suit, and he had no stimulants to keep him wired. Only his anger at being attacked for the third time this month kept him aware.

  The biggest one’s snatch and grab served as a signal for the others to flee. What had been a dark sky full of silently swarming wings quickly emptied and left behind a curtain of darkness.

  “Son of a bitch! I’ll get you maggots!” He fired off round after round until the chamber overheating warning pierced his clouded awareness. Plasma rounds ejected then fell as the gun clicked off and cooled. Steam hissed from compressed canisters releasing foam to bring the temperature down on the tip.

  He’d only managed to wound a few.

  “That’s it. I’m tired of this bullshit,” Lee said.

  He stormed to his motorcycle. Moments later it was back in a normal shape with a worried little girl in the compartment. The only lights came from three sources. One from the skyward facing lights on a motorcycle. Inside it, a young girl missing three teeth shone her handheld flashlight and peered out into the absurdly still distance. In Lee’s mouth was the third source of light. It quickly burned its last as the gruff man huffed and puffed through his umpteenth cigar for the night.

  Part II

  Home base was a collection of four giant square buildings. They had been dropped from orbit about nine months ago and were used for housing, storage, and anything else the outpost needed. Forward Colony Seventeen-Alpha-Six wasn’t big enough to start making its own buildings yet. Plus regulations had them limited on what they could do with the local resources.

  Lee was currently in building three which housed the administrative desks. He verbally berated the room’s owner for ten minutes. The other man stood for everything Lee hated. His family had been on the other side of Lee’s army in the Independence Wars.

  “Johnson, I’m tired of sitting back and letting them take our food!” Lee stunk of endless cigars and was shouting about three inches away from the portly fellow’s face. Something about the ex-soldier had Johnson backed against a wall stammering protests. They were the same mass, but in different spots. The fact that this room was Johnson’s office did not help.

  “We can’t… we can’t just attack the locals,” Johnson stammered.

  “To hell with regulations!” Lee spat.

  “Those are the rules! If the Outer Ring Board finds out we’re trying…”

  “They stole two of our beefclops! They don’t just grow on trees!” Lee spun away and banged on a nearby wall. His arm shook and he tried to rein himself in to no avail. War had left him prone to outbursts.

  “They breed fast enough.” Johnson tried to reassure Lee with half a grin.

  “Yeah, you try breeding them with no defensive net, no H.E.R.D. units and no spare parts to fix them!”

  “We’re already in the red this month. There’s just no money,”

  “I know!” Lee shouted. He had been glaring at Johnson and the stupid smiley face patch on the round man’s shoulder. “All I’m asking”—Lee’s hands were raised in a grasping motion, as though he was this close to throttling the life out of a bureaucrat—“is that you let me go burn a few nests down.”

  Footsteps crashed down the hallway. They made Lee’s angry rant sound downright friendly. The door slammed sideways and a petite woman pointed one finger at the ex-soldier.

  “Lee!” she yelled in a voice both high pitched and clipped.

  “What, Becky? You want to tell me I can’t take care of the problem too?” He realized his mistake but couldn’t stop from yelling at her.

  “No, but you can’t take care of the problem, so get over it.” Becky was half Lee’s size in height and mass. A pair of multi-lensed glasses sat atop her pinned up hair. “What I care about is you taking Bell out in the middle of the night!”

  “No one else was willing to help!” The ex-soldier rode high on anger. His hands gestured over to the window which showed their colony’s alien world.

  “That’s because you should have brought all the beefclops back to base, and then picked up the H.E.R.D.” Her head tilted to one side and nostrils flared. “Instead, you kept my girl out there five hours! In the morning! While you failed to fix the problem!”

  “She said it was okay!” Lee was on the defensive now, but his aggravated tone had failed to dial back a notch.

