I woke in the dark, to the sound of the music. The music made my head foggy and empty.
I couldn’t remember anything, all I had in the black of the familiar space, was the music. I would wake to it, be tortured by it, and sleep to its unending drone.
It filled the air, so thick it was hard to breathe. Numbing my mind, numbing my body, my scenes, my spirit. It deeply resonated through every molecule.
Every time I woke, it was the first time, every time, I sleep the last, only to begin again, anew. Each time I would lose a piece of myself, a misshapen thing only reminiscent of the one that came before sitting in my place, and I knew it.
Each time the signal would pound through me, resonating with me, my body trembling more and more, each signal worse than before. Stuck in my own personal hell.
My ears were numb, but I was fairly sure I was screaming something.
My mind and body acted discretely, separated from one another. It was me, but it was not me, or at least, not me as I was born. I was not born with my flesh warped by artifacts, my skin was not supposed to be stiff like metal, and the rings upon my fingers, never aging, were far older than me. At some point, I had gone from flesh to whatever I was now.
When did I do it… Why did I do it… I can’t remember. Am I my mind or body? Is there a difference, or can I simply not remember my actions as I make them?
Is this hell?
How… how did I get here?
How did I get here?
How did I get here!
HOW.
TELL ME.
GIVE ME BACK MY MEMORY.
I screamed without mouth, or maybe I did, but I could not remember screaming it aloud.
The song, the sound, the signal kept going. Uncaring of my state. My body kept flailing, its animal flailing, smashing its head into pieces of my cell as I lost it.
It, or me, was hurting itself or myself, bleeding fluid that was not quite blood, not quite not blood, onto the table before me while still restrained in the chair.
Each time, the signal took offence. Screaming at me, screeching in its static and sound and with the silence between them.
My body slammed my head into the flat plane until the world darkened, and the sound faded in my perception as I slid into unconsciousness.
What can I still remember?
What do I remember…
“Bandit, what do you remember about the plan?” The man on the radio asks me.
It made me start. I was lying down in a nook of sand next to a stone road, and a bike.
“Christ, MC, you nearly gave me a heart attack. Trust me a little, I remember the plan, it’s not rocket science.” I told him.
“Aha,” he said, his tone clear over my headset, “Well, then you won’t mind me asking you to repeat it.” He asked me.
I sighed before explaining, “Immobilize, pick off, move in and clear, scavenge, destroy, then exfiltrate. As I said, not rocket science. It’s not my first job MC, I’ve got this,” I told him.
He took a few moments to answer, “You have the right process, but remember, it needs to look like a robbery. Smash and grab, indiscriminate.” He told me.
“It is going to be a robbery; I’m hitting a caravan for an artifact, for fuck’s sake.” I chided.
“Yes, but it needs to look like you robbed them to rob them, not to steal an artifact, make sure to empty pockets, and take anything precious. If you can bring it back, I’ll make sure to change it for credits.” He told me.
I gasped, faux shock in my tone, “Old man, you told me you would never do it again. I’ve needed to pass around random junk for credits for forever. And now you’re just going to do it all for me? Is it my birthdate already?” I asked him.
A deep sigh came from the other end of the radio.
“Listen, it’s part of the deposit for the job, don’t go thinking it’s out of the kindness of my heart. Besides Bandit, you still need to drag it away, how much you bring back to our rendezvous is up to you. Think of it as a bonus.” He told me, uninterest heavy in his tone.
He hated being called familiarly, but when you were a mercenary, calm and collected was what you were looking for in a captain, not a buddy. That and our contract never forced me to use 'Captin' or 'Mission Control', I enjoyed it so much I took a cut pay raise when we renewed our contract so I could keep doing it.
“Loud and clear MC. Am I good to go?” I asked him.
“Yes, you’re good to go. Remain radio silent from here on out, they supposedly might be able to detect you otherwise. Over and out.” Mission control told me.
I switched off the transceiver in my pack, pulled the bit off my head with the microphone and got down and waited.
It was hot out in one of the remote parts of Gabriel’s un-terraformed red deserts. I had to keep all of my gear under my poncho to stop it from cooking me when I held it.
Peaking my hat-covered head over my dune once in a while to check if the transport was coming. Keeping the dust out of my eyes, mouth and nose with a simple head wrapping of fabric that was tucked into my jacket.
