Assault on Anomgen Base, Pt. 12

April is right around the corner, and that means National Poetry Writing Month! That also means that this story needs to wrap up ASAP, because I’ll be damned if I let it sit on the backburner for a month when it’s so close to the end. Expect another post sometime within the next 24 or so hours, and then thirty days of poetry after that.

Genni’s vision blurred, the world seeming to shudder and melt before her eyes. Concussed. Got to get up. Got to help. She felt a grip like an iron claw close around her arm and pull her to her feet. When she looked up, Trass’khar’s scaly face and unblinking eyes were looking down at her. She tried to raise her plasma carbine, but the serpentii wrapped its claw around the barrel and pushed it down. She didn’t speak the alien’s language, but she understood his meaning well enough: That will hurt more than it will help.

Her gaze drifted towards the two men dueling with their minds, swinging their psi-blades at each other, neither gaining a clear advantage. The air crackled with the energy they were unleashing. Under her blurry vision, they looked like spirits fighting, an angel and a devil, light and dark.

And that kid Max had chosen to be his sidekick was just lying on the ground, utterly exposed and helpless. He trembled and shook, every attack by the two psykers punctuated by some new shiver. Was he having a seizure? Genni knew that psionic energy could cause a mental backlash in people who weren’t used to being exposed to it. To be as close to a raging duel as Filip was must have been wreaking Hell on his mind.

* * *

“You’ve gotten better,” Grigor hissed through clenched teeth. Max could feel the sweat dripping down his face, could feel the nagging fear in the pit of his stomach that any moment now his concentration would break and his one-time friend would skewer him. But a sense of pride in his own skill was carrying him through. Grigor was right. He had gotten better, and he knew it. When they’d sparred in the academy, Grigor had destroyed him. Even during training exercises back when Grigor had still been in the People’s Army, he’d easily been the more powerful of the two. But now Max was holding his own. Even after Grigor’d gotten himself cybernetically enhanced, even after whatever training he’d had as an Annexer, Max was fighting back hard enough to make him sweat.

It was the little things in life, really.

The odds were pretty good that Grigor would still kill him, after all. But may the Quintessence damn him, he was going to make the son of a bitch work for it. Genni and Trass’khar and the kid could escape. Hell, maybe they’d even accomplish their mission and damage the base beyond repair somehow. If his friends could survive and his enemies made to suffer, then Max guessed he was okay with whatever happened next.

“Nothing? No quip? No insult?”

Max just grinned. “Too busy concentrating, buddy. Sorry.”

“It won’t save you. And it won’t save them.”

Grigor pushed Max backwards, and for a second he held his ground in anticipation of Grigor’s charge. Instead, he reached out with his mind and pulled Filip through the air towards him. The kid thrashed and shook, but his eyes were glazed over like he was somewhere a million miles away.

“No!” Max cried out. His concentration broke. He moved forward to try and protect Filip, shield his body with the energy from his psi-focuser.

Faster than Max’s eyes could follow, Grigor pulled a plasma pistol out of a holdout holster in the small of his back and shot him in the stomach.

Assault on Anomgen Base, Pt. 11

Filip’s mind went blank, his thoughts knocked away like children’s toys brushed off a tabletop by an impatient parent. When he was a child fighting and hustling and playing with the other children on his hiveblock, they’d bragged about how brave and tough and clever they were. They’d each claim to have stared down wild animals, violent drunks and junkies, police, creatures unearthly and supernatural. It was all lies and games, of course, but even as a boy, Filip wondered what it would be like to really face something monstrous, something dangerous. What would he do then?

Now he knew. He’d freeze. He’d do nothing. Grigor Zonda was something between a legend and a fairytale told to frighten children. The greatest warrior in the People’s Army. The most powerful psyker anyone had ever seen. The tortured genius. The traitor. The butcher. The man who had become an unfeeling machine in service to the enemy. Fighter, sniper, pilot, strategist. There was nothing he couldn’t do, no weapon he couldn’t wield, no enemy he couldn’t defeat.

He walked right past Filip without even bothering to look at him. Why should he have? What mind does a tidal wave give to the ships and the villages it crushes with its passing?

Commander Zonda and Max and Trass’khar fired their weapons. Grigor was a font of psionic energy, Filip knew, and he channeled it, focused it around himself like a shield. He could see his friends shouting, could see their firearms roar as they spat death, but the noise barely came through to him. The despair that emanated from Grigor Zonda was like a fog that dampened noise and sights until they were whispers and ghosts. Words came to him in broken pieces and fragments. “Should not have come.” “Monster.” “Surrender.” “Kill you.” “Face me like a man.” “Didn’t have to be like this.” “Shut up and die.”

