A short story about NS, by Digi fyi

Here is a story I wrote in my spare time that I would like to share with my beloved community.

Natural Selection: Cost and Demand
By Digital Anthrax who is in impact <3

“Join the Frontiersmen!”
It was the scam of the century. They wait for you at the door of your school on graduation day, holding the answers to the questions you never knew you had asked.
The recruiting sergeant would hold out a dry, skeletal hand, throwing informational pamphlet after informational pamphlet into your lap, smiling at you like he had rehearsed four hundred and eighty seven times beforehand as he clicked his pen invitingly waiting for you to sign your life on the dotted line.
I felt like Faust, buying into a life of serving the devil in return for a secure future, valour, comradeship, integrity and duty as I took hold of the rope he had cast down to my pit of mediocrity, frayed by the hundreds who had climbed it before me, leading me out from a lifetime with people I could never compete with.
I had cast my poor school scores into the faint, artificial wind behind me and did the deed, selling my sanity piece by piece for 19 and half grand a year with free medical.
My parents would have been pissed if they had have known. They had expected a guy like me to finish first. No such luck.
With my misspent years of underage drinking, chasing girls who were always too good for me and countless lame, on-the-side online business far behind me, I set out for training on a shuttle that looked ten years past retirement, the large TSA symbol flaking off into the mind-numbing winds of time.
Christ knew where all that pay was going, what real food tasted like and what a woman was. Training for the Frontiersmen was like being born again, the first thing you see being your sergeant’s fist as he smacks you right in the face as you come out of your mother, then shoves you back in, swears at you a couple of times and then tells you to do it again like a man.
Three months after learning to eat, talk and shit like a Frontiersman, we were sent to clear out a few nests full of skulks. The things you would flush down the toilet straight away if your kid came home carrying it in his arms, covered in mud. The things your parents would tell you hid under your bed so you would clean up under there once in a while.
Another two weeks after that, our sergeant began trumpeting on his deep, gruff voice; tough guy in E Flat. Telling us to straighten up or we’d find ourselves on Operation Veil, that our mothers didn’t love us and that if he had the chance he would have punched the same mother he mentioned earlier and personally put a better baby in there. The kind of shit that would keep you up at night it was so warm and fuzzy.
Then one night everything changed from many shades of grey back to black and white.
It was binary; there were aliens and there were us. One of the two had to go. Preferably the aliens, but even if it were us, our commanding officers could make a fortune selling our stories on the internet for a quick pile of credits and organising a heap of cheesy remembrance ceremonies to swing a couple of votes and get a bit more extra funding.
Sirens rang through the cabins, their shrewd, nostalgic cacophony reverberating against the cold steel walls, searing through ninety-seven dream clouds at the same time.
They had taught us to turn off the involuntary process of feeling things and replace it with climbing off ones lazy ass, putting on your uniform and clutching your LMG tightly in your fingertips in the space of 37 seconds.
I stood next to Ramirez in the “ready room”, where we would be quickly deployed to anywhere we should be sent. The sirens grew silent against the wall of the questions my brain asked me.
In the old days, someone would have asked for a briefing. Now everyone just kept their mouths shut, their LMGs clean and their eyes fixed at the infantry portals ahead crackling to life in a dazzling palette of nightmare colours.
‘Frontiersmen!’ Captain Jenkins started. ‘It’s time. Your people needs you!’
I had heard him say the same before. Maybe it was déjà vu, maybe I had seen it in a movie or three. I had no idea anymore.
‘Operation Veil is finished. The entire facility is overrun with Kharaa, mostly skulks and gorges. Some that nobody has ever seen. You’re going to be sent in and you are all going to kill them before they spread out further.’
None of us could even believe it. Operation Veil was the backwater post, the first assignment, the place our sergeants would threaten to send us.
‘So I suppose you are all on Operation Veil as of now, gentleman. Gear up, do your duty and you will be fine.’
Translation: ‘we have really no idea what we are putting you up against.’
He squeaked the floor turning on his heel and strode off out the corridor, leaving that musk of education and breeding that officers carried around with them. I felt the circular walls close in on me, pushing the infantry portals and certain death right in my face. The fine print on the form I had signed many months ago now stood before my eyes, framed in the eloquence of sold-out war stories and celebrity testimonials.
Putting my helmet on my head, I felt it clip tightly into place as my vision was replaced by the numb blue tint of the visor with my health and ammo readings flicking to life.
