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¦ Fiction ¦ Nu
Earth Tearjerker
by Lady Daphne Müüse-Strângléur
Illustrations by Bryan Coyle
Chapter
1 – AMOUR KISSED WITH THREE LIPS
The
impenetrable chem-clouds rolled in thick, chokingly poisonous banks across the
arid dustbowl that made up the storm-wracked Stakked Plains of Nu Earth. The war-torn
planet on the edge of the galaxy had seen more battles fought on its conflict-scarred
surface than could ever be possibly counted, and it did seem to most of the participants
that it had probably been one fight too many. This vast, barren and lifeless wilderness
was a strangely apocalyptic dish of war-laced despair-burger and a freaky jumbo-sized
misery-shake, with a side order of mondo-bizarro French Fries…of madness!
Or
so thought Private Paddy O’Malley. Breathing shallowly, he made his painfully
slow passage across this bleak plateau, dragging behind him a rough wooden stretcher
that contained the insensible body of Arbroath McGuinty, his fellow comrade in
the Souther army. Five days since their company had been attacked by a Nort patrol.
Five days since he’d seen his friends gunned down in all their crimson glory,
choking lungs full of chem. Five days wandering lost in the wilderness with no
sense of direction other than ‘onwards’.
He looked down
at the oxy-canister that hung in a makeshift fashion at his side. After a moment
he tried shaking the bottle, but the reading on the little dial remained the same.
Paddy turned his head back to his fallen friend; the hot sweat of oxygen-starved
exhaustion on his face and dust clouding his chem-suit’s visor, as he tried to
lift both their spirits.
“Sure now Arby,
an’ we’ll be back behind our own lines before ye know it, wi’ all the booze and
broads ye could want. C’mon, howzabout a song teh keep us goin’, ay?
“…When
Irish eyes are smilin’,
Sure, 'tis like the morn in Spring.
In the lilt of Irish laughter,
You can hear the angels sing…”
The singing stopped
as suddenly as Paddy’s heart. Had he said that this desert landscape was lifeless?
Apparently on that, at least, he was wrong, for a rough silhouette now appeared
from out that deadly cloud. It appeared to be in the shape of a lone man – yet
it was somehow not quite…right. Whoever or whatever it was, Paddy didn’t
like the look of it. Putting down his burden for a moment, he pulled out his rifle
and began to inch slowly towards this strange intruder.
But all too soon
the chem was rolling in, and Paddy lost sight of the illusory figure altogether.
He might have evaded him entirely had it not been for the three tinny voices that
he heard through the crackling speakers on the inside of his chem-suit. Voices
that were almost lost in the howl of the hot dust-laden wind as he stumbled blindly
towards their unseen originators:
“…guys get a look
at them? You reckon that they’re Norts?”
“Nah, looked like
Southers to me. I reckon we just shoot ‘em anyway to make sure – they’re probably
just stinkin’ deserters.”
“We’re technically
deserters, you psycho! You wanna shoot us too? Oh, ‘cept you can’t, ‘cause we’re
already dead!”
If Paddy was confused
by quite how someone who believed himself to be dead was able to hold at least
the semblance of a coherent conversation with two other dead people, he didn’t
have time to register it. Nu Earth was a place of many strange sights, as Paddy
might have considered when he came upon the mysterious speakers and instead found
instead just an assault rifle, backpack and helmet. Their owner apparently vanished
into thin air.
He might
have thought this, but never had a chance to register this peculiar scene before
an even stranger one literally gripped him by the neck.
The first odd thing
he noticed about the arm that softly circled his throat was that it wasn’t wearing
a chem-suit. The second odd thing was that it wasn’t wearing anything at all,
which Paddy thought was even odder, because Nu Earth didn’t seem like the sort
of place you’d want to go taking your top off, even if (radioactive) sands and
(scum) seas were in abundant supply. The third and oddest thing of all was that
the arm in question appeared to be of a particularly fetching and peculiar light
blue colour.
With half an eye
on his suit’s precious oxy-pipe, clutched tightly by a great blue hand, the Souther
thought he’d venture some form of introductory dialogue. In a strangled voice
which squeaked like a teenager dropping a testicle that comprised 30 percent lack
of oxygen and 70 percent nervous terror:
“Could yeh no kill
me please, hi?”
