Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

This may become an occasional series: scraps of writing I have mostly probably discarded as the basis for a larger story (one I will share I still have hopes to use – will you guess which one?), but think are worth letting folk have a random look at. I do of course assert full copyright control over these story ideas.

This week is something I sat down and committed to screen some 13+ years ago. It was not based on anything in particular, though it definitely holds a debt to Rogue Trooper! Every so often as I’m looking for something else in my rabbit warren of old files I spot it, open it, and like it, or the idea of it. This time I put in some minor corrections and decided to share.

If someone wants to use this as a prompt, or continue the story as they wish, they have my permission to do so, provided I am credited for the portion I share below.

Hallucinatory Future War Seed

The alarm bells rang, the ones we had never heard before. War. Prepare to fight.

I sprang from my bunk – and saw from the wall marking that I was in Cluster 12. I was momentarily puzzled, I had not fallen asleep here, I had been… I was not sure where I had been. But it did not matter. The alarm bells had rung out for three seconds and stopped: we needed no more time to realize this was no drill. Thoughtwaves washed over us, orders and instructions impelling our swift and silent action.

I am a soldier. Was. Am a soldier. Built and bred for combat, organized into combat sheathes of twenty men and women engineered to fight hard wherever needed. We died hard as well. But we were not yet dead. I ran to the lockers: mine was new. I was the insert, the newbie. My sheathe were all there, battle harnesses being put on, armour fields springing  in and out of life as they were tested. No-one gave me a second glance, so I did as was expected and opened my locker and saw my gear. General combat specialist, light demolition explosives, slug and laz for field operations against similarly or lesser armed foes. Even a bladed weapon, to remind us what war once was. Because although I am bred and built for war, our people have not fought for generations. I slung on my harness in seconds, lifted my three primary weapons into place, fitted my armour field generator on and tested it, hearing the familiar hiss of its power cutting through the air, separating molecules as it did so. I was ready.

‘Who is the first?’ I asked. Some faces turned towards me disdainfully.

‘There is no first.’  They answered in thought unison, as though I were a child.

‘Who is the chosen first today?’ I projected back, letting irritation filter through.

‘I am.’ I turned to see a large male, geared for heavy combat, armour field multiple times more dense than my own, one primary weapon, built to take out armoured vehicles, or buildings, even ships, if he was in range. I saluted, and fell into formation.

In combat sheathes we are all equals, there is no hierarchy, though there are specialists. Our first, our operational leader, rotates every day when not in combat and was call designated Alpha. In war, Alpha was for the duration until his or her death, then a new would be chosen.

Alpha stood before us, commanding attention.

‘Today we fight the enemy. We are a ground troop sheathe, we hit the dirt in two minutes. We will be as little as five seconds from combat: mark your perimeters immediately, full sensor arrays on. The enemy is difficult to quantify – its shape changes, so if it moves: kill it. There are no civilians here, only combatants: us, and them. This is what we are bred and built for: do not fail our makers, or your sheathemates.’

I remember feeling concern at that, quickly crushed and hidden from the others: no-one should sense doubt from a sheathemate. What place, what world were we going to, all hostiles, no civilians? Why fight for it on the ground, why not detonate it from space? I was a bad soldier – I questioned too much. I should have known with the invincible certainty of my sheathemates that any more would have been told me if it were necessary. Obey orders, and more will arrive as needed. I am a soldier still. I miss orders.

‘Sign off.’

Names were barked out, and I realized I did not have one I could remember – was I so new? All too soon it came to my turn, and blank of any other thought I shouted (and we can use voice: we just don’t normally – why let inferior enemies know when you are talking?) ‘Insert!’ So that was my name.

There was a blurring as we voidported to the planet’s surface, and then that stomach churning shift as your body finds new ground beneath its feet, new gravity for the muscles and heart to work against, new atmosphere for the lungs to process, always that first burning breath. I had done this before, yet I was new.

The ground was dirt and rock strewn, the colour of altered iron, of dried blood. The sky was black and red, red clouds, black clouds, no stars. We were on a slope, and I could see structures. In the distance across a broad shallow valley was a comms tower, by its design one of ours. To our right beyond the low crest upon which the comms tower stood there was a vast ship of the maritime sort, not space faring, a gigantic triangle of hull pointed toward us, and it was painted black, with red around the deck level, like a child’s model of an old supertanker. It was stranded, keeled over on its side in the desert, but lights blinked from it. I had never seen something of its scale and exact design before.

My armour was alive, and my sensor array with it, a heads up display before me, even as data was fed directly into my cortex, faster that way, but the HUD was a useful fallback if the cortical link failed. There was no movement, my primary weapon remained silent.  My array told me of a third structure, behind us. In unison, for we all received the data simultaneously, we turned, but only I wondered why we had been transported pointing the wrong way. Or maybe I only think it was only I, maybe I flatter myself overmuch.

An alien structure, twisting into the sky, more than a match for our comms tower. It looked like it was made of fused metal that had blistered and bubbled in the heat of its creation, and in some places had worn through, or been stretched, leaving uneven and irregular holes in its fabric, gossamer threads of metal holding up what lay above. Definitely not ours.