Armies. (Feedback would be nice.)
Posted: 2003-12-25 06:37pm
Here is a first draft of a little short story I cooked up today:
Armies.
The sun shone down, harshly, on a thoroughly undeserving landscape. The trunks of the plants, yellowed and dry to the elements, stood rigid over the scorched and blasted landscape, towering overhead. The air was filled with the scent of dried vegetation, vivid, razor-edged, intolerable.
Enriching, intoxicating, glorious!
The creatures were huge. Their dark, chitinous carapaces matte black in the light on the plains between the plants. Multi-segmented and six-legged, they sensed the world in a panorama of sound, the echoes, motions and dull thumps of their environment permeating their perception.
-A breeze, high above in the flowering canopies of the stalks, causing them to brush and rub against each other. The rasping sound filling the air.
-The dull, slow sound/ sensation of breezes past limb and antennae.
-The tremble of a comrade’s leg thumping the ground; the vibration travelling, carrying information, data, locations. Answering vibrations returned throughout the formation, carried through dust and rock.
-The scent of anticipation.
The urgency rippled through the boxlike formation, from leg to leg, from antennae to antennae, from mind to mind. It rode in the air and it spread itself through the ground; the need to engage in what lay ahead, to ride the present and lean, mandibles sweeping and slashing, into the near future.
Into battle.
And above all of it, the scents, vibrations and feel of the breeze, was the sound. It filled the air in a dull drone, eliminating all distractions and dulling the mind. It was the source of the anticipation and the fear of these armoured creatures and their martial organisation.
Fear, expectancy, bloodlust!
A comrade stirs, nervously, it’s shivering transmitted to all. An answering mandible taps the ground in reply. Be still. Be calm. In the body of the formation, one individual’s weakness is everyone’s.
And this is all that could be seen or sensed. The dry ground underfoot and the thick dry stalks all around were no clue. The sun, the light and the dappled shadows from the canopies overhead indicated nothing. All that there was was the droning sound.
Resilience! Determination!
A new sound was becoming evident; a new feeling through leg and claw. It was the dull thumping of the first ranks of the formation, hitting the ground with their mandibles, over and over. The act spread through the ranks as the vibration spread through the ground, until the entire formation was doing the same. As if in answer, other distant formations commenced the beat, the ground drumming with their energy and vigour. The battle-cry spreading.
Fight us! Fight us! Fight us!
The battle cry rose to a crescendo. Drumming and stamping, the formations bellowed their fury at the world, and their resilience to the unseeable threat approaching. Several individuals were shaking so violently they seemed almost in spasm, their juddering motion uncontrolled, tapping straight into an instinctive fury they all felt. More individuals, exclusively those in the front ranks, were showing their urgency by darting forward and backwards, demonstrating their willingness to charge. They were chided by their companions around them each time for their lack of discipline, but it was excusable; the atmosphere was palpable, the scents of all invigorating their comrades, causing them too to release pheromones of conflict. It was a vicious spiral with only one possible outcome, as the drone in the air increased steadily.
There was another stirring in the ranks now, as several individuals, -those with the keenest eyes and senses-, spied something which caused alarm. The ranks joined in their release of alarm pheromones and while the battle cry kept up, every member of every formation turned their view upwards, some stilling themselves for a better view through the canopy.
There!
The source of the terrible sound was now in sight, and what a sight it was to behold: The monsters flew, huge wings moving in blurred rapidity, buzzing and propelling the horrible entities through the air, disgusting multi-jointed carapaces glimmering and twiglike legs hanging from their bodies. The sky rapidly filled with the strange alien devils, growing thick with their bodies.
Looking back, against all disciplinary restrictions, one member of the central formation turned to look to the rear, his poor eyes straining. Past the angry mandibles of others in the ranks and shuddering limbs and carapaces, he glimpsed the specialist airborne soldiers to the rear, folding back their carapaces and unsheathing their wings. The rearmost block-formations began to shimmer with reflected light from flight membranes, as they stretched, reared their emaciated bodies and prepared for the inevitable.
The sky was full of the invaders now, humming deafeningly overhead, safe in their thousands, their tens of thousands of rapacious individuals, come to strip the land of all it could give and move on. The airborne drone was a wall of sound, competing with the battle-cry for volume and influence, and the formations clacked and stamped their derision at the airborne monsters.
