Crocmon
Pop-punk n' space magic. Not always in that order.
What will follow here is something I've done once or twice before. Since this community is notably more awsm, it might get read somewhat. Now, I'm not claiming to be a Bradbury or Heinlein, but what I'm about to post is some nifty Sci-Fi stuff. It gets nasty sometimes, so yea. Don't read if you're queasy. This opening post will have the Prelude AND Chapter One. Further chapters will happen in further posts, etc-etc. Feel free to post though inbetween them. =U
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The years had passed since the boy was young, and contact with his father was full and lively. Until one day, the contact ceased without warning or precedent. The family that Smith left behind didn't know at first, because they were moving to a new planet due to a new opportunity Ethan was invited to take. The man in uniform had come to Ethan's door the summer before he started high school on the colony he had just began to call home. The man delivered the news that hit Ethan like a ten-ton hammer. The budding young man had gone into his room, and sat for approximately three days. The mother had wept, but the boy didn't. He couldn't. The pain was too much to think about. The father he had grown to need, to love, to depend on for stability had been taken away violently, and at such a crucial point in his life. The boy began to zealously dive into this new school, becoming a household name for all who attended it. He learned his trade past just twisting wrenches and fixing things, and he was finding himself being asked to take roles he never thought possible. Roles nobody thought were possible. He turned a childhood hobby into the main focus of his life, using his work and his machines to fill in a gap he had in his heart. There was a single thing he could do now: crying was removed from his repertoire of emotional responses, and when someone asked what he thought of his life, he had only one response left that he could possibly muster.
Ethan Smith laughed.
However, now, he laughed at a new problem. Not a problem of explaining how he thought of himself, but a problem of a rival student he had earned when he came here and put his face to the grindstone to maintain.
He had never before, in his life at the Domus Colonial High School, seen such rabid incompetence. He had stood up in the middle of his class, and despite what the 'ace' of the class had said about the mathematical equation of the way a fusion reactor worked had almost – within moments of it being written on the board – given a value that could cause the reactor itself to go critical in such a way that would be like the joke of dividing by zero the second you turned on a small light bulb attached to the reactor. For a few moments, the top notch student-teacher had to collect himself with the rest of the class before he could think of something witty to say to hide his shock at creating such a basic error.
"Well, what is the proper equation then, Mr. Smith?" The student, Eli Wallace sarcastically asked. "The chances of that value being used in a real-world example are like being struck by lightning… twice… in a submarine." The students in the class chuckled at the obvious mockery, although only four of the whole class fully grasped why he was being mocked and they held their mouths shut, listening intently to Ethan.
Ethan silently erased the last thirty minutes of work written on the holographic board and rewrote the equation in less than five minutes while he spoke about why Eli was wrong. He spoke with indifference, the kind used when stating facts without any kind of condescending tone in doing so.
He began to break down the equation on the most basic of levels, feeling nothing but sheer explanatory emotions. He stressed things that were wrong, and only raised his voice as his breath failed him out of how much Ethan had been speaking. The boy had, for the first time anyone could remember, talked Eli Wallace down.
The actual teacher, Mr. Shepherd, burst out laughing as soon as Ethan put the stylus down; he knew Eli's mistake but had been convinced by the class to stand down until one of them had found an error in Eli's teaching. He chose not to think about the matter since his students wanted to be taught at the hands of an incompetent fool with charisma and a desire for attention, so he just stifled laughter. Said fool could regurgitate whatever was told to him with great enthusiasm as if he understood it thoroughly, given Ethan wasn't there. For a reason nobody could have guessed, Eli rarely was as loud when Ethan walked into the room. But now, it was horribly apparent.
"But I was…" Eli stuttered. Nobody had ever told him so graciously that he was flat-out wrong and were correct in doing so.
"You were going to have these students leave the class with errors in their minds as facts." He put the yardstick down, "You assumed the role of the teacher today: your duty is to use your values and understanding to teach them the rational and the true, not false and outdated engineering equations. And while you did not exactly fail at doing this job because I stood up and pointed out that you were wrong, you really can't say you accomplished that goal since you based an entire lesson off a falsity." Ethan pointed to the desk Eli had originally sat down in, "Now please allow Mr. Shepherd to resume his lect-"
The bell rang, signaling the end of another school-day.
"Allow him to resume this lecture next class." Ethan finished without any emotion other than a polite request.
The students stood up, and noisily left the room. Ethan stood with Eli and Mr. Shepherd.
"Ethan, I'll have you tarred and feathered for that." Eli uttered in a tone of anger with mild sarcasm. One could draw that he wouldn't exactly tar-and-feather Ethan, but he'd try something.
"For standing up and calmly showing you an error?" Ethan replied bluntly.
"For precisely that," Eli said.
"Now, kids, we don't need to fight every time we meet a disagreement." Mr. Shepherd laughed as he spoke. Eli had an animosity towards Ethan for an unnamed reason since they met in this class.
"He's right, Eli. We both have our jobs for the day." Ethan said. Ethan was a school engineer, and Eli was a theoretical physicist. They both had separate jobs they had taken in their freshman and sophomore years, respectively.
At the Domus Colonial High School, everyone had some job or another in relation to the major they chose when they enrolled. Eli had come from a respectable family that had major shares in the colony while Ethan had come from a newly-widowed mother with almost no money to his name that he hadn't earned through his blood, sweat, and tears. He was one of the school's finest engineers – despite barely having above-average grades. His work had been keeping the school and its engineers at the top of the line in their field for years. Eli was a high-grade theoretical physicist, but he hadn't really achieved much in his time at the school.