Veins pounding against the walls of my head to my heartbeat sounded out a marching beat at a very cool walking speed. Sometimes I scared myself. I offered a quick nod at Ramirez next to me and walked through at the same time, four and a half months of interstellar travel lost in a split second you couldn’t remember even if you wanted to. The feeling of being broken and put back together that stayed in your bones for twenty-four minutes and the aftertaste of the morning’s artificial rations sitting in your mouth even after you washed it out twice with the artificial water they gave you.
The next thing I knew, I found myself standing in a gigantic metal room with walls that threatened to snatch my life away with one quick movement. TSA Field equipment was everywhere, set up like a chess board.
This was it. Veil. That moment, all the pamphlets came to life around me in hi-res colour; the professional soldiers, the equipment, the way that fear had been cast out of this place entirely.
The skylight overhead cast a sickening red light onto the scene, setting each man in place as though he were a statue fresh from the mold.
Valour. Three or four of the guys were leaning against the Armory, their visors hiding their sleeping eyes, their LMGs unloaded and slung lazily over one shoulder.
Comradeship. The medical officer that came through with us was in a dark corner, rising to his feet, finishing the age old ritual of pronouncing the wounded soldier dead. His buddies snatched at his pack like hyenas, almost tearing it apart, ferociously dividing up his left over ammo while taking it in turns to glare insidiously at the photo of his girl from back home who didn’t yet know the bad news.
Integrity. Next to the hallway furthest from the Commander’s Chair sat two more esteemed Frontiersmen, in one’s hands a bad looking porno magazine his mother would be ashamed of and in the other’s one of his handgrenades. I watched them each change hands, big, childish grins spreading over their faces.
Duty. I completed the 360 degree arc as my eyes met the doorway leading to Topographical Analysis regurgitating three very properly kept Marines, carrying their dead comrade by his legs, faces aghast, minds completely absent. Their debt had been paid, the loafers at Marine Command Interface oblivious as to what the Devil was asking.
This was it. The pamphlets didn’t lie to me for a second which would have been just as well if I had been listening to what they were paid to tell me.
Ramirez offered me a high-five through the cold, recirculated air as I lowered my pack on the ground. I endured it.
‘Privates Henderson and Ramirez! Stand fast!’ a horribly distorted voice seemed to furiously cast down from the heavens, torn open by our being here.
‘West Skylights! Move! You are both on resource duty. The bastards have chewed up our RTs.’
‘Sir!’
Step by rhythmic step Ramirez and I walked and talked about life back home. MCI disappeared in the distance behind us, caught in the flood of prefab steel floor gushing under our feet. Western Skylights sounded classy, it sure wouldn’t be bad.
The enormous doorway swallowed us both whole, the hot, red light sticking to our skin and hair in exaggerated greeting. An open air vent and a large pipe jutting out from the cornice captured our attention and itchy-fingered aims like a magnet. When both were clear, I stepped in further after Ramirez had.
‘Jesus,’ he remarked as he set his LMG against the wall, pulled off his helmet and mopped his dark brow, glistening with sweat. Christ knows how anyone could sweat in this place.
‘Are you like this around women as well?’ I asked him dryly. Our Commander answered by splitting the awkwardness in the moment, as well as the moment itself, in two with the loud teleporting sound that brought with it in its arms another piece of tax payers’ investment.
He began to build without answering me so I took a step out the other doorway opposite, made sure it was clear, and stepped back with my LMG’s sights fixed upon the floor.
‘Hell no,’ he finally admitted. ‘I’m like Zorro, man, real ninja-like. You know, first thing they’re walking in and then the next they’re in my car.’ He stopped to look back at me and laugh at the lameness of the statement.
‘Sometimes, the even get me to wear the mask, man.’
‘Shit,’ I said through half a grin, hungrily snatching a much-needed cigarette from the pack and lighting it up.
‘I’d say you were more like the backdoor bandito.’
‘Shut up, white boy.’
‘I’ll put credits to pesos that you could get any man you wanted.’
‘You know I love you, man, but trust me – I’m seriously gonna take out my pistol and TK your ass if you don’t shut it.’
I laughed through a hearty drag on my cigarette. Dropping my tightly-held LMG by my side, I looked up at the ceiling and blew smoke at it. Ramirez kept the crafty silence from settling on the floor with the loud clanging that came with assembling a Resource Tower.
‘So have you got a girl back home, hombre?’ Ramirez asked me, probably half knowing the answer already.
‘Nah,’ I said, sucking the last from my smoke and stomping the light out of it with the toe of my boot.
‘Nah,’ I repeated defensively. ‘No, I’ll figure I’m going to just wait for the Sarge to introduce me to his daughter.’
‘You’re a grade A asshole, Henderson, you do know that, right?’
‘That’s what these guys pay me for. And hurry it up over there. Christ. My balls are growing a fungus on them waiting on you!’
