Tear Me Again To Shreds...
Nemesis_Zero
Old European Join Date: 2002-01-25 Member: 75Members, Retired Developer, NS1 Playtester, Constellation
Old European Join Date: 2002-01-25 Member: 75Members, Retired Developer, NS1 Playtester, Constellation
Some of you might remember me posting about a piece of fanfic entitled 'Sins' a few months ago. Well, I finally got around to write a second part, Rob being so nice to host it. You can check both stories (none worth more than four pages) out <a href='http://wayward.netfirms.com/sins/sins.html' target='_blank'>here</a>.
Comments, criticism, threats to my life?
[edited to accomondate for WW]
<b>Heroes</b>
A naked lightbulb came into flickering life. The room it lit wasn't merely shabby - it looked as if the dirt had been there before the walls.
A row of lockers lined one wall, and as numerous years of less than respectful treatment had broken most locks, the light shone upon a variety of pictures on the insides of the half-open doors. Contrary to what one might expect, not all of them were pinups; some were outright pornography.
A man entered the room through a squeaking door and walked over to the one cabinet that still needed to be unlocked. It also had a picture on its doors inside - a postcard with three smiling children, one black, one white, and one asian, two of them boys and one a girl, happily playing on a green field under a blue sky. The inevitable slogan on it read 'You're protecting them.'
The man had often been asked why he had pinned that piece of obvious propaganda into his locker, and his response had been, from the first time he was asked, that, no matter whether this was staged or not, these three kids were still living somewhere within the borders he was protecting. People usually didn't discuss any further.
There's a kind of person you can't help but to imagine in a white cotton shirt and wide trousers, working in a large cornfield. This man was one of them. Even right now, a few million miles away from any field and in a black and blue uniform, the mental eye of the people who saw him still added a straw in his grinning mouth.
The man - the plaque on the locker identified him as 'Michael Cabbon' - reached inside and took some piece of ballistic armor, a helmet, and a rifle out. The equipment was in what is usually described as 'mint condition'. Unfortunately, such words are only used on antiques.
Michael put the equipment on. A few minutes later, he entered a small room with surveillance monitors for walls. The only sounds were an occasional beeping and a gentle 'whoosh' from the ventilation fan above. One single chair stood in the center of concentric circles of keyboards and communication devices.
With the smile of someone completely convinced of what he's doing, Michael stood to attention in front of the chair, which was currently turned to the opposite wall.
"Sergeant Cabbon, reporting for duty!", Michael shouted gleefully.
The chair turned a little, and a man in his late fifties, who had obviously not seen a razor in the last month, glanced over his shoulder at the young soldier. His face suggested a minor inner struggle - he seemed to want to say something, but sighed, and decided against it.
"At ease, at ease." Michael followed the order promptly. "You are aware that it is still fifteen minutes till your shifts start, are you, son?"
The young soldier stared blankly over the chair to the monitors. "Yes, sir."
Finally, the chair spun around. "So why are you here?"
Michaels face showed genuine puzzlement. "Why not, sir?"
His superior sighed again and sipped from a brown mug filled with a dark liquid. "Tell me son, what did you do to get this job?"
"I volunteerd, sir."
As he regained enough self-control to stop coughing, the superior put his mug down and took a careful look at the young man. "Why?" he asked.
Michael stepped from one foot to the other. "Well sir, you know what is said about Venus - the boiling kettle. The planet where a city includes territory from fifty nations. The place where they get things done."
The older man shrugged. Something about him suggested that in his opinion, the same thing could be said about a pool full of sharks. "So?"
"So, I figured - where else can a single man do more for his country than here?" Michael smiled nervously. It was one of those big, brave thoughts that sound remotely ridiculous when spoken out aloud.
His superiors glance got even more intense. Again, he seemed to think about saying something, but shook his head instead. "Well, anyway, you are here. I figure you might just as well go and start your round."
With that, the chair spun back again. Michael saluted and left the room.
The facility had multiple kilometers worth of corridors, and yet, only three to five soldiers guarded it each shift. Michael had been told that this was due to a force-control treaty between the different nations with interest in the city - nobody wanted to risk an all-out war, and thus, it had been decided to keep the amount of armed men so small that no-one could start one. In the case of an attack, the soldiers would merely be support to the automatic turrets directed from the chair under the big fan.
Michael walked by a few pipes - each thrice as wide as he was high and dissapearing in the remote darkness above him ? turned, and checked the magnetic locks on one of the blastdoors leading to the small port of the facility - outside, in Venus' hostile atmosphere.
"Western Access within parameters." he told his helmets headset.
"Hey, Mike, what the hell are you doing here at this time of the night?" sounded the headphone - Ralph, one of the others, who were constantly connected via the facilities communication grid.
