Chace Randolph

This issue is going to be short and sweet. I am still working on my fantasy book for this year’s NaNoWriMo challenge. It’s not going as well as I would like. By that, I mean it’s going really well. The rest of the world is just getting in the way, so my word count is only half of what I want it to be, and I am not as far along in my planned story as I would like to be at this point. I need to finish the manuscript before Christmas. So rather than giving you a lengthy run down here, I am going to get back to that.

In that wheel house, I am going to overhaul my twitter account, and I am starting a new series of YouTube shorts talking not just about cool historical stuff I like, as I have in the past, but about my content specifically and how I got to where I am with it now. I think the next book I write will be the horror spin off of my sci-fi series. The book is already started, and I just want to finish it. Get some of those back burner projects off the stove. The interesting thing about it is that I have been writing this book by hand, with a pen, on actual paper, not typing it. It’s a very different animal, a very different creative animal, and I like it. I like how it is going. It’s just something I have to do in small doses. Not just for the sake of my wrist, but because it’s such a different vibe from what I normally write. So it’s a different path for me, but it’s a whiskey, it must be sipped, I can’t chug it like the beer I normally write with. (No, I don’t really drink, that’s just a metaphor some people might understand, and like most of my writing, it kinda got away from me the more I wrote it and I just went with it to see what happens.)

So there’s all that. Let me share another of my little short stories I wrote sometime some place, and give that to you, as a thank you for being here, checking out my website, and helping generate traffic on my site. Also, I might put a few of them together into a series and submit them to a local college where I happen to be an Alumni. We’ll see how that goes, anyway here’s a longer one, called Free Fall. It is more of a story than a thought experiment like the others were. I hope this helps make up for how brief I have been here…

Free Fall

A hard knock echoed through the thin metal walls as a fist hammered on the other side of the sheet metal. Echoing painfully loud in the cold hollow room. The Sargent’s voice percolated through the sheet metal and boomed inside the room nearly as loud as his banging fist had. Squeezing between his lips around the phat stub of a cigar, perpetually in his mouth like the spark plug for an engine of curse words.

“Something Nasty is going down on Mars. Get booted, suited, and down to the briefing room in five.”

Romulus and the other Praetorian of the fifth empire stirred in the darkness of the chamber. The men woke from their machine induced slumber and wordlessly donned their equipment. Pulling their ceramic plate carrier rigs and unloaded kinetic weapons from their footlockers.

Each of the guardsmen mere minutes later was exiting the ready room and spent a moment in the T pose between the double doors of the ‘weapons’ locker’ exit. A dozen mechanical arms springing out from the walls, flash welding the armor plates and pouches pre-loaded with ammunition and medical equipment onto the plate carrier rigs as of each of the Praetorian passed through. Seconds shy of five minutes later, the entire company was armed, armored and had reported to the situation room. Standing in their allotted locations around the edges of the darkened portions of the amphitheater room. The Sargent stepped out of rank from the shadows and reported to the Battalion commander as she emerged from her location in the shadows. Stepping into the pool of light, up to the holographic sand table. She inhaled deeply to begin the briefing, her inhale and expanding chest causing the straps of her unloaded plate carrier rig to creak with the breath.

“Gentlemen… Some nasty stuff is going down on Mars. A hive somehow slipped through the heliopause and the Kuiper belt defense systems. They approached with such speed that they didn’t even engage in the automated defenses of the inner defensive ring and went straight for Mars. The engineers there have been on their own down there for almost an hour. The empire is not willing to lose any more of the manufacturing output from Mars than we already have. Much less to suffer the insult of these mindless hive bugs penetrating so deep and so quickly into the Sol system. The job is simple. Get in, kill the bugs, protect the automated factories, and let the engineers get back to work. Normally we would just use satellites or remote ships to exterminate them, but the hive has already sullied the inner workings of our machines. This is a job for men. The Factory has to be cleared room by room. You’ll take an elevator up to the launching platform, be loaded into you drop pods and they’ll put you in the upper reaches of Mar’s atmosphere. You are Praetorians. Most refined warriors humanity has to offer. You already know what to do once you get there. You are dismissed, to you drop pods.”

The room was totally silent as the Battalion commander ceased speaking and stepped back out of the light. The holographic table played out a simple display indicating the region each of the Praetorian marines would be responsible for and the overlapping zones they were to cleanse of these hive aliens. A known and mindless threat. Drifting in the dark depths of space. Descending seemingly without reason or co-ordination on whatever caught their eye. The shuffle of hundreds of boots broke the silence as the men turned as one and their boots marched in unison to the doors.

