Grand Crossing

Here is a simple map of Grand Crossing township, which was mentioned briefly in my last post, and is the site of the all the action in the first few chapters in my Spear of the Ancients story (I really, really like maps, so hopefully ya'll enjoy it).

Later.

Inspiration

Ok, here comes another addition to the blog: if you guys are at all like me, you find a lot of inspiration for your writing in a lot of different places. So, as of now, if you find pictures or maps or even links to music—basically whatever you want—you can now post them up on the blog . . . we'll make kind of a growing repository of writing inspiration.

To post an image, just start a normal post like you always do, and click on the image icon up above the Posting text box (the picture icon is third from the right). From there, you can browse through your computer, find the file you want, and upload it to your post. Browser then has quite a few options for sizing and placing the image.

As far as labels go for this images and what not, just label them 'Inspiration', and then if you also want to link them to a particular story, give them a second label that is the working title of your story.

We'll try this out and see how it works.

Later.

Science Fiction Illusions of Control Colton Goodrich Continuation of Chapter 3

It keeps going and going. Firstly. Maaka got a name change to Sam or Samuel. Why? Cause I felt like it. Keep an eye out for any sort of reappearances of his old name, as well as characterization, plot holes and the like.


Peacekeepers Joint Command, Beijing, China
Sam followed down the hallway after Colonel Newton. His job had many perks as well as disadvantages, some of which irked him to no end. Working with Colonel Newton was an honor to say the least, but he hated having to follow him around like some lapdog. Still, in the months Sam had worked with the Colonel, he had learned quite a lot, and been lucky enough to be privy to some very interesting meetings that he would have been excluded from had he worked with some other officer.
Less than three hours ago Colonel Newton had received a summons to Joint Command in Beijing. Without another word said, Colonel Newton had taken off for the airport and the two of them had grabbed a scramjet directly to Beijing. The jet had arrived less than an hour ago and Sam was still trying to deal with the powerful jet lag that had come as a result of the fast flight. He had taken several medications to counteract the drowsiness, but he felt like he was fighting a losing battle against exhaustion. Colonel Newton on the other hand, seemed to be completely immune to the effects of crossing so many time zones at such a high rate.
They walked straight for the unassuming door at the end of the hallway, and a split second before they reached the entry, another man walked in front of them from another one of the halls. Sam was surprised to see that it was Emmanuel Tam and it seemed the other two men were no less shocked at the appearance of the other. Dr. Tam smiled as he encountered the two, and Sam walked forward held the door open as Colonel Newton walked inside the room followed closely by Dr. Tam.
“I’m surprised to see you here, Emmanuel,” Colonel Newton remarked quietly.
“Come now. I may work private sector, but do recall who my largest client is. They need my skills for plenty of applications,” Dr. Tam said under his breath as Sam followed in after the two.
Sam looked around the room towards the assembled dignitaries that sat in the many soft chairs in the room. Dim lights flooded the chamber leaving only vague impressions of who was there. It struck Sam as odd that government bigwigs always liked holding secret meetings in conditions such as this. It seemed so; he paused as he thought of the appropriate word, so inconsequential. Who were they hiding from? A few dim lights wouldn’t keep their privacy long. A wide circular table was placed in the middle of the room and a massive wall-screen sat up against the long wall of one side of the room. The sitting dignitaries seemed oblivious to anyone entering the room and the same attitude was passed to their aides that stood motionless behind them.
Colonel Newton strode to one of the chairs and sat down, while Dr. Tam moved to sit in the chair to Colonel Newton’s left side. Sam knew he was only there as Colonel Newton’s aide, not one of the invited experts so he remained standing behind Colonel Newton with his arms crossed behind his back.
He cautiously looked around the room, trying to appear stalwart and disinterested. Spread throughout the expanse of the room he spied at least three members of the United Nations Security Council. One of them, a woman in her middle years, seemed to be fast asleep with her arms folded and her head bowed. The two others were holding a hushed discussion with a General of the Navy on the opposite side of the table. The President of the Security Council sat off in one chair and she conversed with Field Marshal Grimmel, the supreme commander of the Peacekeepers ground forces. Two Representatives from the Parliamentary Assembly, specifically on the Armed Forces Council sat looking awkwardly about the room with the look of people who were well out of their element. Several other Force Commanders sat about in the other rooms as well as some people that Sam didn’t recognize off hand.
Saranya Singh, the President of the Security Council stood up as soon as Dr. Tam and Colonel Newton took their seat. The two of them were all that was left for the group to wait on and so Councilor Sing started the meeting simply by standing. The sleeping Security Council member was immediately awake, and all conversation went silent as all the assembled people turned their gazes to her. The office of the President of the Security Council had changed over time since its original inception. Taking a page out of most parliamentary procedures from past governments, almost every election now consisted of voters picking which party they favored for which group. From Security Council to General Assembly to Parliamentary Assembly to the Secretary General. Now the position was generally one that lasted for the same period as the Secretary-General rather than one that lasted for a year or less. The Security Council President presided over the actual Security Council which looked over all peacekeepers, humanitarian efforts and police forces.
While the position wasn’t as powerful as it had been a century ago, the sphere of importance for the office still carried fairly significant weight in any part of the U.N.
“Peacekeeper forces were all put on High Alert earlier today. I’m afraid the decision had to come faster than I could wait on getting appropriate permissions,” Saranya said.
Sam casually shifted his eyes around the room. There were a lot of big names here in the room. Why were Colonel Newton and Dr. Tam here? They certainly had influence, but surely not as much as these others did. There were three and four star generals sitting in the room. Colonel Newton was well below such rankings
Saranya pulled out a small wireless remote. A flick of her finger on one of the buttons caused the wall-screen to flicker to life. A press of another button and the screen changed to an image showing an overhead view of a very large building. Sam recognized it as the Secretary General’s personal house at Vienna. He continued keeping out his exterior faced of almost lethargic coldness. Aides were supposed to be seen and not heard. No, scratch that. Not even seen. If someone actually notices you standing there, then there is something wrong with the way you’re going about your impassiveness.
“Yesterday evening at 2134 hours local, there was an intruder alert at the Secretarial Mansion. The intruder was not caught,” Saranya continued.
Sam waited for her to continue now that his curiosity aroused with just those few words. How is an intruder any of our concern? It was a distressing occurrence, but not something that merited a meeting of such scale as this. By the looks on the faces of the other assembled dignitaries, they were all thinking the same thing. All of them except a few that was. The other Security Council members as well as some of the Generals did not look confused. They had a look on their face that was a mix of fear and being sick to their stomach.
“I’m sure some of you are wondering how such a development demands such an emphasis. Believe me, the incident gets better,” Saranya said with a smile that left Sam slightly discomforted.
