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13 September 2011

FWS Flash Fiction: Empty Places-Part One: "Off-Worlders"



I never told my mother about the number of times I slipped out of the tent, past the guards, and out beyond the fencing. There, in the cold desert air, with the star beaming down on me, I felt the vastness of the universe, and knew in my heart, that one day, I would go out there. While we lived there in the desert camps, I learned all the stars with human colonies orbiting them, and didn’t listen to what people said about how the colonist abandoned Earth after the mushroom clouds. I wrote off most of these people, like my mother, as religious nuts. I didn’t realize these were the good days of my life.


When I asked about colonists, my mother spit on the floor of our tent, “they don’t need us anymore! Left us to rot!” She made a weird sign with her hands, and ordered me never to speak of it. Three days later, a raiding party from the city on the edge of the desert hit our encampment, slaughtered the ones who resisted, took what they wanted, and left the rest to die in the heat. Scavenges picked me, gave me a gun, and told me that if I wanted to live, than I worked for them. For years after, I did what they told me, and those terrible deeds were beyond my imagination. It was a forced hell that lived in for years, but you get used to it, but then one day we rolled into market with a fresh haul, and everything changed.

The ‘market’ was actually an abandoned cattle ranch complex that be converted to a neutral zone for trading in mostly stolen goods and people. I hated place like these, it was a stage for trading on human misery, and we were loading down with misery in the trailer. It was hot, filling the dense air with smell of sweat, grease, and sex; it seemed to me to be the correct odor for a den of organized sin. If only my mother, the godly women she was, could see me now…with a weapon I my hands, and blood my fingernails. Weapons were allowed in the market, but one magazine only, and once we surrounded our ammo, the boss of the outfit started in on me…

“Listen to me, you little bastard,” Zinc, the boss of the outfit spit dust and terrible breath at me as we cleared the checkpoint, “no wandering off, you hear me?! You do, and I’ll shot ya, skin ya, and sell your marrow to the grill.” Then his half-fingered gloves pawed at my chest. “Give me your rifle” I surrounded it without a fight, but my hand was on my knife, “no gun no work…bastard.”He smiled with his three teeth, slung the gun, and jumped out of the ramshackle SUV, dust clouds whipping off of his faded overcoat. “Sandoval,” another one of the dirty raiders pointed to cages we hauled over the last forty miles, “get the women to the dealer.” I sighed, resigned myself to my grim duty, the hauling of captured women to a slave dealer, then taking the pay slip to that greasy bar, where they spend Zinc & Company spent it on one day of drinking and fucking. That was the way it had been for the years I served with Zinc, raiding, stealing, then blowing it all. I normally volunteered for guard duty on the trucks, and it allowed me to see the stars…that’s all I needed.

“No sandbagging, boy,” Zinc pointed from the bar’s door, “I want my money, or I’ll whoop’ya!” He threw the keys to the cage directly at me; I moved and allowed them to sail into the sand. They turned, laughing as disappeared in their cave of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The women always begged me to free them, most cried, offered me all manner of sexual favors, but a few, who were brandings with the marks of other owners, wore blank, lifeless expressions. They just entered the cages, waiting for the bidding to start with dead eyes. I wondered if my mother was like these women now. A women that was broken and waiting on death. I processed them as quick as possible with Oz, she knew us, and Zinc’s ways. Oz didn’t even blink when she had her boys shove the captured women into those dirty pens…’cause she had the same eyes…soul-less, like a doll.

Oz wrote out a payment slip while swatting away the flies that swarmed her tents. I, oddly had gotten use to the smell of dirty pens and bodies. “Damn, I wish they’d shut the hell up!” Oz cursed at a gathering down the street.

“Snake-oil?” I asked looking at the elevated stage, as a man paced and spoke to the gathering of townspeople and raiders. It didn’t look friendly, I could hear that much, but the man was unlike anyone I had seen. He was dressed in a crisp, clean suit, I’d seen those only in pictures.

“Off-Worlders…been here two weeks.” Oz blurted. I turned my neck so hard to Oz, I felt a pop.

“Off-Worlders?!", My eyes bugged out and she looked up, “like from the stars, right?!”

“Yeah… what the hell, Sandoval?! She probed me, but I ignored her, shocked at the fact that an honest-to-god colonist was standing a few hundred meters from me. “Why do you care?” I couldn’t hear the speech, but I heard the mob booing and cussing. I watched as several well-armed, armored guards leveled factory-fresh carbines at the hissing crowd. Their gas-masks obscured their humanity, but they didn’t need the unwashed masses to see their eyes to know that they were serious like a heart-attack.