I waited, running my hands over my gear and peeking until two hours later, way out on the horizon, I saw the train of land rovers come into view.
Their tires kicked up a smallish plume of red sand as they moved down the road.
“Here we go then.”
I started setting up, pulling out one of my heavily modified hand cannons. My beautiful beautiful, hand cannon was originally one of the mass-produced, somewhat clunky model 3050 Marine Peacekeeper. It was a big handgun that was intended to shoot hunks of wonky bioplastic at someone. It was a big scary nonlethal thing a Marine could carry to help keep the law on a habitat or station, without the worry of some twenty-year-old getting jumpy and putting a hole through an important module and killing everyone.
The model was more a functional prop than a well-made killing machine.
I had changed it so drastically from the plastic-cased mass-produced model that no one back on the Gull knew what it was. And it had seen many modifications since I first signed on, longer barrel, shorter barrel, replaced parts, and five long years of tinkering with it had made them look cursed at some points and wonderful at other points. In truth, the two guns had likely been fully replaced during their service.
Currently, Righty had been fitted into an old longer barrel and a rig with a stock and a fancy little scope on it. It looked like crap, handled like a pole, and was heavy. But it would let me hit a larger target at a much longer distance, and I could just pull the handgun out after.
When you have a deadline and a bank account with a value lower than the IQ score of a Terran mutant, you do what you have to do.
I crawled up the dune onto a flat portion just by the crest laid down and started looking through the scope at my approaching targets.
It was an old thing, not old like an artifact but just old. Its paint was chipped and washed out; presumably, it was once rusty red and orange, but now it was just peachy with bits of steel underneath. Each of the three carts was homogeneous in its color and make, only the things differentiating them from one another being the chips in their paint and the add-on tied to them. Down the sides of the land wagons were big metal tanks for liquids. Handles held objects to the side, extra wheels, boxes with unknown riches, and some extra baggage.
I could make out small plumes of smog coming off pipes that led to the front of each cart, the place you would expect to have an engine. A very big engine. A combustion engine.
“Who the hell uses a combustion engine to drive? What type of rich assholes am I robing here? Well, that’s good to know, at the very least.” I muttered to myself, not moving from my prone position as I took in the sight.
My bike was electric, and the Junker used combustion, but it was a fucking voidboat, and even that was specific gasses, not gasoline. Gasoline was just too rare and expensive to use as fuel in most of the system, and people generally didn’t like to pay more than they needed. It was something you would only use if you wanted to go way out in the middle of nowhere without the use of a voidboat. Like if you wanted to secret away an artifact in middle of nowhere.
That, at least, was reassuring, if annoying. But I pulled my hodge-podge rifle down over the dune and started loading it. Pre-shaped solid gun putty and six shots of plasma got pressed into the cylinders of the six-shooters, the soft polymer edges of the shot shearing just a bit to give it a press seal. My secondhand cannon was loaded with heavy slugs. Twelve shots in total ready to fire, with a few more in a side pouch ready to be loaded in.
I got back into position and waited for a good time to strike. The targets kept rolling along toward me as I sized them up. The drivers and their buddies next to them the only real way to estimate the amount of danger I might be in for, so I narrowed in on the frontmost driver and waited for the silhouette to come into focus.
When it did, I kind of wish it hadn’t. “Fuck me sideways. That’s one ugly fucker.”
Sitting in the driver’s spot was a clanker. Bits of metal covered him, signs that he had been ‘upgraded’ with artificial parts.
He was a hideous amalgam of man and metal that looked more like an industrial accident that went too far. The kind of stuff to get a mechanical arm hooked up to a human body generally made most people who lost an arm think twice about getting it hooked up. It was a one-time payment to buy and get it installed, but then you had a lifelong subscription in the form of pills to numb the feeling of pain they caused. For what he had going on, he had to be zoinked on them.
Now some people hated prosthetics, some would call old granny with a pacemaker a clanker, and some would call it at a full limb or a torso. What made the man a clanker, to me at least, was the little embossed metal plate where the forehead should have been. Two gears with a hand caught between them.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
He, and likely everyone else if his buddy’s forehead was anything to go by, were Mechanicites. Machine cultists that wanted nothing more than to strip their bodies of flesh and become machines, their cult lived towards the edge, on the moons of the outer rim. They were freaks who saw enslaving and ‘upgrading’ people to serve the machine as a good thing.