The smile triggered a memory, something he had forgotten from years ago. The concept harkened back several months after he had finished basic. He and Pixie had managed to pool enough money to take a quick weekend trip to Africa during the duration of leave. The respite was to venture to what Pixie had called “the last wild place on Earth.” They had both been young, excited, and stupid. In a moment of sheer stupidity, neither had remembered to fill their jeep with enough hydrogen for the entire trip out into the savannah.
The end of the first day had seen them stuck in the Kalahari Desert waiting for rescue. Had they not had their coms in their ears, he would have sincerely doubted their chance of surviving the day. The bright sun basked down on them, raising the day temperature to well above anything he had ever been comfortable with. Off in the distance a herd of antelope—gemsbok?—drank at the edge of a watering hole while a pride of lions looked on from the shade of an acacia tree. After the jeep had broken down and come to a complete stop there had been an awkward pause between the both of them for what had felt like an hour and she had turned to him and given him a smile just like the one Saranya had now. The smirk had spoken of an almost sadistic enjoyment behind the misery of the fact that they were stuck. What could have been a miserable experience waiting for some sort of rescue had instead become a day and a night to remember. Or at least he had thought so at the time. Thinking back, he could remember the last time he had even thought of Africa. Or of Pixie. He briefly wondered where she was now. What she was doing. I should have stayed, he thought. But I couldn’t miss out. This was the opportunity of a lifetime! She would have done the same!
He snapped out of the memory. How had the President of the Security Council’s smile brought such memories as those on? Sam mentally kicked himself as he had realized he must have missed some important part of the briefing. Up on the screen, the satellite image of the house had changed into a detailed three dimensional image of the mansion. A red line representing a path of some sort snaked through the house and led to random locations, before exited out in the same direction the red line had originated from. A pathway through the house by the intruder, Sam immediately figured out.
“After Perrone got down to the bunker, the intruder persisted through the house, as if they were playing a game of cat and mouse with the security personnel. Every time the security guards thought they had the guy cornered, he escaped through a window or a door and reappeared somewhere else in the building. Security cameras got nothing. Nothing that is but blurs and amorphous shapes, and even with digital enhancement, there was nothing solid. This escapade lasted for almost fifteen minutes until the intruder left the house as quietly as they had come in.”
She pressed a button on the remote and the wall-screen flickered to the image of a security guard. The man stood impassively against a clean white background while a data table of statics for the man appeared along the right side of the wall-screen. Some sort of Western European background by the look of him. He was slightly round at the middle, but seemed to be well in shape regardless.
“Sergeant Michael Sedgewicke. After being debriefed, he is our most credible source of information. All the accuracy tests came up positive. The stories he told us were the truth or at least as much the truth as seen from his perspective. He saw them when they first showed up and he saw them when they left the premises as well,” Councilor Saranya said. She paused as if she didn’t want to continue speaking about Sergeant Michael Sedgewicke. She held her fist to her chin as if she was deep in thought.
“Sergeant Sedgewicke got one clear look at the intruder when they exited the premises at the atrium. While the lighting in the area was dim, it was clear enough that the Sergeant got a decent view at the intruder. Or rather the leg of the intruder as they slipped through the window. It… was not human.”
“Not human? You mean it was an animal?” one of the Parliamentary Assembly representatives asked. The man stared up at Councilor Saranya behind thick rimmed classes. Sam recognized the heavyset man as Cedric Smith, one of the representatives from some section of North America.
“No. I mean it was… not of this world. He said he saw the foot quite clearly. His words were,” she paused and spread her left hand into an L with the index finger and thumb. A tiny view screen popped into being between the two fingers and she read, obviously skimming, directly from the screen. “Narrow, and long. Three-toed foot, each toe splayed from the others at one-hundred and eighty degrees. Bumpy skin like a lizard’s.”
Sam saw the eyebrows rise on pretty much everyone in the room. He tried to hold onto his composure as well remaining as impassive as he could. This is definitely odd. The room fell silent as it seemed every dignitary waited for someone else to break the silence. Finally Councilor Saranya broke in.
“This represents a security breach of the utmost importance as you can imagine. And implications of such as this are wide ranging as well. So you see why I’ve had the armed forces put on High Alert of the off chance that we need them, but…”
“But what can they do against saboteurs and spies?” Colonel Newton finished the sentence as Councilor Saranya let the sentence hang in the air.
“Exactly. We need to get a plan out in operation in order to better determine what exactly is going on here,” Saranya said.
Sam noted that no one seemed to be speaking about the elephant in the room. They all seemed to be trying to avoid saying anything about it in fact. Aliens? Sam couldn’t believe that. Why here? Why now? Mankind’s own pursuit of the extraterrestrial had increased in the past decades. The desire to find out if there was anyone else in this expanse of space had been met with nothing more but stony silence. No one was listening. Or maybe they were and just didn’t want to respond. A chill ran up his back as he considered the possibilities behind that statement. There were plenty of outcomes he could think of following that line of thinking and not all of them were necessarily good things.
“Did we get any satellite images of the area?” Dr. Tam asked.
Sam suddenly realized why Dr. Tam had to be here. As the sole provider for technology for the U.N., if anyone could come up with any sort of technological solution to the problem, he could. Sam kept his ears open as he listened to the conversation.
“Within ten minutes of the even finishing, an overhead satellite managed to snap several thermal shots of the area for three miles in every direction. Nothing. That’s the problem with such proximity to a large urban environment. Whatever we’re looking for could be in the city and we could have them on the image and not even know it,” one of the Security Councillers said. Sam didn’t recognize the woman off hand. She had Chinese features, and her name was on the tip of his tongue, but he kept silent.
“Perhaps we need to turn out attentions skyward then. Any approaching uh… extraterrestrials would have to keep themselves in orbit. If you couldn’t spy anything on the ground then perhaps you could keep a watch for anything anomalous in the skies. It would almost be far easier. The only problem is knowing how far to extend your viewing range away from the planet,” Dr. Tam said aloud.
“If I recall, current satellite orbits extend to about half Lunar distance. That range could be decent enough to at least watch for anything approaching. You wouldn’t get any details other than the confirmation of an anomalous presence. I don’t know how effective doing that would be. You could watch for years and miss what you were looking for,” Colonel Newton said.
“We’ll get it done. It’s a start at least. In the meanwhile, I’d recommend going to a communications blank out on this for the moment. There doesn’t seem to be that much of a threat at the moment, so I think we’d be safe in moving forward with that. We’ll have to definitely put all security forces on a communications lockdown. Some whistleblower will leak the High Alert out so we’ll need to find a cover story for that,” one of the other Security Councillers said. This man had dark Arabian features. Sam thought he detected a hint of a Persian accent in his voice.