“What do they want, Oz?”

She walked up behind me, “seems the colonies need our help.”

That caught my attention more than the alien-looking colonial soldiers. “Help?” I repeated, trying to listen.

“Yeah, they didn’t help us one bit after the nukes!” I blocked Oz out, and strained to hear pitch from the stars, while recalling my mother telling me about the day of red skies and black rain. How the great cities and important people got swept away in great nuclear fires. Not a single colony came to help us… but now… they needed us? My mind spun.

“War up there, like down here, Sandoval.” She hinted, I uncross my arms, and dug at my belt, searching for something while Oz painted the scene for me. “That man’s been talking about someone trying to wipin’em out… He says they’re coming here, next.” She laughed and took a drink, “My worn ass that someone wants to come here!” She smacked it with a free hand, “But that’s what Mr. Fancy been saying, they been gettin' their ass kick. So they figure they come down here, and get some real warriors, ‘cuz we’ve been killin’ each other since the mushrooms!”

“What’s they been promising?” I turned towards her good eye, and unbuttoned my pants. “Gotta be something big, right, Oz?” She laughed again, and turned to hand me the payment slip that would pay for Zinc’s whoring.

“If you fight, and they win, you never have to come home,” She watched me dig out something from my pants. “Like some green farming colony or some shit like that.” Green, I though, it’s all dust here… I refused the slip, and handed Oz a small leather bag.

“For my sins.” I said as she opened the small pouch and dumped out some wedding rings and loose stones. She wore surprise as she fingered through the jewelry that I collected in secret from Zinc and the raiders. I wouldn’t need money where I was going. “How many?” I asked as watched the platform.

“Women, Sandoval?” She questioned, “goin’ to start a whore house?” She laughed, but I smashed down my fist.

“Fuck, Oz!” I pushed the rings and stones towards her, “free as many as you can!” She was clearly bewildered.

“Where the bloody hell are you going?”, I bolted from her tent, before she could react, I was running at full-clip directly to the stage, the off-world soldiers saw the movement, and trained their compact weapons on me as pushed my way through the crowd. Laser bounced around my forehead, I stopped dead and shot up my arms. The thin man in the suit walked over, hand on a pistol, brushing aside his guards,”you wanting to sign up that bad, eh, boy?” His glare looked deep into my eyes. The mob hushed as I looked back this flea-bitten dust town, then back to the flawless pressed uniform.

“Ready to go, sir.”

8 comments:

  1. Hello William!

    Your stories are getting even better!! I like this one. This idea shows a lot of promise- you should keep working on it. Maybe you could someday make a book out of this story.

    The off-world soldiers must look like Overwatch soldiers from Half-Life 2. Gas masks and compact automatic weapons- just what you need for visiting the remnants of a war-torn Earth.

    You've managed to invoke the feel of certain older SF stories. The theme of off world colonists leaving the Earth before an atomic war destroys civilization reminds me of some of the old Ray Bradbury stories, where colonists on Mars would look up one night to see the Earth erupt into nuclear fire. Many old SF stories place an atomic war happening sometime in the future.

    I'm looking forward to the next installment of this series. I suspect our protagonist will be finding that our off-worlder friends are going to send him to some pretty hellish situations. Who exactly is attacking the off-world colonies? Hopefully not insect aliens- we've had those already. Maybe another kind of alien race with advanced technology, or perhaps aliens composed of several different symbiotic creatures- try for some truly original aliens.

    Christopher Phoenix

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  2. Thanks! This story as been in the works for three years, and the basic idea came from the first epsiode of ST:TNG...1987.
    The aliens are something I have been working on since I first played Half-Life 2.
    Mr. Phoenix, you have an assigment, I need a hard-science pulse laser rifle for use by these soldiers in the flash-fiction. Please comment back with the design if you would be willing...I'm tired of writing about bullets...for a change.

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  3. I have an assignment!! A pulse laser rifle based on hard science... I am quite willing to design a pulse laser rifle for your flash-fiction. I might need a little time to work out all the details, but I won't take too long. I already have a feel for what a real laser rifle might be like.

    I can understand that you would get tired of bullets after a while. Bullets are popular nowadays, but lasers have a certain romance about them. Realistic energy weapons are actually really cool.