Ethan walked out the door, and continued to his office. While walking, he took in the sights of his school. Domus Colonial High was known throughout the Inner Colonies as a social experiment. It was testing a theory that, given the opportunity, a person of any age could excel in their chosen careers. The entire school was run like a town, where the students were in charge of any and all institutions. While it at first sounds like a childish dream, in practice the school had all but childish qualities. From apartments to legal firms, the town's economy was completely ran by students and interfaced directly to the stellar economy, with trade from the students to large players in the economic games becoming a frequent occurrence. While the school had buildings that were run by faculty and staff, these were only places such as lecture halls, classrooms, and detention buildings. Classes operated as they would in most colleges: a teacher lectured on concepts particular to their study, and students took notes as they needed. The real learning, boasted many supporters of the school, was learned on an individual basis by the working students.
As Ethan got to his office, he calmly punched in the access code and took a deep breath. The office was his home-away-from-home. There would be days when the principal would find him sprawled out across the desk, sleeping with a mug of coffee tipped over on the floor and other days where the air would be thick with smoke as he built a new tool or worked on his armor. Today, however, he found someone new admiring his work. Ethan grabbed a handgun-shaped tool, the photon-cutter, and aimed it at the stranger's head. After a flick of the power switch, three red laser-sights appeared and stretched through the air from the tool to the bun of hair.
"Who are you and what are you doing in my office?" He asked, holding his arm steady. The person turned around, and he was surprised to realize this new person was feminine, and genuinely intrigued by his work.
"Are you this hostile to all your visitors?" She said, smiling. "My name is Rinoa Walter. I've heard all sorts about you, and was curious to meet you." The voice she spoke with was full of sarcasm as she continued: "My ex-, Eli, says all sorts of great things about you."
Ethan knew the name she claimed was hers. He thought for a second on why, and then she twirled a small golden keychain around her fingers. Time seemed to slow as he tried to discern what was on the end of it asides from her house and office keys. Attached to the small gold loop was a block with 'RW' carved into the sides. The block was a bluish green, a unique metal compound that she had developed after reading Atlas Shrugged and learning of the strength of Rearden Metal. She was the famous Rinoa Walter: the top-notch metallurgist at Domus Colony. She had almost instantly climbed to the top of her field, and then began to quiet down as far as her unwanted publicity. Rumor had it that her successor and most recent ex-boyfriend took the spotlight by swapping out the metal compounds they had both presented at the mid-term exams of last year; her sophomore year. After that rumor ran its course, he changed majors and became a theoretical physicist.
"Well, I haven't heard too much about you, other than that disaster at mid-term last year, Miss Walter." He said evenly.
"You're quite different. Most people would have died if I came to see them personally."
"I couldn't see why, Miss Walter." He looked her over again. She was a mildly frail depiction of beauty. She had long hair that passed her shoulders, and blue eyes with the glance of a temptress. Her dress-casual clothing of slacks and a button up suggested a form of nobility, and her presence in Ethan's lab was not deserved. No, not because she didn't fit the room, but because the room didn't fit her. He looked at her eyes again, and politely held her glance with a smile.
"But, we're skating around the purpose of this conversation." She broke the glance as she looked to his suit of power-armor in a stasis pod. Ethan was too polite for someone known to be so horribly blunt, she thought. "My office has a mining laser that has recently broken down. I came to you because you've got the best track-record in the engineering department as far as getting it done and done quickly." She stated, hiding the fact that she had seen him work in various sections of the school and was curious if he held himself like that constantly.
"That I do, Miss Walter."
"Please, don't call me 'Miss Walter' like I'm some kind of old fart of an aristocrat."
"Why is that?"
"I don't like it. Call me Rinoa, if you please."
"Yes, Rinoa."
They held each other's stares for a few minutes before Rinoa realized she hadn't moved. She nervously broke away and moved to leave. She hoped he wouldn't, but she wanted him to tell her to wait.
"Do you want me at your office or are you bringing it here?" He said, breaking the silence.
"Be at my office, tomorrow during your free hour. I'm off the whole day."
He arrived during his lunch hour, half-past ten. She was in front of a tripod-mounted mining laser, tinkering with it. She unscrewed one bolt, and a small processor fell out. He stepped through the doorway wearing his overalls, an oil-stained and faded-denim pair of overalls. He watched her toil, and then he pushed her aside. She watched him investigate, wishing she had done something to have him stay.
"The processor is the only problem," He stated, pointing at the processor on the floor. He then took his right hand and flicked a small portion of exposed machinery. The tripod collapsed, and the laser on top of it fell apart. "Now it's worth calling in an expert," Ethan laughed, almost maniacally as he looked at her face. She had an expression of bewilderment.
"Well, can you fix it?" She asked, her face regaining a look of self-control.
"It will take a few hours, you know." Ethan said. His eyes belied all the laughter he wanted to make.
"Well then, get to work. Just tell me how much I'll need to pay you."
Ethan spent the hours toiling away, making the hunk of scrap metal into a machine worth using. He took each separate piece, then combined them either with a twist or a slap and then combined that piece into the central motor of the laser. He worked with almost computerized precision, as if each motion of his arms had been calculated and refined then simplified to use only the exact amount of force needed to execute it, and then performed in such a manner that the loss of force was easily made up for in the desired result. Every twist of his wrench was the same kind of motion a sculptor makes when he carves the grooves on a fingertip: if there was any force used, it was only the force used in processing the thought. The rest fell into place. Between motions, the young engineer seemed to have the energy to hold a conversation. It was as if the laser, when finished, would not run off the microfusion cell in it but instead would run off his energy, like he had an outlet on his back.