Michael grinned into the microphone. "I woke up early."
"Folks, I'm getting something over the citygrid", the overseer said. "Apparently, there's some crap going on at the spaceport. Guess it won't affect us, but a citywide standard alert has been sounded. You know what that means."
"Roger," said Michael and headed towards the main gates - in case of an assault one of the most vulnerable points of the facility.
He met Ralph, a dark, skinny man in the middle of his twenties, and a third soldier Michael only knew remotely there.
"What daya think? Did they find a menacing looking candybar again?" Ralph greeted him.
"Better safe than sorry, I guess," shouted Michael, trying to be louder than the automated cargo transporter that sped by into the facility.
Ralph shrugged and activated his mic. "Hey chief, any news?"
"Contact to the port broke some minutes ago." The old man seemed concerned. "Seems this is bigger than expected. The last thing we heard was something about the biofilters. Maybe some SOB staged an attack with Anthrax-C."
"Yeah, or somebody tried to smuggle his pet through and they accidentally hit the wrong switch, eh, chief?"
All they got for a response was static.
"Chief?"
The three soldiers looked at each other.
"Damn... Mike, you and I check what's up with the old fella," Ralph said. "Gene, was the name, right? You stay here. Close the door if it gets rough."
Gene nodded, the other two grabbed their guns and ran down the hallways towards the surveilance center.
"Do you think this has something to do with the port?" Michael asked while he entered the security code for the door.
"Damned if I kn... oh, <i>no</i>."
Half of the monitors were dead. Many of them had literally been ripped in two. Wires hung loose from above the now still fan. The circle of keyboards had been broken. And the once black chair shimmered red in the light of the monitors.
"Do you see his body somewhere?"
"Nope. But he's dead for sure. Nobody can lose that much blood and live to tell about it."
"Well," continued Ralph, "we'd better get Gene and start searching for the **** who did this."
Michael nodded and activated his headset. "Gene, we need you here."
"Gene?" asked Ralph, his voice nearing hysteria.
The line stayed dead.
"Damn, damn, damn," screamed Ralph as they reached the abandoned gates. "That's it, man. Let's get away."
Michael looked at him, puzzled. "It's our duty to defend this facility."
Ralph stared back. "Hell, Mike, we're up alone against an enemy who got two men without them even getting a chance of firing a goddamned shot, the controls for the sentries are smashed, and this compound is bigger than the village you grew up in! It's hopeless! Hopeless!"
Michael didn't respond for a while. Then he sighed. "Well then, run away. I won't. I'd rather die than see the face of a ... of a traitor every time I look in the mirror."
The dark soldier pointed at the facility. "You're going to die for this?"
"It's within our borders. I won't step back from them."
Without a further word, Ralph took his rifle, the two spare clips in his utility belt, and pushed them into the young soldiers arms. "You **** hero."
When the other one was gone, Michael went inside the facility and closed the gates. They shut with a pneumatic hiss.
Then, he took the clip out of Ralphs gun and leaned it against the plaque next to the gates. The young soldier touched the letters of the name of his country embossed in it. He would defend it.
This was the moment in which he heard it - a sound like the devil chuckling.
Michael spun around and brought his rifle up, scanning all doors for potential targets.
Out of nowhere, something hit his body armor and produced a shower of a green liquid that smelled a little like the stuff Michaels father had used to clean his tools. Most of it hit the armor, but a little dropped on his left arm. It felt as if his flesh burned in ice cold fire. The soldier screamed.
When he regained control of himself, he finally saw it. A black nightmare, a little larger than him. It stood there, about twenty meters away, and watched him. If a bacterium could've looked the other way through the microscope, Michael thought, it would've seen a similiar expression, and with this thought awoke rage in him.
He slammed his rifle in his hip and pulled the trigger. "I am not dead yet!", he screamed.
The nightmare dissapeared.
The next things Michael percieved were a short chill like that from the wind of a bydriving car, an intense smell, and the sudden absence of all pain. The black beast stood right in front of him and looked on Michaels maimed arm. It beat him again.
Michael spun around and landed on his chest. He felt instinctively that standing up was impossible.
His gaze wandered up to the plaque. His view blurring, the letters seemed to form a face of a little girl happily playing on a green lawn under a blue sky. Michael lifted his left, bleeding hand, tried to touch the face. He couldn't defend her.
"Forgive me."
The black nightmare dissapeared with the soldiers body. Blood obscured parts of the plaque, making the name of the country unreadable. Only the facilities name could be recognized: New Heaven City Dumps.[/edit]
Comments, criticism, threats to my life?