Most people thought of them as terrorists, and in a quarter of the countries I knew of, holding that sign was something that got you executed. On sight. With everyone with you included for good measure.
“Well, I suppose I’ll be doing a good deed by killing these fuckers. Wouldn’t want these guys to get an artifact.” I murmured to myself, my lips coming up into a grin.
Getting to off Mechanicites was just a bonus though.
Eyes on the prize, Bandit, eyes on the prize.
I waited, planning out my strikes, waiting for them to close in.
Down the road from me, the road curved around a sandy patch with a rocky hill behind it, the road temporarily curved to stay off the sand, before curving back towards me. I short turn, up a short hill.
The wagons had slowed for the turn and began to go up the hill, and I lined in my shot on the front cart’s engine block. My hands were ready, and as the third turned the corner and started to climb, I fired.
The crack of my gun rang in the air, and as the projectile cut a trail through the air, I turned my makeshift rifle as the recoil lifted the barrel until I could bring it back on the last of the wagons. The crack of my second shot was overpowered as my first shot burst.
All those years ago, when I saw a cheap gun that fired a .50 calibre wad of plastic, it occurred to me, hey, I think I could fit a plasma generator in there. And as it turned out, I couldn’t fire a plasma generator. But I could fit a container that could airburst already contained plasma in one. And hey, while I was there, why not put in a range sensor, so I did.
That’s all to say, a plasma plume hit the cart, burnt through the steel and compromised the engine block before dispersing. The rifle raised as the engine started to misfire, its carefully made engine locked up, the plasma shocked the electronics put in the engine compartment, and the cart stopped. No one had caught on, and the second shot's recoil brought my gun up to the driver.
I fired again, trusting my familiarity with the gun, and I started to pull the gun back down on the middle cart as the sound of two bursts of plasma went off. The sound of the engine cooking was all I needed to know as I brought the gun down, wrestled it to where I needed to go and fired my fourth shot, with my fifth shot targeted at the drivers.
I moved my gun to my final targets, which had finally started to move. I took the shot and started part three of the plan.
I lifted the rifle with the recoil, stood up, and started down the dune. I knocked the stock up, freeing my pistol as it swivelled out and away, and I pulled it out of the barrel extension like a sword, tossing the setup off into the sand. With my other hand free I reached into my pouch and brought out the premade bullets, and started loading.
My hands acted on reflex, and I loaded one and was on the second by the time I got to my bike.
My bike was a cheap beaten-up thing, it was like the Junker was, though. I loved old stuff; I loved getting into the guts of something and getting it running. Mass-produced just meant you could always buy parts. If a part broke down, you could fix it or get a part custom. It also meant you knew exactly how it worked.
I slipped Righty into my second holster and got the thing moving, the tires bit into the sand while I was in low gear, and it started pushing me forward onto the road and down to my quarry.
Once I was on the straightaway, I moved into a higher gear but not going all the way up, and balanced.
I knew my equipment well.
When someone rode a bike, they were expected to do things like keeping their hands on the handlebars. After many a fall and many a set of cast-off gear, I had long since learned how to ride with no hands. I could thus use my hands to do more important things. It didn’t take a mercenary long to figure out what to use them for.
I used them to keep loading my hand cannon. It wasn’t very far to the caravans, but it was far enough to get the second round all the way in and get onto the fourth round before I got to them and needed to get off.
I came to a stop and took in the situation.
The caravan had stopped, the engines had stopped popping, dead hunks of steel. The first passenger was fused to the side of the front cart.
Next off then, sweeping and clearing.
I started by finishing Righty number four and setting the gun to fire before holstering it. I instead drew Lefty, angling my stance like I was using a sword, a duelist’s pose, as I went to behind the cart. I took the corner wide and quickly, which saved me a visit with Doc when the well done dazed-looking Mechanicite fired a gun of his own. Too little, too late.
Lefty one, Clanker zero.
The jacket on the slug didn’t even separate, it was too short a distance to exit the container.
I checked the area in front of me, but it was clear. There was yelling, however, as people in the carts freaked out and ready themselves to sally out.