"So, what do you think of the original cell?" Rinoa asked.
"Do you want my honest opinion, Ms. Walter?" The overall-clad engineer replied.
"Yes, Ethan, if you please." She scribbled in a few figures based on the year's mining yield.
"Personally, I think it's awful. The word 'garbage' comes to mind quite a bit. I just now finished reassembling it, seeing as how the mining laser's energy consumption was disastrous. Had it been shown how much it used before I got to it, there would have been outrage. I'm curious as to what terrible mathematics created it," Ethan continued, pointing at various portions of the cell's parts as he described how the cell was a disaster in this day and age. "In the days when the fusion reactor was first being researched, this would have been considered a gold-mine. Now, it's considered about as useful and efficient as a fossil-fuel consuming combustion-engine running a suit of power armor." He propped the tripod into the air, and activated the laser.
"Any particular reason you activated it?" Rinoa asked sharply.
"I need a test subject for the laser's potential." He replied bluntly and as if he were preparing to display a beloved class project.
"Follow me. Mount it on him," She motioned to a small gravity-field emitter drone, "and let's go." She walked out the door, letting her right arm hold it open as she hooked around the doorway. Ethan grabbed the drone, and aimed it up at the laser. The mining tool lifted into the air, and Ethan motioned to the drone for it to follow. Moving with various beeps and clicks, it followed the pair to the mines in the back of the school.
The mines of Domus were considered a mother-load not only due to large quantities of gold, but of every other metal safe to be mined and a few that weren't. The minerals and ores found in the planet's crust were enormous considering its Earth-like biosphere and minor size. Rather than buy it from the company that discovered it, the ECNF moved to build a shipyard there. When it was announced that the colony was founded by the small expedition company, the ECNF and Brotherhood of Shadows moved their fleets to protect it, relocating their shipyard to the gravity well of a nearby gas giant. They did the only thing they could do now that the economy had put a peg in the proverbial map over Domus: protect it not as alms or some kind of attempt at swaying the company to selling, but as the duty of the government: the protection of industry. The colony was failing quickly, however, due to a schism in the corporation's board of directors. The split was over how the mining colony should look. The company's founder stood up after a long leave of absence and dissolved the council. He called upon an army of architects, city planners, and the Brotherhood of Shadows to not figure out what to do with it, but to start it. The Brotherhood of Shadows worked under a contract to explore the planet with mining probes and to clear out a suitable plot of land to house the beginning of the colony. After the architects and planners had designed it, a small section of scaffolding that was planned to be a shack had collapsed on a worker with a photon cutter. The scaffolding caused no harm, but his startled pull of the trigger caused a land-slide that exposed a large fortune in minerals. The school was built around that after the curriculum was redrawn to include mining.
After arriving there, the drone released the laser, and it quietly floated to the ground. The drone clicked and beeped twice, then hovered away. Rinoa pointed at the shining copper, and Ethan nodded. He aimed it, and discharged a red laser into the copper.
The laser discharged in spasms, making Rinoa believe it was malfunctioning. It took her a few minutes to realize, however, that the laser was not malfunctioning unless it was meant to cut shapes out of the rock rather than the copper. Each spasm of laser beam snatched a clump of copper from the cliff-face, and deposited it on the ground below. The sediment and worthless sand was left there, sitting as if that was what the copper hid. The cliff seemed to have been stripped naked.
Rinoa watched Ethan direct the mining laser with a precision she had only seen in the paintings of her grandfathers using pickaxes. She was wondering how anyone who hadn't been trained in the craft since birth could mine with such precision. She wondered "Why?" and only after he stopped had she realized she spoke aloud.
"Because I set it to have a thin margin of purity by correcting a few lax subroutines, which decreased the range of the laser's cutting capacity to the point where the purity will be on such a small rate, that only a few molecules in each clump won't be copper." Ethan spoke calmly as he deactivated the laser and called for the drone.
She thought about his words. Not all of them, just the phrase 'Because I set it to,' and what that meant. He spoke with no inflection, no hidden emotion or passion; he displayed his pride so openly that assuming he was trying to hide it was an insult. He stood on the word 'I' as he spoke, stressing it not in sarcasm or arrogance, but merely stating the fact that he did it and that he was proud of it. Her thoughts went wild with what this boy represented. He seemed to naturally move through the air and almost seemed to own the area he was in. Almost as if the area fitted him too well, and that the very air in it was grooved for his ranges of motion in specific.
"Rinoa?" He asked calmly.
She came to, and motioned the drone to grab the laser. "Yes, Ethan, how much do I owe you?" She asked quietly as she started to walk to her office. He followed, staying in step.
"Roughly twenty-seven."
"Dollars?"
"Yes."
"Nothing more? That's a cheap price compared to the amount of money you just earned me."
"As I expected."
"Well, what's up? No way would anyone give me this kind of efficiency in my mining laser without some kind of higher price in mind."
"Twenty-seven is all I need to take you out on a nice date."
"Really?"
"Yes. Saturday?"
"Make it Friday night. My Saturday's booked."
"Fine then."
"Oh, and my favorite place is right on the top of that cliff we were mining at." She opened the door to her office, motioned the drone inside and then followed it in. Ethan waited outside, and after a few minutes Rinoa exited with a small wad of money equaling thirty dollars.
"Why's that?" Ethan took the money she handed him.
"We've both worked there."
Ethan grinned, and handed back to Rinoa three dollars.