He looked forward and up at the invaders and snapped his mandibles himself, challenging them to come down and fight. Challenging them all.
But then a third, more strident, tone added itself to the symphony of noise on the air. This was no buzz, no drone and no ground-carried vibration of limbs, but something entirely alien. A high-pitched whine, carried on the air at a frequency so high it would be barely noticeable, save for it’s incredible, agonising volume.
He stiffened then, his limbs locking straight, and every individual in every formation did likewise, responding to the call. The battle-cry faded amidst the trumpeting and the droning of the invaders carried on, dominant and leering triumphantly.
The sound faded then, so abruptly that it was a period before any could react.
But react they did. Their vigour uncapped, their urgency freed, they bellowed. And acted.
He was at first surprised at the roar that sounded behind him, but then he became invigorated at the realisation. The airbornes were taking off! Hundreds of them, their wings beating with a low pulse as they ascended in a great black flock, up and overhead, between the stalks, through the canopy and into the invader swarm. Not soon afterwards, the first of the invader monsters came down. The battle cry at last answered, they pierced the canopy and poured down upon the formations in a torrent, landing amidst them, behind them and in front of them. The aliens retracted their mighty wings, reared and screamed, together, at the ranks, their presence inherent now as a hostile stench.
Charge!
The ranks chose that moment to surge ahead. Exultant, the glorious scent of battle-pheromones raging in his head, he led the charge in the forward ranks of his formation, across the dusty ground at the increasing invader horde ahead and between the forest-stalks.
The nearest of the invaders reared at him, and he got a close look at the monstrosity. A nightmare of ugly morphology, six-limbed and light-brown. It’s rearmost limbs were long and powerful-looking and it’s carapace seemed flexible towards the rear, flexing most disgustingly as it’s forelimbs writhed. Most notable, perhaps, apart from the wings, was it’s face. It’s mandibles were tiny and shrunken, moving continuously as if hungrily devouring the very air. Massive eyes dominated the head of the atrocious creature, and long antennae, far longer than his own, streamed backward from it’s head over it’s body. It seemed far smaller than he had expected, with it’s wings folded up so.
Suddenly, the creature let loose with it’s rearmost limbs and soared overhead in a great bound, landing some distance behind him, in the middle of another formation. He ignored it and carried on, as more invaders landed. One reared up in front of him again, menacing, stinking and defiant.
He removed it’s head with a quick movement of his mandibles. The body slumped and twitched as he ran over it and became trampled by the rearmost ranks. He bellowed and renewed his charge, side-by-side with his fighting comrades, but more and more of the insidious vermin were landing now.
Another invader fell to his mandibles, two of it’s limbs removed and the rest of the body skewered and carried along, the head and forelimbs of the creature hideously continuing to resist, thumping his carapace hollowly. It was long seconds before it fell from him, twitching more slowly now, to be torn up by others, allowing him to see forward again.
The view he contemplated was horrific. The invaders were numbering in their countless thousands, streaming down from the malevolent sky and through the canopy. Clumsily, they alighted wherever they could; canopy, stalk, ground or, more and more frequently, on each other. One of the mindless beasts haphazardly came down and collided with his comrade to the right, sliding over his body and into the ranks behind. It was dreadful. They were mindless, stupid and weak. They were easily despatched by mandible and trampling, but they were relentless. For each of the creatures that fell, five or more took his place. More died, left and right, but he found himself clambering over the writhing bodies of living invaders as he advanced, duelling with those on top.
The high-pitched whine sounded again, and the formations obeyed it’s strident and complex tones. Breaking to the left or right, they broke apart to commence encircling the enemy. His formation broke right, and to his left he saw the dark flanks of assault formations through the forest of parched stalks, charging forward in their own particular path or route of conquest.
The whine came again and again, directing the formations and groups from it’s hidden source, impossible to pinpoint with the purity of it’s pitch. Impossible to ignore. Dark bodies came falling through the canopies and past the stalks; airborne soldiers, limbs grasped around tortured and impaled invaders, protected from impact by their thick carapaces, unlike the soft-bodied monsters they brought down with them, wings folded back as they plummeted to flatten their cargo.
Fights us! Fight us!
