Big Love, a Logical World Short

[Ford Prefect]

This is my Christmas present to you all. It features both combat and and music. It is a little strange, but this will be the last piece you'll be getting out of me till after mid-January. Enjoy.

Big Love

His name was Leeroy Killcaid, and he was one of the most popular rock stars in recorded history.

Let’s examine how much of an achievement that this is; history has been recorded for a total of a hundred and nine thousand years, and over that time there have been many, many rock stars. Yet in examining the rock music from a million million races across a trillion trillion stars, Leeroy Killcaid still managed to be one of the most popular. He had performed live in front of quintillions of sapients, all on the same planet. Of the countless octillions of humanity, the vast majority had heard his voice. Leeroy had been richer than a Navigator, more famous than the First Lord of the Commonwealth. He had reached out to other species, other galaxies.

No longer. More than ten years ago he had signed onto one of the Crusade Fleets, the vast militaries that the Imperial Commonwealth had created three millennia ago to fight outside of the borders of the Milky Way. It had caused arguments with his band members, but he was set. He’d given them a speech about paying back society in a way that only active combat could “Look at all the dudes and dudettes who bought it back in the Nomad Wars, all the helpless civvies. Ten million worlds smashed into little pieces, a thousand times that number of ships destroyed with all hands lost!” as he spoke, something patriotic stirred within him, the same thing that had driven him to consider joining up “I want to repay what was done then. I want to stand up for those stars and those dwarf galaxies that the ICE has sworn to protect.”

Leeroy hadn’t, at the time, known that the ‘protectorate’ system existed merely to give the Imperial Commonwealth more resources. Every star system was usable in someway, currently seven hundred million star systems were inhabited throughout the Home Galaxy, and just about every other one was used for the purpose of resources; star farms, mining worlds, black hole manufactorum. The Commonwealth consumed an ungodly amount of mass daily; some said thousands of star systems were processed day in day out.

Leeroy knew now, of course, and it irked him. He was not fighting for the noble endeavour of protecting the sophonts of the ICE, but rather to secure the resources required to sate the endless hunger of the gargantuan empire. So here he was; instead of his comfortable jeans and ripped t-shirt, bandanna tied around his head, sweating it out while wailing on his axe in front of an extraordinarily large number of people, he was huddled in the shadow of a stratoscraper, hiding with his squadies as energy weapons with the kind of power that made the sun jealous obliterated hundred acre sections of the city.

Nuclear fire surged through the streets as tanks traded missiles and lance blasts and only the squads’ interlaced shielding saved them from an untimely and ultimately crispy death. When Leeroy had logged into training for the first time and met the artificial intelligence who taught the Macwood Fleet Crusade’s soldiers everything there was to know about war, he had been told the following, rather bleak statement:

“You are to be the poor bloody infantry. As far as everything has come in warfare, including the increasing escalation in the power of weaponry involved,” and this was the truth, the smaller infantry portable weapons (such as Leeroy’s rifle) could vaporise an unarmoured posthuman, “Infantry has never been discarded, but it has been improved. Fully equipped, you will be stronger, faster, smarter and so much more deadly. Fully shielded, you will be able to take a hundreds of times more firepower than your armour could manage. However, this is useless in the face of total warfare, the kind which you will encounter often. Cities will be levelled and the crust itself split open.”

In the far distance, on the horizon, there was a flash of intense brilliance so great that it was as though everything had gone white, and if Leeroy had not excellent flash suppression equipment, then the brightness would have smote him dead. A pillar of light descending from the dark heavens, scattering the coal black clouds out for miles in every direction. It struck the earth and the world itself shook as though a god had taken up a hammer the size of Luna and brought it down into the crust.

The flash was brief enough, and followed by an explosion of trillions of tons of debris, thrown up into the air as a great wave that blackened the sky. Through it Leeroy could see flashes of molten red, as though Hell itself was coming up to the surface to collect him personally. Great pillars of hot molten rock spewing out from the broken crust.

“Oh Breaker take me.” Muttered Gelsin, leaning heavily on her drum-fed missile launcher “The shields are down.” The squad collectively craned their heads up at the sky, at the flashes through the thick rain of black debris. The earth shook heavily again as another beam of coherent electromagnetic death shot through the above sky, and struck the far edge of the city. A rain of molten metals began as well as the material torn from the crust and hurled through the air.

“I seriously hope they stop shooting the planet.” Grumbled Vesker, just to Leeroy’s left “I hate ortillery in the same hemisphere as me.”

“Let’s move squad, on the bounce!” Snapped the sergeant and as one they moved, heading for the building they had painted on their HUDs.