The north wall of the amphitheater sported many doors. Eight at a time, the battalion slipped through the openings into the phone booth sized rooms beyond. The doors would seal behind them and a helmet plopped onto their heads. Making a seal with the rest of their hard suit and linking them into the battle net with the rest of the unit as the air cushions inside the walls of the chamber inflated. Immobilizing all the soldiers, including Romulus. Seconds later, they would be accelerated away. Magnetic lines built on a lattice truss work of carbon fiber and nano steel lifting the men upwards away from the earth’s surface. Accelerating continually. Slowly bringing the men up to the fastest speed the human body can withstand. Making Romulus feel light-headed and woozy as all the blood pooled in his feet. His heart struggling to pull it up to his brain against the G forces of acceleration.

Minutes later, the pods containing Romulus and the other soldiers finally started to slow. Forcing them to deal with the opposite problem as they decelerated. They got head rushes, their vision changed colors as they suffered ‘red outs’ upon deceleration before coming to a halt at last. Mere minutes had passed, and each soldier was now many hundreds of kilometers above the surface of the earth, well outside the atmosphere.

One of the things that made humanity so dangerous to the intergalactic community was their ability to creatively solve problems, to innovate. To go under or around obstacles and not always fight through them. One of their creative solutions was a workaround. A backhanded way to circumvent the laws of physics. To break the speed of light. To move men and material instantaneously from place to place so long as they could clearly identify where that place was.

They had turned psychic energy into mechanical energy. Harnessed the power of the mind and using it to propel the body. The drop pods, with the soldiers inside, were loaded into the projector, stacked like bullets in a magazine. The projector could only hold so many pods. Was only capable of launching a couple of dozen soldiers at a time. Therefore, the battalion would be deployed in waves.

Romulus was somewhere in the ranks of the second wave. There was no noise as the machinery worked around him in a vacuum. The cold, heartless computer minds and the blazing hot of whirring mechanism handled him just as unforgiving as the hot and cold of space would. His pod jerked and rotated as he was advanced through the magazine. The impact absorbing airbags almost as important before the launch as they would be to the landing after the launch.

The prompt came up across the heads up display inside his helmet. Romulus easily pushed other thoughts from his head, as soldiers were well conditioned to do. Instead, he thought of only his destination. Some nondescript point in the cold upper atmosphere of Mars. A set if co-ordinates played in his head as he read them from the HUD over and over again. The Machine harnessed the power of his mind. Used his subconscious, his military induced iron willpower as fuel and with the feeling like he had suddenly had several kilograms of cold stones in his gut, he left the platform at the top of the elevator that extended up through earth’s atmosphere and in the next heartbeat found himself in free fall, descending past the first tendrils of clouds that were starting to form in the upper layers of Mar’s thin atmosphere that humanity was slowly breathing life into.

Romulus and his pod rattled and shook. He clenched his jaw until it hurt inside his helmet to keep his teeth from clattering or biting his own tongue. He was jerked even more violently as the first stage of the descent thrusters ignited. Telling him he was about four thousand meters above the surface. His body was totally immobile. Held in place by the inflated airbags in the walls. He mentally prepared for landing. The combat pod jerked again as the first stage burned up its fuel supply and the second stage ignited. He descended through one thousand meters and His HUD kicked back on, having had enough time to synchronize with the satellites and by extension of the battle net the rest of the battalion that had dropped with him. Romulus took these few heartbeats before landing to reflect.

Reflect on his mother he hadn’t seen in years, his brothers. He didn’t know if they were even still alive or not, having been conscripted just as he was. To his wife, he hadn’t been permitted to speak too since the hive had started falling upon the colonies of the empire, falling out of the darkness nearly a decade ago. To his child, he had never met, that he didn’t even know the gender of, who was also now nearing ten years of age.