[edited to accomondate for WW]
<b>Heroes</b>
A naked lightbulb came into flickering life. The room it lit wasn't merely shabby - it looked as if the dirt had been there before the walls.
A row of lockers lined one wall, and as numerous years of less than respectful treatment had broken most locks, the light shone upon a variety of pictures on the insides of the half-open doors. Contrary to what one might expect, not all of them were pinups; some were outright pornography.
A man entered the room through a squeaking door and walked over to the one cabinet that still needed to be unlocked. It also had a picture on its doors inside - a postcard with three smiling children, one black, one white, and one asian, two of them boys and one a girl, happily playing on a green field under a blue sky. The inevitable slogan on it read 'You're protecting them.'
The man had often been asked why he had pinned that piece of obvious propaganda into his locker, and his response had been, from the first time he was asked, that, no matter whether this was staged or not, these three kids were still living somewhere within the borders he was protecting. People usually didn't discuss any further.
There's a kind of person you can't help but to imagine in a white cotton shirt and wide trousers, working in a large cornfield. This man was one of them. Even right now, a few million miles away from any field and in a black and blue uniform, the mental eye of the people who saw him still added a straw in his grinning mouth.
The man - the plaque on the locker identified him as 'Michael Cabbon' - reached inside and took some piece of ballistic armor, a helmet, and a rifle out. The equipment was in what is usually described as 'mint condition'. Unfortunately, such words are only used on antiques.
Michael put the equipment on. A few minutes later, he entered a small room with surveillance monitors for walls. The only sounds were an occasional beeping and a gentle 'whoosh' from the ventilation fan above. One single chair stood in the center of concentric circles of keyboards and communication devices.
With the smile of someone completely convinced of what he's doing, Michael stood to attention in front of the chair, which was currently turned to the opposite wall.
"Sergeant Cabbon, reporting for duty!", Michael shouted gleefully.
The chair turned a little, and a man in his late fifties, who had obviously not seen a razor in the last month, glanced over his shoulder at the young soldier. His face suggested a minor inner struggle - he seemed to want to say something, but sighed, and decided against it.
"At ease, at ease." Michael followed the order promptly. "You are aware that it is still fifteen minutes till your shifts start, are you, son?"
The young soldier stared blankly over the chair to the monitors. "Yes, sir."
Finally, the chair spun around. "So why are you here?"
Michaels face showed genuine puzzlement. "Why not, sir?"
His superior sighed again and sipped from a brown mug filled with a dark liquid. "Tell me son, what did you do to get this job?"
"I volunteerd, sir."
As he regained enough self-control to stop coughing, the superior put his mug down and took a careful look at the young man. "Why?" he asked.
Michael stepped from one foot to the other. "Well sir, you know what is said about Venus - the boiling kettle. The planet where a city includes territory from fifty nations. The place where they get things done."
The older man shrugged. Something about him suggested that in his opinion, the same thing could be said about a pool full of sharks. "So?"
"So, I figured - where else can a single man do more for his country than here?" Michael smiled nervously. It was one of those big, brave thoughts that sound remotely ridiculous when spoken out aloud.
His superiors glance got even more intense. Again, he seemed to think about saying something, but shook his head instead. "Well, anyway, you are here. I figure you might just as well go and start your round."
With that, the chair spun back again. Michael saluted and left the room.
The facility had multiple kilometers worth of corridors, and yet, only three to five soldiers guarded it each shift. Michael had been told that this was due to a force-control treaty between the different nations with interest in the city - nobody wanted to risk an all-out war, and thus, it had been decided to keep the amount of armed men so small that no-one could start one. In the case of an attack, the soldiers would merely be support to the automatic turrets directed from the chair under the big fan.
Michael walked by a few pipes - each thrice as wide as he was high and dissapearing in the remote darkness above him ? turned, and checked the magnetic locks on one of the blastdoors leading to the small port of the facility - outside, in Venus' hostile atmosphere.
"Western Access within parameters." he told his helmets headset.
"Hey, Mike, what the hell are you doing here at this time of the night?" sounded the headphone - Ralph, one of the others, who were constantly connected via the facilities communication grid.
Michael grinned into the microphone. "I woke up early."
"Folks, I'm getting something over the citygrid", the overseer said. "Apparently, there's some crap going on at the spaceport. Guess it won't affect us, but a citywide standard alert has been sounded. You know what that means."
"Roger," said Michael and headed towards the main gates - in case of an assault one of the most vulnerable points of the facility.
He met Ralph, a dark, skinny man in the middle of his twenties, and a third soldier Michael only knew remotely there.
"What daya think? Did they find a menacing looking candybar again?" Ralph greeted him.