“Sharks on the right!” shouted Rookie. This was what Leeroy hated a lot about warfare, the thick jamming that went on; and thick it was, almost like a soup of blinding proportions. With every man and his dog stealthed up against a soldier’s sensors, you couldn’t tell if anyone was there outside of three hundred metres if you didn’t have line of sight.

They were not soldiers you wanted line of sight to – Selakhar, armoured heavily in their power suits, wrist mounted guns ready to fire, shoulder mounted weaponry active and seeking. There was no time to order the squad to scatter before the shooting started, nor was there any need to. Imperial rifles barked as Selakhar energy cannons replied, sending bright knives of violet light stabbing through the falling rain of black debris, cutting molten grooves through the ferrocrete, slicing their way through a block of stratoscrapers leaving glowing tunnels through hundreds of streets.

Leeroy kept his head down as grav-driven missiles sailed across the uncomfortably short distance. The Selakhar were packing some serious explosive death on their persons; anti-armour ‘breacher’ type missiles designed around shield penetration and directing the blast of its amat matrix, long range antipersonnel missiles carrying kilograms of antimatter for reaction with an equal amount of matter, super-dense kinetic kill missiles designed to fly about at just about the speed of light. The first was overkill, the second dangerous to the firers at this range. Rather, a salvo of micronukes was launched off down the street at point three cee. ECM flung the fast moving rockets off target and into the surrounding starscrapers. Fireballs almost fifty metres across blossomed for nary a third of a second.

Winds of great strength blew away the falling debris from the previous orbital strikes, taking up billowing clouds of dirt and dust. Leeroy crouched down in cover as tactical information showed up on his Squad Level Integration System (known colloquially as ‘Slice’). He got to his feet with the rest of Second Fireteam, ‘Boo’ phasing and stealth systems went up and they passed through the walls like silent apparitions; the effect was made more real by the fact that the Legionaries had to fly through.

Leeroy glanced right as they passed by the Selakhar – quite nearly a whole platoon. Sixteen battlesuited sharks against only a dozen Imperial Legionaires in ‘soft’ armour was not a fair fight by half. Their guns were bigger and they all had heavies on them. All Leeroy had was greater manoeuvrability – at least their electronics were roughly the same. None the less, superior firepower with an equal level of coordination was the decisive factor here.

Second Fireteam regained proper solidity, and opened fire before their feet had hit the ground, although their anchoring electromags had already sieved a hold of the ground. Leeroy’s Thompson barked, launching high velocity, fin stabilised armour piercing penetrators at an extremely high rate of fire. With targeting support from his OASIS, Leeroy could have opened up a soft boiled egg beyond the horizon without utterly destroying it, but Selakhar ECM was screwing him over and so his aimbot was essentially not nearly as useful as it normally was.

However, the Imperial Army had been trained to deal with this eventuality, training its soldiers to hit an egg on the horizon if need be – nothing fancy, just splattering it. Of course, they couldn’t do it one handed and right off the bat, but that’s unimportant – the Selakhar were considerably larger than eggs, and at less than three hundred meters away far too close for comfort. So Second Fireteam fired on them with Thompsons and drum-fed multi-missile launcher and twin-barrelled hypervelocity repeater. Shield interactions were sharp white flashes, explosions were directed. The squad focussed their fire on one shark and it went down before others could rotate their torsos around.

There’s the thing about Selakhar, they don’t actually have legs naturally. To make up for this, their battlesuits have high-performance mechanicals, which means they can pivot about on their hips. With coordination provided by their alien OASIS type computers they can effectively walk in one direction while facing their torsos elsewhere. Five sharks whipped around to face them, arm mounted weaponry spitting out proton beams frozen into a little shell of individual space/time at an extremely high speed – Leeroy’s OASIS recognised the threat and got him moving into the air, but none the less he was hit by several of the energy ‘bullets’, their contained charges unleashed onto his shield all at once in a coherent, focussed burst. He tumbled backwards and zipped up as they tried to track him with their blue shells. Thousands splattered against the darkened and empty windows, vaporising the small area that they hit and shattering the rest of the panes.

Purple lights lanced up into the sky and Leeroy was almost hit, but collected by the pressure wave which tossed him around like a doll and yanked him upwards. He tucked, rolled and fired a single round from his rifle, a round that would core its way through a mountain, into one of the windows of a nearby building. The sheet of whatever transparent material this planet used instead of buckyglass shattered into little tiny pieces and followed the slug as it passed through the floor, and the next floor, and the twenty or thirty floors before it finished, buried two miles into the crust. Leeroy slid inside and rolled as another energy lance pulsed through at an acute angle, shooting straight through the fifty or sixty floors into the sky.