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Prelude
The night air was thick with moisture, making Sergeant Major Smith sweat inside his armor. The sweat was partially introduced due to the humidity, and partly introduced to the current state of affairs on his location. He was on the planet Ragnarok, a hellish world in which the deserts rolled for miles and the few traces of water were so laden with salt that they were undrinkable.
There was also the blood. Infected or otherwise, the blood contaminated the waters too.
Smith poked his head around the corner of the pod he was dropped in, and quickly jumped back into the pod to dodge a sniper round. He took his assault rifle, and kissed it; it was going to save his life today. The Plague forces were desperately fighting on this planet, for reasons unknown to him. He knew why, but it never really was a big worry of his. The Plague, monsters composed of human corpses, was desperately fighting to find an artifact of a lost civilization called the 'Ragnarok Jewel' or something like that. It was supposed to hyper-evolve whatever touched it, and the leader of the Plague wanted to use it on his monstrous minions and turn them into even more appalling bad-asses. And according to the Brotherhood of Shadows operative that made the speech, if the ECNF and the Brotherhood performed this joint-operation successfully, then the Plague would be no more.
Smith looked over to the other pods, which were manned in a similar fashion to his: a soldier at each, ready to fire. He put hand motions out, signaling to them that they needed to take out the sniper. He uttered a thought, and the last known location of the sniper was marked on everyone's Heads-Up-Display that was provided by their helmets. He was the only one who had been surgically outfitted to make use of the latest trend of using neural-implants. He scratched at the metal on the back of his skull, and made the 'go now' hand gesture.
Take a peek around the corner, accompanied by a gunshot.
Its attention's drawn.
All hands fire on that location, good.
"Grenade!" A soldier shouted. The spherical object flew in an arc, then warped into its target area and stuck to something that looked like the top of a crashed tank. The metal seemed to transform as the Copperhead engulfed in it stood, revealing it had been using the smart-linked scope with its abnormal helmet and encasing itself in the remnants of the heavy-armored Emperor tank. The grenade beeped, and the Plague foot-soldier wearing the copper-colored metal helmet (that gave it its name) threw its arms into the air and screamed as it exploded.
There were shouts of joy that were loud and seemed to echo over the wastes. The world they were standing on seemed to be nothing but mineral-rich sands. And even then, it just seemed to be that. It probably was as dirt poor as Earth had become after being mined dry, hit with nuclear war, and then rebuilt upon with the best of intentions.
Intentions these Plague were destroying.
Smith felt the ground shake, and he shouted to his squad to stay calm. They closed in on him, putting their backs to one another. Their formation was similar to the kind elephants made around their young in event of a lion attack. Except the tusks the marines wore now fired .556 bullets.
The quaking earth below them warped the sands, causing an arena of sorts to form. It was like they were on a platform of sand, and the platform was sinking while they were perfectly safe. It didn't' make much sense, but that wouldn't stop them from being ready for anything. The sands parted, and Smith held his hands out to calm the squad.
As the monster emerged from the sands, it became horribly apparent that they'd need the calming.
The largest documented Banshee had erupted from the sands, and its presence was made clear with a single bellowing of its vocal chords.
The gigantic beetle-like creature snarled in Smith's face, and he knew it was the one. This was the same one he encountered a year ago. On Vista, he had fought it. It was a vicious one that relied upon scare tactics and guerilla attacks to terrorize specific targets. This particular Banshee had tasted Smith's blood before.
"Call for assistance. I'll hold it off." He shouted.
"But, sir…!" A private replied.
"We'd need a commando to kill this thing. And I'm the closest we've got. Hold your ground, and cover your ears."
Smith held his hands in front of him, and materialized a weapon he researched and built with his son over the course of many years. The son first just poked at it with a wrench, but as he got older, the boy began to ask about the mathematics behind it. He asked what the lab-techs were writing on the walls. And the boy began filling in the gaps, eventually learning how important math was and falling in love with it.
This weapon was unique. It was a magnetically accelerated assault rifle – the first one made. Only the ECNF's fancy Bellator project would be getting them mass-produced due to cost, but Smith's part in proposing the idea and also his help in creating it and testing it gave him a model he was free to modify.
And modify he did. This weapon was extremely unique. The bullets were made to never come in contact with the barrel, using extremely light shielding the bullets never came in contact with the interior of the weapon. It used an experimental material to instantly wipe the weapon of residue, and with this material the residue was put back into the casing. Ammo automatically recycled. Clips were loaded with thirty shots, but based on how one fired a clip could last an entire war. The moment it overheated, however, the magazine would auto-eject and melt to the ground. The magazines would melt due to the small computer arrays inside it that calculated target distance and size of the shielding. On the slightest sign of overuse or extensive stress, the magazine could melt. The gun ejected it to prevent damage. This made the perfect assault rifle for any soldier.
Smith was that 'any' soldier. And his weapon made him a legend, as it had saved his men multiple times.
As he charged the Banshee with a spray of the rifle and a pain of its kickback, he felt his mind wash away the image in front of him, and he went back to the day he was told his help was needed on Vista. It was the last time he'd seen his son. Five years ago.
"Dad, what's that?" The boy asked, his index finger pointing at the gun Smith packed and his face holding a curious look.
"It's a tool." Smith replied curtly. His armor was on, his boots were laced, and his face was grim. He packed more into his red box. This box would break the items inside it apart and allow him to access them all later from a device called a nanopack. It allowed the guns to materialize instantly, and for Smith to carry all he could possibly need.
"Is it a hunting tool?"
"No."
"Then a power-tool."
"Kind of."
