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spacesord-blog · 7 years

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All sixes and...

Are you deranged like me? Are you strange like me? Lighting matches just to swallow up the flame like me? Do you call yourself a fucking hurricane like me? Pointing fingers 'cause you'll never take the blame like me?

Whispers covered the crowd like the hum of a drive core, the bodies pressed close like narrow corridors. It was oddly comforting to him, to be surrounded by people and quiet noise. On a ship, in a prison, out in nature, it seemed he only really felt comfortable in any guise when he could blanket his own buzzing mind with a layer of nigh-incomprehensible murmurs and whispers that only a practiced ear could discern.

And Sevens had nothing if not a practiced, discerning ear.

Shock was prevalent. Nobody could quite believe what had gone down. The accusation, the outrage, the uproar. How could their brave, selfless leader have made a whole family disappear? He could he have done something like that when his entire message focused wholly on saving people, on lifting them up to his level of ascended comprehension and bettered reality? It was hard for many to acknowledge that the man they hailed as hero and savior was in truth a monster and the greatest device of their downfall.

Sevens, of course, knew the truth. He had sought long and hard for it, had grown up learning it, had finally seen it for himself in written transcript of correspondence between a pursuit vessel and command ship. A part of him didn’t want to believe it was possible even now, but he had the evidence burnt into his memory, into Dave’s heart.

Pilot, fire at the uploaded coordinates at mark. Sir, that shot may destroy the ship. That’s the point, Pilot.

Dirk had ordered the attack. Had monitored the pursuit. Had engineered the entire event just to lure out the Unreal Air and destroy it. Maybe he had wanted Dave dead, too. Maybe he just didn’t care. Either way, Dave was not happy--and neither was Sevens. He pushed Dave back down before the emotions could seize control and focused on his mission instead.

And all the people say you can't wake up, this is not a dream You're part of a machine, you are not a human being

The mansion gate was guarded by two nervous-looking men who looked more like they ought to be playing with blocks instead of rifles. Sevens didn’t have the heart to hurt men that nervous--besides, they’d be more likely to shoot first rather than question why they were being attacked. Instead he went up and over the wall, the crowd so engrossed in their discussion that they hardly looked twice at the strange man going up and over.

The grounds of Dirk’s private mansion were well-patrolled, but had just enough holes for a talented sneak to fit through. On his way he heard more whispers, more hushed for lack of density. Even Dirk’s men were beginning to doubt his golden image. That alone pleased Sevens probably more than was right. Dirk had always been a manipulative bastard, able to wear a mask for any situation, and the fact that cracks were showing even to his best-paid cronies spoke greatly to the damage done to his reputation.

Something began to nag at Sevens’ mind as he scaled a tree and walked along the boughs to an open window. Things like this didn’t just happen. Dirk was too careful, too cautious, too calculating to leave an obvious trail. Someone had to have found something, a thread that led to a tapestry when tugged, a tapestry of lies and artifice that the elder Strider wove with masterful hands.

Sevens very dearly wanted to know who that someone was.

His musings were forced aside as he leapt practically into the arms of a guard pacing past the window, and he was forced to put the man down before he could sound an alarm. He dragged the man to the nearest door, which was thankfully a closet, and got to work stripping him of any useful tools even as he bound his arms and legs to his throat.

With your face all made up, living on a screen Low on self esteem, so you run on gasoline

Satisfied the guard wouldn’t escape--or at least not without some serious aid--Sevens slipped deeper into the mansion, past patrols who marched solo. No whispers here, no mutters, no uncertainty in cold metal ballistic masks designed to dissipate energy and stop bullets cold. Sevens knew their vision wasn’t limited, either. Technology was a terrifying force in personal defense.

It seemed to take a lifetime to get to Dirk’s inner sanctum, where he found the door shockingly ajar. Sloppy. The damage must have been worse than he assumed. There was little Sevens wouldn’t give to have been in the room when it happened, when the man spoke out against Dirk’s shadow tyranny. He heard voices inside, and after a moment of internal debate leaned over to peer through the crack.

“I don’t give a pithy fuck what you have to do, Spades. I don’t pay you to come to me with bullshit.”

“You better watch your fuckin’ tone, kid--”

“Or what? You’ll send another oaf like Boxcars to try and ‘remind’ me of how terrifying you’re supposed to be? Here’s a newsflash for you, you insipid mobster fuck. I pay you for one thing, and one thing only. Discretion.”

Dirk lifted something from behind his desk and threw it at the Dersite standing across from him. “Look into his eyes, Spades, and tell me if I gave a single roaring SHIT about how big and strong he was.” The crime boss was silent, but Sevens could see his shoulders go tense, hear the whir of mechanical limbs mimicking their organic counterparts. “I’ll say it again,” Dirk said softly, voice silky smooth and deadly as a viper. “Find the woman with purple eyes. Black lips. Blonde hair. Find her and bring me her fucking head.”