Leeroy looked up through the metres wide glowing hole as flames licked along the grassy carpet. Why isn’t the floor fire retardant? He asked himself as another Selakhar micronuke raced past on dumbfire-proximity setting. It was very close, and burned clean through the heavy jamming that described Leeroy as an ‘inert object’. Leeroy skipped away as it went through the process of exploding and got maybe a metre and a half away before being collected by the wave of pressure.

The atomic explosion blew out all the windows on that floor that were still intact, and all the other windows for that matter nearby. It threw odd hemispherical desks, s-shaped chairs, alien navis and office equipment, as well as an Imperial soldier away from it, slamming them into walls, or in Leeroy’s case, through the wall, and the next one after that, and another one, just to spite him. He groaned briefly, though he was unharmed, one does not do anything but groan after surviving a close proximity nuclear explosion (other than thank your personal deity, or more appropriately the men and women who designed your shielding and power generation units, and whoever decided to fund the use of them both). He’d lost his rifle in the explosion, and he set about finding it. As he did so, he checked out the progress of his squadmates on Slice.

The Selakhar were advancing, which was classic tactics for the sharks. The make up of the average Selakhar, a nine foot tall and in a big power suit didn’t lend themselves to human tactics. Not as quick or as agile as a Legionnaire, nor as compact, they rarely took cover. Cover was of limited use in modern warfare anyway – nothing you could find on the ground would offer any real protection. Rather it existed to hide your body from being picked out and targeted by your enemy. Seeing as Selakhar are so large, they need larger obstacles to hide behind.

This can be time consuming when the only things that actually stick around long enough to work as cover for a shark are buildings. Not very proactive to be standing behind a building when you could be shooting things and taking objectives and winning planets for the Ocenkar Imperium, is it? Ten thousand years ago Selakhar tacticians determined the best way to keep their boys alive was to have them keep their opponents head down. Withering hails of coordinated fire designed with the intent to makes sure that exposing oneself to open fire would be dangerous in the extreme. Battlefield awareness had long come to the point that if they can fire on you, you will be able to fire back – quickly too.

So that was what the Selakhar were doing, advancing while laying down fire patterns based on simulations that were run at beyond lightspeed by their onboard tactical computers based on the fire arcs recorded the last time the Legionnaires had opened fire. They weren’t moving slowly either, they would make the intersection in less than twenty seconds.

The squads’ graser burned through the finally clearing air with its distinctive crack, and it was replied to by a half dozen energy lances that struck seemingly random areas within twenty metres of where the beam had come from. Another graser shot, and again a lightning fast response, this time with eight lance beams. The burnt out husk of some kind of car flew towards the Selakhar, but it stopped in midair and was flung back at even greater speed. A Legionnaire rolled beneath the tumbling vehicle and sprung up against the nearby building, across the street and into another, placing more rounds against the enemy. Though he crossed the six lane road in the time it took to blink, the Selakhar had him tracked and then saturated his probable landing area with weapons fire, enough to take a sizeable chunk out of the whole building. The starscraper creaked, tilting on melting supports, ready to topple onto Leeroy’s building.

Leeroy knew what Rookie had been up to of course, a distraction ploy. An old, old tactic if you wished to call it that – as the Selakhar were busy obliterating some considerably worthless real estate, the squad did their own saturation, squad support weapons launched missiles and heavy duty energy beams with help from the grav-driven grenades from those without such a weapon. The Selakhar were not bunched together, though where the concentration of sharks was densest, that was where the squad focussed their guns. Obscured by fire, three sharks met their demise, hit by anti-tank weapons, the explosions turning the ground for ten metres in every direction into an orange, bubbling pool.

Return fire was dispersed by the dispersed nature of the attack. The sharks spread further apart and kept moving – if the humans wanted missile hits they’d need to try seekers against Selakhar countermeasures. Staying out in the open was suicide besides, time to move into closer range, inside the buildings.

Leeroy unclipped one of his grenades. His rifle was no where to be found, the tracer didn’t seem to be working. He tossed the little bomb into his left hand and pulled his machete out from behind his guitar. There was rarely any call to use the blade for much, though without his rifle he only it and grenades. Point zero range was surprisingly safe however – less chance of being caught with a nuke when you were right up close and personal with someone’s comrade.