Chapter One: Storms from the North (Part 1)

The fire built under the steady wind of the bellows, hissing and licking the roiling air greedily. The flames grew and the black coals blushed, first a bloody red, then a fierce orange and finally a wicked yellow stained white at the edges. The forge creaked and groaned like a living thing as the heat built within, but still Ethyn Hardric waited. Brick and mortar and hot steel flexed and moaned again, and the rudy light flooding from its mouth caught the ghost of a smile on Ethyn’s lips. He knew the forge like it was a thing living, could read its sounds, watch its color and taste its breath and know when the heat was steady, the fire high, and the coals ready. Some men avoided hard work like they avoided the plague, but for Ethyn, his time in the smithy was an escape, a chance to build and shape. A time for creation.

A moment longer he waited, eyes half-closed against the searing heat, arms rock-steady at his side, hammer in his right hand, tongs in his left. His da had raised him in the smithy, sending him running for tools and water and the like almost from the moment Ethyn could walk. As the years lengthened, so had Ethyn, and soon his da was teaching him the run of the forge, the strange balancing act of hammer and anvil that at once was a storm of strength and a gentle dance. He was at home in the smithy, with its low girder ceiling hung with tools, and its plain stone walls lined with scrap iron, a half-dozen finished pieces and three times as many projects still unaquainted with the heat and the hammer.

There was a subtle change in the heart of the forge, nothing the eyes or ears could detect, but a change nonetheless. It was time.

With a single, fluid motion, Ethyn hefted the tongs, plucked up the wide plate of dull iron that was resting on the anvil to his left and slid it into the open mouth of the forge. Air, boiling like hell twice baked, washed over him and he turned his back to the roaring fire, edging closer to the open end of smithy. The entrance to the shop faced north, giving him a clear view out over the hard-packed dirt of the yard where the two slat-ribbed mastiffs—Ebb and Dar—were dozing in the shadow of the low-walled well and the banty rooster, four hens and a dozen chicks were pecking about in the dust. Beyond the well and opposite the smithy was the low white-washed stable that Ethyn and his da had built the summer before, its steep thatch roof just falling into the deep shadows cast by the Waterwood. The last light of the sun was just lowering below crowns of the mighty oaks and elms that rimmed the homestead on the north, south and west, bathing the forest in a gentle, golden light.

In the west, a single star—Vallare in the old tales that Ethyn had loved as a child, She who Guards the Ward— flickered above the forest, bright as flame and white as cold ice, a counterpoint to the bank of dark clouds that was hugging the northern horizon. A frown turning his lips, Ethyn’s gaze lingered on the gathering storm. It had been a dry summer, though not quite so dry as the last year’s season, and the storms that normally washed Grand Crossing township clean each spring just after planting had been few and far between. The storm—if it came—would be a welcome one, and Ethyn doubted that his were the only eyes that tracked the heavy clouds.

A single lance of lightning stabbed down from the black underbelly of the clouds, and the westerly breeze turned suddenly to the north, gusting into the yard and scattering the chickens like bowl-pins and kicking up whirling funnels of dust that danced past Ethyn, strong enough to press the thick leather apron tied about his waist tight against his legs. Holding up his free hand to keep the dust from his eyes, he held his breath and counted silently, waiting for the distant rumble of thunder.

