Slow Burn_Deep Darkness

by Stephen Landry

  I can still remember the shanty town I grew up in. Why am I a sociopath? How did I get this way? Well, it all began like most mental diseases in my childhood. My mother and I were in the market just like the many times we had gone before. She knew the streets and alleys like the back of her hand, like the back of my hand. We were singing as we walked through an alley. She was on the last line of the verse of one of my favorite songs (a song I have since forgotten or possibly blocked out - all I know is 'Something about the bird sings') and then she was falling. A stray bullet from a firefight two blocks away had opened her skull and splattered me in blood. I sat by her side for an hour before medics finally entered the area and took her body away covering it in a black trash bag. They asked if I had a guardian present and I said 'no' and when I told them where my home was they said I was on my own. I never saw my mother's body after that. There was never a funeral. She was simply there one day and gone the next. I was eight.

  Area 5 reminded me of the market. As I shot at the people that appeared in the streets I thought about how much I hated that place. A group of soldiers attacked us from up on a ridge. Another grenade cleared the way and I found myself smiling as I walked through an alleyway littered with burned corpses. I thought about the medics that carried my mother away, I thought about how they had simply told me to find my way home. They had no compassion just like I had no compassion now.

  "Elyse, how are you holding up over there, don't wander too far off," it was our squad leader Jack. Jack was the only one in our group aside from Kal that had the most sense (though Kal fell in love with me so he may not have been quite as smart as I give him credit). Jack was calm, even when murdering people. He had been a sniper before joining Squad-13, originally he liked working alone, playing the role of assassin and spy but the Hegemony (and the 'Sons') had far greater plans for him than that. Jack was standing behind me next to Andrew and Anja (aka 'Tusk' as she had liked to be called - I heard she had a hard on for Walruses). A few blocks down stood Kal, Cillian, and Mizuki rounding off our team. We had split into two groups, another part of our mission, something Jack had just revealed to me via my wrist PDA was that there were 'traces of biological materials in the area' and that Sect-17 may be using Area 5 to develop biological weapons. This didn't strike me as the kind of place for that kind of work, I always imagined secret lairs being inside castles or laboratories clean with a touch of gothic architecture. Area 5 didn't even have paved streets. We were walking on dirt. I guess cleanliness didn't really matter when making a 'bomb' and terrorists worked with what they had.

  The FTLS Falcon flew above us. It wasn't a starship or anything, just a lightweight cruiser that hovered in the sky above. It held maybe six personal each more than capable of holding their own. I wondered for a moment how many death squads the Hegemony actually had. I watched as they began raining missiles down on the other side of Area 5, probably killing those that tried to escape.

  "Why bother sending us in when they can level this place from the sky?" I asked.

  "They need us on the ground to confirm the weapons are real and capture any intel we can about what they might have had planned," Jack said. "No one told me anything about gathering intel?" I said slightly confused. "Well it isn't your job, we just want you to kill, gathering intel is mine and Mizuki's mission, but now that I have mentioned it if you see anything let me know," he said with a grin. At the same time, he pinged the rest of the squad and gave them a heads up as well. So any computers, USBs, or anything that looks like it could hold some kind of information about Sect-17 and what their plans are we had to pick up. Guess we weren't just burning the place down completely after all. I thought about cursing him. 'Not my mission' what the hell. "And I was having so much fun just firing on everything now I have to look out for damn computers and hard drives," I said adding a few curse words to the end. It didn't matter I was having too much fun blasting away at the rebels to really care.

