10
Jun
Boots crunched on the red soil as the ship was offloaded, and the crates of cargo piled up outside. Then the crew set about unpacking, putting together the first of the tools that would allow them to build a new home.
Days later, the first of the true heavy machinery whirred into life, and a pit was born near the ship. Into it the crew carried beams, roofing over the space as they sealed and supported the walls. From time to time they paused, looking skyward, for so far from home, the constellations looked different, and some they could not see at all.
Work continued apace, and soon the pit had become a home, complete with all the amenities needed. The best was when the crew could come in and take off their working gear and relax in the warmth and fresh air, for outside was a cold and dusty place.
They were required to keep a log of their activities for each day, and often the crew would wake to see that new orders had arrived, or new suggestions. It felt good to know that despite the distance, people at home cared.
Finally, after many months of labour, all the work required to set up was complete, and the last of the boxes was unpacked. The crew relaxed among her potted garden, and she smiled. She’d been told that the next ship had a man on it. Not a bad present after three years alone.
This story is based on the concept of a One Way, One Person trip to Mars.
13
May
Armies clashed that day on the field, as magic tore into mundane. Bow and arrow met flintlock, and fire from the mages was countered by the roar of cannons. Elves there were, and trolls too, and for once they fought on the same side of battle, the sylvan creatures using their lithotrophic allies as shields.
The sky darkened as the elves let loose their arrows, but the roar of massed muskets provided an equally sharp counterpoint, and even the thick hides of the trolls were no match for the volume of shot. Many fell, as did many of the gunpowder wielders, pierced through by shafts.
Dwarves burst from the ground, axes swinging left and right as they worked themselves into a battle frenzy, shattering apart the massed ranks of their foe. Orcs and goblins charged as they saw the disarray in their foe, piercing war cries placing fear in enemy breasts.
Yet their foe rallied, and legions of pikes bore down upon the advancing force of orcs and goblins, and their berserk charge failed upon the thousand spikes. The dwarves fell too, as they succumbed to foes with armour heavier than their own.
Both sides stood beaten, bloody, all but broken. Mages had cast their final spells, the cannons had fallen silent, and the exchange of archery and gunfire was only a ragged counterpoint to the screams of the wounded.
Heavy footsteps sounded in the east, and the forces of magic cheered, for the giants had come at last. Late to the battle perhaps, but no foe had yet thrown them down. From their hands spun great boulders, crashing through the lines of the mundane. With a roar, they jogged forth, clubs in hand, ready to sweep this pesky foe from the field.
Thin sounds came upon the air, muffled by cloud and fog, and it was only when the first explosion struck that the giants cast their eyes upwards. Hanging beyond even the mighty reach of the giants were dirigibles, and from their bellies came forth great waves of iron canisters. A few failed to explode when they struck the ground, but all too many sent great gouts of earth skyward.
Whirlwinds of shrapnel tore through the forces of magic, raining down upon them like so much hail. Ruin walked across the land, leaving little more than muddied trenches, but the giants used their great forms to hide the lesser races beneath, sacrificing themselves against the deadly iron.
When at last the rain stopped, the army of magic stepped forth once more, only to find themselves facing a reformed battle line. Three rows of flintlock muskets barked in turn, and once more the metal shod feet of the pikemen ground forward.
Man had come to claim this land as his own.
9
May
A glow sank down in the northern sky
framed in light, pure and dry
A silhouette of ancient form
standing there, before the dawn
It called and beckoned and made me know
That to the peak I must go
And so I strode far past my door
hunting now, for evermore
I looked and dug and searched a while
And with long years, I did compile
A guide, a map, a way out to there
That place beyond lost in the glare
I strove and struggled and tried my best
But when I lay unto my rest
I still reached for my ending goal
And down I sank, not quite whole
6
May
There is only one thing in sight for me
and with each step
it goes further back into eternity
A single lost moment
all wrapped up in chance
It was a bright blue day
All sunny and warm
And yet within each shining light
lurked a great harm
For there was little in what was said
to show compassion or remorse
All that we have now
We have taken from them instead
They have killed my only daughter
a little girl of but eight or nine
I went to bring them to the slaughter
But what I found instead was mine
2
May
Promotion sucked. Sure, the gear was better, but the missions nearly killed Jenny each time he did one. He’d been created as an organ replacement for some fat old rich man, and now he was mostly replaced. From the waist down, he was cybernetic. Medics had saved what they could of his legs after the console fell on him, but that was little enough. So they just chopped everything off and gave him mechanical legs.