A hundred heart-beats passed with no thunder, and Ethyn gave a rough snort and turned away from the open air, back into smithy. There would be no storm tonight, the clouds were still too distant; more likely than not the clouds would pass them by completely, skirting past the township to rumble over the empty lands to the north and east. Another dry week awaited the farmers. With a disappointed sigh he turned back to the work at hand.

Within the forge, the metal plate glowed a pale crimson, flecked with black flakes of carbon and other impurities that the fire’s heat had forced out of the iron. Retrieving the tongs, Ethyn slid the wide plate out of the forge and placed it on the cold anvil. Squaring himself to the anvil and tightening his grip on the tongs, he bounced the twenty-weight hammer in his hand once, getting the feel of it. Then he went to work.

For Ethyn Hardric, blacksmithing had always been, and always would be, a sort of controlled storm, a harnessing of heat and force and imagination that pulsed through his veins, a counter to the pounding of his own heart. The twenty-weight fell and thunder rumbled within the smithy. The iron plate rang in answer, conforming to a plan that only Ethyn knew. Sparks spat and hissed as they scattered through the dark, stale air, swirling around him like the fires that the old stories claimed had heralded the Beginning of Time and Creation.

Life and purpose pulsed through him, and Ethyn laughed out loud, a short sweet sound that ended as soon as it had begn, as he lost himself in the task at hand.

Slowly the metal plate bent and changed, guided by his steady hand. He thinned and stretched the iron until it drooped under its own weight; then, with quick, sure motions born of years of practice, he bent the plate over on itself and began pounding again, hammering until it was a single whole piece once more. He repeated this process a dozen times, until the single plate was actually formed of two dozen thin layers, layers that made the plate stronger than any single mass of iron.

Dipping the worked plate back into the forge, he began counting slowly, scarcely aware of the ache in his arms and the sheen of sweat that covered him from head to toe, gray eyes focused on the now-cold steel that began to blush once more. At one hundred counts, he turned back to the anvil. Faster now, he began working the plate, pulling out one corner, giving it a sharp point like the toe of a boot. That done, he set the piece back in the forge to heat again, and switched the twenty-weight for a smaller ten-weight. Laying the angled plate across the anvil horn, he used the hammer to bend the plate, giving it a gentle curve.

At some point the rhythm of the work took over, and Ethyn lost count of how many times he returned the cold piece to the fire, lost track of time and forgot the sun that had set and the stars that were growing out above the yard. His right arm went numb but he didn’t slow the precise rhythm of hammering, pausing only now and again to brush dark, sweat-matted hair back from his eyes.

It almost startled him when he realized the work was done. Chest heaving, he took a step back from the anvil to admire the finished piece in the dying light of the forge fire. It was a plough blade, plain and unadorned, but Ethyn felt pride in his work regardless. Last of all he’d worked the cutting edge of the blade with a file, honing it to a razor’s edge that gleamed in the firelight and would cut through sod like like an oar dipping through water. Master Chesam, a portly man who worked a good fifty banners of land just south of Grand Crossing village with his five sons, would be well pleased with it. The Faith knew he should be: the new blade was more than worth the grain the farmer had barted in exchange. Ethyn would deliver it in the morning—a more than welcome chance to pass through the village and drop in on a few neglected friends while he was at it.

Reaching behind his back to unlace the apron thongs, he turned from the anvil towards the welcome cool of the night air—and pulled up short at the sight of a tall man, cloaked and hooded, standing just outside the smithy.

“You’re a fine hand at the anvil, Ethyn Hardric,” the figure said. The voice was rich and deep and . . . sad; laced with a weariness and pain that Ethyn could feel in his bones, like a man forced to sleep a thousand years on bare rock and broken glass. He frowned inwardly at his fancy, but was unable to shake the feeling.

“Many thanks, sir,” Ethyn managed, taking a step towards the man in an effort to see him better. Whether by chance or choice, the fellow had placed himself at the very edge of the light, so that the toes of his mud-caked boots and the end of his short-cropped, graying beard were the only things visible. The rest of the man’s face was masked in shadow, yet Ethyn could feel the man’s eyes on him, like twin auls digging under his skin. “Have . . . have we met?” The question startled him, even as it spilled out of his lips. Nothing about the man, from the cut of his cloak to the way he carried himself, suggested he was from Grand Crossing or any of the other villages in the township, and yet Ethyn could not shake the feeling that he’d seen the man before.

The stranger laughed, a rough chuckle that raised Ethyn’s hackles—not just because of the sound, which was as devoid of anything like happiness, but the smell too: stale ale and old pipeweed—and stepped into the light. “You don’t know me, Ethyn Hardric, but I have known you for a long, long time.”

Stiffening involuntarily, Ethyn bit back a gasp and barely managed not to stumble backwards. The rest of the man—from his tattered breeches that might have once been green to the thread-bare cloak that seemed a running contest between old patches and newer holes, to his ancient, sun-blotched and time-wrinkled skin—was as travel worn and mud-caked as his mismatched boots. But it wasn’t the man’s clothing that startled Ethyn. Beneath the deep cowl of his cloak, the stranger’s eyes were wrapped in a yellowing, blood-stained bandage that looked so dirty Ethyn imagined he could smell it rotting, right there on the man’s face. Whatever Ethyn had thought he’d imagined of deep eyes and searching glances, the man was clearly blind.