  Log - 11

  I always knew I was different. Even when I was young before my mother died. Instead of playing with dolls I played with sticks and boys. I even got into a fight when I was six with an older boy. I don't remember who won. Older kids in my village always preyed upon the younger, the weak. The adults hardly ever intervened. If they wanted us to have a good childhood they would have moved us away from that place. I guess my mother had tried. I shouldn't blame her. She had done the best she could for me. I was provided for and given an education. Even after she died and I went to live with one of my aunts I heard about how she had spent twelve hours a day working to save up for our escape. She even had passports made for both of us - forgeries, of course, the kind that were untraceable. She had hoped that by the time I was ten she would be able to put us on a transport at the port and the two of us would fly into the stars together. My aunt gave me my passport. Told me if I wanted she would use my mother's money to send me away. When I was nine I told her I was ready to leave.

  It was easier then I thought it would be. My mother had prepared everything. I had cousins that lived on a colony in Mars, a settlement called Pergonae-3. I can still remember the fear I felt as I walked alone into the port. I told showed the guards my luggage (nothing but wrinkled clothes and a few pictures of my mother) and my fake passport - they barely bothered to check it (just like the guards in the Erebus) and let me through. The port was so clean and white. It was unlike anything I had ever seen up to that point in my life. I felt like I had won the lottery. I was wearing my best clothes and an outfit picked out by my aunt. Compared to the people around me I must have looked like street trash but I didn't care. I was on top of the world and soon I would literally be rising above it all. As I boarded my transport I stumbled and stared out at the city. I knew I would never see that place again. I hated it. I wanted everyone there to die. I had so much rage in my heart but my mother's death had set me free.

  I thought about the stories I had heard of people rising from the streets and becoming rich and famous. The inspirational ones that make people feel better about their useless mundane lives. I believed for that moment in time that I was destined to be a celebrity. What was I going to do? Paint, sing? I had plenty of time to find out, I was only nine years old. Another child looked my way. A young girl my age traveling with her parents. She waved at me. I thought for a moment that she would be my new best friend. I felt like I was making a connection with everyone. When I went to talk to her I was put off by her parents.

  The shuttle was going to take several days to reach Mars. Once there I would meet up with my cousins at the port, they would be holding a sign for me. When we launched I felt my ears pop. The launch itself made it hard to move. I felt my stomach flip and turn. I thought several times that I was going to throw up but then we broke through the atmosphere and leveled off. Each of us began to float. The shuttle I boarded had been old. It had no artificial gravity. It would have been an awful two days if I had to stay awake but the flight attendants had us sit in egg shaped pods. A form of temporary stasis. Cheaper then feeding passengers in the long run. I let the attendant strap me in and within a few moments, I had fallen asleep.

  Two days later I woke up and we had landed at a small port on Mars.

  Pergonae-1.

  It looked like a desert town. There were few buildings and residents. Most of the dock was dusty, the martian soil here still hadn't been quite terraformed but at least the oxygen wasn't stale or dirty. I was breathing clean air. I thought about what I had learned about the planet. How it was right before the Skrav invaded we began terraforming Mars, a venture that would have taken centuries and lifetimes to accomplish but after the invasion there was a huge technological revolution and the terraforming process had sped up to twenty years. Mars had all the building blocks for life, all we really had to do was establish an artificial atmosphere, pump a few gases into the air, plant some trees in a mixture of Earth and Martian soil (the bacteria from the Earth soil quickly spread across the martian planet as did the seeds of plants) and wai
t. Pergonae-1 was apparently the second to last stop the shuttle had made with only a few of us still onboard that were leaving. Plenty had boarded though. Every seat was filled with Martians leaving to venture towards Earth. I wondered why anyone would want to go there? Once they left they would be heading towards another city to pick up more passengers. Truly I didn't care. I had made it to the stars. I thanked my flight attendant and whispered a short prayer saying 'thank you' to my mother. She had told me one day I would soar. I had finally escaped.

  It was easy to find my cousins waiting for me. I recognized them almost immediately from pictures my aunt had shown me. We walked outside the port together. The horizon was empty. It looked like there was nothing but dust for hundreds of miles. Mars wasn't a very big planet, not nearly the size of Earth. I thought for sure that there would be more civilization than there was but I was wrong. I was wrong about everything. From one shanty town to another. Pergonae-3 was just as bad as the village in South Africa.