The battle wore on, devolving as it did so. Structured formations eventually breaking to their skeletal command chains as individual soldiers got lost and, frequently, killed mistakenly by their own side. The organised carnage had faded to be replaced, now, by a steady tired trudge through carcasses and carapaces. Bodies of the fallen lying underfoot, the battle had to continue, with mandible extended and leaning forward into the future. To fight. To die.
To victory!
Fight us! Fight us!
The high, strident tones continued, ordering the formations under the dry canopies. The war continued.
-------------------------
The battle continued, the protagonists roaring and bellowing in insectile complicity, their means and methods unknowable by any inferior human ear.
It continued beneath the canopies of the dry stalks.
It continued above them, where airbornes mingled with the greater swarm.
It continued up close, on the small-scale, as mandible met carapace.
And it continued on the large scale, where beneath the locust swarm high-pitched sounds, modulated to machinelike purity, commanded compact legions.
The farmer was veiled, his ears plugged against the intensity of the swarm’s susurration as it filled the air, the tiny insects colliding with the veil and crawling hungrily, to be swept aside by a vengeful gloved hand. He observed the field in front of him, it’s warm yellow colours vibrant in the afternoon sun and the heat of the day and smiled, knowing what was going on within.
His gloved hand thumbed a small handheld device, complete with a small screen, showing blotches and dots in chaotic patterns. It was an overlay of the field in front of him, and as he thumbed it, wishing the blotches and formations into different shapes and arrangements, a hundred tight beams of ultrasound streamed out, unnoticed by his mediocre senses.
And under the dusty-yellow crops before him, thousands of genetically-tailored stag beetles marched, fought and fell, each carrying a tiny transmitter on their black hides. Each unknowingly part of this bizarre cycle of man, machine and nature.
After all, chemical treatments were allowed no longer in commercial crops. Pesticides and similar toxins were outlawed outright. This was, after a fashion, an ecologically sound solution to the locust problem. More expensive than most, perhaps, but better than losing a crop to the little beasts. Provident with natural fertilizers too, as the short-lived insects of both forms fell, died and decomposed.
-And, more to the point, it was fun.
The farmer continued to play with the little handheld screen, and grinned under his veil as he did so.
Armies.
The sun shone down, harshly, on a thoroughly undeserving landscape. The trunks of the plants, yellowed and dry to the elements, stood rigid over the scorched and blasted landscape, towering overhead. The air was filled with the scent of dried vegetation, vivid, razor-edged, intolerable.
Enriching, intoxicating, glorious!
The creatures were huge. Their dark, chitinous carapaces matte black in the light on the plains between the plants. Multi-segmented and six-legged, they sensed the world in a panorama of sound, the echoes, motions and dull thumps of their environment permeating their perception.
-A breeze, high above in the flowering canopies of the stalks, causing them to brush and rub against each other. The rasping sound filling the air.
-The dull, slow sound/ sensation of breezes past limb and antennae.
-The tremble of a comrade’s leg thumping the ground; the vibration travelling, carrying information, data, locations. Answering vibrations returned throughout the formation, carried through dust and rock.
-The scent of anticipation.
The urgency rippled through the boxlike formation, from leg to leg, from antennae to antennae, from mind to mind. It rode in the air and it spread itself through the ground; the need to engage in what lay ahead, to ride the present and lean, mandibles sweeping and slashing, into the near future.
Into battle.
And above all of it, the scents, vibrations and feel of the breeze, was the sound. It filled the air in a dull drone, eliminating all distractions and dulling the mind. It was the source of the anticipation and the fear of these armoured creatures and their martial organisation.
Fear, expectancy, bloodlust!
A comrade stirs, nervously, it’s shivering transmitted to all. An answering mandible taps the ground in reply. Be still. Be calm. In the body of the formation, one individual’s weakness is everyone’s.
And this is all that could be seen or sensed. The dry ground underfoot and the thick dry stalks all around were no clue. The sun, the light and the dappled shadows from the canopies overhead indicated nothing. All that there was was the droning sound.
Resilience! Determination!
A new sound was becoming evident; a new feeling through leg and claw. It was the dull thumping of the first ranks of the formation, hitting the ground with their mandibles, over and over. The act spread through the ranks as the vibration spread through the ground, until the entire formation was doing the same. As if in answer, other distant formations commenced the beat, the ground drumming with their energy and vigour. The battle-cry spreading.