Yet, the old man’s face was pointed right at him, as if he could somehow see Ethyn through the mess of bloody cloth. Ethyn shivered, and then did take a step back.

The old man grinned then, nodding like he could see Ethyn’s reaction to his scarred features.

“My name is Danel Terram boy,” he said, taking another step into the smithy, “And I’ve come to save your life.”

Ok, sorry it took me a while to get this posted. For those of you (Albert, mostly) who might be a little confused, this is the continuation of the fantasy story I started writing a while ago. The previous three posts (Four Cries Break the Silence, Prologue thingy, parts 1, 2 and 3) can be found in earlier posts. If you haven't read them, I'd encourage you to read them along with this one, so you get the full effect.

Anyways, my question for this post (and for this first chapter) are:

1) I'm trying to get the action moving faster than in a normal high fantasy story, but also maintain the depth and worldbuilding that you get from the longer, epic stories. Let me know how I'm doing on that.

2) How is this introduction to Ethyn?

3) How is this introduction to Danel? (the physical description, mostly, on account of he hasn't said/done much yet)

4) What did you like most about this opening for a chapter/entire story?

5) What did you like least?

Thats about it.

Later.

Chapter 1: Shadow Man (Part 1)

Hey ya'll, here's chapter one to my sci-fi story. I'll be getting lots more to you soon. My biggest question for this section is: The boy's name is intentionally left out during this early part of the story. Is it too confusing, or is it interesting? How does the whole thing read? Were you lost at any parts? How does the dialogue between the boy and the computer work?

Um, thats about it. Enjoy:

An alarm began to blare somewhere nearby, and the boy felt several things happen all at once. His tube leaned forward on its short robotic arms, jerking stiffly as the gears ground against each other. The tiny needles in his wrists and elbows and the base of his neck retracted with a ratcheting clatter, and the slim cables that suspended him in the middle of the tube let go of his arms and suddenly he was falling, slowly and gently, through the thick, warm fluid that was still sloshing about viscously, thanks to the bobbing tube.

The boy had been dreaming, like always, and he didn’t really wake up until his knee bumped the cold, curved wall of the tube. Then his eyes did pop open, and he knew instantly that something was . . . different.

The world outside of his tube was never clear, but usually their were huge leering faces peering at him through the tube, their features distorted by the amber liquid he lived in and the thick glass of the tube. Except their eyes, of course. Their cold eyes were never distorted, hard pinpricks that stared at him accusingly from between white masks and white hats. His tube never moved, he never woke up, without the Watchers being there.

Except today.

There was a quiet whine behind his head, and the tube began to tremble. Then, with a long, loud sluuurrrp! the liquid began to drain out of the bottom of the tube, taking the boy along with it. He closed his eyes with a calm sort of resignation, and waited for the hands to catch him like they always did. Only, this time they didn’t.

Falling amid a shower of golden fluid, he only had the chance for one strangled yelp before he flopped onto the cold, hard metal floor beneath his open tube. Stunned (but really more surprised than hurt) the boy lay there for a long moment, chest heaving, waiting for the Watchers to pick him up. A long, long time passed without any hands grabbing him, so finally he opened one eye to look around, only to find that he couldn’t see through the fluid that worked its way between his eyelides. Groaning, he pushed himself up until he was sitting and rubbed the last of the thick stuff out of his eyes.

All around him the jelly had piled up in thick blobs that were hissing and popping and dissolving in great clouds of steam. The stuff was even rolling off his own skin like smoke! He tried to brush the steaming stuff off of his shoulders, but it just stuck to his hands; and when he tried cleaning his hands off on his legs, the jelly just stuck there too. Finally, he gave up. The stuff was disappearing fast enough anyways.

Standing on wobbly legs, he looked around in growing confusion. He really was alone. Well . . . sort of, anyways. He was standing in the middle of a long hallway—so long, in fact, that he couldn’t see the end in either direction; instead, the far ends of the hall seemed to curve up somehow, like he was standing at the bottom of a circle so huge he couldn’t see all of it. And there wasn’t a person in sight, at least not anyone walking around.

Tubes, just like his own, lined either side of the hall, stretching off into the distance and disappearing with the curve of the floor. More tubes than he’d ever imagined, and each one occupied. Like his, the tubes were each wide enough to hold a small person, and mounted from the ceiling on thick arms of metal and some kind of white, shiny plating. The boy stepped up to the nearest tube, the one just to the right of his, and stared up in fascination at the child inside. It was a girl—her head was shaved just like his, but he could tell because she was wearing a funny looking black wrap that covered her whole torso, instead of smaller piece like his, which just covered below his waist. Deciding it would be fun to show off a little—after all, no one ever got out of their tubes unless the Watchers were waiting—he rapped his knuckles against the glass. The girl just kept sleeping. Frowning, he reached up to knock again, harder this time, but then thought better of it. If he was too noisey, the Watchers would just come and put him back in his tube again.

A sudden grinding sound made him jump nearly out of his own skin, but it was just his empty tube retracting up into its socket. He laughed at the sight, then clapped a hand over his mouth, eyes wide. That was the first sound he’d ever made. At least, he thought it was.

A long ways down the hall, one of the long lights set into the ceiling was flickering, and the boy decided he’d better investigate. His bare feet made no sound on the cold metal floor, which was a good thing . . . he was too excited by his surroundings to pay much attention to being sneaky. He’d never seen the hallway before, not like this, not from outside his tube. The Watchers always covered his eyes as soon as they had him secured to the hard, wheeled table they used to move him around. This was way better.