Yes, Leeroy carries a guitar. Why? He’s a rockstar, and in times of stress the lieutenant enjoyed some good music. It didn’t exactly encumber him in any way either. You could tie a cow to Leeroy’s back and it wouldn’t slow him down. He swiped the floor to ceiling window and it burst outward, raining glimmering shards into the street. He leapt out, sighted a Selakhar moving in and flung the breacher down. The device was a marvel of technology, designed to penetrate shield systems through a combination of propulsive tech and self-shielding. It burrowed through the solid plane of protection before not exploding, but imploding. The nuclear force holding the atoms of mass apart themselves was disrupted and half a metre radius of matter collapsed down to neutron star density briefly before expanding back out in the form of a tremendous explosion. Making use of his electromagnetic and gravitic control, Leeroy darted down and into his previous building, ground floor, where he knew that parts of his squad were taking on the sharks.

The shattered room was filled with an eerie blue light thrown out by the Selakhar energy guns, and lit up by the Imperial muzzle flashes. Leeroy dashed forward, vaulted a mass of burnt out desks and used his machete to push aside a Selakhar’s gun arm. He gritted his teeth as the easily stronger soldier applied more force, their force fields crackling together in an impressive display of energy blossoms. Leeroy let go and practically teleported inside the sharks guard, pushing the point of the machete into his shielded abdomen. Leeroy applied as much spare energy as he could onto a monatomic point even as the Selakhar’s arms came round him like some monstrous bear hug, though any bear caught in this hug would be severed in two.

It had been what Leeroy had expecting, and the Selakhar helped to drive the blade through into his own belly, and certain vital organs there. Energy fire was being directed at him now, so he swung the armoured form in the way like a shield. The powered grasp of the alien soldier sealed around Leeroy’s normally frictionless head, trying in vain to crush his skull like a watermelon.

The he was dead, innards vaporised as the blade passed into his flesh. He levitated the shell, braced himself and flung the battlesuit towards the other Selakhar inside, whom absentmindedly caught the suit and turned his shoulder cannon on Leeroy, boring a deep whole into the planet as the target, moved aside, caught by the shockwave. He didn’t last much longer however; without support the Thompson rounds pierced his shields, his armour and his body, killing the creature inside instantly.

Slice had only three members of the squad still kicking, there were still nine Selakhar around to kill them. Leeroy kept down as the sergeant snuck over. The gorilla had his rifle still in hand and he nodded to his soldier.

“We’re screwed Leeroy,” Sarge mused, reloading with an entirely fresh clip, though it was doubtful he had gotten that low on the previous. “Damn sharks had us under fire too quick. I should have had us retreat. Got any more breachers?”

Leeroy settled down, blackened machete tight in his hand “No sir.”

“It’s always the way. I’ve got plenty of microgrenades left, but I don’t feel like spamming them up with three hundred and twenty milligrams of amat matrix.”

“Aren’t we supposed to ruin planets in combat sir?” Leeroy asked, though it was truly a rhetorical question.

“That’s right, but I don’t intend to get caught in my own explosions, nor do I intend to put the rest of my squad in danger that way. Frankly, I wish this thing would just end. This tiny skirmish with no one around doesn’t feel right; there are tens of millions of us running about this city.” He shrugged his big gorilla’s shoulders “Like that mechanised column pushing this way.”

Sarge sounded both stunned and extremely happy, and Leeroy felt the same. What lucky chance had struck that Imperials would be coming this way, racing down the roads at hundreds of miles per hour? It certainly wasn’t due to any calls for help from a single beleaguered squad.

AFVs hit the Selakhar with heavy repeaters, the light grav tanks nipping around like a monkey to surround them. In mere seconds they were dead, hit with two many vehicles too quickly. Leeroy stood up with his sergeant and stepped out into the street to be greeted by one of the tanks. Leeroy had talked with tanks before, a single intelligence guiding whole squadrons of the things.

“Legionnaires.”

“Tank.” Replied the sergeant as more vehicles roared past. “You’re hitting deep into the lines?”

“A simultaneous attack, yes. If you could mount up I can deliver your squad back to our lines. One light tank isn’t a loss to be noticed.” The sergeant nodded and motioned for Leeroy to get on before knuckling over to hurry Wilson, the last squaddie, onto the vehicle. Without a moment’s pause, the tank flung itself back round the corner and towards the command lines. Leeroy looked down at the passing vehicles safe beneath the bubble of their theatre shield.

“Hey tank.” Leeroy said quietly.

“Yes Legionnaire?” the tank replied.

“I’m going to ask you to do something pretty stupid. Will you take me out to the attack zone?”

“Killcaid!” the sergeant snapped.

“I’m afraid not. I have a job to do.” The tank said evenly “The attack is under strictest stealthing, it can’t afford to be disrupted.”