And then suddenly the world came into sharp focus again. Filip looked up and saw Max and Grigor face-to-face with each other, their psi-focusers projecting blades of yellow and dark purple that sparked and hissed as they met. They circled each other, Grigor’s face a passionless mask of flesh and cybernetic metal. Max’s was unflinching rictus, every bit as unnatural. “How’s it going, Greggy Boy? Been a while. You going to say anything? Yes? No? Just going to do that ‘strong silent type’ thing?”

“Your prattling betrays your true feelings, Clown. You know the hopelessness of your situation. Why deny it?”

Max laughed. “Just my nature, I guess.”

From where she had taken cover behind the massive terminal that controlled the base’s power systems, Genni cried out. “Max, move! Give me a shot! Give me–”

Grigor’s head snapped towards his sister, as if he’d noticed her for the first time. “Silence.” His psi-focuser surged with energy, enough to surprise Max and drive him backwards a few steps. With mechanical precision and inhuman quickness, Grigor lifted his plasma pistol and fired it at her. The bolt struck true, but it flew through the air strangely, ponderously slow. It caught her in the chest, but it sent her flying instead of punching a hole through her body. She slammed against the far wall with a metallic thud and a grunt of pain.

Max paid the attack no mind. If he didn’t care or if he couldn’t let himself care or if he simply had to maintain his focus, Filip couldn’t say. Trass’khar snarled and ran to Genni’s side. Filip just sat motionless as he had been, overwhelmed by despair.

But then the despair began to give way to anger.

Assault on Anomgen Base, Pt. 10

Filip stumbled to a halt, his shoes screeching against the metal of the base’s floor as he simultaneously tried to backpedal away from the gun in his face and surrender and die cursing the hated Annexers. His would-be executioner’s face shifted from a mask of steely resolve to a morass of confusion and surprise to anger to delight all in the space of a second, the change coming faster than her words could keep up. “Freeze, you– wait, what? …Max!”

Genni dropped the gun, pushed past him, and threw her arms around Max Blaston. Ignored by the lady for another man. Damned if that wasn’t always the way of things. Still, Filip smiled. This part of the mission had gone right at least.

Max returned Genni’s hug. “Well, that’s a Hell of a way to greet your rescuers, Commander.”

“’Rescuers?’ Excuse me, do I look like I need rescue?”

Max chuckled. “Well, we’re here to extract you, then. I assume you weren’t just going to walk home.”

Genni smiled. “No. I guess even I need a pilot.”

Trass’khar made a noise halfway between a snort and a sniff and pointed at the computer terminal Genni had been working on. She glanced back over her shoulder. “Oh, simple. I’m going to blow this place up.”

Filip said softly, “Oh, that’s what we’re here for, too. Uh, in addition to rescuing you.” Genni turned her attention towards Filip and looked him up and down as if she were seeing him for the first time. She wasn’t, of course. They’d met before. But maybe he just wasn’t very memorable.

Genni smirked. “Good. You three can help out by covering me while I finish wrecking their system.”

Filip took a moment to examine the door they’d just come through before the three soldiers nodded and took up defensive positions. It was standard stuff, no more secure than he would have expected to find in a ritzy hab block back on the hive. He frowned. It was stupid. Beyond stupid. It was pathetic. It was the kind of thing that settled into your stomach and dragged it down like a lead weight. These clowns were that incompetent and the People’s Army couldn’t beat them? The Annexers were fools and they’d put together a weapon this deadly? It was all so hopeless. They’d already lost. Why even fight?

Filip shook his head. By the quintessence, where had that come from? Those thoughts had come on so suddenly and so strongly. It was like they’d been forced upon him. Like they’d come from some outside force, but what?

Suddenly the door blew inwards, collapsing to the floor with a heavy clang. All of them let out gasps of surprise. Standing in the frame was a lone man, dressed from feet to shoulders in black and grey titan armor, cybernetic augmentations all over his body, a plasma pistol in one hand and the other glowing with psionic energy so dark it seemed to suck the very light from the room.

“Hello, Sister.”

Assault on Anomgen Base, Pt. 9

The computers that controlled the base’s power plant were simultaneously an absolute joke and the most frustrating machines that Genni had ever had the displeasure of working with. In the time she’d spent with the People’s Army, she’d visited two dozen worlds, a handful that she’d never heard of before and another handful that were backwaters stuck in veritable Dark Ages. She’d seen tech so advanced that she would have had to dedicate a decade of her life to studying it, and she’d seen tech so primitive that she’d have to do the same thing.