Every single one of the children in the endless line of tubes was sleeping. Every once in a while the boy would stop and wave at a boy or girl, hoping they might be awake. Sometimes he even risked knocking on the glass again. But it never worked. They were all sleeping. It was kind of funny, seeing all of the sleeping kids. In fact, it was really funny. The boy started laughing again, and this time he didn’t stop. He liked the sound of his own voice.

By the time he neared the flickering light, his own tube was hidden by the curving floor. He wasn’t worried though. He could always just turn around and walk back to his tube if—

Right beneath the flickering light there was a door set into the wall between two tubes. He stopped beneath the winking light and stared at the door, and while he stared, a question began to worm its way into his head.

What was on the other side of the door?

His stomach twisted when he realized what he was thinking, and a cold knot formed in his chest. The Watchers wouldn’t like it if they caught him on the other side of that door, he knew that much, and it was almost enough to send him running back to his tube.

He turned away from the door, heart thumping, and took a single step back towards his tube. Then he stopped again. What would he do if he went back? He couldn’t climb up inside, not with the tube retracted. And who knew if the Watchers were even coming back? And then another thought struck him: maybe the Watchers had left. Eyes wide with excitement, he smiled. Maybe they were never coming back! In that case, he couldn’t just sit around in this cold hallway waiting for nothing. He had to find out where this place was. More importantly, he had to find a way to wake up the other boys and girls.

Gritting his teeth, the boy turned back towards the door and took a careful step forward. The door was wedged between two tubes, almost like whoever had put it there was trying to hide it. It was a plain, gray slab of metal, reenforced with thick metal bars. There was no handle that the boy could see, no way of opening it. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know why he’d thought it was a door. Maybe it wasn’t even a—

He’d taken half a step forward, when the door hissed open without warning, sliding soundlessly up into the ceiling to reveal a dimmly lit room beyond. Heart hammering in his throat, the boy edged forward, eyes and ears straining for any sign of the Watchers.

The room beyond the door was tiny compaired to the long hallway outside, with a low ceiling covered in dim lights and whirring fans. A dozen thick steel pedestals dotted the floor, each one coming up to the boy’s waist and topped with an assortment of screens: long wide screens, small round screens, blank triangular screens, and some screens that didn’t seem to be made out of anything . . . just rectangles of light floating in the air above the pedestals.

The boy crept into the room on the balls of his feet, barely looking back when the door shut behind him.

Only one of the consoles was active. It stood at the center of the room, and all of the other pedestals seemed to be oriented towards it. Light flooded from its half-dozen screens, blinking on and off as information flashed across the bright panels. Mesmerized, the boy angled between the other pedestals, hardly noticing the other banks of dark screens that lined the walls of the room.

The central console was raised up above the rest of the room on a kind of round step, which the boy jumped up on. He leaned in close to the screens, eyes jumping back and forth watching the flashing lights and shifting shapes that scrolled up and down, and sometimes across, the screens. He was so busy taking in the lights and colors and the little clicking sounds that came from inside the pedestal beneath the screens, that it took him a minute realize that something was written on the largest, center screen:

Hello

The boy laughed. “Um . . . hello,” he said nervously, and realized for the first time that he could talk.

He blinked, and the words on the computer had changed. You must leave this place

The boy blinked again, this time in surprise. “What?”

More words. You must leave now

“Leave? Why? Where would I go?” The boy shook his head. “I don’t even know where here is!”

You are in danger

That got his attention.

“Danger? From who? Are the Watchers coming?” He shot a glance over his shoulder, back the way he had came. The door was still shut. That was good. The thought of being pounced on from behind, was enough to make his knees tremble.

You will leave this place now

The air above the screens shimmered, and suddenly there was a floating picture rotating slowly over the boy’s head. He gasped, shrinking back instinctively, but the picture just stayed where it was, turning slowly in the air. It was made all of bright green bars, and seemed to show somekind of long . . . sliver, or something. There was a bulge around the middle of sliver, and at the base of the bulge, a pusling red dot. Next to the dot, written in bright read letters, were the words YOU ARE HERE.

“Its a map,” the boy exclaimed, surprised that he knew what the picture was, and even more surprised that he knew what a map was.

Correct

The glowing wire skeleton expanded and morphed, zooming in to focus on the blinking red dot. The new map, the boy realized, showed the outlines of the very room he was standing in, along with the surrounding rooms and passageways all around it. An arrow leapt out from the red dot and zig-zagged its way through maze of rooms and halls, the wireframe image expanding as the glowing trail grew longer. Thomas watched in growing consternation as the trail continued growing, leaping up elevator shafts and twisting round long empty chasms that he didn’t recognize.

“Um . . .”

The arrow stopped in what looked like a huge room on the outer edge of the gigantic sliver.

The boy squinted, retracing the red path. “Is that how I get out of here?”

Correct

He stood up straight, leaning back from the weird screens. “I don’t think I want to . . .”

Find Samuel Matthews

“What?”

Have you memorized the route?

The boy scanned the glowing path one more time, almost without meaning to, then nodded reluctantly. “Yes. I guess.”

Find Samuel Matthews

The screen went dark and the door behind the boy whisked open.

Chapter two part so and so

Pixie moving through the camp, just met with an old friend, captain Adrian Tanaka

Been rather busy lately so I keep forgetting to post stuff.