Then his first mission after promotion, he’d lost his left arm. Cybernetic replacement. Then part of his face in backblast from an explosion. Course, if he hadn’t been promoted, they’d have shot him to save energy. Organ replacements were cheap. Organ replacements who’d survived as much combat as he had weren’t.
JNY-35197 was on his third mission after being promoted. He figured he’d lose his other arm on this one. Deep strike with a team of seven humans and two Devastators. Jenny’d never seen more than one per team before. That meant ugly. Real ugly.
It also meant juggernauts. Lots. The humans on the team all had brand new power armour that would shred alien battlesuits by the dozen. Jenny had gotten point duty, and with it a flechette shotgun. Clouds of bolts tore infantry to pieces. Did shit against armour though.
No Command on this mission. Too dangerous to transmit, they’d said. Bastards had turned off the suit radios. No talking to anyone. So the team hand signalled. Well, the Devastators just nodded. They didn’t have hands.
Jenny paused. He was half a klick ahead, five from destination. And there was bugger all here. Just a damn plateau in the distance. One damn plateau in a bloody plain. He zoomed in, closing his human eye. A fortress. With a space port. And they had ten men. Command was mental.
He waited for the others, then explained in short gestures. They got it. Another suicide mission. Even the Devastators paused for a second. Then they started walking. Jenny cursed, hitting one of them with the butt of his weapon. It didn’t even slow.
The other humans were running. He followed. Hell was about to arrive, and Jenny wanted to be far away. Heading around the fort. Fast, not stealthy. Suits should protect them though.
The boom shook the valley. The Devastators had opened fire. Three spaceships evaporated in the opening salvo. The rest went up in the next round. Then the fort began spewing juggernauts and firing back.
Jenny stopped watching and hit the deck, crawling to the others. They conferred briefly. Damn. Had to go in. He lead the way towards the back side of the fort. The front side was pockmarked slag. And dying. One Devastator was still firing. Probably not for long, but they’d done their job. Time for the organ replacements to make it work.
A tap on the back and he sprinted the last hundred metres. Slapped a demo charge to a wall and dove aside. Aliens would notice the blast. Humans hit the opening, weapons firing. First room cleared, no casualties. Second room, a couple alien dead.
A flechette shot cleared the third. JNY-35197 chuckled. He liked the new toy. Kept him alive longer. Rooms four, five and six were empty. Seven bagged a human. Two repeater bolts to the faceplate. Unlucky. Another run of clear rooms. Jenny cursed. Speed was keeping them alive, but that was going to run out.
It did. Fire erupted through the wall. A juggernaut in the inner courtyard was targeting them. He didn’t have anything to fight back. Neither did the others. So they fled.
Didn’t help. AP rounds got three humans. Half the team gone. They ducked further into the building, heading down. Maybe they could get underground, hole up and plan.
Nope. Jenny ate a shell coming round a corner. Armour deflected most of it, but it still stung. He fired, ripping the room apart on full auto. Killed everything. Then the gun whirred. No more ammo. He had one mag left. Better make it last.
Explosions behind. Grenades. A glance showed two humans with him, not three. Another organ replacement gone. Three rooms later, his mag was at half. Damn battlesuits didn’t stop coming.
A tap on his shoulder. One of the others gestured for a hold, then led the way in, shooting selectively. A computer room. Maybe. Looked a lot like the cockpit of that dropship. Jenny took one entrance. The human who had led in fitted something into a slot on the console. So that was why they had come here. Jenny shrugged. Was going to be damn hard to get it back out.
Repeater bolts erupted through the door. He rolled back, landing prone and firing. Quarter of a mag left. An eighth. And empty. Jenny shouted, then threw a grenade through. That held the battlesuits for a moment.
The other two humans grabbed him, and they ran, snapping shots where they could. Armour blocked most of the bolts. A couple hurt. One pitted Jenny’s cybernetic arm, and it shorted. Shoddy manufacturing for a battlefield unit.
They ducked and wove through corridors, a damn maze. Jenny sighed. He was going to die here. That damn juggernaut would get the organ replacements as soon as they fled.
A left turn. Daylight. He sprinted, putting extra energy into his new legs. Ugly, but faster than he used to be. The plain was a ruin, burning fires and slag. The Devastators had flattened the space port, leaving behind the wreckage of ships. The three humans used the carnage as cover.