‘Thanks for the heads-up,’ said Ramirez, finishing his work and shouldering his LMG now made cold by the hard steel floor.
‘Private Ramirez reporting in, Commander. Objective complete.’
‘Good. Well done, boys. Now do something important. I’ve put out a waypoint on your visors just outside the facility’s old Cargo hold. Get there and put up a phasegate for me.’
‘Sir,’ we both sounded off loudly into our headsets inside our helmets, the angels on our shoulders.
‘Oh, and stay right away from that Hive. You are weapons free from here on out. Over.’
The angel’s shift was over, nothingness took it over. I tried not to let Ramirez see I was nervous and I could tell by his face that he was trying to do the same.
‘¡Dios mio!’ said Ramirez, breaking under the weight, throwing his hands on top of his head, a few more dozen Spanish phrases containing the word ‘mierda’. I watched, amused, until he had finished and calmed down again. God damn Mexicans.
‘Hey, just relax there, Bandito! You watch my back like you’re so good at and I watch yours. We both make it home and most probably get big fat promotions and a night with the Sarge’s daughter and the Commander’s sister.’
Accepting my somewhat loose verbal contract, he gripped my hand in his, smiling.
‘Hermanos por vida.’
‘Hermanos,’ I repeated in my North of the border Spanish accent.
‘Time to be a hero, hombre.’
‘Just shut up and cover me, Ramirez.’
We marched in loose formation for three hours, checking corners, open vents and underneath a superfluous network of foot-thick pipes. I took a split second to glance at my watch. Only two minutes and forty-seven seconds had passed since the Commander had spoken to us. Time was such a liar.
Walking through the endless network of dimly lit corridors, I felt like a white blood cell pulsing through the veins of a diseased, mortally wounded animal. The infection loomed closer. You could smell it in the air and taste it on your lips.
Staircase after staircase, bend after bend. Maybe the Commander told us there was a Hive so we wouldn’t slack off. Or there could actually be one there. My temperature rose like my uncertainty was cooking me alive ruthlessly and my heart beat so fast that if I thought too hard, it would skip a beat or two. Earth’s finest.
‘Henderson!’ Ramirez hissed in a whisper. ‘¡Escucha! Did you hear that, man?’
I had heard something. A clang, a scrape and a zapping sound as the light overhead flickered. In my mind, the TSA Frontiersmen’s textbook snapped itself open before my eyes. Skulk.
I wheeled around, left and right, feeling the corridor get tighter and tighter until I felt as though I could hardly breathe. 15 metres from the waypoint. Luck had clearly packed up and left to go and be around someone that deserved her.
I pointed towards the open vent behind us and Ramirez stood flush against the wall and I turned around to face it, clicking off the safety on my LMG, feeling its graceful, weightless form in my hands, gripping it tightly, about to do my species’ work.
I raised the sights to my eye, got down on one knee to steady my shaking hands. I gave Ramirez the nod to perform his part of the epic maneuver. Just like in training. Except this time, the drop target thinks for itself.
He clasped the LMG tightly by the barrel and banged onto the wall next to the vent. Nothing happened. The sounds stopped. The silence made my stomach turn, the last remaining saliva in my dry mouth burning through my tongue like acid.
‘Guess it was nothing, Henderson,’ remarked Ramirez as he walked away from the wall; and out of seemingly thin air, a streak of orange-brown light dashed from the vent almost reaching Ramirez before stopping and falling short.
He stood staring at me gape-jawed. I had fired my weapon without even realising. I walked crunching spent LMG shells under my feet towards the skulk, mortally wounded, drowning in its own fluorescent blood. There was no need to finish it. It was dead.
‘Jesus Christ, Ramirez,’ I shouted to the most nervous Frontiersmen I’d ever seen dead or alive. ‘Don’t ever do that again! Do you hear me?’
He said nothing.
‘We’re almost at Cargo. Let’s keep it moving.’
Seeing a skulk is the kind of shit that jump starts your heart, making you the kind of nervous that will shoot yourself in the foot if so much as a fly buzzed past. The kind of nervous the Sarge had beaten out of us back in basic training. Tried to beat out of us in basic training, apparently. All in all, it wasn’t good for Ramirez, it wasn’t good for the Commander sitting back there in his chair and most of all, it wasn’t good for me.
This was the alien’s turf now. Whatever humanity that was once stored here had been gutted and cleared out, the empty room put up to 40º, the only place on this whole God-forsaken facility which man wasn’t meant to go. And man wanted to go there. He wouldn’t get his hands dirty sending me and Ramirez, so here we were, whether we would even make it back to the ship let alone home hanging in the balance on a fraying piece of piano wire.
That was how it was around here; it either wasn’t or it almost was. With the skulk, it just wasn’t. His three hour lifespan ended in the space of three quarters of a second, his value at the 0.5 resources our army had spent on the ammo I had used to kill him. That last quarter of a second would have been enough for him though. 1.25 seconds and Ramirez would be writhing on the ground, gasping for air, trying his hardest to hold the massive tear in his neck with the blood pissing out of it, clotting as it hit the floor. 2 and the skulk would be up on the roof, sizing me up as he came towards me. 2.5 and it would claw my face to get me on the ground, chomping through my body armour the same way it bites through ships’ hulls.