“What if I told you that I intended to end this?”

The intelligence behind the tank had mused for what an organic would term ‘an insignificantly brief moment’ and considered Leeroy Killcaid. In close contact he was able to examine his physiology, his mind, the way he said his words. The tank’s brain was extremely intelligent and even with a considerable helping of common sense; he came to the same conclusion.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this.” Said the tank, booting both the sergeant and Wilson of its hull and onto another one of its frames before zipping down the road at high speed.

“Leeeeeeeeee-ROY!” shouted the sergeant ineffectually as he was carried away by the second tank.

They accelerated past the armoured column in the blink of an eye, racing past stratoscrapers that were broken into jagged teeth that reached for the sky. Leeroy pulled off his helmet, clipped it to his belt then pushed his snoopers up onto his forehead. That done he pulled his guitar off his back, out of its case and started to tune it. It was a custom made Stratocaster that Hendrix himself had given to him. That was a great day, when he first put his hands on this guitar.

The Selakhar were getting closer, so the tank enveloped them in a heavy duty stealth field, so impermeable that nothing, not the gravity signature or Sub-etha signals got through it on either side and the tank had to poke a little camera through it to see. In this bubble of you-can’t-see-me-I’m-not-there, Leeroy formed his fingers into those familiar shapes and stroked the strings. It sounded good.

“The sharks are up ahead, a full command post. I’m glad I’m under this field though because their point defence would be withering.” Leeroy stood up “I guess I’m your stage then.” The stealth field went up even as Leeroy started playing, using the fine gravity control of his suit and that of the tank to form a speaker. His fingers splayed across the G, the D, the A. It was just like another concert only this time, it was a concert where if the audience disliked him, the could throw nuclear weapons at him.

“Looking out for love,” he sang out in a voice that would have made Lindsey Buckingham proud, his voice amplified a hundred times. “In the night so still. Oh I’ll build you a kingdom, in that house on the hill.” The Selakhar paused before wiping Leeroy out of the sky “Looking out for love! Big, big love.” He stretched the last word out and the marshal of the Selakhar attempted to raise his eyebrows even as the wind turned against them. He didn’t even have eyebrows to raise, and yet he wanted to raise them.

“You said that you loved me, and that you always will,” the music seemed to getting louder, or at least more intense – the very buildings themselves were buckling away from him. “Oh you begged me to keep you, in that house on the hill.”

The sharks waited no longer and opened fire, emplaced cannons and missile launcher opening up on Leeroy and his tank. But as he reached the chorus again, and his fingers moved faster again, moving into the solo of the song, energy beams and missile just exploded into nothing. Leeroy’s fingers moved like spiders and deep within his mind he thought that it might have been his greatest performance to date. The road was cracking and the wind had taken up hurricane intensity, then went beyond that. Starscrapers ripped themselves free and flew out to the horizon, across the sea. Waves grew higher and higher.

“I wake alone with it all, I wake up, but only to fall.” Even as he sang, the clouds circled overhead as though Leeroy himself was the eye of some storm. Steam rose from the ocean and the massive Selakhar command post was moving. Standing on his balcony, the marshal watched as kinetic kill missiles vaporised themselves and plasma lances bent away from the musician.

“It seems that we have reached a new plane of music,” he remarked as the crust threatened to crack, red flashes showing in the ground “Where instrument and musician becomes as one, and reaches to the edge of the universe.” Leeroy reached the climax of the final chorus, and the marshal, as well as his fully shielded command post, as well as the entire city from horizon to horizon, were gone in white hot flash. Leeroy kept on strumming, pushing back the ocean into titanic wall dozens of miles high.

And then he stopped.



Thanks to Lindsey Buckingham for writing the song that inspired this. Fleetwood Mac for the win!

Mischellaneous information: The Thompson rifles used in this short aren't actually rifles, though they look like them at first glance. The correct term would be 'repeater', though I like the word rifle.

[Kwizard]

Great stuff. Just curious, what's the general idea you have in mind for the next one?

[Ford Prefect]

Cheers. The next thing I post will definetly be another chapter of my Warhammer 40,000 fanfic, Astrum es mues Oyster, which many have been waiting for.

[Admiral Bravo]

As always another excellent Logical World short, Ford.

[Hawkwings]

awesome as always. On a related note, did he just vaporize that entire armored column, as well as every other friendly unit in the city? Or just everything in front of him?

[Ford Prefect]

Only everything in front of him, the grav-tank broke ahead of the main assault as well, so there were no Imperial losses from the Power of Rock.