Anomgen Base was run on digital computers, not quantum machines. She wasn’t sure but she thought that it probably couldn’t even connect to SolNet. It existed in a place of isolation, of antiquity, of obscurity. There were advantages to it, she supposed. There was no way for the base to be hacked except for by someone physically present in the room. But against someone who was physically present, there was almost no defense that the Annexers could hope to mount.

Now all she had to do was figure out how the damn system actually worked. When I get back to base, I’ll have to be sure to mention this during debriefing. Our spies need to be trained in the use of this outdated nonsense.

If I get back to base, I mean.

Setting aside the fact that a patrol could show up and shoot her in the back at any moment, her self-appointed mission to destroy the base would make escaping equally difficult. She could disrupt the processes that produced the base’s nuclear fuel, but that was a short-term solution to the issue of the base at best. In a short amount of time, the Annexers’ engineers would be able to undo whatever she had done. She needed to destroy the reactors themselves. Disrupt the fusion process, force the automation to keep feeding fuel to the fire, let the whole thing go critical, try and divert the excess heat and energy to the base’s ammo dumps and fueling stations and hangars. It might work. It wouldn’t annihilate the base, but blowing it to pieces might be just as good.

The sounds of gunfire and the dull thump of debris colliding with the hull of the base served as a fitting soundtrack to Genni’s desperate work. She typed hurriedly, read screens full of data she only half-understood, improvised and hoped for the best and cursed her younger self for not paying more attention in the many science classes she’d taken over the course of her life. The noises of battle grew louder as she worked, and it was only at the last moment that she realized that they were inside the hallway she had come from. Footsteps were fast approaching, and with a single curse, Genni set the program to run, drew the plasma carbine she’d taken from her would-be jailor, and aimed it at the door to the room.

Assault on Anomgen Base, Pt. 8

Now that he knew she was here, he could sense her presence everywhere. Of course Brekart hadn’t told him that she was here. The woman was greedy for glory. Doubtless she’d thought that if she turned the greatest general of the enemy over to the Chancellor, she’d reap unimagined rewards. A promotion. A larger command. A greater share of the spoils of battle. More autonomy. And she would have seen Grigor as an obstacle to that success, as a competitor.

Grigor shook his head. She didn’t understand him. Of course, no one really did, but she was especially blind, set in her beliefs and obstinate to a point that it cut through his malaise and actually frustrated him.

Bah. Their bickering didn’t matter. Genni was aboard the ship and she was loose? Very well. Grigor would capture her himself and put the entire debacle to rest. He reached out, looked for her specific thought patterns and emotional tendencies and she was–

The power plant.

But why? Why had she escaped from a prison cell just to–

Explosives.

She’s going to destroy the power plant. She’s going to destroy the base.

The cloud of sorrow and hopelessness and apathy that defined Grigor’s every waking moment lifted, and in its place a surge of fear crashed through him like a wave.

She was going to ruin everything. In a universe of cruelty and uncertainty and senseless conflict, the Jaffe Republic brought stability and order. Their methods might have been harsh, but people had to be coerced out of their natural state of animal brutality. Some were responsive to the necessity of the arrangement, some weren’t.

The base was instrumental in achieving peace, didn’t she see that? The leadership of the so-called People’s Army were all short-sighted fools who saw the Republic as conquerors, as “Annexers,” but surely Genni was smarter than that. She had to be. She would see reason, wouldn’t she?

The fear faded. Grigor closed his eyes and took a deep breath, cast his feelings into the void at the center of his being. He made his way towards the base’s power plant. She would see reason. She would.

He would make her.

Assault on Anomgen Base, Pt. 7

Grigor sat alone in his isolation chamber, trying to pick individual minds out of the noise of Anomgen Base. He could sense waves of emotion as was always the case: fear now. Anger. Excitement. Confusion. Something was happening, but it was impossible to say what unless he could lock onto a single mind and analyze its thoughts.

Of course, he could always leave the tank and go see for himself, but his reasons for avoiding that were two-fold. First, there was value in testing himself, in pushing the limits of his mind and his senses. Second, active exposure to other minds turned the noise from a gentle caress to a slap across the face. It was mentally deafening. It was physically painful. If he wasn’t prepared for it, it would leave him incapacitated, mewling and helpless.

