Golden Brown - Logical World short

[Ford Prefect]

Please note that this really is short - the shortest thing I've written in a while.

Golden Brown

“I saw a pale horse, and the name of he who sat upon him was Death. And Hell followed with him.”

“Shut up Franklin.”

“Aye Sar’nt.”

Legionnaire Kastmer paused in his walking, his ballistic stormcoat swirling about his ankles. He brought his assault rifle up to his shoulder and surveyed the shattered remains of this place through the various vision filters in his sealed helmet. He breathed cool, recycled air. It was definitely the site of modern warfare. For hundreds if not thousands of miles around, the very crust of the world would be scarred, glassed, opened to the mantle. There would have been dozens more such patches of dead planet. From orbit it would be as though an angry god had struck the surface with a moon sized fist over and over again.

It was a tribute to ferrocrete that even some buildings still had walls. The remains of armour lay strewn along the great street in their thousands. The burnt out and melted hulks of thick armour that were once might tanks had fused themselves to the ground. Occasionally one might find some carbonised bones, but organic material was not designed to survive the rigours of combat outside of shielded suit of armour, and the only common reminder that the collateral damage involved sentient sophonts were the blackened smears in the shapes of dozens of different species, or the white shadows burnt forever into surrounds.

Kastmer shouldered his rifle and freed his head from the composite armour shell that was his smooth, featureless helmet. Flakes of dead skin fell from his head as he shook it, and he took in a deep breathe of what should have been fresh air, but instead tasted stale and hot, smelling of charred flesh and flash broiled meat, of discharged hyper-accelerant and steel. Heat radiated from the ground and smoke coiled into the air in great plumes.

The street seemed to have been subjected to having a tank mounted energy lance; undoubtedly fired down the almost eighty kilometres of road to strike another armoured unit. The heat coming off that blast had melted the road as well as the building fronts around them. The deformed bodies of those unfortunate to have been in the immediate vicinity of such a blast were still locked in the once molten ferrocrete.

A square now and blackened lumps of what used to be sentients. Kastmer went down on one knee and peeled away the roasted flesh of what he believed to be human, and found enveloped in the sickening embrace a girl, curled into the smallest ball Kastmer thought it was possible to be.

“She’s alive. Third degree burns.” He reported, gathering detailed information about her condition through his heads up goggles. Kastmer rolled her onto her back, and brushed aside dried strands of hair from her face.

They had no medico with them. There was no need when most of them were high performance cyborgs and equipped with the best in autodocs. Those autodocs could be used to provided stimulants and life back to the near dead, and so it was that Kastmer’s OASIS had him apply painkillers, nanomachines, temporary synthskin. He moved with unerring precision, guided by the perfect and unfailing sub-Turing intelligence contained within the Hyperspatial Sub-meson processor he carried about with him.

He glanced up at the statue of Our Lady Victory at the centre of the square. Amazingly, she still stood tall and strong, though undoubtedly she would have been subjected to waves of pressure and shrapnel. The girl before him opened her eyes, staring blankly up at the sky. Kastmer, placed his hand beneath her head for support, and she focussed on his face.

“Did they beat us?” she asked, her voice quiet.

Kastmer looked over to the statue, then up at the sky. “No. We won.”

[darthdavid]

You ROCK.

[Hawkwings]

awesome, please expand this!