Thursday 13 September 2012

impending feeling of doom


His head was nearly all filled with joy, but a small shadow hanged at the back of his thoughts. As he kissed her lips and fumbled his hands around her waist he could feel a small itch, a little something deep inside his consciousness. Everyone was feeling it, not just him, a taste of impending doom, nearing, growing, a small spot of darkness in the blissful light of the oscillating twin suns of Sheliak.
 She had been just another girl, for a while, but as time passed on he did really fall for her and now he was thinking of asking her to become his wife. He had already begun the preparations, having bought the ritual beggar's cloth and the ticket for a shore trip, where he had to find a pair of perfectly round stones, one yellow and one blue. In a couple of days he'd arrange for them to be together at sunrise, but since he wanted to make sure that she wasn't expecting it, he had asked for the help of friends, in two days time. They were to show up, unexpectedly, at his place and insist on taking the two of them out for a couple drinks, and then, as sunrise approached, they would leave one by one, until the last of them asked for a ride home.
 That way he'd be alone with her, close to the gardens, and he could say to her "oh well, if we are here, we might as well watch the sunrise, sitting on the grass", and even if she did suspect anything he'd just say "oh come on, no way I could have planed all this!" until the suns started to rise, when he would remove his clothes, showing the beggar's cloth on his skin, and then he'd present her the round stones - "As the two suns revolve around each other, feeding each other with love and heat, so I want to revolve around you. As the two suns live forever bonded, so I want to live with you" - and she would say yes and he would be filled with joy and they would dance under the trees, the two stones firmly in her hand, her arm around his naked waist, and the birds would sing of their love.
 Even as he made plans for that, the feeling of doom grew bigger, but he was sure it was just his fear of she saying no, not knowing that what he felt everyone else in Sheliak-Three felt on the back of their heads. If he hadn't been so focused on her eyes and her every word and her every smile, he might have noticed the old man ranting about the end of the world on the street. But even focused as he was on her, he noticed the bright shine of a object entering the atmosphere as everyone did. And those few that missed the first, saw the second, or the third, or any one of the other hundreds of antimatter bombs that fell om the surface of the planet. The deaths of all living things on Sheliak-Three happened in a short span of seconds, barely enough for him to think that at least this way they'd be together forever.

Thursday 6 September 2012

Test Flight


It wasn't her first time aboard a Dragonfly class space ship, but this was one of the new Imperial Army ones, and the controls were placed differently. It took her almost two minutes to find the starter, and another full minute before she figured out how to turn the radio off. Once she did, the console filled with messages from the control tower (she never understood why they called it a tower, most of the times it was just another room, lost inside the stations, with screens and little angry men screaming at her because she wasn't respecting her vectors to the line) telling her to turn the radio back on. She replied, as soon as she found the keyboard that had been hidden on her side, where she usually found the user manuals.
  "I can communicate through here. Don't disrupt my music. Speaking of which, how do I turn the music on?"
  "The DF-4XTN is a fighter ship. There is no music."
  "LAAAAAAAAAAME" - she typed and said at the same time, reaching for her ear buds as soon as she pressed the return key. After checking that she had enough battery time on her wrist-comp to last the test, she selected a song at random from her "epic fight music" folder. The cords of the quantum bass echoed in her ears as she read the exit vector and waited for the "OK to go" from the tower. After a few more back and forth with the poor low ranked soldier tasked with controlling her lane, she finally hit the release button and the small ship was shot out of the station into the minefield. She should let the computer take care of dodging the obstacles, but it was too much fun to do it herself, and the voice was singing in her ears "Dance in the nebulae, dodging lasers and shooting aliens!" so she flew, pressing the trigger (locked, luckily) and blasting imaginary aliens from the skies of Jupiter. The console was screaming at her
  "TURN THE COMPUTER ON!", "THAT'S NOT YOUR EXIT VECTOR!", "YOU ARE HEADING TO A NO-EXIT ZONE!"
   She took her time to reply to that one, typing with the left hand and controlling the ship one-handed :   "there is a exit, it's just tight" - and directing the ship to a small gap between two mines and a asteroid, the left wing almost scrapping a bit of ink from a mine. She turned the radio on for a few seconds to scream a "HEEEEEEEEEEEELL YEEEEEEEEAAAAAH!" and then turned it back off. Sometimes she wonder how long it would be until she got expelled from the army, but most of the time she just wanted to have fun. The console blinked a "ENEMY AHEAD" warning, and the targeting system directed the aim to the closest test-enemy. She turned the targeting comp off and aimed manually, blasting the small satellite from the sky, and then flying through the debris (rule thirteen of space battle : never fly through the debris of a just destroyed enemy) to take aim for the next one. A few moments later she was returning to the station and feeling so good, she let the dragonfly take control of the entry, leaning back as much as she could in the stiff chair, singing with the radio back on. She would be heavily penalised for a lot of technicalities, but the truth was, she did a better than perfect score in the part that mattered : 16 shots, 17 enemies down. Although she had to admit that the the alignment of those two satellites next to the asteroid she blasted to get rid of both was luck.
    There would be more next week, and next time, she'd do it by the book. If she felt like it.