Origins 02, Separation of Privilege
~ mjbanks
The mother sets the child on the ground so they can approach cautiously the door, each close to the edge and looking for security, around the frame to look for danger, and then both begin blending into the crowd. As troops begin filling the area they split ways, the child sidles against another family and she begins running. In the commotion, her distraction draws open fire into the crowd with disregard, the child approaches the soldiers as she draws fire, eventually too close one of the soldiers shoves the boy to the ground, but not before stealing his pistol secretly. The child begins shooting them quite fatally, one shot each and second shots for surety between dispersal warning shots into meddlesome bystanders. With the security team dead, he straps one rifle and carries two, running by the standard as quick his shoes and almost to defilade receives a laser shot in his leg, giving her a rifle he examines the wound, his left leg bleeds a mercury streak.
In urgency she asks, “How bad?”
“It’ll heal!” he shouts over the lasers hitting their barricade with thumping sounds.
He stomps his right foot to stand, turn, and hunker over the crate, immediately opening fire. She joins him, a pleasant laughter as they fire at new security, but as she fires at them, he fires at the lab to destroy all. His rifle not firing repeating burst, but a solid cutting incendiary beam soon the target of the new security forces. His rifle overheats to make an error tone and a cooling sound as he switches to the second, a few shots at them to thin their numbers and resumes laser cutting, a well-regulated militia surrounds them again. They concentrate their assault on the boy who draws his fire from the lab to them, a beam cutting broadly, but the retargeting laser beam is conspicuous, drawing their ire quickly and to his disadvantage. They stop him from cutting thru them with the turning ray, as he shelters behind his barricade she rises in time to notice a mortar rifle. As the grenade launches she switches to beam-laser and destroys it only inches from the barrel, in the middle of their militancy.
Lasers silent as wounded groan and fade, molten edges of destruction and ashes surround the blast area, any innocent are gone and only a few clever looters remain, all too eager to leave quickly during the recession of violence, she looks down-on the boy who is breathing and blinking, but wounded. She sees a vendor cart, takes its fuel tank, dragging it, and kicks it into the lab.
“This will have to do the old fashioned way,” says she, and leaning on a crate fires scattered burst laser at the tank, ducking from the blast.
“Damnedest,” says he to her. “I don’t think there is another chapter for me…”
“Nonsense, you will see so much more,” she said. The sound of ache matched the sorrow of her eyes.
“Come to me,” he groans, “hurry there will be others soon,” as his hand waves to her. “When you found me I was dying and you gave me life, now you are leaving as I die.”
“Rise and we will leave,” she urges.
“You have been mother on these missions in the years, now and forever you will have always been, and that loving memory I will keep. Go, they are coming,” were his final words.
She checks if he is sleeping, but finding him taken to the eternal she arises and starts running toward the surface gate. The two automated security turrets she disarms by rifle blasts while running without pause, to the surface dusty world where she initiates her distress-beacon. A calculated soldier from the transport-landing zone attempts to stop her without success.
In the command center, the sentries tell the base commander that the beacon has initiated at the surfacing tunnel. It makes her easily targeted and surface patrols the commander sends to her location.
“This is Commander Sandborn, there is a level one gamma beacon near tunnel one entry, find the carrier and arrest, target is female and wiped out the security skeleton crew.” His tone is stern and now silent, a call and ID interrupt the surveillance video of the damaged area for First Lieutenant Ryiauk V. L. Kio’ronlin, call sign, RYK.
“Commander, did you say a woman?” he asked.
Smug, “I did,” in reply.
Quickly follows, “Every newbie?”
Met with, “Every, damn, one,” clears his throat, “order your men to shoot her legs, drag her here if necessary, there was a medical raid, she’s one of those damned Simulants.”
“Yes, sir!” he says and closes the vid-call, driving over the terrain, approaching the old town close enough to see it without the vehicle’s screen digital magnifier.
A ship somewhat bigger than a shuttle breaks geosynch orbit and approaches the planet, passing an automated cargo courier machine and leaving a natural few other resting vessels.
As her hunter arrives with two others from the land rover, she sees him arrive from-over the rooftops, stopping at her building. The sand blows with the wind and fades the daylight, a morbid pale sun thru the restless clouds, dust gathering on her clothes and the scarf protecting her breaths. She watches the soldiers enter her building, she counts to ten and leaves them by leaping from one building to the next, twice until finding a blockade from the annoyance of erosive wind with any luck able to see them exit. Quick in the door to secure combatants, none and to the stairs they run with heavy boots, they realize her relocation and pursue, again she jumps to another building, this time firing a shot at their vehicle. They exit and meet the damage with disappointment, and look to their watches, seeing the beacon has shifted now again.
Ryk’s subordinate Narran, “This is cat and mouse, and we need to strike and sweep.”
“I’ll take the stairs,” he says to them both, looking at the first to say, “target’s run out of building, you cross thru and stop her if she climbs down,” to the second, “You go with him, punch a hole in the wall and go to the other building roof if she doubles back up top,” pointing over, then up. “Let’s go,” he orders as they follow him into the building.
She fires down on them as they enter the building, enough that they see the dust in front of the doorway and look to each other.
“Who cares? Go!” Rick orders.
