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PREVIOUS CHAPTER INDEX NEXT CHAPTER Dark Crimson by Nick "spineless" P. Midway. Shit. I’m still only at the Midway. Every time I think I’m going to wake up in dusty Karoggon. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I would wake up from my nightmares into nothingness. I hardly spoke to my wife and yet mustered the strength to say yes to a divorce. While there, I wanted to be back in the war, on my feet, machinegun slung over my armoured shoulder and bullets at bay, anticipating. I wanted to be here. And now, I wasn’t quite convinced anymore. I felt weaker, softer with each passing minute as I awaited a mission, any sort of orders. The desolation, the pain, the grief of being locked up in my tiny metallic containment chamber was far worse than these same feelings out in the battlefield. Meanwhile, some clueless sergeant is lying behind a blood-covered rock, getting stronger, squinting under the dim alien sun. Not everyone gets what they want, but what I wanted was realistic. I wanted war, and war was here. It was everywhere, in my small room, in the halls beyond, and millions of kilometres away on the dusty surface of the Stroggos planet. War was here, but not how I wanted it. I didn’t want to waste it away, killing time by purposefully churning in my bed, rolling across the floor, pounding at the walls, feeling insanity creep in with the boredom. I wanted to experience the war, but not from the side. I wanted to be out there, fighting, getting stronger. I wanted a mission. And so they brought it to me like the damn room service that continually knocked at my door. But they were weak, as was I. I avoided them as if their weakness was infectious, harmful. They broke into my thoughts, intruded, they were no more that faceless men with masks. Masks drawn roughly, abstract paintings of the wartime, which was nothing to them. But it was everything to me. It had started with that first meteorite, or at least that’s what we thought it was at the time. I never saw it, but I felt it. Back then, I was different. The war had changed me. And now, the lack of it changed me even more. It fell from the sky, a fiery testament of what was to come. More pod-like crafts came, fighting for the glory of the Stroggs! Aliens, that’s what they were. Damned biomechanical freaks sent on a suicide mission as a warning, a first wave. A warning! It was a plan without logic, tactically pointless, a crazy fruit of an alien mind. But why did I marvel at it? After all, how many men had suicided simply to make a statement? The Strogg made a statement, and a strong one at that. But they were smart. It really wasn’t a suicide mission as it was labelled at first. Hundreds of screaming, clutching, writhing and pale with fear human beings were dragged back on their steaming spacecrafts. They have videos, the expressions of absolute fright burned onto film for everyone to see the horror. They carried them off to their pods and took off. It was so fast, so swift, there was little time to react. The only damage inflicted was a single pod that was taken down with a missile. And when opened, it revealed the horrors of Stroggos. But they knew that they couldn’t get us all the way from their barren planet. They knew they had to do something else. Generally, they were mindless freaks. And yet, they had their scientists and thinkers that could easily outsmart the politicians and scientists running our own planet! They skimmed along the distorted surface of space and time over dark stars came upon our solar system. Rumour has it that they’re developing devices that serve the same purpose. That means the bastards don’t even have to leave their planet for a good meal. I was among the first to see this. The government simply labelled them as a simple race that could bring us little harm. Little harm! I suppose a few thousand dead civilians does come as ‘little harm’ knowing the several billion that still occupy the globe. One should never underestimate his enemy. That’s what mindless octogenarian politicians, dressed in their neat suits and not having the tiniest shred of sense, decided. That is why dead soon piled at a rate that morticians couldn’t keep up. Graveyards filled while space lessened. After the first few initial Strogg strikes, it wasn’t unusual to find a pile of dead bodies shuffled to the side of the sidewalk like snow, waiting for their turn to be cremated. They were discarded; the Stroggs wanted their human prey alive. And more came, while the government said they could do little for fear of being ridiculed. But what’s to be made fun of with a mound of corpses piled here and there? It was horrible. What did they want? The government said that they were after our planet’s resources because they had exhausted our own. But one look at the captured Stroggos podship and it becomes evident that they care little for metals and minerals. No, they wanted flesh, human flesh. This was shown by the meathooks and cool lockers, by the metallic skin frames, tools for removing skin from flesh, flesh from bone, and other devices for more specific purposes and reasons too ghastly to put in words. Who knows just for what all this was. Perhaps experiments, perhaps to build more Strogg monsters. They were, after all, a race compiled of many other alien races, sewn together roughly with the gaps filled in with mechanical legs, arms, and supplemented by the usual weapons. Metals and minerals my ass! They were after humans, and whatever they wanted with them, it was too ghastly to think about. Perhaps simply for food. Or maybe for worse. And then it was finally decided that immediate action had to be taken. About damn time! Had the politicians seen their error? Had it become clear that, after killing a city’s worth of human beings, Stroggs were dangerous? Perhaps not. The other members from the Coalition pushed them. The only thing that prompted the idiots into action, however, was the fact that they had spied something disturbing on the Stroggos planet. It was a gigantic weapon of sorts that slowly came together, bringing along with it fear. After much debate, it was sophisticatedly coined as the ‘Big Gun’, and all feared it. No one knew how it worked or what it would exactly do, though there were speculations. Fear of the unknown, I believe they say. That, and the discovery that the Stroggos platinum content was fairly near to the planet’s surface, while it wasn’t quite so on Earth. Platinum was more valuable than gold and was also useful in technologies utilising hydrogen power, the main way for obtaining energy these days. Platinum could hold large quantities of hydrogen while dampening its explosive nature. War broke over the horizon. Some protested, claiming that all the government cared was for the planet’s minerals. Others supported the war, proclaiming, ‘support our troops’ while they continued living in their utopian hometown that had yet to be destroyed. Both were idiots, both were wrong. War was unavoidable, but politics pushed it forward for the wrong reason. A week ago it had become official. War had started. Draft came into effect and thousands of soldiers gathered in lines over the rubble of their demolished cities, waiting to climb into their one-man cocoons and fly to the planet Stroggos. They were going to move the war to their turf. So they went, carried by their troop carriers and utilised the same points of space-time distortion that the Stroggs used. Few survived this initial attack, though more waves followed. Little information was released to the public, but nearly all of the soldiers were listed as KIA or MIA and their families were paid morose visits by military officials that expressed their grief and sent condolence. War. War had started, but not for me. At least, not until the long awaited knock came at my door. PREVIOUS CHAPTER INDEX NEXT CHAPTER |
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