"What's it going to fix?"
"Bad guys."
"Like the Plague?"
"Yes."
"So, when are you coming home?"
"When all of the Plague and other bad guys are fixed."
"You mean dead?"
"You shouldn't be worrying about dead or not. Just when they're not a problem."
"But if they don't die, you will."
"Don't worry. I'm not dying."
"Jim's dad died last week. The man in uniform came to his house and all that. Jim hasn't talked for days. His mom cried as to how now he'll die a second time, since Jim's dad's body wasn't recovered."
"You shouldn't think about stuff like that."
"It's hard not to."
"I understand. Look at your old man," Smith turned his son to him, and knelt to his level, "I am what the boogeyman checks his closet for. Remember? You called me that."
"Yea, but what do you check your closet for?" The boy asked, his face one of worry. The curiosity and naivety most children should have possessed was long since lost when the entire family – mother, son, and Smith himself – had to flee their previous home from the Plague. Smith's son was introduced to death long before he should have. He shouldn't have been told why they were leaving. Smith couldn't bear lying to him, however.
"I check my closet for what all men should fear." Smith looked down and to his right. He closed his eyes, preparing to answer the next question.
"What's that?"
"The man in uniform coming to our door."
Smith's mind snapped into place, and the Banshee stomped in front of him. He ran up its foot, and climbed its leg. He found his way onto its back, and took his knife to stab into its hide. The knife penetrated, and he hit the monster's flesh. Which part, he didn't care to find out. He was thrown off by a buck from the Banshee, and it screamed at him. He covered his ears, his gloves expanding and forming around them and filling the gap almost as if they were listening to his inner scream of fear.
The Banshee's screech proved non-fatal, and Smith stood up. He fired a clip into its right eye, the magazine emptying instantly as the bullets glided through the air just below the speed of light. The recoil from the weapon was minimal, but the kick was tearing Smith's shoulder apart. He remembered that sentence fragment he had told his son. Asides from goodbyes and "come-back soon" shouts, it was the last thing he said to the boy. His legacy, his pride, all that he had put into the world summed up by one person.
The Banshee smacked him away in one of its pained spasms.
He bounced off the dirt, and looked up as his armor began to compensate for the force of that fall: it had fractured most of his ribs and dislocated his elbow – the armor fixed this with a hiss of steam all the way down his body and a pop at his elbow. A Shuttle was overhead. The Bellator squadron was dropping a single soldier into this. If it weren't the Bellator squadron, the notion of a single man to reinforce Smith would have pissed him off. The soldier slammed into the dirt, the powered armor providing a memorable silhouette in Smith's mind. Smith made a wave towards it, and it raised a rifle much like his own, except the bullets were not as extensively modified as his.
Smith charged the Banshee, and met the Bellator half way. He and this soldier made an identical spray of fire into the creature's mouth, and it clamped its mouth shut in response. Its right eye bleeding profusely and its left widening in rage, the monster charged. It hit Smith, who was on its forehead. After it stopped, it threw him in the air with an upward thrash of its skull. He dismissed his rifle, and drew his knife from his shoulder. He held the knife over his head, and landed on the creature's neck. His sternum absorbed the force of the impact, and he was barely breathing. He fell down its side, dragging the knife down. When he landed, he felt the force of falling twelve feet to the ground hit his armor and go straight into his body. His stomach felt twisted.
He essentially slit the throat of the beast, and jumped off a diving board into concrete at the same time.
The Bellator aimed a long and powerful rifle, known as the Bellator Gauss Rifle. The personnel-grade railgun was essentially the BFG for any soldier on the field creating devastation anywhere it was aimed. Smith left his knife in the wound as he spun around to run away. The Banshee screeched at Smith, and took the slug of depleted uranium from the Bellator's weapon to the side of its head. The beast screamed, and burrowed violently into the ground as it fled.
Smith's vision began to blur, as the adrenaline of the fight ran its course and he felt the injuries take its toll. He had fractured the better part of twenty-six bones, broke four, and dislocated one elbow. His internal organs had been battered to Hell, and he suffered a concussion.
The Bellator rushed to his aid, taking a first-aid kit and producing a scanner. He checked the man's wounds, and when the holographic image of Smith's body became completely red with injury reports Smith groaned.
"Are you gonna make it, tough guy?" The Bellator said through a tin-can of a speaker.
"I think you should be telling me, Mr. Badass." Smith coughed, tasting blood for the fiftieth time.
"From the looks of it, I want to say you will. But…"
"So I'm screwed?"
"The last screech stopped just short of bursting your arteries. Your body is practically done."
Smith made it to the ship he was stationed on, the ECNF Raptor, and the doctors gave him a similar response.
"We can't treat wounds this close to death, sir." The doctor muttered, "Every organ in your body was severely damaged and practically flash-cloned before this. You hit the point where the organs in you are dying faster than they can be cloned. Even with stem cells, we can't fix this."
"So, this is the time I actually say good night?" Smith felt a strange sense of peace wash over him. Not a peace of death, but the peace one encountered when coming into contact with his one fear: and then being shoved into a corner to watch it destroy him.
"I'm so sorry…"
"Don't be. Send a man in uniform to my family. Tell them I died by gunshot. Don't tell them I died because of how much punishment I've taken out in the field. I can't let my kid know how I was barely alive as it was. I'm his hero. Him knowing I was of a hollow, dying body in the first place would destroy all he thinks of me. I don't want that. I want him to remember me." Smith's voice quavered. It would be the first time in a very, very long while that he had cried.
