The Gaming Outpost

Ethereal black smoke domed the sky; the grit of it clung to the teeth, and clogged the throat. Looking down the descent of the white marble way, between the awnings of the avenue of merchants, while the distance distorted, blurred, and stung the eyes and the brain for the smoke drifted here too past the unseeing and unknowing residents of the City of Four Hills. But the hunter saw, smelt, tasted the bitter smoke. It creeped as if to jump up on his shoulder when he was not looking, hooked beneath his sole to make the stone unwelcome met, and curdled around ankles seeking trippage and damage.

The hunter knew it of old. He had destroyed vampires in Philly, and in Costa San Rico, and on the streets of Old London with each city a resident of different worlds. All these different in their form, and powers, and sometimes even natures, but all held the taint of the Undead, by their very existence they let into a particular Reality their gritty, bitter entropy.

For a vampire not only is often Damned, and soulless, and a bloodthirsty monster, but he hastens the heat death of the universe, and spreads ill luck by its mere existence. Thus the hunter hunted, but not as a hero. He had been such, but by his second hunt, when the screams of the burned thing echoed in his ears, he knew better. He was not a hero. He was a janitor, a garbageman, a sewer tech.

Still, he had not seen such a mass of mono-taste smoke. It meant several things. The single taste made it clear there was but one Monster. But the steadiness of it made clear that the Monster was a master.

But that saved the worse for last. For most Masters become reclusive and static. The hunter had met one that he had been unable to kill, somewhat unwilling in truth, who lived on a teaspoon of blood a month. Such was the nature of the Master Vampire. But, here…here was different. Here a master had not retreated from the world, and learned economy and durability. Here a master had gone the opposite way and become profiligate and debauched in a sea of blood.

And that worried the hunter greatly.

At the head of a column of mounted knights, Sir Raspers of Harrowgard aka Thomas Victor Jennings of Palmetto Lane, Pensacola, Florida, Earth rode forth on his giant bay horse. Leaving the castle behind and the cheering lads, and weeping maids, the double line of twenty kept at an easy trot down to the Sea Road. There, they turned south as they clattered throught the empty streets of what had been a fine fishing village before the raiders burnt it. Not wanting to as the ashen smell still clung to the ground, Sir Raspers known for his smoker’s voice, reined the column back to a walk for the Sea Road was treacherous underfoot with rocks bobbing to the surface after every winter, and on occasion a sheer drop off cliffs to the left and into the sea.

By noon, they had reached the first guardpoint, and they stayed to enjoy a repast and a report from the worried men there. Inside the low earthen walls, they ate their bread, cheese, and ham, and then set out again.

By nightfall, they were a few miles short of the next guardpoint so they pushed on into the twilight until they reached it. This caused no little bit of worry to the guardian quartet who heard a large group come up the road at night, and so they were greeted with especial relief and gladness.

The warmth of the fire after the occasional salt spray of the day, and the hard riding was also welcome as was the cooking sausage and pears. Sir Raspers went aside to talk with his lead men, and the captain of the guardpoint as he took the time to smoke one of his few remaining cigarrettes. Despite what people said, a pipe was just not the same for him.

He took the reports, and then had the chaplain pray, and then bade his men to sleep which they did for tommorrow would see them enter the Warthing Wood, a treacherous place home to bandits and unclean things once human, and the day would be even harder than the first.

The kevlax-silk blend armor short sleeve shirt rode up above the tattoo of a spider pierced by a dagger on the sergeant’s right bicep as he crouched by the entrance to the Tunnels. A dark mouth of concrete chunks, held together by molded-green spiderspit, stank of blood and acid as the sun went down, and the interior heat of the underground warrens breathed out into his face, his twitching nose. The scent told him things.

Putting down the heavy plasma rifle, he took up a single pulse lasecaster glove for his right hand, and a spitter digger for his left. Leaving the heavy rifle behind, the sergeant moved forward to the tunnel mouth across the crunching bones of rats, and an occasional cat. Above him, the abandoned downtown towers of Seattle watched with indifference, one might say. The sergeant thought they cheered him on, being the creation of Man, and he being a man, even if he was from another universe.