So 3 seconds to err on the side of caution. That’s all it took. The difference between life and death, survival and loss. It all really made you think. Well, I’m not sure about Ramirez…
‘Private Henderson reporting in from outside Cargo, Commander.’
‘Roger that, private. Well done.’
In return for saving my best friend’s life, the Commander dropped the phasegate he had promised earlier. I guess what they say about officers being true gentlemen is true.
The heat was stopping me from thinking straight, the walls moved around laughing at us blowing an uncomfortably soothing warm draught through the corridor. Ramirez had started to build but was fumbling with the tools and dropping them on the ground very noisily.
‘Come on Ramirez, you big dumb Mexican’ I said endearingly. ‘Let’s go, man. We need to build this or we’re dead. Here. Now.’
He stopped and rolled his eyes.
‘Look, white boy. I told you already, hombre, I’m from El Salvador not Mexico. How many times have we had this talk, eh? How many times?’
‘Just keep putting this thing together, Ramirez, or we’re dead. And nobody’s going to be from anywhere, just in bodybags, jettisoned into space to lighten the load and save fuel.’
I built so quickly that my hands began to ache, the single beads of sweat feeling like sandpaper as they rolled down my face and dripped on the floor with a thud. Record time, we had the thing built as it lit up and hummed to life. The Sarge would have been proud of us.
‘Right, men. Take and load up one of the shotguns and phase through to Cargo. We get one chance and one chance only at this! Let me down and you die.’
‘Reassuring,’ I said lamely to no-one in particular.
‘What the?’ the Commander said in a voice too uncalm to belong to an officer. ‘What the hell is that? Men! Everyone! Back to base now! Now!’
Without spending a second to question it, Ramirez and I phased back to a familiar scene, painted with a brief minute of a memory past. Panic was in the air, the ground rumbled and grown men were crying, sergeants and corporals were yelling orders at statues of soldiers, getting them to fight and die for the TSA one footstep and one heartbeat at a time.
The thumping was getting louder and louder. It was almost deafening.
Whatever it was – was about 10 feet tall and 16 long and was not stopping. It broke through a wall of men like they were made of paper, it charged towards us at an unmeasurable speed.
I was firing at it the whole time, to almost no effect. It couldn’t be stopped. With a stomp it knocked as all over. Passed out for a brief second, I wondered if I would wake up. It was extremely unlikely. I didn’t have a God to pray to or a woman that would miss me, but I had a mission.
In almost a split second I woke up on my feet with my gun unloaded, across the room from Ramirez. He was firing his empty LMG at its face, screaming and pleading in Spanish for it to not kill him today. It gored him with its horn, the impact sickening, the smell of blood fresh and the sounds of his screams audible even over the gunfire. What was left of Ramirez was swallowed whole and finished with a deafening roar.
It was like a dream. I didn’t have time to check whether I was awake or not or whether my body still worked, I just ran. The beast had taken enough gunfire and had turned around, stomping and making his escape and I was after it.
Reloading my gun, I fired another clip on the run into its thick hide, getting no more than a grunt of pain out of it. I reloaded and fired another. And then another.
I had passed Topographical what seemed a life time ago, I had no ammo, and the adrenaline had worn off. The beast was getting too far away. Each breath grew more painful than the last, like locking lips with a flamethrower and letting it give you CPR. My legs began to gave way, the beast disappeared around a corner.
I just stopped and fell on my knees. It was over. He wasn’t coming back and no amount of medpacks would be able to change that.
I tore the helmet off my head, letting the light outside caress my natural eyes blurry with tears. A forlorn hope was raised above my head in a cloud smothering the life out of me so painfully and slowly that it hurt. I started to feel the pain my legs and deep in my chest from the long run after Ramirez, my head spun like crazy as though I had taken a few too many catpacks the sky had fallen on my head.
The lines had finally caught up with me, running past as though I wasn’t even there. I couldn’t tell any of them apart. I wouldn’t leave and fight, I wouldn’t take any orders. It was just me and death locked in a blasphemous staring contest that I was inevitably to lose.
I had paid the price of survival, for a crack at a Hive that we never got. I heard a bang in the distance and the lights above me flickered and faded away. It had been done. Humanity’s muscle had been flexed. Men had died, men had been saved.
For us, there was more war to come. More grief and more tears. More far away battlefields, more friends to make and more friends to lose. More orders to take, more tales to tell.
But for Ramirez, he could be dismissed. For he had repaid his debt in full.