Fight us! Fight us! Fight us!
The battle cry rose to a crescendo. Drumming and stamping, the formations bellowed their fury at the world, and their resilience to the unseeable threat approaching. Several individuals were shaking so violently they seemed almost in spasm, their juddering motion uncontrolled, tapping straight into an instinctive fury they all felt. More individuals, exclusively those in the front ranks, were showing their urgency by darting forward and backwards, demonstrating their willingness to charge. They were chided by their companions around them each time for their lack of discipline, but it was excusable; the atmosphere was palpable, the scents of all invigorating their comrades, causing them too to release pheromones of conflict. It was a vicious spiral with only one possible outcome, as the drone in the air increased steadily.
There was another stirring in the ranks now, as several individuals, -those with the keenest eyes and senses-, spied something which caused alarm. The ranks joined in their release of alarm pheromones and while the battle cry kept up, every member of every formation turned their view upwards, some stilling themselves for a better view through the canopy.
There!
The source of the terrible sound was now in sight, and what a sight it was to behold: The monsters flew, huge wings moving in blurred rapidity, buzzing and propelling the horrible entities through the air, disgusting multi-jointed carapaces glimmering and twiglike legs hanging from their bodies. The sky rapidly filled with the strange alien devils, growing thick with their bodies.
Looking back, against all disciplinary restrictions, one member of the central formation turned to look to the rear, his poor eyes straining. Past the angry mandibles of others in the ranks and shuddering limbs and carapaces, he glimpsed the specialist airborne soldiers to the rear, folding back their carapaces and unsheathing their wings. The rearmost block-formations began to shimmer with reflected light from flight membranes, as they stretched, reared their emaciated bodies and prepared for the inevitable.
The sky was full of the invaders now, humming deafeningly overhead, safe in their thousands, their tens of thousands of rapacious individuals, come to strip the land of all it could give and move on. The airborne drone was a wall of sound, competing with the battle-cry for volume and influence, and the formations clacked and stamped their derision at the airborne monsters.
He looked forward and up at the invaders and snapped his mandibles himself, challenging them to come down and fight. Challenging them all.
But then a third, more strident, tone added itself to the symphony of noise on the air. This was no buzz, no drone and no ground-carried vibration of limbs, but something entirely alien. A high-pitched whine, carried on the air at a frequency so high it would be barely noticeable, save for it’s incredible, agonising volume.
He stiffened then, his limbs locking straight, and every individual in every formation did likewise, responding to the call. The battle-cry faded amidst the trumpeting and the droning of the invaders carried on, dominant and leering triumphantly.
The sound faded then, so abruptly that it was a period before any could react.
But react they did. Their vigour uncapped, their urgency freed, they bellowed. And acted.
He was at first surprised at the roar that sounded behind him, but then he became invigorated at the realisation. The airbornes were taking off! Hundreds of them, their wings beating with a low pulse as they ascended in a great black flock, up and overhead, between the stalks, through the canopy and into the invader swarm. Not soon afterwards, the first of the invader monsters came down. The battle cry at last answered, they pierced the canopy and poured down upon the formations in a torrent, landing amidst them, behind them and in front of them. The aliens retracted their mighty wings, reared and screamed, together, at the ranks, their presence inherent now as a hostile stench.
Charge!
The ranks chose that moment to surge ahead. Exultant, the glorious scent of battle-pheromones raging in his head, he led the charge in the forward ranks of his formation, across the dusty ground at the increasing invader horde ahead and between the forest-stalks.
The nearest of the invaders reared at him, and he got a close look at the monstrosity. A nightmare of ugly morphology, six-limbed and light-brown. It’s rearmost limbs were long and powerful-looking and it’s carapace seemed flexible towards the rear, flexing most disgustingly as it’s forelimbs writhed. Most notable, perhaps, apart from the wings, was it’s face. It’s mandibles were tiny and shrunken, moving continuously as if hungrily devouring the very air. Massive eyes dominated the head of the atrocious creature, and long antennae, far longer than his own, streamed backward from it’s head over it’s body. It seemed far smaller than he had expected, with it’s wings folded up so.