The glove held its juice in the palm of his hand, in a biological energy pack made of chitin, which were made of sugar in a maximal reflective energy cage that looked like diamonds, but was borrowed from a frog. Point a finger, will the shot, and zaaaaap! Energy would race from the pack, down a fiber optic line, and out a small gate at the tip of the finger.

In order to get in, he’d have to crawl on his belly, and considering he was hunting spiders, who ran at full human sprint in the same place he could crawl, that seemed a bad idea. So he sat the spitter digger to work. The conic mouth inhaled rock chunks at one end, digested them in the tubular middle of two inches, and shot them out the other fan shaped end.

In a few minutes, it was done, and he scooped it back up in the midst of it as his close combat ‘knife’. A spitter could also cut through spiderflesh as well as rock. One would think it was noisy, but the marvelous little machine used contra-vibrations so that running, it was actually more silent than not running. It was a black hole for sound.

The age of the scent, and the intensity told him that there was not a horde waiting for him in the First Waiting Chamber. If there had been, he would have been toting the plasma rifle. Every spider warren had such a place near its exterior mouth so that they could rush out and overwhelm a large foe. The flattened oval shaped clamshell room was fifty feet across tilting down about fifteen degrees, and six foot tall at its center. The sergeant slow stepped into it, looking right, left, up, and down because spiders could dig holes in dirt floors and be up a man’s leg, and in his face faster than you could blink.

Careful to not cut himself with the spitter, the sergeant wiped some sweat off the left side of his forehead before it dripped into his left eye, and then advanced some more, listening, feeling, smelling. They were out there, and it was his job to make the ‘terraformers’ extinct. In a few decades, their masters would arrive in sublight ships, hoping to find a planet all ready for their inhabitation. The sergeant intended to greet them with a spaceship the size of a moon. But first things first. Spider blasting.

“No. You don’t understand!” I shouted, and surgestepped across the bunker to slam Light Colonel Kellman in the chest, and up againsts the dirty ceracrete wall. His powered armor crunched under my bare hands, and his eyes widened at the frank impossibility. And then training kicked in, and he tried to armbar me, but I faded back, and spun him so that he landed facedown on the holotable.

“Stop.” General Cooper ordered. We both moved. Him to rise, and me to circle in the small space amidst the other officers in the Circle. “Next man moves, gets shot.”

The sergeant at arms racked his plasma cannon which was heavy enough that he needed his full powered armor to tote it. It was also big enough to tank down a pammier or an enemy Wolfjumper battletank.

We froze, and I looked calmly at the General. He viewed me with displeasure in his cold, gray eyes.

“Explain without the theatrics.” I started to speak in reaction to this demand, but the general pointed a finger at Kellman.

“Sir. Enlisting untrained women to fight the invading Wolfen would be slaughter. There are no armors available in their size. They have no training. In my pam, I could kill dozens. The Wolfen would gut them.”

General Cooper looked at me with a dead fish like mouth pursed.

“How many?” I said to Kellman.

He blinked, and shook his head.

“How many women would it take to kill you? Give them weapons familiarization and proton double barrels.”

He shrugged and spoke off-handedly.

“I don’t know. Two hundred.”

“Okay, then we send two hundred fifty to get you.”

I said calmly, and then waited. The explosion of outrage came from all sides. I waited some more until the sergeant at arms restored order by shooting a low power pulse into the ceiling.

“Its…” Kellman sputtered.

“Its exactly that bad, gentlemen. Ordinarily, wars avoid civilians. There are no civilians in this war. The Wolfen aim to exterminate the human race. Ordinarily, you want to keep your breeding stock, to be blunt, of young females alive so they can repopulate in one generation. We’re trying to survive for one generation.”

I paused and looked around them.

“If I have to, I’m going to send young women out armed with sticks.” I paused. “And so are you.”

There were tears and shock in everyone’s face, and then a broken voiced General Cooper spoke.

“The verser is right. This is a War to the Knife. Give the orders.”