They’d made the end of the port when a shell ripped apart the trailer. The juggernaut had arrived. The next two shells missed. The third sent the humans tumbling, shrapnel cutting through armour. Neither of them could move. They’d almost made it.
29
Apr
I was a writer when I set out to tell this tale, a writer of some renown in the world beyond these closed walls. That was, I fear, a great long time. Or so it would seem, for my experiences have reshaped my life, yet I believe chronologically little more than six months have passed. But that is of no matter for this telling, for I cannot look forward. I have seen many things, and when I have recorded a warning of their existence, I think that might life shall be at an end.
What I inscribe in these pages will seem fantastical, nonsense, the product of a fantasist. I say that this is not the case, but I pray that you do not find the truth behind these scribblings. It will eviscerate your memory, and render you little more than a shambling dreamer.
As a writer, I journeyed through a great many lands, some lost to posterity, always in search of material that could be woven in amongst the leaves of my books. This latest was merely the next in a long series of these travels, but on this I had chosen to go north, for I sought inspiration in the cold.
North I went, until I was forced to hire a dog sled. I paused there to load my belongings and speak with the locals about places of interest, but little came to ear, and so with the sledge prepared, I set out once more. Days I travelled, then weeks, until all about me was ice, and I stood the northernmost member of humanity.
I had arrived at the changing of the seasons, and each day the sun had sunk lower in the sky, until on this night, it would touch the horizon and disappear, not to return until the following spring. And so I placed a roll of film into my camera, and photographed this once a year occurrence. Yet I found as I looked through the lens there was a strange dot that afflicted my pictures, one that grew in size as the solar orb vanished.
I wiped at the lens, convinced it was little more than a spot of snow, and thought no more of it until I returned to a civilized country. There I borrowed the services of a dark room and developed the negatives I had taken to jog my memory. It was upon perusal of the developed film that I found something strange, for a wisp had encroached upon all of my attempts at capturing that glorious sunset.
Each photograph bore this strange imprint, and two red dots stood out upon the face of the sun, somehow appearing much closer than the rest of the glowing sphere. I muttered into my drink that night, bothered that each and every image of that sunset had become corrupted by some mechanical failure of my camera. Or perhaps some atmospheric effect had fouled the reproduction.
I thought little of it, until such time as other photographs from other journeys showed the same effect. Always taken of the sun at the close of the day, they had the strange swirling wisp and two red spots. In Asian temples, atop Roman ruins, in the depths of an Amazonian jungle, all struggled under the writhing illusion.
For my next research expedition, I bought myself a new camera, one with better film and a crystal lens, for at the time I remarked to myself that the markings had to be an artefact of the camera’s shutter. Yet when I returned from that journey, once more the strange items had placed themselves within my frame.
It then began to appear on images that had been taken before my journey to the northern climes. I found that photographs that had resided on the walls of my house for a great many years now bore the two red dots. Despite the strangeness of these occurrences, my curious nature overwhelmed any good sense and I delved into research, attempting to discern the nature and the meaning of two red dots upon the sun, surrounded by a wisp.
Rare books at the Royal Museum yielded nothing, nor did the most ancient texts with university archives, and even those contacts I maintained within the occult world found themselves puzzled by the reference. A year’s study did little more than deepen my curiosity, and so I undertook journeys to places simply on the off chance that they might house a document that could explain the phenomenon.
At last I found a reference, a single scrap of ancient vellum parchment that had to be translated from a language long lost to man. Yet even that yielded little, and what writing it contained was of uncertain use. Night comes. Twin red orbs upon the day. Night comes. It was only later that I discovered the meaning of that phrase, to my sadness and my loss.
They are not orbs, nor are they marks upon the sun. They are eyes. And the wisp that surrounds them is what little corporeal form they have. They have followed me, and I have been their Moses, leading them from a barren waste of hellish form to a paradise. I hear their language within my head, and I sorrow, for it means that I have little time in which to finish this memoir.
They are all about me now, a great profusion of whirling hosts, for they have been feeding upon those around them, drawing sustenance from humanity. Soon, they will become a plague, and then the rulers of this world, and we will be little more than a shadowed memory.
There is but one hope, and it rests in the light of a false dawn. God bless you all, and may he forgive me for what I have done.
25
Apr
For the first time in a long while, I’ve written another entry in the Jenny serial. With luck, I shall finally get around to finishing the story this time.