His thoughts were interrupted as the columns of flame his pod rode upon sputtered and went out. Meaning he was a mere ten meters above the surface. Romulus and his pod free fell the rest of the way. The momentum driving the end of the pod into the red Martian soil like a giant tent spike as three meters of its length disappeared beneath the surface, holding the pod upright. The chamber he was locked in filled slid inside the shell of the pod, decelerated by regulated fluids preventing Romulus’s back from compressing. By the time he blinked, the airbags around him had deflated, and as he blinked again a set of small explosive charges ejected the door off the front of the pod. Romulus made the gigantic step from the inside of the pod out onto the barren Martian landscape. He took a magazine from the pouches loaded onto his hard suit and loaded his weapon with it. The environmental control unit in the suit almost immediately kicked on as the freezing air and howling carbon dioxide wind sapped all the warmth from his body. He was instantly shivering. Still clenching his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. His hard suit’s heater wouldn’t keep him comfortable. The empire didn’t care about comfort. He did take solace in that it would keep him alive. He was a praetorian, he was valuable, he may not be comfortable, but at least he would be alive. The winds howled and whipped crimson sand across the horizon. The weak sun was settling on the horizon. Night would fall soon and the cold would only get worse. The HUD inside his helmet indicated his objective was nearly a kilometer away.

His trained and resolute will power gripped his feet and lead Romulus towards the shape in the distance. The mechanism of the facility was dark and menacing in the twilight. A twisting mass of pipes and access shafts and bulbous chambers like an ocean full of giant Octopi had been dumped on the surface and left to congeal. The winds shrieked and the temperature continued to fall. Romulus lost feeling in his hands and feet. He slowed his pace as he picked his way across the rock-strewn landscape. Rocks of any shape and size still stood between him and the facility. Some were no larger than his head. Other’s larger than some of the archaic armored vehicles the crops still used for ceremonial purposes.

Soon the wind carried a shriek on its shoulders. A noise that was certainly not natural. Something between a hiss and scream slithered through the darkness, making itself heard over the howl of the wind. A noise that made your bones itch. Romulus dropped to a knee and readied his weapon as his eyes danced back and forth in the dying light, searching for the source of the noise. Some thirty meters away, a boulder moved. It turned to face him and unfolded. Because it wasn’t a boulder. It was one of the hive’s warriors. The four-meter insect-like arthropod arched backwards to raise itself upward. Towering taller than any man could be. Its set of forward most appendages stretched out from its shoulders. They spread meters wide and held high, so the bristling oily hairs on its arms could feel, could taste the air and the environment around it. Its smaller ancillary arms were still tucked tightly against its chest, its vicious claw-like hands rhythmically clenching in anticipation. Then it spoke again. The Labrum pulled upwards, the mandibles spread outwards. Each mandible was nearly as thick as a human arm. They spread wider and wider until the alien’s mouth was gaped as wide as Romulus’s shoulders. He watched in horror as the Maxilla inside its mouth vibrated and squirmed with anticipation as the shriek drug on. It settled back onto the ground. The thick armored shell of the monstrous hive alien varying in color. Taking up the entire spectrum of browns between butterscotch and dark chocolate.

Romulus didn’t have time to be scared or horrified. His training took over. His thumb released the safety on his weapon and pushed the fire selector into burst mode as his grip tightened and braced for the recoil. His index finger took up the slack before breaking the crisp electric trigger mechanism.

The magnetic accelerators pulsed three times, microseconds apart, launching three metallic projectiles. Hollow canisters filled with some mission-specific load, sometimes an armor-piercing core, or a high explosive charge. In this case, it was a gel-like payload of chemical insecticides.

The three projectiles slammed through the thick carapace of the alien’s shoulders and for a moment the giant hive monster continued forward, its many legs working like the ores of an ancient ship, undulating up and down, pulling it across the ocean of Martian sand. But the chemical payloads of the projectiles now buried deep somewhere inside the spongy flesh interior of the insectoid’s body took effect. After a few meters, it stumbled and fell. The beast hissed, chattered and screamed. Its body twisted, convulsed. The convulsions slowed and became little more than twitching.

The horrific sounds and screeches lingered in Romulus’s ears as he passed the automobile sized arthropod’s body. The evening slipped into the night as his boots carried him closer to the twisted chaotic mess of ducts, tunnels, machinery and the looming industrial form of the manufacturing and engineering facilities in the distance. He marched on through the walls of blowing sand. Alone in the howling dark, the Battle net inside his helmet indicating the others praetorian of his battalion were out there in the darkness too. Separate but together in their march towards the massive automated industrial complex that served as the lifeline to the mega-cities of the earth as well as the gateway, the staging area for the ships aimed at the other distant parts of space where humanity itself had traveled to and festered in their new colonies.

If he survived something as important as this, it would undoubtedly earn him his freedom. Freedom from the legions and return to his wife and the child he had yet to meet.