All at once every plan in Sevens’ head vanished. Sevens himself disappeared. Dave surged to the fore, filthy and disguised and crouched in frozen shock. Rosa. He nearly whispered her name, the name he hadn’t even let himself think about for months and months. Rosalie. Rosalie’s alive. Rosalie did this. He nearly cheered. The only reason he didn’t is because the door shoved open and he found himself face to severed head.

He looked up at Spades, the black beetle-shell covering barely flexing even with the intensity of Spades’ scowl and shock. He barely gave the mob boss time to react, his arm shooting up and out to crash against the Dersite’s chin, his head shooting back with an audible snap as the carapace along the back of his neck shattered. Dave turned and pointed at Dirk as the warlord scrambled for one of the weapons hidden in his desk.

“You’re lucky this time, Emperor,” he sneered, and darted away as a hail of bullets shredded the door behind him. Alarms wailed to life, guards poured from the woodwork, and Dave fled through it all, stopping only when forced. He was unstoppable, he was alive, he was finally fucking alive again. Rosa.

Guards milled outside as he leapt from tree to ground and sprinted through the brush to the wall. He was up and over before anyone could spot him, and melted into the crowd in seconds, shedding Sevens’ mask and goggles. He didn’t need the persona anymore. He had nothing to fear.

He looked back at the mansion and for an instant he thought he could see Dirk peering out from one of the taller windows, citrine eyes wide with outrage and confusion. Dave let himself smile as he faded out of view.

Nothing was easier. If anything, it would only be harder. But soon, hopefully, he wouldn’t have to do it alone.

I think there's a flaw in my code These voices won't leave me alone Well my heart is gold and my hands are cold

#expositional

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spacesord-blog · 7 years

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well

shit

i mean nobody follows me here yet anyway but that doesnt mean i cant sit here expositing all my shock and awe over revelations relating to my situation

why is it always family that takes the time to drop its pants then hunker down right over you and heave until youre neck deep in The Shit

theres a reason why kids dont talk to their parents isnt there

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spacesord-blog · 7 years

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my eyes hurt

thats what i get for staring at bright lights though

#i cant help it #the notion that i get to turn the switch all on my own is a little daunting right now

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spacesord-blog · 7 years

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well

shit

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spacesord-blog · 7 years

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spacesord-blog · 7 years

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that awkward moment when the town flirt asks where your significant other is and youre honestly not sure if shes dead or not so you just kinda start to yell at an even volume

sorry carrie it isnt you

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spacesord-blog · 7 years

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ive never seen an old dog angrier than beth when i landed earlier holy shit

and you thought your obnoxious anklebiter of the early 20th century was bad

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spacesord-blog · 7 years

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525,600

It is, in all honesty, by and large a blur. He’s tried, convicted, and sent away with very little in the way of actual legislation or fanfare. They know if they let it become too widespread, too well-known, that he’d become a living martyr, his ship and life destroyed at last in the name of righteous action. So they keep it quiet. D.M. Strider, AKA Prisoner #097784-2205-3, is quietly shuffled into the evening news with no mention of how or why he was captured and jailed.

For the most part that doesn’t bother him.

What does is the fact that he had to spend time there at all. And that his ship was destroyed. And that for some reason when men of any species are forced into a small space with limited outlets for aggression they more often than not turn on one another.

It helped that he was only a smuggler, and a clean one at that. No gun running, no drug trafficking. It gave him a certain weight with the more honorable crooks and criminals. It meant the bottom-feeders wouldn’t even try to mess with him. They targeted the true slime, the pedophiles and rapists, the child-killers and the patricides, though often those very same men made up their numbers. They were ultimately all cowards, and none of them wanted to mess with someone as rough-looking as #097784.

The rebels wanted him, though. The leaders of movements the state had deemed too dangerous to leave free but even more dangerous if killed. Men with big ideas about how a talented smuggler could help them and their movements. 097784 wanted nothing to do with them, though. They were radicals, their notions extreme, often just as much so as the dictators they professed to oppose. In reality they had just been slower to the punch than their rivals.

Another group were the smugglers. The prison men whose lives had been lost the day they were incarcerated, who made a living peddling goods for cigarettes, blowjobs, a choice favor here and there. Men who saw 097784 for what he was and wanted no threats to their enterprise. It was them who came first, with hired fists and clumsy threats. Seven men, put down in seven seconds.

097784 became Sevens. Quiet, composed, dangerous. People left Sevens alone for a while after that first fight. The guards had turned a blind eye, no doubt paid off, but he had seen some of their apprising looks in the aftermath. The respect the fracas had built for him. And even he knew that was key.

The rebel leaders came next, though, inevitably. They tempt him with promises of exotic concubines smuggled in for conjugal visits, women who will twist his mind and body in ways the human psyche could simply not envision without the aid of powerful hallucinogenics and an extremely active imagination.

They offer him riches of gold and silver, of gemstones and glory that would wait for him if only he could help The Cause.

Sevens ignored their temptation. He has had the finest of women that the multiverse could offer. He ignored their riches and glory. He had run his fingers through raw spun gold and gazed into amethyst so pure even the memory makes his gut ache with longing. No, they could not tempt him, not with all the gold and jewels and willing flesh in the universe.