Suddenly, the creature let loose with it’s rearmost limbs and soared overhead in a great bound, landing some distance behind him, in the middle of another formation. He ignored it and carried on, as more invaders landed. One reared up in front of him again, menacing, stinking and defiant.
He removed it’s head with a quick movement of his mandibles. The body slumped and twitched as he ran over it and became trampled by the rearmost ranks. He bellowed and renewed his charge, side-by-side with his fighting comrades, but more and more of the insidious vermin were landing now.
Another invader fell to his mandibles, two of it’s limbs removed and the rest of the body skewered and carried along, the head and forelimbs of the creature hideously continuing to resist, thumping his carapace hollowly. It was long seconds before it fell from him, twitching more slowly now, to be torn up by others, allowing him to see forward again.
The view he contemplated was horrific. The invaders were numbering in their countless thousands, streaming down from the malevolent sky and through the canopy. Clumsily, they alighted wherever they could; canopy, stalk, ground or, more and more frequently, on each other. One of the mindless beasts haphazardly came down and collided with his comrade to the right, sliding over his body and into the ranks behind. It was dreadful. They were mindless, stupid and weak. They were easily despatched by mandible and trampling, but they were relentless. For each of the creatures that fell, five or more took his place. More died, left and right, but he found himself clambering over the writhing bodies of living invaders as he advanced, duelling with those on top.
The high-pitched whine sounded again, and the formations obeyed it’s strident and complex tones. Breaking to the left or right, they broke apart to commence encircling the enemy. His formation broke right, and to his left he saw the dark flanks of assault formations through the forest of parched stalks, charging forward in their own particular path or route of conquest.
The whine came again and again, directing the formations and groups from it’s hidden source, impossible to pinpoint with the purity of it’s pitch. Impossible to ignore. Dark bodies came falling through the canopies and past the stalks; airborne soldiers, limbs grasped around tortured and impaled invaders, protected from impact by their thick carapaces, unlike the soft-bodied monsters they brought down with them, wings folded back as they plummeted to flatten their cargo.
Fights us! Fight us!
The battle wore on, devolving as it did so. Structured formations eventually breaking to their skeletal command chains as individual soldiers got lost and, frequently, killed mistakenly by their own side. The organised carnage had faded to be replaced, now, by a steady tired trudge through carcasses and carapaces. Bodies of the fallen lying underfoot, the battle had to continue, with mandible extended and leaning forward into the future. To fight. To die.
To victory!
Fight us! Fight us!
The high, strident tones continued, ordering the formations under the dry canopies. The war continued.
-------------------------
The battle continued, the protagonists roaring and bellowing in insectile complicity, their means and methods unknowable by any inferior human ear.
It continued beneath the canopies of the dry stalks.
It continued above them, where airbornes mingled with the greater swarm.
It continued up close, on the small-scale, as mandible met carapace.
And it continued on the large scale, where beneath the locust swarm high-pitched sounds, modulated to machinelike purity, commanded compact legions.
The farmer was veiled, his ears plugged against the intensity of the swarm’s susurration as it filled the air, the tiny insects colliding with the veil and crawling hungrily, to be swept aside by a vengeful gloved hand. He observed the field in front of him, it’s warm yellow colours vibrant in the afternoon sun and the heat of the day and smiled, knowing what was going on within.
His gloved hand thumbed a small handheld device, complete with a small screen, showing blotches and dots in chaotic patterns. It was an overlay of the field in front of him, and as he thumbed it, wishing the blotches and formations into different shapes and arrangements, a hundred tight beams of ultrasound streamed out, unnoticed by his mediocre senses.
And under the dusty-yellow crops before him, thousands of genetically-tailored stag beetles marched, fought and fell, each carrying a tiny transmitter on their black hides. Each unknowingly part of this bizarre cycle of man, machine and nature.
After all, chemical treatments were allowed no longer in commercial crops. Pesticides and similar toxins were outlawed outright. This was, after a fashion, an ecologically sound solution to the locust problem. More expensive than most, perhaps, but better than losing a crop to the little beasts. Provident with natural fertilizers too, as the short-lived insects of both forms fell, died and decomposed.
-And, more to the point, it was fun.
The farmer continued to play with the little handheld screen, and grinned under his veil as he did so.