It hurt. Badly. But JNY-35197 was still alive. He tried to move. Couldn’t. The console had fallen on his legs, crushed them. Suit had numbed him. Waist down was probably gone. Jenny shrugged. Hope his owner hadn’t wanted a sex change.
Propped on his elbows, he surveyed the room. Stirring forms there and there. Three humans up and at the door. He shouted at them, a quick question. Hmm. Six made it, four dead in the crash. And no fire coming through the hole in the blast door. Jenny’d been in worse spots before. Unless the ship blew. He’d never died before, not for real.
A repeater spat through the opening. The humans answered. Jenny dumped covering fire through, not able to see what he was shooting at. Better not. Save the ammo for someone who can fight. Might make it last.
Command better remember which dropship was which. Course, they didn’t care about the organ replacements inside. He didn’t want to die yet though, so Jenny tried raising them on the radio. Static. Damn hull. Jenny sighed and passed out. He needed the rest.
He woke to more fighting. Four humans firing, and another carcass on the ground. Aliens still fighting for the cockpit. Meant they thought the dropship could still fly. A curse, then only three organ replacements firing. Jenny tossed his repeater towards the sound. Ammo was almost out, then.
No grenades. Odd. Guess the alien battlesuits didn’t want to damage the consoles. A glance towards the hole. Three firing again. A soldier dead or out of bolts. The end wouldn’t be far off, then.
Static on the radio. New static. Jenny shouted at the others to get down, but they were already diving for cover. Superheated plasma blew through the hole, melting everything it touched. JNY-35197’s armour started to glow. Infiltrator suits could dissipate an awful lot of heat, but this was ungodly.
Then it stopped, and the radio crackled. No, cackled. And cackled. Well shit. The other infiltrators pulled the console off of Jenny, one of them throwing him over their shoulder. So only four of them had made it.
Ducking through the hole they found a Devastator. Of course. This one had plasma jets where the criminal had once had arms. It hissed and chittered. Then it pointed. There was a tunnel straight through the hull of the ship. The Devastator had melted his way through everything. Guess they were going out.
Daylight. Then Command called. The four organ replacements were going to get promoted. Whatever the hell that meant.
22
Apr
There are days that are good, and days that are bad, and a great many that fall into a morass between the two. That was one of those days, a little bad, a little good, all mixed together into a great serving of life.
Hanging out with friends, relaxing, doing nothing but talking. That was the good. True, to some people it might seem meaningless or unimportant or wasteful, but most people will tell you they remember a silly story from a friend more than a lecture from a teacher. And then there was the bad. Getting shot down by a girl, hearing about a death in the family. That went a fair way towards counterbalancing the good times. But overall, it was a middling day.
Now, the next day? That was a bad one. The shelter we were staying in got hit by a mortar round. A couple of friends died. They were right under the impact. The girl got it in the neck. Well, she didn’t really have much of a neck left, was more what I’m saying. Me? I got off lucky. I was on the crapper, and we’d put up a dirt berm for privacy. I’d just sat down, too. Fastest shit I took in my life. Not that there was much I could do when I finished. The wounded were going to make it without my help, and the dead, well, they didn’t need any help.
They got bagged up and dragged away, living and the dead. Some to surgery and some to the morgue. Turned out a few were just stopping off at the hospital on the way to the freezer. They’d looked okay, but concussion had pulverized a few organs. Lost a few more friends than I’d thought. They’ll ship in fresh meat, replace the bodies. Souls are dead though, and that sucks.
I might make a few more friends, but my tour’s up pretty soon, and I don’t see the point in learning their names. Not worth the loss. Maybe I should though. Not like I can go home and talk to anyone. They didn’t get me after the last tour, so I came back. Nothing says I’ll like it at home this time around.
Yeah, I’ll be back. And I’ll probably die in a mortar attack when I could sitting at home on a couch drinking beer. But I’d just rather be here, y’know?
18
Apr
I danced and spun among the midnight wave
A thoughtful soul amid my nave
I saw and heard the dancing night
swirling it around me in my delight
It cloaked and covered and comforted my soul
and whispered that it was time to go
And so I danced and sang on down the shore
searching and hunting for my door
It opened wide and opened bright
and took me safe out from the night
and here I wake within my bed
the dream of joy lost instead
8
Apr
Light!
Dark?
Yet both at once…
Strange.
Perhaps I dream?
Or are they yet me.