  Log - 12

  Area 5. I had killed twenty maybe thirty rebels by the time we made our way 1/3 of the way through the block. There were so many of them mostly about the same age as I was. The look of shock on their faces aroused me. I could feel the adrenaline of war, the rush as I pulled the trigger, one after another they fell. Terrorists. They might as well have been Skrav. My exo-suit held up against the bullets they sprayed towards me. They were firing rounds from old war machine guns, M16s, AK47s, classics that they no doubt bought on the black markets.

  Everything seemed to be going to plan Jack and Andrews had my back. I knew I could rely on them. I knew Kal was safe. The two of us had just started to see one another outside our uniforms at this time and I felt connected to him. Over my PDA I read a ping. A private message from Kal, 'How are you holding up?' it asked. I said aloud, "another day at the beach," and my PDA immediately transformed my words into text. The two of us had gone to the beaches on the West Coast only a week ago when we had taken some shore leave. It was the first time I had gone somewhere that I didn't feel like killing anybody. We toured the streets of L.A. & Hollywood, watched movies till way past midnight and went to an after hours bar together and drank whiskey and wine. Kal's life had been so different than mine. Kal grew up in Brazil, but not in the slums. His parents had been rich though they died when he was very young. He spent his adolescence in private military school and eventually enlisted at the age of eighteen. He saw combat in the Middle East (that place is always at war), China, Tibet, and Mars. By the time he was twenty-one (he was only a few months older than I am - and when we joined Squad 13 we were both twenty-twos) he was ranked number one in his class. He was a prodigy, not only with a gun but with computers and technology. I was a lucky girl.

  Reynold's our commanding officer pinged all of us, 'Mizuki found the package, return to previous thought, extraction at the south ridge fifteen minutes'. The message was clear to all of us - mission success - all we had to do now was leave. That should have been easy. The FTLS Falcon would turn Area 5 to ash in less than twenty minutes and we had to prioritize and make sure we weren't in their way. At the south ridge on the border between Area 5 and Area 6, we would have a dropship waiting for us. It would be automated, they wouldn't send a real pilot our way. We officially didn't exist anyway. Squad-13 was black ops, this mission, hell even our enemy Section 17 didn't officially exist on any records. As far as the world knew every nation had their difficulties but we were all at peace. No one cared about the divide between the rich and the poor and many countries were prosperous with middle-class populations that could afford to live the way they wanted (minus the sailboats, flying cars made by Ferrari and other rich people toys). Our struggle was a secret one. A secret war fought in slums and shanty towns against an enemy that didn't exist against warlords that fed off the ill will of countries struck by poverty.

  If the public had known the truth what would they have done?

  We kept order. We kept the peace. We kept fighting a war so that no one else would have to.

  Since the beginning of civilization, humans have always been at war amongst themselves and this was no different. From tribal clans fighting for territory to the Hegemony and Sect-17 fighting for control of space trade and technology.

  Jack and Andrews were a block behind me now. I was quickly approaching the south ridge. I had five minutes before pickup. Area 5 burned behind me, buildings and cargo holds toppled over, the city was in ruins. We had done our job with pinpoint accuracy. I stood on top of a cargo hold for a moment eyeing the drop ship in the distance. 'Almost there' I thought. I hit the dirt ground hard loading another clip into my M44. I hadn't killed anyone in three minutes. If there was anyone left they were hiding or running having realized they had lost. That was what I told myself before my eyes burned from the sight of a child.