So they decide to force him.

The guards can’t ignore the fight that time. Sevens is assigned one week in the dark cells. The fourteen men sent to beat him into cooperation are either hospitalized or transported to prisons that specialize in physical debilitation.

When he got out nobody seemed all that interested in trying to test him or win him over. He was quiet, kept to himself, and not worth the trouble of trying to kill. He had some secret, too, a name he never spoke and a tattoo he paid for in a year’s worth of cigarettes to be etched in rare expensive violet ink right at the base of his neck. Nobody knew what it meant but Sevens. Nobody found out.

Even so, Sevens knew it was a matter of time. A shiv in the lunch line, a garotte in the shower, a dose of poison in his meal. One way or another someone would just get rid of him.

People like Sevens, Prisoner #097784-2205-3, D.M. Strider, Dave, people like him are never just left alone.

That never proved more true than the day he was released. A pair of guards came to his cell, woke him up, marched him wordlessly to discharge. He was given his clothes, his belongings--what remained of them--and marched to the shuttle bay, where an automated taxi sat waiting in launch prep for him.

“What’s going on?” he asked one of the guards, a thickset Susuide with ivory tusks curling on either side of his blunt snout.

The guard just gave him a dirty look from his tiny piggy eyes and scowled. “You’re leaving.”

That was all he could hope for, he supposed. As he boarded the shuttle and allowed the launch sequence to finalize he settled back against his chair, awkward in street clothes that didn’t quite fit as well as the red jumpsuit he had been assigned. To leave. To put Sevens behind him and remember Dave.

The shuttle never did make it where the automated service intended. A false positive was sent several light-years out from the prison complex, but the actual shuttle fell right off the radar and hadn’t been seen since.

Not that it matters. People like Dave are never left alone for long.

#expositional

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spacesord-blog · 7 years

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Upside Down

The world had been a fairly chaotic place for long enough now that the random twists and turns didn’t do much to disrupt Dave Strider. Of course, by world it can be safely assumed to refer entirely to his perception of reality, rather than a single isolated world. For an interstellar smuggler and ex-military man world was a much simpler word to refer to a galaxy many several thousand times beyond the scope of average imagination, and many hundreds of times beyond even an advanced one.

Even so, he found himself ill-prepared for what the ‘world’ in all its compartmentalized meaning threw at him on that day. He had sent her, his muse, his love, his life ever since that bizarre road trip, he had sent her far away and knew he could find her on the other side, if there was another side to this. The numbers, the coordinates, were stored safely in his computer, and once he got free and clear he could send her the signal and they could keep on going.

But he didn’t get free.

Some nights it still haunted his dreams, those final moments aboard the Unreal Air. They had punched through a blockade on a high-risk run to the colony past the Horsehead border, a highly contested region of space rife with political bullshit he couldn’t be bothered to try and keep up with. Innocent pioneers were being caught in the crossfire, though, and Dave would be damned before he let them suffer.

As life contrived he would be so damned.

They punched through the blockade readily, the disabling weapons on the ship humming through the hull as he throttled up and shot into the nebula to try and ditch their pursuit. But the warships chasing them were more dogged than he had given them credit for. It had all boiled down to a single moment, a final chance to decide if they would go down together or if he could give her a final chance to experience something outside of his limited scope.

“Please,” he asked, voice quiet, “There’s nobody in this I want to save more than you. Don’t ask me to watch you go down with me. Don’t make me lose you to my own folly. Please.”

Sometimes he wished she hadn’t agreed. Or that he hadn’t asked. A selfish part of his darkest core wished she had been there with him but he knew if she had they might have executed her on the spot. The Bonnie to his Clyde, the power to his stealth. She had always done more, gone further, been more driven to do whatever it took, and by extension was the more dangerous. So he put her into the pod, trusted she could pilot it safely away as their weapons punched through the last of his shields and the ship caught fire and a hundred alarms screamed imminent hull breach.

All he cared about was hitting the perfect angle, the right one so she could shoot into the nebula’s depths and evade any pursuit. Her signal would be masked by the electronic interference. In his dreams he can hear her scream ‘wait’ even as the pod ejects, which is impossible, absolutely impossible. But he hit the angle. She got away, even as a volley of bolts struck midship and tore a massive gaping hole in their bedroom.

He slammed the emergency seals, and the cockpit jerked free of the rest of the ship instants before it exploded into a thousand tiny fragments. Emergency deflection shielding spared his angular pod from being shredded by the blast, but the damage was done. The ship was gone. The coordinates of her trajectory were gone. The plans to reconvene he had made without telling her were gone.

He had been captured, taken, imprisoned. Prisoner #097784-2205-3. Dave Strider was effectively dead, sentenced to forty years in a hard-labor supermax. He has nothing left of her but a memory, and nothing left of his ship but a meaningless registration chit embedded into his omni-tool.

In the end he supposed it was actually better than he could have hoped for. She was alive, and he was imprisoned. At least she’d be allowed to live.

God, he hoped she’d be allowed to live.

#expositional

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