The back of the cart was clear, but that meant little, the second cart’s driver and passenger were carbon which was a plus. I could hear the people inside the first cart gearing up. I looked at the cart, circling around the back. The door was still closed, thankfully.
The metal cover looked thin to my eye, the area where it was bent out around the doorway, making it look like a fitted metal tarp. It was like one big thin sheet, meant to keep out the elements, which, if its worn exterior was anything to go by, was a task it excelled at.
Gabriel’s red sands were a very nice red color, and they were toxic and radioactive. It's why I had to breathe through a sheet. And almost no vehicle on Gabriel I had ever seen had open compartments, with, I supposed, the exemption of the driver’s seat, which only had a windshield, the doors were apparently optional.
Sand was good at a few things, you could use it to make glass, for example, it could be used to grind down surfaces. The oxides could be reclaimed and produce oxygen, and the other parts could be used for all kinds of things, most of Gabriel’s soil was, in truth, metal oxides; it just acted like sand.
The red particulate’s composition aside, sand was a useful thing. What it was not useful for was punching through solid steel.
I took the chance, backed up and let four slugs out in rapid succession, each one meant to sweep the cabin beyond the thin back wall.
They punched through the steel wall, casting off their jacket’s midflight, leaving four holes in the back. I could hear the yelling pick up in intensity for a moment, but I needed to make sure my back was clear before going down the wagon train.
I drew Righty and moved up, putting a slug through the area that held the hatch shut before kicking the door in.
Seven dead men were on the ground, and one living one slouched on the wall.
He held a gun, but he was unsteady. I wasn’t.
Lefty and Righty 9 Clanker Zero.
I stopped and holstered Lefty and got three rounds into Righty. Backing out of the threshold and moving to the second cart. I peeked over the side and kept my ear open for behind me. I couldn’t make out much with how loud the two guns were, but I got ready as they sortied from the second wagon and started filing out to the side.
I lined the cultists up in my head, exited cover to get a good line of fire and squeezed off a pair of shots before sliding back into cover. Two metalheads hit the ground, and I went to check behind me on the other side.
I turned the corner and met with a woman with a big wrench.
When she saw me, she screamed, “For the Prophet.” And started sprinting with her wrench held high.
I put a bullet in her.
As it turned out, they were right. Metal was strong, and flesh was weak.
She kept moving forward with her momentum as she died, and I was forced to step out of the way as her wrench carried her through where I was.
Up close, I could see her bald head was patterned with symbols, and at the part where the spine and head met, she had a tiny metal case joined to her.
A slave then, probably some poor girl who caught their eye. They had little boxes wired to them; stars know what they do to the poor fuckers, but once you were taken, you never came back, not even in a box.
“Sorry, lost one, rest now,” I told her.
She didn’t reply, I couldn’t even look her in the eye while she bled out.
I could hear two more fuckers. I had two more bullets.
They too, were screaming, pounding footsteps coming from the open side of the train.
I stepped back over the dead girl and her wrench, until I had to lean past the edge of the first cart.
Two forms passed behind the front of the second cart, the smoking engine somewhat obscuring their forms when I passed out two shots into them. One of the bodies dropped, the first shot made a clank, and the second one made a “gurk”.
A man, about six foot in height, and with enough metal to make him look armored carried a dented metal shield. It was a tall rectangular wall of steel, but he held it in one hand. In the other was a long prod of metal, a white-hot spark on its tip.
I started to back up back around the corner as the man came after me.
“Witness your bane, unbeliever. Your flesh shall be replaced, but you will not be enlightened.”
Righty was empty, so I holstered him, he was a very good boy and deserved some beauty sleep. I turned as I did and got clear of the caravan. The proximity of the cliff made it harder to move, it was like a tunnel which his lance could hold me back.
I had one bullet in Lefty, but if I wanted to pierce the armoured figure, I would need to hit him at optimal range.
Considering how he screamed as he came after me, and seemed to be gaining on me, I would be hard-pressed to get the range I needed.
I was able to clear the caravan and get some fifteen paces past it and out into the open, but I didn’t go towards my bike.
Instead, I laid my hand on Lefty, turned to face him and drew. His shield snapped up, solid metal blocking his sight and any hope of me landing a hit on a vital.
That was ok, I didn’t mean to shoot him. Instead, I reached my right arm down, not for Righty, but for my other friend.