  I held my M44 up front, alert, gripping the barrel. The child was seven maybe eight years old, skinny, malnourished. The child's arm had been amputated and replaced with a cybernetic prosthetic. It looked like something from the movie 'Terminator'. He stared at me wearing a yellow shirt and blue shorts holding a small teddy bear down by his side. A trick I though, a hallucination. No way there should be kids here. Then another appeared. A little girl even younger with just as many cybernetics. Another boy appeared from behind her with goggles stretched over his eyes a cybernetic leg. Suddenly I was surrounded. Children were crying all around me. I thought for a moment I could hear them begging for food, water, others begging that I save them. Some looked at me as if I had been some kind of saviour, smiling at me with teeth. I could smell them. They were scavengers, rooting through piles of junk in the city collecting cans and other pieces of metal that they could recycle or sell to junkyards and dealers. Some of the kids had bags full of broken parts. I could remember doing the same when I was young on Pergonae-3. A shanty town on Mars, a junkyyard full of scraped ships that no one attended to or wanted. I can still remember my older cousins as they told me they were sorry Mars wasn't the glorious place I had imagined it would be. I could remember spending eight years of my life living just as these children are now before I enlisted. What was I doing? They must have beens hiding from the gunfire.

  Two minutes. Jack and Andrews stood behind me.

  We were nearly out of time.

  Log - 13

  Music was better when you knew the artists were alive. Maybe stasis somehow changed my musical taste. Either way, I couldn't find a single thing on my infinite playlist I wanted to listen to with the exception of a few 'power ballads' and 'shreds' here and there. Nothing fancy and nothing anyone would recognize.

  Eight hours is a long fucking time to spend in a transport ship strapped in with soldiers and refugees. Citizens of the Erebus, Citizens of humanity. Looking around I found it so hard to believe that we were all that was left. If I really really was going to spend the rest of my life on this ship or on that colony these would be the ugly mugs I would be spending it with and I had never been very good at making friends.

  A young soldier about my age (but not since he was actually four years younger and had been awake since the Erebus left Pluto) sat beside me. I could see him from the corner of my eye looking at my body checking me out. I knew I had been a fairly attractive woman but I had no time for games. I wasn't interested in making new friends nor was I interested in sex or games at the moment. All I could think about was my mission. I kept wondering if I heard Miguel's voice in my ear if he was somehow watching me right now. I wondered if he would order me to degrade myself for his amusement. He had after all already ordered me to kill and I did. Sleeping with a stranger was far easier than that and who knows maybe this young soldier would be worth my time.

  Eyes on the prize. I wasn't sitting here to get laid.

  I had to figure out how I was going to confront Reynolds.

  "Message for my lady," the young soldier said handing me a small purple cloth he pulled from the inside of his coat. The clothing was made of cotton, I wondered now how rare
such an item would be. The color purple in some cultures meant the item being presented was of great importance. I looked at him taking the cloth in hand and asked, "are you sure? I have only just woken up and I know nobody on board," I said trying my best to sound as innocent as I could. "A message from Slen, I believe he was your employer correct, I was also brought here under his supervision though I arrived far later than the two of you," the young soldier said looking me up and down. "Yes, you are Elyse, I would recognize you anywhere, I have spent hours watching over you while you slept, sorry, I'm sure that sounds weird, I'm not trying to sound like a pervert or anything that was a part of my job, I'm sorry I wasn't there when you woke up," he said. I opened the clothe and from inside fell a USB chip.

  "And what exactly is on this?" I asked motioning annoyed at the USB that had fallen into my lap. "Everything, the future, the past, Kal, Squad 13, the various jobs you took as a freelancer, and the key to getting that collar of your neck," he wrote on a sheet of paper for me to read. I couldn't blame him for not speaking. He knew somehow that Miguel or at the very least one of his men would be listening in.

  "How did you come by something like this?" I asked trying not to let the mention of Squad-13 or Kal's name get the better of my emotions. It was possible that many onboard this ship, especially the military, had a hand to play in the Hegemony and maybe even some of the missions Squad-13 had performed. Actually, I had no doubt in my mind that the politicians and officials that made up the Hegemony were here. "You see, I'm Reynolds assistant," he mouthed without speaking - smiling.