    I have a question, however. Are all the off-worlder firearms in your story going to be ray-guns, or are the pulse-lasers unique and powerful firearms used by the soldiers against the aliens? Are the rifles and pistols the off-worlders are threatening the unruly crowd with laser rifles, or are they using projectile weapons? It would make sense that they would not take along expensive and powerful pulse lasers if all they need is a compact automatic weapon, since they are threatening humans, not fighting aliens. Sort of like in Half-Life 2, where the CP units use pistols and compact automatic weapons, but the heavier units and transhuman soldiers use Overwatch Standard Issue Pulse Rifles. Soldiers who had to deal with heavily armed and hostile alien forces are more likely to feel the need for energy weapons than soldiers that only have to deal with other humans.

    I have some ideas for the pulse lasers- I will comment back as soon as I have worked it out. Do you think you could perhaps name the character who designed the pulse lasers in the story Mr. Phoenix? Most guns have a designer- like Eugene Stoner, who designed the AR-15/M-16 rifle, or Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47. Mr. Phoenix could have decided that human forces needed powerful new energy weapons to counter the alien threat and utilized advanced technologies to create a handheld pulse-lasers.

    Christopher Phoenix

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  4. My ideas for the pulse laser are them to be used against a series of enslaved alien spieces using bio-armor (still working on that), and I thought about some soldiers buying traditional bullet weapons from the black market, like US soldiers using the AK-47 in Vietnam and dumping the M16.
    Or they use the laser in conjuction with other weapon systems, like rapid fire gauss guns, some sort of machine guns...frankly, I wanted something different for Empty Places than caseless KEW or traditional firearms.
    The name, at the moment, is the Steyr-Phoenix MILSPEC laser rifle...it can be changed, but I think the idea for the inventor....Dr. Phoenix..hmmm

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  5. You know- if you want something other than ordinary firearms or caseless ammo rifles like the Heckler and Koch G11 (or M41A!!) for a nearer future fiction than Empty Places, you could always try chemical laser firearms. I already designed a laser blaster for your story Empty Places, but I am still doing research on laser firearms, and if you want something different for another story, I think I would like to design something a bit grittier and dirtier, based on research in chemical lasers.

    Chemical lasers generate laser light with a chemical reaction, mixing together chemical fuels in a combustion chamber. Chemical laser are capable of continuous output in the megawatt range, and a lot of research has gone into them. They are much more powerful than current solid state lasers, and the most powerful prototype "ray-guns" are chemical lasers. The off-putting aspect of chemical lasers is that they require vats of toxic, explosive chemicals, and the exhaust from a chemical laser is very toxic. The exhaust can be as big a danger to the user as the laser is to the target.

    Some science fiction has suggested that man-portable chemical laser firearms will be used in the future. Generally, such weapons contain the chemicals in cartridges or magazines and some sort of filter to neutralize the exhaust gasses. The output is continuous-wave, a beam shining constantly at a steady output for a fraction of a second to a second.

    David Langford mentioned such a weapon, suggesting the user would have to carry a big vat of toxic chemicals on his back to fuel the hand weapon itself.

    It seems that David Langford has already been left behind- this patent application from TRW systems describes a chemical laser capable of providing short bursts of continuous wave lasing action from portable and disposable cartridge units. The plan is to store the dangerous fuel in cartridges, so they would be easy to carry and not present a tempting target for the enemy. In the laser, the cartridge would be ruptured, releasing a flow of reactants to fuel a short burst of continuous wave laser action. The heat and neutralized reactants are removed from the laser cavity after the shot.

    Christopher Phoenix

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  6. Here is a link to the patent application.
    http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3863176.html

    Here is a another link that discusses the SF use of chemical laser firearms.
    http://www.orbitalvector.com/Firearms/Laser%20Firearms/LASER%20FIREARMS.htm

    I had been resisting the use of chemically fueled laser carbines since I did not know how much reactants you'd need for a shot, or if it is practical to carry them in cartridges. Now that I have found serious proposals to create portable chemical laser weapons that provide short bursts of continuous wave laser action from portable and disposable cartridge units, it seems that this might be the direction energy weapons will take if solid state, electrically powered lasers are not practical.

    This technology would be very useful on future battlefields. A portable, cartridge fed, sealed laser that could generate short bursts could be used for both lethal and non-lethal applications. Non lethal applications would include include target designation, infrared battlefield surveillance, range finding, jamming and blinding infrared optical devices, optical intelligence purposes, etc, according to the patent description. As for lethal applications- I heard somewhere that a portable laser sniper rifle designed by TRW systems would burn a hole straight through a soldier from a mile away...