Next to Righty, in an old scabbard, was a family heirloom that had been in my family line for generations. Each of the firstborns of my family was trained to wield it and inherited it once they came of age. It was my call sign’s name’s sake, Bandit.
I made to move right, luring out a thrust, but also getting ready to dodge it. He caught the movement of my upper body, his lance and its burning tip brightened, a part of his mechanical arm triggering something.
I could see as I was moving that his arm was connected to the lance, and that it seemed to telescope out of his forearm. It was likely powered by him, though I had no idea where the source of it was.
I saw a part of his arms move, his body getting ready to commit, and my hand resting on the blade itched.
Concealed by my body and the poncho, I pulled it up, my arm ready like a spring.
He committed.
Several things happen simultaneously.
My right leg extended out, and my left began to crouch, lowering my profile. His arm made several motions forward, a mechanical hammering motion, as he lined the lance for my chest. Bandit left its sheath; the lance came shooting forward, lancing four feet.
I could feel the heat of the lance as it clipped my hat, both searing it and flinging it off my head. It burnt a streak of white light into my vision as my body, facing towards his right, pulled back, my poncho clearing my blade's path.
It flies up from my hip, cutting everything in its way, curving as I roll my torso and begin to push myself left. The blade arcs counterclockwise until it faces the ground, and I move.
The man is fast when it comes to contracting or extending. But a fighter, he is not. He stares as I move from his vision and into the blind spot of the shield. Over and in.
I close the distance, the wind whipping at the top of my head, uncovered by the loss of my hat.
I dash over to the left, up to the edge of the shield. I plant my feet, and bring the blade up, through the shield, the arm and out. Before his arm started falling but I sprang forward, around the shield and into range to strike him.
His face was still pointed in the direction of the lance, while his eyes are moved over to the corner of his eye.
He manages to say, “Art-ugh.” As the blade comes down like a wave. Down and forward from its high position, passing through him from the side of his steel helmet face, down through his upper chest and exiting from his left hip.
And for insurance, I step around and to his back, bringing the blade up along where his spine would be, before skipping back again.
The blade before me had taken on the blues and reds of oxidized steel from its matt, almost translucent grey look it got when in the scabbard.
The blade, as always, was flawless, with no sign of any wear, nor covered in any blood or material.
And, of course, it had the pattern.
Not wavey like a blade of damascene steel, no swirls or stars, no smooth lines. In truth, I don’t even think the blade had a grain pattern, I didn’t think it was steel or any mortal metal it was more like crystal.
It instead had a hexagonal pattern, like every other artifact. When it was translucent, You could see the inside of the blade, between where the hexagonal structure extended through the blade, so dense they could trick the eye into thinking that it was a solid color.
It was a sword, a beautiful sword, with a silly story behind it. But it was not meant to be wielded by us. It never got dull, never chipped, it could pass through almost everything I had found with its perfect edge.
It was never hot, and never cold. It never left my grip when I held it, and while for me it was as light as a feather, Goshe had found out the hard way when he tried to steal it, and it fell on his foot, and he got stuck there for hours just how impossibly immoveable it was.
Every time I drew the blade, I couldn’t help but get lost in it. It was like staring into the stars, it was a thing that enchanted me, it had always enchanted me. There was something about Sixes. Six bullets in my revolvers, six sides and six points and six angles of a hexagon. Our bodies were made from them, ice took that orientation, and the bits of our eyes that saw were hexagons.
Life loved the number six.
I only snapped out of it when a voice boomed off to the left.
“Heretic, you shall be purged by the pow-ah.” The seven-foot behemoth said, only cut off when I shrieked, hopped up, Lefty came up, and I accidentally blew his head off, while nearly taking my own off with the sword.
I stared at the body of the monster of flesh and steel, a hulking behemoth. Even after my few moments in the air, all I could do is watch as the body of the hulk stood straight up, bits of his brain and marrow splattered across the desert.
“Fuck me, this sword is dangerous,” I said, sheathing the blade in its scabbard, the only scabbard that could hold the sword.
I holstered Lefty and rested one hand on my hip and the other on my chest plate. I took deep breaths until my heartbeat returned to normal.
Final Score?
Lefty and Righty: 19 Metal heads: 0.5.
The freak-out counted; I would never live it down.