Chapter 10
"The path to hell is paved with good intentions; the path to government is paved with good intentions and other peoples money." ~ Edvaard Ehrlis,
"Something Stupid This Way Stumbles"
"Love is like forgiveness in this one way; both are only truly possible if you can start with yourself." ~ Ohmish Covenant, 12th century, SGD.
"300 Billion stars, ladies and gentleman. Can you believe it? In just this one galaxy, there are 300 billion stars. And, of them, only 200 or so intelligent life-forms that are still extant, and the oldest intelligent lifeforms are..what do the archeologists tell us? Almost a billion. So, intelligent life showed up a billion years ago. Think about that, folks. And, in all that time; a whole billion years, not one single solitary one of them made a city that didn't smell like piss." ~ Late Show with Terry Yorke
Buran IV was a cold hell; one carved of dirty ice and cracked grey granite, jumbled stones and brutal gash-like crevasses that crisscrossed the terrain like vestiges of some unearthly, unimaginable war.
Except, of course, she could imagine just such a war. She could imagine a struggle so vast and so long-lasting it would deface and destroy an entire planet, or gouge it, or cut it, or freeze it solid. She could imagine it, and, where she could, she would do her best to be as hellish as the terrain itself, and as unyielding, as chaotic, as cold and as deadly. Not because she was inherently bad; such moral categories didn't exist on Buran IV. No; she would be all of those things because they kept her alive. And being alive was preferable to the alternative: as ugly as treading Burans' vast sheets of ice might be, being buried under one of them would be even more terrible.
She sighed, forcing her mind to clear itself, going through a five-step
Boa Dai ritual to pause, reflect, and release bad thoughts before they became a habit. She sighed only in spirit, of course; her body was covered in a viscous, hyper-oxygenated jelly that protected her from
the bone-numbing cold and radiation, but had the down-side of making her feel as if she were drowning. All the training in the world would never make the immersion easier. Some things you had to grit your teeth and move past, though. And the money made the difficulty worthwhile, if not the scenery.
She chuckled mirthlessly, kicking a loose pebble from beneath her foot. She presently stood on a jagged out-cropping overlooking the vast bowl of the Kalombba Crater, a fifty mile around crater that had, in warmer times, been filled with a twenty foot deep lake, now frozen solid. She thought, for a sad moment, of all the small creatures frozen solid in that water, killed when Buran wandered into a dense cloud of interstellar gas. With Burans' feeble light gone, the planet had plunged into this icy hell. And then people like her had come, because hell would be terribly lonely without people like her in it. She shrugged, stepping carefully over a patch of black ice, a subtle grin playing over her face as she found what she'd come for; the Enemy had left tracks here, and recent. Her grin went feral as she unslung her lone weapon, a magnetic-rail sniper, caliber .75.
If she belonged here, it wasn't because she was a lost soul, stumbling through perdition and purgatory. No; she had never been that innocent. It was because the Devil called his own.
"Something Stupid This Way Stumbles"
"Love is like forgiveness in this one way; both are only truly possible if you can start with yourself." ~ Ohmish Covenant, 12th century, SGD.
"300 Billion stars, ladies and gentleman. Can you believe it? In just this one galaxy, there are 300 billion stars. And, of them, only 200 or so intelligent life-forms that are still extant, and the oldest intelligent lifeforms are..what do the archeologists tell us? Almost a billion. So, intelligent life showed up a billion years ago. Think about that, folks. And, in all that time; a whole billion years, not one single solitary one of them made a city that didn't smell like piss." ~ Late Show with Terry Yorke
Buran IV was a cold hell; one carved of dirty ice and cracked grey granite, jumbled stones and brutal gash-like crevasses that crisscrossed the terrain like vestiges of some unearthly, unimaginable war.
Except, of course, she could imagine just such a war. She could imagine a struggle so vast and so long-lasting it would deface and destroy an entire planet, or gouge it, or cut it, or freeze it solid. She could imagine it, and, where she could, she would do her best to be as hellish as the terrain itself, and as unyielding, as chaotic, as cold and as deadly. Not because she was inherently bad; such moral categories didn't exist on Buran IV. No; she would be all of those things because they kept her alive. And being alive was preferable to the alternative: as ugly as treading Burans' vast sheets of ice might be, being buried under one of them would be even more terrible.
She sighed, forcing her mind to clear itself, going through a five-step
Boa Dai ritual to pause, reflect, and release bad thoughts before they became a habit. She sighed only in spirit, of course; her body was covered in a viscous, hyper-oxygenated jelly that protected her from
the bone-numbing cold and radiation, but had the down-side of making her feel as if she were drowning. All the training in the world would never make the immersion easier. Some things you had to grit your teeth and move past, though. And the money made the difficulty worthwhile, if not the scenery.
She chuckled mirthlessly, kicking a loose pebble from beneath her foot. She presently stood on a jagged out-cropping overlooking the vast bowl of the Kalombba Crater, a fifty mile around crater that had, in warmer times, been filled with a twenty foot deep lake, now frozen solid. She thought, for a sad moment, of all the small creatures frozen solid in that water, killed when Buran wandered into a dense cloud of interstellar gas. With Burans' feeble light gone, the planet had plunged into this icy hell. And then people like her had come, because hell would be terribly lonely without people like her in it. She shrugged, stepping carefully over a patch of black ice, a subtle grin playing over her face as she found what she'd come for; the Enemy had left tracks here, and recent. Her grin went feral as she unslung her lone weapon, a magnetic-rail sniper, caliber .75.
If she belonged here, it wasn't because she was a lost soul, stumbling through perdition and purgatory. No; she had never been that innocent. It was because the Devil called his own.
To view this post on G+, click here
Subscribe to:
Post Comments
(
Atom
)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
No comments :
Post a Comment