Boots and a small blast from a special-shot rifle cartridge that sings right before detonation, not enough to hear as a projectile, the munition lodges to the wall, microscopic integrity becomes fragile, the soldier bursts thru it. His head down the wall shatters and bursts, he rolls on the next room’s floor to his feet still running, the boot steps matched by Ryk’s ascending the three flights of stairs with both eyes in vigilance.
Knowing she close nears capture looks for her best option of escaping. Seeing, over the ledge, the soldier on the ground floor, she fires at the window and damages his rifle in attempting to damage him. He watches the barrel heat from the laser-shot and then cool quickly, cracking as it does he uses his gloved hand and removes it, it’s now a scattergun, but figuratively named and literally acting as a shower-guns of toxic and incendiary radiation. The shuttle arrives and opens a door, a fighter ship in disguise, a triplicate targeting rifles unit unhinges and charges to fire, she disables the distress-beacon. On the ground floor the soldier moves to a window on the next wall to aim at the approaching vessel, tossing decrepit furniture aside the first window blasts apart, his burst-rifle doesn’t make an ineffective shot as the vessel blasts his window.
Rick hears the blast and moves to the window, seeing the armed ship he runs to the far side of the building to modify his rifle. He puts it on his knees and unfolds the butt, aligning the power source for long range use and turning one switch from ‘Combat Setting’ to ‘Hyper Mode’ setting, but not to ‘Destruct’. Only to run to the window and slide to the wall on his knees, the length of the gun rests on the top of his shoulder as he fires thru glass, missing the vessel in the air. The ship diverts from landing after firing a shot right at him, without landing a door opens and drops a passenger, allowing the ship to wait from safer distance and scan for targets within the walls.
Ryk activates comm and shouts, “Narran! Narran, do you copy!?”
Narran is mostly vaporized, but his partner Salim replies, “Ryk, what the fuck?”
“Get to center building, rifle to hyper, they've got a warbird, fuckin drop that thing!” Rick shouts.
Salim replies, “Copy! Where are backup?”
A rolling vehicle in the desert trailing a cloud of dust into the clouded air replies, “We’re two minutes out, sir, dig in till we get there and radio is loud and clear.”
The woman and the new arrival, a man with her same complexion, run across the building and enter the next rooftop.
“Well that’s a relief,” Ryk says to himself, then radios again, “And that’s how you come in, loud and clear, as soon as you have a shot, drop the fucking gunship, over.”
Inbound replies, “Copy that, extreme prejudice, en route.”
Narran fires at them and her newly arrived ally drops behind the wall, looks around the edge of a doorway from the floor, and shots him in the head.
“Are you damaged?” he asks.
“I’ll need repairs, cover the door,” she replies.
“We have their comms,” the pilot from the ship says over their private link.
[Overheard] “Narran, tell me when you have the shot,” says Ryk.
The woman thief and the soldierly man of pale complexions pause to hear more. Narran slowly regains consciousness, his helmet cracked falls from him as he begins to move.
Narran says, “Second floor,” in a gravel voice.
The woman enters the doorway and shoots him before the sentence finishes, this time without helmet it is fatal.
“Pilot, energy signatures?” she asks.
“Only the one, two buildings a little below you, heading your way fast, we’re sending to your visors.”
They see a vague view of where Rick is hiding compared to their location in comparison to the ground and the outlined structures.
“Narran? Narran! Narran bleep blur!” Ryk curses.
“Meet us in the middle, pilot,” she says.
“We’re clear for now,” he says.
“Are you functioning?” she says.
“Some rifle burns, nothing a little polish won’t fix.”
“I could go for that.”
Ryk breaks one wall to enter the floor with slow caution, looking for them over his rifle, but his position on radar slow and distant in the wrong building. The dust in the air, a small window of the rooftop door provides dim light. Their stare calm silence until their first blink, where they form a passion in the roof stairwell like wild lusting beasts, quick and over when the red hazy dots light the edge of the radar, getting their collars straight they notice the cavalry radar dots close enough to be below them, so they leave for the roof.
Thru the window Ryk sees the ship approach and runs to the center of the buildings, breaking thru the old walls without blasting, firing the field cannon at the ceiling, the ship cannot land as a laser pierces the roof. Her ally gives suppression fire, he points down and she reenters the building, he shoots at Ryk and after the second laser the man jumps into the roof to hunt Ryk.
“New locals entering the building,” says the pilot over the radio.
She sees her counterpart and Ryk about to come into sight of him, making effort to survive.
She shouts, “It’s time we’re done here,” which draws attention of Ryk who shoots at her, but giving Simon time to put his gun to Ryk’s head.
“SIMON, NO!” she furiously shouts.
“You never learn! Nothing makes you need to die here!” he says.
“We HAVE, to GO!” she beckons.
Simon lowers his pistol with an excessively long barrel and shoots him in the leg, and while falling, in the other leg, and runs for the stairs as she watches the room, to the roof where she watches from the destroyed door as the ship comes close. The doors open as it hovers enough to open doors showing armed escorts await, firing at the police behind them, lifting and closing, taking a path with the building between them and the land-patrol vehicle.
The sand blows, the winds carry, the ground rests acrid and barren until the next calm of rains that only come under planetary nightfall by which wait for lengthy days to end. The police vehicle radar on the ground sees the weaponized shuttle move. Before the tank can maneuver around the building, the ship has already turned hard right, cutting into the storm, shifting energy signature, and hiding its weapons for travel.
/hny! (¡fna!)/