It meant that he was alone, alien from the rest of humanity. But that was fine. He’d be alone his entire life, isolated even from his family, from his twin. He was used to it. He’d learned how to draw power from it. Let other psykers draw power from love and joy and fury and fear and pain and all the other emotions that ruled hearts and minds. Sorrow was Grigor’s, and in knowing sorrow he knew truth, limitless and essential and unforgiving. The universe was one of sorrow, of suffering. It marched steadily towards a great ceasing, great loneliness and isolation as all matter in it separated from itself and became too cold and distant to ever interact.

Holding that certainty in his heart, drawing comfort from it even as it weighed heavily upon him, Grigor emerged from the isolation chamber. The thoughts of everyone on the base surged into a roar, but in doing so, they became a kind of white noise. Brekart will know what’s going on, he thought as he searched for the Commander’s mind. He found it quickly. The woman was standing on the bridge, shouting orders. He sensed anger. Rage, really. How dare the People’s Army attack us here, how dare they, our psi-drones will shred their pathetic fleet and then we’ll harvest every last one of their bases, what do you mean the prisoner’s escaped?

Grigor frowned. That thought needed further examining. He’d been in the isolation chamber for a long time. Evidently they’d taken a prisoner and hadn’t seen fit to inform him. But why? Why would they do that, unless–

He pulled the name from Brekart’s head. Genni…

Assault on Anomgen Base, Pt. 6

Max was shaken from his thoughts by the sound of footsteps echoing off the walls of the base. Trass’khar let out a low angry hiss. Filip whispered, “They’re coming.” Max grunted and prepared himself, thinking of a time back in academy when he’d been walking up some stairs and the seat of the pants of the girl in front of him had suddenly split open for no reason.

Max chuckled. His right hand tightened around the grip of the plasma pistol he’d brought with him. The psi-focuser in his left crackled with yellow energy. He was ready. Let them send their troops. Let them send a squad. Hell, let them send a whole platoon. He could take anything they wanted to throw at him. He was feeling it, man.

Two figures rounded the corner, and Max’s first thought was that they were the vanguard of some larger force, overeager scouts rushing ahead to either find glory or death at the hands of their hated enemies. But after a second, he saw that they weren’t wearing the armor and tactical masks of standard Annexer troops, their special forces, or even their rookies. They were clad in the simple fatigues of combat engineers that were expecting to see absolutely no combat. The two figures looked as far from trained soldiers as possible, one of them short and paunchy, the other tall and painfully thin. Their faces wore similar expressions of shock, which quickly turned into fear.

Before they could properly react, Max shot his hand forward and unleashed the psionic energy he’d built up there. The two engineers went flying down the hall in a flash of yellow light, slid across the floor, and stayed down. “Are they…” Filip began and trailed off, as if afraid to give voice to his thoughts.

Max shook his head. “Their brains are a little scrambled, but they’ll be fine in a while.” He paused to think about it. “Won’t really matter if we blow this place to pieces, though.”

The kid said nothing. Max had nothing to say to him. Trass’khar broke the silence by hissing and clicking.

“I know. Weird, right? You’d think they would have sent a proper squad of soldiers to investigate the impact. Or at least a fire team to serve as an escort for the engineers.”

Trass’khar snorted and sniffed. Max laughed softly.

“That’s crazy, Trasky. What other problem could they possibly be dealing with?

Assault on Anomgen Base, Pt. 5

Filip hadn’t vomited when they’d crashed into Anomgen Base. He’d passed out, but only for like a second. Max was kind of proud of him for that, honestly.

Trass’khar had hissed in the kid’s face and then licked it with his prehensile tongue. If the serpentii wanted, its spittle could be as caustic as chemical weapons, but there was no reason for that now. On its own, Trasky’s spit just made your skin tingle a little and was lemon-scented.

Max chuckled to himself at that. Evidently it was a mark of shame amongst the serpentii to have such innocuous saliva. When Max had told Trass’khar that it wasn’t a bad thing at all, he’d hissed out something that roughly translated to, “Oh, good. At least the apes like it.”

“What are you laughing at?” Filip asked. There was a hint of nervousness in the kid’s voice, but it wasn’t showing in his body language, in the way he held his pulse rifle. You might have seen it in his eyes, the way they darted around, but constant threat assessment wasn’t a bad trait in a soldier. “What’s so funny?”

“Everything, man. Everything’s funny.”

Filip sniffed in distaste but said nothing. Max just shrugged and turned his attention back to the task at hand, as best as he was able. Psykers could be unnerving, he knew. It was easier to focus one’s energies and powers if they were single-minded, and individuals who could naturally fixate on certain things tended to be more likely to manifest psionic abilities. It was a sort of chicken-or-the-egg type of thing, and nobody really knew if psionic power brought out certain personality traits in people or if something else predisposed those folks to both. Powers weren’t necessarily limited to certain personality types, but there was some correlation there. If you were an angry person, learning how to channel your psionic potential into blasting people was easier than learning how to use it to heal them.