Smith inhaled, closing his eyes. The boy he loved with his whole heart and raised as best he could called him 'what the boogeyman checks his closet for' and his wife who loved him so much was the world to the both of them: father and son. He imagined having to tell the boy he was dead. Tears welled in his eyes. He exhaled, and his view dimmed to black. His final breathe consisted of one word, and an entire lifetime of emotions like sorrow and love.
"Ethan..."
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Chapter One
The years had passed since the boy was young, and contact with his father was full and lively. Until one day, the contact ceased without warning or precedent. The family that Smith left behind didn't know at first, because they were moving to a new planet due to a new opportunity Ethan was invited to take. The man in uniform had come to Ethan's door the summer before he started high school on the colony he had just began to call home. The man delivered the news that hit Ethan like a ten-ton hammer. The budding young man had gone into his room, and sat for approximately three days. The mother had wept, but the boy didn't. He couldn't. The pain was too much to think about. The father he had grown to need, to love, to depend on for stability had been taken away violently, and at such a crucial point in his life. The boy began to zealously dive into this new school, becoming a household name for all who attended it. He learned his trade past just twisting wrenches and fixing things, and he was finding himself being asked to take roles he never thought possible. Roles nobody thought were possible. He turned a childhood hobby into the main focus of his life, using his work and his machines to fill in a gap he had in his heart. There was a single thing he could do now: crying was removed from his repertoire of emotional responses, and when someone asked what he thought of his life, he had only one response left that he could possibly muster.
Ethan Smith laughed.
However, now, he laughed at a new problem. Not a problem of explaining how he thought of himself, but a problem of a rival student he had earned when he came here and put his face to the grindstone to maintain.
He had never before, in his life at the Domus Colonial High School, seen such rabid incompetence. He had stood up in the middle of his class, and despite what the 'ace' of the class had said about the mathematical equation of the way a fusion reactor worked had almost – within moments of it being written on the board – given a value that could cause the reactor itself to go critical in such a way that would be like the joke of dividing by zero the second you turned on a small light bulb attached to the reactor. For a few moments, the top notch student-teacher had to collect himself with the rest of the class before he could think of something witty to say to hide his shock at creating such a basic error.
"Well, what is the proper equation then, Mr. Smith?" The student, Eli Wallace sarcastically asked. "The chances of that value being used in a real-world example are like being struck by lightning… twice… in a submarine." The students in the class chuckled at the obvious mockery, although only four of the whole class fully grasped why he was being mocked and they held their mouths shut, listening intently to Ethan.
Ethan silently erased the last thirty minutes of work written on the holographic board and rewrote the equation in less than five minutes while he spoke about why Eli was wrong. He spoke with indifference, the kind used when stating facts without any kind of condescending tone in doing so.
He began to break down the equation on the most basic of levels, feeling nothing but sheer explanatory emotions. He stressed things that were wrong, and only raised his voice as his breath failed him out of how much Ethan had been speaking. The boy had, for the first time anyone could remember, talked Eli Wallace down.
The actual teacher, Mr. Shepherd, burst out laughing as soon as Ethan put the stylus down; he knew Eli's mistake but had been convinced by the class to stand down until one of them had found an error in Eli's teaching. He chose not to think about the matter since his students wanted to be taught at the hands of an incompetent fool with charisma and a desire for attention, so he just stifled laughter. Said fool could regurgitate whatever was told to him with great enthusiasm as if he understood it thoroughly, given Ethan wasn't there. For a reason nobody could have guessed, Eli rarely was as loud when Ethan walked into the room. But now, it was horribly apparent.
"But I was…" Eli stuttered. Nobody had ever told him so graciously that he was flat-out wrong and were correct in doing so.
"You were going to have these students leave the class with errors in their minds as facts." He put the yardstick down, "You assumed the role of the teacher today: your duty is to use your values and understanding to teach them the rational and the true, not false and outdated engineering equations. And while you did not exactly fail at doing this job because I stood up and pointed out that you were wrong, you really can't say you accomplished that goal since you based an entire lesson off a falsity." Ethan pointed to the desk Eli had originally sat down in, "Now please allow Mr. Shepherd to resume his lect-"
The bell rang, signaling the end of another school-day.
"Allow him to resume this lecture next class." Ethan finished without any emotion other than a polite request.
The students stood up, and noisily left the room. Ethan stood with Eli and Mr. Shepherd.
"Ethan, I'll have you tarred and feathered for that." Eli uttered in a tone of anger with mild sarcasm. One could draw that he wouldn't exactly tar-and-feather Ethan, but he'd try something.
"For standing up and calmly showing you an error?" Ethan replied bluntly.
"For precisely that," Eli said.
"Now, kids, we don't need to fight every time we meet a disagreement." Mr. Shepherd laughed as he spoke. Eli had an animosity towards Ethan for an unnamed reason since they met in this class.
"He's right, Eli. We both have our jobs for the day." Ethan said. Ethan was a school engineer, and Eli was a theoretical physicist. They both had separate jobs they had taken in their freshman and sophomore years, respectively.
At the Domus Colonial High School, everyone had some job or another in relation to the major they chose when they enrolled. Eli had come from a respectable family that had major shares in the colony while Ethan had come from a newly-widowed mother with almost no money to his name that he hadn't earned through his blood, sweat, and tears. He was one of the school's finest engineers – despite barely having above-average grades. His work had been keeping the school and its engineers at the top of the line in their field for years. Eli was a high-grade theoretical physicist, but he hadn't really achieved much in his time at the school.