“Well, little sister, yours truly just managed to pull off a stunning victory in Warzone the other night,” Adrian said as a grin split his face. He had always called her that, but for no reason that Pixie could figure out. The man was maybe only two or three years older than she was. And they certainly looked nothing alike.
“Warzone, eh? How did that one go down?”
Warzone was a popular wargame that a lot of the troops happened to play in their free time. The brass had cracked down on a lot of the virtual gaming that had been going on years ago. They had decided video games were making the troops fat and lazy, an allegation that was not entirely without merit. Instead the soldiers had started turning to wargaming. Some of the ranking officers had managed to procure their own models for the wargame and kept them stored safely in their quarters. Such models would surely have disappeared in moments were they in the public barracks with a private or corporal.
The wargame was a simulation of World War Three. There were some other wargames that soldiers played from other historical eras, but this one seemed to be the most popular. Tanaka had a fairly good Asian Ultranationalist army he used whenever he was playing. Pixie hadn’t played in years. She had an army back at her parent’s house, but she had never bothered to get it sent here. Maybe it was about time, now that she no longer had to share a room with other soldiers and her models would be safe from thieves.
Tanaka was going into great detail at their replication of the Battle of Orenburg, the battle where the Asian Ultranationalist forces had tried to push their way into Europe, culminating in a tremendous clash at the river around the Russian city of Orenburg. The Europeans as well as the Russian Loyalists had managed to push the Ultranationalists back, but from the way Tanaka described the events of the game, Pixie got the impression that the scenario had not been a terribly accurate representation of history.
He seemed to notice she was drifting off or not paying as close of attention as he may have hoped. “Whats the issue, little sister? Don’t you want to bask in the triumph of victory with me?”
Pixie looked back towards him and smiled as she nodded. “Sorry, my mind was elsewhere.”
“Bah, you just have no respect for the martial might of the Ultranationalists! I’ve got blind zeal! I’ve got decent weapons too!” he said with a laugh.
Pixie smiled with his laugh. She had met him about a year earlier, when he was just a gunner for some other Captain’s walker. He had since been given command of his own, almost at the same time she made Sergeant. The two had hit it off reasonably well, even given the large discrepancy in rank. He certainly didn’t seem to mind having friends outside the tankers circles. Adrian had said the majority of tankers were a bunch of hot heads and her down-to-earth mannerisms were a refreshing jolt of fresh air.
“What did you hear about this meeting of sorts tonight?” she asked as soon as he finished laughing.
“Good question. Well… you didn’t hear it from me, but we may be going to high alert. Weapons primed any everything,” Adrian said in hushed and slow whispers.
Pixie tried to keep her composure but her jaw almost dropped open. High alert?! Such a thing hadn’t happened in decades. “You’re not serious,” she said, keeping a straight face.
“Oh, I’m quite serious. You can be sure of that,” Adrian chided.
“Dee-tee-eff,” Pixie cursed, “What on earth for? I hadn’t heard anything.”
“That’s the part where my information source dries up,” Adrian confessed, shrugging as if it couldn’t be helped. She had no idea where Adrian got his information, but when he told her his secrets, the information tended to be correct. There hadn’t been a major armed conflict since the South American Separatists almost forty years ago, and that rebellion had been nothing more than a joke. The Peacekeepers had gone on high alert for two weeks, which also happened to be the duration of the conflict. High alert demanded that all military personnel be ready to deploy at once. It meant transport plans docked and ready for soldiers. It meant tanks and walkers fueled and armed, ready at a moment’s notice.
“You’re contacts have to be wrong. I haven’t seen or heard of anything that would necessitate an escalation of that magnitude,” Pixie said, voicing her thoughts.
His sources had to be wrong. To simply go on high alert without warning was unheard of. The South American conflict had been simmering and brewing for years. Sure, there were little conflicts from unhappy citizens, but such problems were swiftly dealt with by local police forces. And even those conflicts were rare. Maybe once a year or so, and in a population size of over twenty billion citizens that said plenty to the frequency of such occurrences.
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just saying what I heard, and I believe him. Them. I believe whoever they are,” he said with an innocent grin. Adrian had never given up the names of any of his contacts, but Pixie knew they had to be high ranking command staff. If some Lieutenant or Lieutenant-Colonel was found leaking information to a tanker, they would find themselves redeployed to Antarctica or Siberia in a heartbeat.
“I suppose they’ll have to give us a reason for high alert, then,” Pixie said aloud, more to herself than to Adrian.
“That they would. Hey, I’d love to stay and chat, but I need to check on some uh… dealies,” he said, gesturing off towards the machine shop.
“Dealies?” Pixie asked, narrowing her brow as she looked at him.
“Yeah. Dealies with the doohickies and the faz… uh… wanglers,” he said, shrugged as he spoke the gibberish. He waved goodbye to her even as he started running to the machine shop. “Hey, Rawlings! Did you get that sandwich I asked for?” Adrian yelled off to someone Pixie could see, not bothering to look back at her.
Pixie lingered for a moment, and then shrugged. Tankers. Can’t live with ‘em. She turned and walked back out of the motor pool, leaving the machines of war behind. She headed straight towards the commissary, looking to grab lunch while she could. Hopefully it’s something decent today. The last few days, Cookie had seemed to be literally scraping the bottom of the barrel, fixing whatever he was able to find, and the food generally ended up being lousy quality. No one had the nerve to say as much to the man.
He was probably wider than he was tall, every pound of that muscle. Those who picked fights with the man either were drunk or had the advantage of numbers. Either way had not got well for the belligerent, who ended up in the hospital with broken bones and bruises all over their body. Cookie told anyone who would ask him that he pulled his punches when he got into a fight. Pixie didn’t doubt that. She walked inside the commissary, which she noted seemed a lot emptier than it usually was.