    TRW systems already mentioned building a portable laser a few soldiers could carry. Perhaps a portable DEW carbine for individual soldiers could be designed this way. The cartridges would be not unlike modern day weapons, and since the laser is sealed, the users would not have to worry about the exhaust melting their faces off. Cartridges could be bundled in magazines. The laser would produce intense CW bursts of laser radiation, lethal to a few hundred meters or more, and capable of dazzling or blinding beyond that. The output would likely be infra-red, invisible to the naked eye. If portable cartridge-fed chemical laser cannons become common on the battlefield, miniaturization of the technology might create weapon a single soldier could use. I can imagine a laser rifle, maybe even a pistol or SMG equivalent, and a heavy laser support weapon be created this way- all fueled by disposable cartridges. Say a century in the future, after chemical laser weapons have become widespread... maybe even earlier.

    If solid state lasers don't become powerful and efficient enough, and powerful batteries are not available, this is how I would create a ray-gun. Perhaps the key to laser firearms is not futilely trying to improve solid state lasers or find batteries strong enough to power them, but to miniaturize chemical laser technology to a scale a human can carry and invent disposable fuel cartridges to power them. Fuel cartridge technology aims to both fuel the laser and dispose of the exhaust in a portable package, something I could imagine a soldier carrying in the future.

    Christopher Phoenix

    ReplyDelete
  7. Here is a link to the patent application.
    http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3863176.html

    Here is a another link that discusses the SF use of chemical laser firearms.
    http://www.orbitalvector.com/Firearms/Laser%20Firearms/LASER%20FIREARMS.htm

    I had been resisting the use of chemically fueled laser carbines since I did not know how much reactants you'd need for a shot, or if it is practical to carry them in cartridges. Now that I have found serious proposals to create portable chemical laser weapons that provide short bursts of continuous wave laser action from portable and disposable cartridge units, it seems that this might be the direction energy weapons will take if solid state, electrically powered lasers are not practical.

    This technology would be very useful on future battlefields. A portable, cartridge fed, sealed laser that could generate short bursts could be used for both lethal and non-lethal applications. Non lethal applications would include include target designation, infrared battlefield surveillance, range finding, jamming and blinding infrared optical devices, optical intelligence purposes, etc, according to the patent description. As for lethal applications- I heard somewhere that a portable laser sniper rifle designed by TRW systems would burn a hole straight through a soldier from a mile away...

    TRW systems already mentioned building a portable laser a few soldiers could carry. Perhaps a portable DEW carbine for individual soldiers could be designed this way. The cartridges would be not unlike modern day weapons, and since the laser is sealed, the users would not have to worry about the exhaust melting their faces off. Cartridges could be bundled in magazines. The laser would produce intense CW bursts of laser radiation, lethal to a few hundred meters or more, and capable of dazzling or blinding beyond that. The output would likely be infra-red, invisible to the naked eye. If portable cartridge-fed chemical laser cannons become common on the battlefield, miniaturization of the technology might create weapon a single soldier could use. I can imagine a laser rifle, maybe even a pistol or SMG equivalent, and a heavy laser support weapon be created this way- all fueled by disposable cartridges. Say a century in the future, after chemical laser weapons have become widespread... maybe even earlier.

    If solid state lasers don't become powerful and efficient enough, and powerful batteries are not available, this is how I would create a ray-gun. Perhaps the key to laser firearms is not futilely trying to improve solid state lasers or find batteries strong enough to power them, but to miniaturize chemical laser technology to a scale a human can carry and invent disposable fuel cartridges to power them. Fuel cartridge technology aims to both fuel the laser and dispose of the exhaust in a portable package, something I could imagine a soldier carrying in the future.

    Christopher Phoenix

    ReplyDelete
  8. I'm sorry I double-posted... Blogger was being Hal-9000 and refused to actually show my comment, even though it acted like it had accepted it.

    I would very much like to find out what CW laser radiation does to the human body. I have found some discussions, but not many- Atomic Rockets only discusses lasers that fire a rapid series of pulses to achieve penetration. From the people who actually build lasers, I've heard long pulse YAG lasers can cause some serious harm to the human body.

    Dune had continuous wave laser weapons known as lasguns. A sustained shot could cut a man in half, but laser weapons were not used much because the interaction between a laser and a Holtzman field caused a massive explosion.

    I suspect a continuous wave laser would burn straight through a target. Since the laser pumps heat into the target, I suspect that human tissue messily vaporize. If you were using a laser rifle that fired a short CW burst, you might not notice since the beam might last only a fraction of a second.

    Christopher Phoenix

    ReplyDelete