Ethan walked out the door, and continued to his office. While walking, he took in the sights of his school. Domus Colonial High was known throughout the Inner Colonies as a social experiment. It was testing a theory that, given the opportunity, a person of any age could excel in their chosen careers. The entire school was run like a town, where the students were in charge of any and all institutions. While it at first sounds like a childish dream, in practice the school had all but childish qualities. From apartments to legal firms, the town's economy was completely ran by students and interfaced directly to the stellar economy, with trade from the students to large players in the economic games becoming a frequent occurrence. While the school had buildings that were run by faculty and staff, these were only places such as lecture halls, classrooms, and detention buildings. Classes operated as they would in most colleges: a teacher lectured on concepts particular to their study, and students took notes as they needed. The real learning, boasted many supporters of the school, was learned on an individual basis by the working students.
As Ethan got to his office, he calmly punched in the access code and took a deep breath. The office was his home-away-from-home. There would be days when the principal would find him sprawled out across the desk, sleeping with a mug of coffee tipped over on the floor and other days where the air would be thick with smoke as he built a new tool or worked on his armor. Today, however, he found someone new admiring his work. Ethan grabbed a handgun-shaped tool, the photon-cutter, and aimed it at the stranger's head. After a flick of the power switch, three red laser-sights appeared and stretched through the air from the tool to the bun of hair.
"Who are you and what are you doing in my office?" He asked, holding his arm steady. The person turned around, and he was surprised to realize this new person was feminine, and genuinely intrigued by his work.
"Are you this hostile to all your visitors?" She said, smiling. "My name is Rinoa Walter. I've heard all sorts about you, and was curious to meet you." The voice she spoke with was full of sarcasm as she continued: "My ex-, Eli, says all sorts of great things about you."
Ethan knew the name she claimed was hers. He thought for a second on why, and then she twirled a small golden keychain around her fingers. Time seemed to slow as he tried to discern what was on the end of it asides from her house and office keys. Attached to the small gold loop was a block with 'RW' carved into the sides. The block was a bluish green, a unique metal compound that she had developed after reading Atlas Shrugged and learning of the strength of Rearden Metal. She was the famous Rinoa Walter: the top-notch metallurgist at Domus Colony. She had almost instantly climbed to the top of her field, and then began to quiet down as far as her unwanted publicity. Rumor had it that her successor and most recent ex-boyfriend took the spotlight by swapping out the metal compounds they had both presented at the mid-term exams of last year; her sophomore year. After that rumor ran its course, he changed majors and became a theoretical physicist.
"Well, I haven't heard too much about you, other than that disaster at mid-term last year, Miss Walter." He said evenly.
"You're quite different. Most people would have died if I came to see them personally."
"I couldn't see why, Miss Walter." He looked her over again. She was a mildly frail depiction of beauty. She had long hair that passed her shoulders, and blue eyes with the glance of a temptress. Her dress-casual clothing of slacks and a button up suggested a form of nobility, and her presence in Ethan's lab was not deserved. No, not because she didn't fit the room, but because the room didn't fit her. He looked at her eyes again, and politely held her glance with a smile.
"But, we're skating around the purpose of this conversation." She broke the glance as she looked to his suit of power-armor in a stasis pod. Ethan was too polite for someone known to be so horribly blunt, she thought. "My office has a mining laser that has recently broken down. I came to you because you've got the best track-record in the engineering department as far as getting it done and done quickly." She stated, hiding the fact that she had seen him work in various sections of the school and was curious if he held himself like that constantly.
"That I do, Miss Walter."
"Please, don't call me 'Miss Walter' like I'm some kind of old fart of an aristocrat."
"Why is that?"
"I don't like it. Call me Rinoa, if you please."
"Yes, Rinoa."
They held each other's stares for a few minutes before Rinoa realized she hadn't moved. She nervously broke away and moved to leave. She hoped he wouldn't, but she wanted him to tell her to wait.
"Do you want me at your office or are you bringing it here?" He said, breaking the silence.
"Be at my office, tomorrow during your free hour. I'm off the whole day."
He arrived during his lunch hour, half-past ten. She was in front of a tripod-mounted mining laser, tinkering with it. She unscrewed one bolt, and a small processor fell out. He stepped through the doorway wearing his overalls, an oil-stained and faded-denim pair of overalls. He watched her toil, and then he pushed her aside. She watched him investigate, wishing she had done something to have him stay.
"The processor is the only problem," He stated, pointing at the processor on the floor. He then took his right hand and flicked a small portion of exposed machinery. The tripod collapsed, and the laser on top of it fell apart. "Now it's worth calling in an expert," Ethan laughed, almost maniacally as he looked at her face. She had an expression of bewilderment.
"Well, can you fix it?" She asked, her face regaining a look of self-control.
"It will take a few hours, you know." Ethan said. His eyes belied all the laughter he wanted to make.
"Well then, get to work. Just tell me how much I'll need to pay you."
Ethan spent the hours toiling away, making the hunk of scrap metal into a machine worth using. He took each separate piece, then combined them either with a twist or a slap and then combined that piece into the central motor of the laser. He worked with almost computerized precision, as if each motion of his arms had been calculated and refined then simplified to use only the exact amount of force needed to execute it, and then performed in such a manner that the loss of force was easily made up for in the desired result. Every twist of his wrench was the same kind of motion a sculptor makes when he carves the grooves on a fingertip: if there was any force used, it was only the force used in processing the thought. The rest fell into place. Between motions, the young engineer seemed to have the energy to hold a conversation. It was as if the laser, when finished, would not run off the microfusion cell in it but instead would run off his energy, like he had an outlet on his back.