The commissary was stationed inside a large carnival-like tent, something that surprised Pixie to no end. The structure had supposedly been here for three decades at least. Why don’t they just built an actual structure here and call it quits? Probably budget cutbacks or bureaucratic laziness. She sighed and walked inside the tent.
She was immediately hit with the smell of cooking foods and meat as she walked inside. Several tables and chairs lay scattered throughout the opening and Pixie was happy to see that the place wasn’t too crowded. A bunch of commissioned officers sat off to a side of the tent, having finished their meals long ago. They laughed and spoke to each other, seemingly uncaring of anyone else inside the tent. Other enlisted soldiers were scattered about the tent, some sitting in groups with each other, others sitting by themselves, chowing down on the food as fast as they could before getting up to leave. She wondered how many of them were actually supposed to be here and how many simply had hunger pains and had snuck away from other duties to grab some of the food.
As she pulled the tray along the serving table, the private on duty slopped some sort of muck onto the tray. She grabbed a biscuit, some silverware, and a drink and moved to sit at an empty table. Looking down at the food, she suspected no soldier who had seen what was being served would try to sneak in and get more of the stew. It had the faint trace of cinnamon, pepper and several other spies. Some sort of vegetables floated in the stew, along with some meat of one kind of another. Faux-meat definetly. The Peacekeeper’s bureaucracy had become particularly big on using the lab-grown stock as opposed to the slaughterhouse kind. That type of meat product had almost faded to obscurity once scientists had figured out how to mass produce lab grown meat. She had tried both meat from freshly slaughtered livestock and the faux-meat several times and hadn’t noticed the difference in any of those opportunities.
She started eating the stew, and almost regretted it. It really seemed that Cookie was scrapping the bottom of the barrel for this stuff. Probably getting ready for a new shipment of food and he’s trying to clean the pantries out. She casually glanced up and saw the big man bustling about the kitchen off to the side in the tent, stopping to occasionally direct the Privates as to what they needed to do. They seemed to do so with some small amount of hesitation. She sincerely doubted they were here by choice. Kitchen duty always remained a good discipline tool.
She felt a presence come up behind her, and she could already smell the rancid breath of Sergeant Gordon Rodriguez. The big man sat down next to her with an almost stupid smile plastered across his face. His hair was shaved almost to the scalp, giving him the appearance of a peach covered in fuzz. She wondered how a man such as this had ever worked his way above Private.
“Heya, Pixie,” he said across from her.
“Heya, yourself,” she said as she dipped the biscuit into the gravy and took a bite.
“You never did get back to me about that tournament,” the man asked.
Pixie blinked while she chewed. Why can’t the man find a breath mint? Doing such certainly wasn’t a hard thing to do. Simply brush your teeth once and a while. As it was, his halitosis smelled as if an animal had crawled into his mouth and died. Tournament? She suddenly recalled what he was talking about. The man lived for competition and fancied himself a fine brawler and hand to hand fighter. The moment he had found out she knew a thing or two about martial arts; he had tried to get her to enter in on the camp’s unofficial ring matches.
Nothing too fancy or too brutal, just some no holds-barred hand-to-hand combat. Medics were always on hand and no fighters had gotten seriously injured in some time. But Pixie had no desire to be caged like an animal and forced to fight for the entertainment of a bunch of unkempt hillbillies. The Colonel presiding at the camp had tried to crack down on the fighting rings, but he had finally stopped bothering when the fight organizers always found another place to meet late at night. The Colonel could probably have shut it down for good now, but Pixie had heard several rumors from Adrian that the he now placed a harmless wager on a match every now and then.
“I’m sorry it must have slipped my mind,” Pixie said.
“C’mon, don’t be like that,” Gordon said.
The man was mostly harmless, like a big kid, but he still was a decent fighter if what she had heard could be believed. He was also incredibly persistent to the point of aggravation
“I’m not being like that, Gordo. I just don’t really have that much of an interest right now,” she asked.
“Too bad. We just got someone who claims to have a black belt in hapkido,” Gordon said, trying to tempt her.
Pixie groaned. “You know I’d never do that least of all. I hate hapkido on hapkido. It’s so…” she searched for a word. “So boring.”
“It could be fun. Besides, you’ve never tried doing this before. You might enjoy it,” Gordon said, his eyes alight with the possibilities.
“Maybe, maybe not. Give me some time to think about it,” Pixie finally said, trying to get the man to go away and leave her alone.
Finally the man got up and walked away, disappointment visible on his face, but he knew when his proposal had been rejected. Pixie went back to eating the food that lay in front of her. Her thoughts had already drifted beyond the uncouth man and his fighting rings. High alert, huh? Such a prospect was certainly startling if true. What on earth could alarm the Brass enough to send cause them to declare High Alert? The cause would certainly have to be something big. Hopefully they’d explain more tonight.

The Green Hills of Earth

Sorry its been a while guys . . . I'll get something up this week. In the mean time, you've probably all read this, but its pretty cool:

The Green Hills of Earth

Let the sweet fresh breezes heal me
As they rove around the girth
Of our lovely mother planet
Of the cool, green hills of Earth.

We rot in the moulds of Venus,
We retch at her tainted breath.
Foul are her flooded jungles,
Crawling with unclean death.

[ --- the harsh bright soil of Luna ---
--- Saturn's rainbow rings ---
--- the frozen night of Titan --- ]

We've tried each spinning space mote
And reckoned its true worth:
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.

The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.

Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps a race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet ---

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the friendly skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.

Robert A. Heinlein