“Don’t worry son.
If I wanted to kill you, then you’d already be dead” came the replying growl at
his ear a hairsbreadth of a fraction of a heartbeat later, with a voice so deep
that Paddy could feel it run through his very body and down into the core of Nu
Earth itself.
“Erm…could ye let
go of my throat then, please…sir…?”
The arm withdrew
as silently as it appeared, and Paddy breathed a much-needed gasp of precious
life-giving oxygen. Then he turned round to face the man behind him and all the
air left his lungs once again. It wasn’t just that the man was entirely blue.
It wasn’t that he was half-naked, in an imposingly ‘look-at-my-half-naked-fetchingly-blue-toned-muscles-that-could-snap-your-spine-like-a-cheap-breadstick’
kind of way. It wasn’t the fact that his eyes were completely white with no pigment
or iris visible of any kind.
No, considered
Paddy, it was all of these things and the Mohican that made this figure
at once both imbued with an appearance of utter, trouser-staining ridiculousness
and the potential to snap you in two, gut you and strum your intestines like strings
on a cadaverous man-banjo if you ever so-much as dared to laugh in his
presence.
‘Aww shite!’ would
be his answer if asked to sum up his feelings in two words.
“Don’t sweat kid
– it’s only when you can’t see Rogue that you’re just seconds away from
a sit-down dinner with Death himself.”
The voice, Paddy
realised, was coming from the gun that still lay on the ground. And if he hadn’t
put the pieces together already, the words ‘Genetic Infantryman’ popped quietly
into his head and the truth finally hit him hard in the face like a warm, wet
kipper.
“Would ye be thon
Rogue Trooper, by any chance? Only we’d heard yez died out on Hill 19, or at least
that’s what them Nort vid vultures wuz sayin’” he ventured cautiously.
“Ignore that Norty
propaganda! That was some other poor chump,” countered the talking backpack. “When
Rogue dies, it’ll be because there aren’t any Norts left to kill. But we’re
dead enough for you – our digitised souls recorded down to the smallest personality
quirk and stored on biochips in Rogue’s equipment. My name’s…”
“I know who yez
are!” Paddy interrupted. “Every Souther knows ye, though most reckon ye’re just
Nu Earth legends, like the crock o’ gold paradise a’ Cinnebar or that giant man-eatin’
underground Space Bear. But ye’re real, not blarney! Rogue Trooper – the
last of the G.I.’s, genetically engineered to withstand all forms a’ chemical
and biological attack. Ye can only return to Milli-Com when ye’ve killed the traitor
that betrayed yer buddies at the Quartz Zone drop. Ye’re Bagman, right?
The rucksack wi’ a mood a’ unpredictability that could get yer pals into trouble
at any time.
“An’ ye must be
Gunnar, the rifle that likes to kill an’ kill ‘till there ain’t no more
killin’ to be done, an’ then kills himself some more anyway, just ‘cause he likes
killin’” Paddy continued, pointing at the rifle, before turning his gaze to the
expectant helmet.
“An’…erm…ye must
be…err…Hattie…the hat, who…uhh…”
“The name’s Helm,
you know-nothing grunt, and I can play mp3s!” As if to prove this, the sound of
‘Bongo Rock’ by the popular freak-beat combo the Incredible Bongo Band began blaring
from beneath the plasti-steel covering of the turtle shell-shaped headgear.
“Eh, whatever ye
say Herman, sure’n it’s not really important” Paddy continued disinterestedly.
“Why you…! I, Helm,
ought to ring your scrawny excuse for a neck, you potato-groping leprechaun!”
“What with, Harry
Hatter? Are ye gonna beat me to death wi’ yer deadly brim o’ doom?” retorted Paddy
over the ever increasing volume of the turgid pop classic, before Bagman broke
them up.
“Shut your synth,
you guys! My sensors detect a psycho-gas storm coming up sharply behind us!”
Rogue, as usual,
took a firm and manly charge of the situation:
“There’s a Nort
Kashar unit still dogging our path too, and the trail left by the stretcher this
guy’s been dragging is going to lead them straight to us. We need somewhere to
bed down for the night and let this storm pass and remove our tracks. We’ve got
to move – now!”