PS sorry about paragraphs

i like the mention about time lies, Very well written.

w000t

NICE story man =D

this stuff is great! more episodes please =)

*fully expects 7 books of ns mayhem from digi

wonder if u could submit this to unknownworlds =P

i love you digi

wow that is long

meh i will read it another time, but from i can see from first few paragraphs looks a goo dstory.

tl;dr HAHA!

love you too, haymo for taking time from your busy study schedule to read it <3

It was a good read, when I was locked outside the house because I forgot my keys, and I managed to leech wireless internets.

I have a column now, spike.

Awesome read.

lol at that.

Now you need to integrate romance, and sex scenes a long the way.

I am proud of you

/me salutes

This post has been edited by Spike on Aug 17 2006, 08:44 PM

lol that was funny as, god read during my boring moring lecture

read it in between classes @ uni... great read..DO THEY GET CARGO DOWN?!?! i imagined commanders nowadays to say "fine ill be a gentleman and drop u a pg"..just a question..did they phase back at the end or was it a beacon..i thought it was a phase back but they ended up on oposite sides of the room.

*edit* the best part was making ns_veil seem more lifelike. the way they explored west skylights, and their remark about the name will make me think about that next time i play

This post has been edited by UnknownSoldier on Aug 18 2006, 10:35 AM