"Better safe than sorry, I guess," shouted Michael, trying to be louder than the automated cargo transporter that sped by into the facility.
Ralph shrugged and activated his mic. "Hey chief, any news?"
"Contact to the port broke some minutes ago." The old man seemed concerned. "Seems this is bigger than expected. The last thing we heard was something about the biofilters. Maybe some SOB staged an attack with Anthrax-C."
"Yeah, or somebody tried to smuggle his pet through and they accidentally hit the wrong switch, eh, chief?"
All they got for a response was static.
"Chief?"
The three soldiers looked at each other.
"Damn... Mike, you and I check what's up with the old fella," Ralph said. "Gene, was the name, right? You stay here. Close the door if it gets rough."
Gene nodded, the other two grabbed their guns and ran down the hallways towards the surveilance center.
"Do you think this has something to do with the port?" Michael asked while he entered the security code for the door.
"Damned if I kn... oh, <i>no</i>."
Half of the monitors were dead. Many of them had literally been ripped in two. Wires hung loose from above the now still fan. The circle of keyboards had been broken. And the once black chair shimmered red in the light of the monitors.
"Do you see his body somewhere?"
"Nope. But he's dead for sure. Nobody can lose that much blood and live to tell about it."
"Well," continued Ralph, "we'd better get Gene and start searching for the **** who did this."
Michael nodded and activated his headset. "Gene, we need you here."
"Gene?" asked Ralph, his voice nearing hysteria.
The line stayed dead.
"Damn, damn, damn," screamed Ralph as they reached the abandoned gates. "That's it, man. Let's get away."
Michael looked at him, puzzled. "It's our duty to defend this facility."
Ralph stared back. "Hell, Mike, we're up alone against an enemy who got two men without them even getting a chance of firing a goddamned shot, the controls for the sentries are smashed, and this compound is bigger than the village you grew up in! It's hopeless! Hopeless!"
Michael didn't respond for a while. Then he sighed. "Well then, run away. I won't. I'd rather die than see the face of a ... of a traitor every time I look in the mirror."
The dark soldier pointed at the facility. "You're going to die for this?"
"It's within our borders. I won't step back from them."
Without a further word, Ralph took his rifle, the two spare clips in his utility belt, and pushed them into the young soldiers arms. "You **** hero."
When the other one was gone, Michael went inside the facility and closed the gates. They shut with a pneumatic hiss.
Then, he took the clip out of Ralphs gun and leaned it against the plaque next to the gates. The young soldier touched the letters of the name of his country embossed in it. He would defend it.
This was the moment in which he heard it - a sound like the devil chuckling.
Michael spun around and brought his rifle up, scanning all doors for potential targets.
Out of nowhere, something hit his body armor and produced a shower of a green liquid that smelled a little like the stuff Michaels father had used to clean his tools. Most of it hit the armor, but a little dropped on his left arm. It felt as if his flesh burned in ice cold fire. The soldier screamed.
When he regained control of himself, he finally saw it. A black nightmare, a little larger than him. It stood there, about twenty meters away, and watched him. If a bacterium could've looked the other way through the microscope, Michael thought, it would've seen a similiar expression, and with this thought awoke rage in him.
He slammed his rifle in his hip and pulled the trigger. "I am not dead yet!", he screamed.
The nightmare dissapeared.
The next things Michael percieved were a short chill like that from the wind of a bydriving car, an intense smell, and the sudden absence of all pain. The black beast stood right in front of him and looked on Michaels maimed arm. It beat him again.
Michael spun around and landed on his chest. He felt instinctively that standing up was impossible.
His gaze wandered up to the plaque. His view blurring, the letters seemed to form a face of a little girl happily playing on a green lawn under a blue sky. Michael lifted his left, bleeding hand, tried to touch the face. He couldn't defend her.
"Forgive me."
The black nightmare dissapeared with the soldiers body. Blood obscured parts of the plaque, making the name of the country unreadable. Only the facilities name could be recognized: New Heaven City Dumps.[/edit]
Comments
sequel
*donces*
wait, why am I posting and not reading....
*slap*
man, that was pretty damn good
more...
and what happened to the religous guy?
As for Bertrand - he stood right in front of a container full of Kharaa that had been forced to spend undisclosed amounts of time in a small space without of anything but each other to take their aggression out on. Need I say more?
fair enough
just keep the work coming...
btw , did "it" use the 1.04 or 1.1 version of its ability ? <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo-->
...
good stuff.
*takes out a fork and knife*
"MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE!"
but yeah, it doesn't matter what patch it was, becuase fades still have acid rockets...(right)....
and how do they get fades, that must have been a large crate, or the had better of been two hives, (or one if it was 1.1) lying around
<!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' valign='absmiddle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->