If you were powerful enough to get famous, you tended to get a nickname based on whatever your personality was like. By the time he’d graduated, he’d earned a nickname of his own: The Harlequin. Everything was funny, man. He’d chuckle to himself during tests. He’d laughed as he spat blood after Grigor Zonda knocked him on his ass during a sparing match and knocked out one of his teeth. And as the war with the Annexers dragged on, as months became years and he’d had to bury more and more friends, he told stories of the good times they’d all shared together, misadventures in basic, those surprising moments of levity on the battlefield that hit you just as sudden and as hard as a bullet to the brain.

And now here he was in an enemy base, surrounded, no obvious escape, on a rescue mission because Genni thought she could appeal to her brother’s better nature.

Hilarious.

Assault on Anomgen Base, Pt. 4

“Bogey on my six! I can’t shake ’em! I can’t–” and then a burst of static and then nothing.

Jingo screwed her eyes shut. Anger washed over her. Guilt. Fear. Despair. Just for a second, she let herself feel these things. It was a second too long, she knew. The men and women and beings under her command looked to her for leadership and inspiration, and she couldn’t let them down by being anything less than deliberate and precise and brilliant.

“Stay the course, Phantoms,” she said. “We’ve got a job to do, and we’re not going to let these brainless robots keep us from doing it.”

“Roger that, Phantom-Leader!” Cries of assent rang across the comms. Their voices were strong, all of them. They’d lost a quarter of their number so far, an unthinkable figure for the Phantom Squadron, but they weren’t giving in to despair in the face of overwhelming odds.

She’d never been prouder.

Ahead of her, one of the psi-drones burst into a flash of light and a crackle of purple psionic energy. All around it, the auto-drones that it had been controlling suddenly stopped mid-maneuver and continued along whatever their last path had been, so many puppets with their strings cut. Her skills had been honed to the point of effortless instinct over years of active duty, and once she was behind the controls of a barely had to think about what she was doing.

She was faster than the drones, but only barely. She imagined what they’d be like with better programming, with stronger psykers, with psykers with better pilot training. There were a million parts in this insane scheme the Annexers had cooked up. A million failure points. But the damn thing wasn’t failing. And if any of those parts improved, it might honestly be more than the People’s Army could hope to answer.

A fleet of mass-produced attack drones remotely controlled by psychic pilots. A base that could spew the things out as fast as they could be destroyed. Planet crackers that could strip mine entire worlds for the resources to build them. It had to stop here.

There was a flash of light. The Tiger shook violently. She’d taken a direct hit, but the shields had held.

Her fingers swept across the controls, moving like machines in their own right. Sudden deceleration. Five targets sped into her sights. Auto-lock on the psi-drone. Fire and watch the show.

As she passed through the explosion, Jingo’s eyes drifted down towards Anomgen Base, towards the hole that Max Blaston’s boarding pod had torn in the massive structure of the thing. “This is Phantom-14!” the comms spat. “I’ve taken heavy damage. I’ve got to retreat!”

“Go,” she replied. “Get to safety. You’re no good to anyone dead.”

“Roger, that! I’m sorry, Jamizon!”

She didn’t respond. She shut her eyes one more time and said a silent prayer. By the quintessence, hurry up, Max. I don’t know how much longer we can last out here.

Theophory, Babel (2016)

I haven’t had time to write a new post, unfortunately. I’ve been revising some of my older work to submit to a couple different places. Are they improved? I think so, but who can objectively appraise their own work. Anyway, links to the originals are below and the new drafts are below those. Enjoy!

Theophory

Flax hair and lapis eyes

I created you

 

You, my beautiful heterodoxy

You, my graven image

You, my one who is like God

 

I ate of your body

Drank of your blood

 

I built a coffee shop altar

Where I could kneel before

Your laugh, your smile

Where I could make myself believe

 

(That I did not

Do it backwards

That I did not, in my apostasy,

Create a goddess to save me

Instead of finding one to believe in)

 

Babel

Do you remember the language we spoke then?

A wild tongue, squeaks and growls and moans,

A language of the body, muscles vibrating like taut strings.

We held each other and we trembled

At what we had built

 

Soft promises piled up to reach the sky,

Towers topped with choirs,

Mouths singing syllables of love and praise

To spite the whole world, singing so even

Angels would have to say,

 

This is not right. This is not allowed at all.