"So, what do you think of the original cell?" Rinoa asked.
"Do you want my honest opinion, Ms. Walter?" The overall-clad engineer replied.
"Yes, Ethan, if you please." She scribbled in a few figures based on the year's mining yield.
"Personally, I think it's awful. The word 'garbage' comes to mind quite a bit. I just now finished reassembling it, seeing as how the mining laser's energy consumption was disastrous. Had it been shown how much it used before I got to it, there would have been outrage. I'm curious as to what terrible mathematics created it," Ethan continued, pointing at various portions of the cell's parts as he described how the cell was a disaster in this day and age. "In the days when the fusion reactor was first being researched, this would have been considered a gold-mine. Now, it's considered about as useful and efficient as a fossil-fuel consuming combustion-engine running a suit of power armor." He propped the tripod into the air, and activated the laser.
"Any particular reason you activated it?" Rinoa asked sharply.
"I need a test subject for the laser's potential." He replied bluntly and as if he were preparing to display a beloved class project.
"Follow me. Mount it on him," She motioned to a small gravity-field emitter drone, "and let's go." She walked out the door, letting her right arm hold it open as she hooked around the doorway. Ethan grabbed the drone, and aimed it up at the laser. The mining tool lifted into the air, and Ethan motioned to the drone for it to follow. Moving with various beeps and clicks, it followed the pair to the mines in the back of the school.
The mines of Domus were considered a mother-load not only due to large quantities of gold, but of every other metal safe to be mined and a few that weren't. The minerals and ores found in the planet's crust were enormous considering its Earth-like biosphere and minor size. Rather than buy it from the company that discovered it, the ECNF moved to build a shipyard there. When it was announced that the colony was founded by the small expedition company, the ECNF and Brotherhood of Shadows moved their fleets to protect it, relocating their shipyard to the gravity well of a nearby gas giant. They did the only thing they could do now that the economy had put a peg in the proverbial map over Domus: protect it not as alms or some kind of attempt at swaying the company to selling, but as the duty of the government: the protection of industry. The colony was failing quickly, however, due to a schism in the corporation's board of directors. The split was over how the mining colony should look. The company's founder stood up after a long leave of absence and dissolved the council. He called upon an army of architects, city planners, and the Brotherhood of Shadows to not figure out what to do with it, but to start it. The Brotherhood of Shadows worked under a contract to explore the planet with mining probes and to clear out a suitable plot of land to house the beginning of the colony. After the architects and planners had designed it, a small section of scaffolding that was planned to be a shack had collapsed on a worker with a photon cutter. The scaffolding caused no harm, but his startled pull of the trigger caused a land-slide that exposed a large fortune in minerals. The school was built around that after the curriculum was redrawn to include mining.
After arriving there, the drone released the laser, and it quietly floated to the ground. The drone clicked and beeped twice, then hovered away. Rinoa pointed at the shining copper, and Ethan nodded. He aimed it, and discharged a red laser into the copper.
The laser discharged in spasms, making Rinoa believe it was malfunctioning. It took her a few minutes to realize, however, that the laser was not malfunctioning unless it was meant to cut shapes out of the rock rather than the copper. Each spasm of laser beam snatched a clump of copper from the cliff-face, and deposited it on the ground below. The sediment and worthless sand was left there, sitting as if that was what the copper hid. The cliff seemed to have been stripped naked.
Rinoa watched Ethan direct the mining laser with a precision she had only seen in the paintings of her grandfathers using pickaxes. She was wondering how anyone who hadn't been trained in the craft since birth could mine with such precision. She wondered "Why?" and only after he stopped had she realized she spoke aloud.
"Because I set it to have a thin margin of purity by correcting a few lax subroutines, which decreased the range of the laser's cutting capacity to the point where the purity will be on such a small rate, that only a few molecules in each clump won't be copper." Ethan spoke calmly as he deactivated the laser and called for the drone.
She thought about his words. Not all of them, just the phrase 'Because I set it to,' and what that meant. He spoke with no inflection, no hidden emotion or passion; he displayed his pride so openly that assuming he was trying to hide it was an insult. He stood on the word 'I' as he spoke, stressing it not in sarcasm or arrogance, but merely stating the fact that he did it and that he was proud of it. Her thoughts went wild with what this boy represented. He seemed to naturally move through the air and almost seemed to own the area he was in. Almost as if the area fitted him too well, and that the very air in it was grooved for his ranges of motion in specific.
"Rinoa?" He asked calmly.
She came to, and motioned the drone to grab the laser. "Yes, Ethan, how much do I owe you?" She asked quietly as she started to walk to her office. He followed, staying in step.
"Roughly twenty-seven."
"Dollars?"
"Yes."
"Nothing more? That's a cheap price compared to the amount of money you just earned me."
"As I expected."
"Well, what's up? No way would anyone give me this kind of efficiency in my mining laser without some kind of higher price in mind."
"Twenty-seven is all I need to take you out on a nice date."
"Really?"
"Yes. Saturday?"
"Make it Friday night. My Saturday's booked."
"Fine then."
"Oh, and my favorite place is right on the top of that cliff we were mining at." She opened the door to her office, motioned the drone inside and then followed it in. Ethan waited outside, and after a few minutes Rinoa exited with a small wad of money equaling thirty dollars.
"Why's that?" Ethan took the money she handed him.
"We've both worked there."
Ethan grinned, and handed back to Rinoa three dollars.
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Yes, I'm sure my idea of a happy utopian place might be different than yours. I don't wanna get into a big philosophical debate, just tell me whatcha think.