Oskar the Beast
only had a first name. Or at least that was what everyone supposed. No one would
ever dare to actually ask him whether or not he had more than one name. It was
said that one man was going to dare to ask him once, but he had his lips
torn off and was garrotted with his own tongue before he could even utter a single
word.
So everyone called
him ‘Beast’, because he resembled nothing so much as five separate gorillas roughly
stitched together into the horrifying semblance of a man. Such an imposing figure
was Oskar, that even his commanding officers in Nordland’s Kashar Legion phrased
their orders to him as unusually polite and deferential requests.
Oskar was not what
you would call a bright man – if they gave out awards for stupidity he'd win every
single stupid one, but would be so stupid as to forget to turn up on the day of
the stupid awards ceremony. But he did take an extreme amount of pride in his
job. It didn’t matter to him that the job in question usually involved bloodily
eviscerating fellow human beings on a regular basis. He just liked what he did,
and he did it well.
This was why Oskar
was unhappy. Well, he was never actually happy, but at the moment he was even
less happy than usual. And this wasn’t very happy at all. The unit under his command
had been part of the joint Kashern-Kashar force that had massacred the Genetic
Infantrymen when Milli-Com first dropped them onto the face of this greedy globe
of war, in the silicon heart of the Quartz Zone.
Massacred, but
for one lone survivor. The Rogue Trooper. The name was like bitter ashes on Oskar’s
lips. It was shameful to his sense of Legionnaire’s Honour that even one
potential victim could escape his efficient ministrations. This was surely an
affront to his own skills as a soldier. His own sense of personal workplace satisfaction
would not allow him to let a job go unfinished.
And so, since that
day, he had dogged the G.I.’s progress, watched him blaze a trail across Nu Earth
and felt his lust for vengeance grow ever stronger in the black pit of his stomach.
Many and long were the seemingly vast number of horrendous tortures that he had
since thought to visit upon his mortal enemy. Despite the recent reports of the
Trooper’s ‘demise’, he knew that he was still out there, still fighting his one
man war against an entire planet. He could feel his presence in his warrior’s
bones.
And finally it
seemed that his quest was to be fulfilled, as his scouts brought him fresh news.
A trail had been found, of something being dragged, still visible against the
dusty desert floor. Already, Oskar was sharpening his horrifyingly keen-edged
ceremonial hunting knife in preparation…
“Just scanning
the immediate area, Rogue.” Bagman began to hum softly, before he quickly continued.
“There’s a small lagoon less than a klick away, natural vegetation and a fresh
water source even – should provide adequate cover for us until after this chem-storm
blows over.”
“Okay, we’ve got
to get there fast! I’m afraid we’ve got to do this part on foot, so I’m gonna
have to carry your buddy here.”
Rogue leaned down
towards the body of McGuinty still laid on the stretcher, then stopped suddenly.
“Bagman! Run a
fully body scan – quickly!”
Bagman’s sensors
hummed soft and low for a moment before he finished the scan and fumblingly tried
to pass on the results of what he’d found.
“Life signs…negative.
I’m sorry pal…but your friend’s dead!”
“Sure’n he’s dead.”
Paddy looked over, unconcerned. “But comp’ny’s hard to find round these parts,
y’know. An’ we bin together for a long time now. Plus, he’s a very good listener.”
A pregnant pause gestated
so long as to give birth to an uncomfortably embarassed silence.
"...Right...
Well we haven’t got time to argue the point, we’ve got to get moving!” Rogue hefted
the corpse of Arbroath McGuinty over his shoulder.
“Are you sure you
know what you’re doing, Rogue?” Helm asked quizzically. “I, Helm the talking hat,
reckon that carrying that dead guy’s only gonna slow us down.”
“Sometimes in war
it’s important for a person to latch on to something – or someone – as
a sort of psychological crutch, to keep them going. If carrying a dead body’s
going to get this guy to the lagoon any quicker, then carrying dead bodies is
what I’ll damn-well do!”
“I say we just
shoot him, and then we don’t need to worry about carrying either corpse!”
“Synth out, Gunnar.
Now - let’s knife!”
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