  “No, she’s ten! She doesn’t get to say what’s okay and what’s not. I do!” Becky poked one tiny finger at Lee’s chest. Each stab sent him retreating in the same manner Johnson had done from Lee. The portly man had sense enough not to grin and slid away from the argument. His office didn’t have enough room to support this mess.

  “Ten, Lee! Not a fighter, not fit for field duty, what does that mean, Lee?” the woman yelled.

  Lee, who had been forced to extinguish his cigar upon return to their outpost, looked nervous. His eyes darted anywhere but Becky in hopes of an easy escape.

  “Lee! Tell me!”

  “Ma’am. It means she can’t go past the border,” he muttered and studied the floor.

  “And where were your stupid beefclops? Where were you attacked with my little girl?” Her eyebrow raised and head tilted back. Becky’s finger didn’t let up jabbing into Lee’s chest.

  “Past the border ma’am,” the larger male admitted.

  She reminded him of a former commander, one who had shot Lee in the leg to prove a point. A larger fire was needed to calm him down and Becky had plenty to spare. Lee chose to keep the scar as a reminder of his ongoing ability to make stupid choices. It rarely helped.

  “Good. You do it again and I’m shipping you back to the docking station and canceling our contract. Then the army can do what it wants with your rehabilitation status.” She focused her attention on Johnson and glared. He wasn’t sure what he’d done wrong besides occupy the same room.

  “Come on, Becks.” Lee went from angry and aggressive to plaintive and almost desperate.

  “No!” Becky—who resented the name Becks with a fiery passion—twitched an eye despite the Happy Patch on her arm. It was fresh and the yellow smiley face still glowed. She should have been pleasant even in the middle of a rainstorm but wasn’t.

  “Just a few, Becks. Just let me burn out a few nests then we can get back in the green. I can give them a punch in the nose they won’t crawl back from. Before it’s too late.”

  “No. Your gear is only authorized to be touched if raiders attack. Not the local wildlife! If you so much as touch your armor or weaponry, I’ll send you off!” Becky stormed out of the room and left a scowling Lee behind. Johnson looked toward the exit and back at Lee. He wasn’t comfortable sitting at his desk until the ex-soldier left him well alone.

  Finally, Lee walked off. His shoulders slumped and head hung from the outri
ght denial of his much desired killing spree. A full minute later, after his heart rate came down, Johnson slid back into the chair and sighed, then righted a fallen picture frame.

  It displayed his sister, who lived a stress free existence on the inner realms of a United Planets, some billions of light years away. Life, Johnson reflected to himself, had been much easier when he stayed at home.

  Part III

  Since Lee found approval from the outpost executives to be unlikely, he instead routed directly to the repair hanger in building four. The inside was huge and expansive with cranes that ran along railed walls. Normally he would have gone to cooking and ranted about the dwindling supplies, but they’d proven to dislike the aroma that followed him around. Both chefs also advised that they didn’t like Lee’s face, ass, or shoes, especially the shoes. Mud got everywhere.

  “I need two Cadence Modules and a better set of Auto-Wrenches.” Lee tried to smile but his face wasn’t built for it.

  “I need a million bucks and two girls high on Heart Throb serving my nether region, but we ain’t gonna get what we want.” The other man was thin and covered in brown and green grease. “Less’un you got any of those laying around?”

  “For fuck’s sake. We’re not even big enough to have a pleasure module, you expect me to find someone on Heart Throb? Much less two? Plus there’s the matter of me needing some R and R myself,” Lee said with his arms crossed. Heart Throb made the women, and men, feel a certain way, much like the Happy Patch kept people peaceful.

  “Well I ain’t got spare Candies or Wrenches,” the man under the mower spoke coolly despite Lee’s attitude. He wasn’t on a Happy Patch but could remain calm. Lee suspected he stowed away a Wild Leaf or two or found a method to synthesize a replacement from local fauna.

  “Fuck a duck.” Lee paced around in the crowded room. Even though the room was the largest in their colony, it still had too much crap in the way for his liking.