Practise Bits: Raid
February 5, 2012 in Fiction
Luisa nervously walked barefooted, her dress hem swinging with each vigorous step, down the right-hand grassy rut. In her hands was her ‘walking stick’, legally three feet long, and not an inch longer. The air was balmy, and trees thrust out new growth on either side of the wagon track road, but her eyes kept moving, watching, searching.
And then she saw a Greenpeacer courser, a huntsman step from the woods that by law belonged only to the Lord of the Green. And her mouth went dry as she saw how tall he was, and broad of shoulder. If only she had one of the forbidden guns, but against a brute like that, she might as well give up, and hope he would be kind for the Lords were enlightened. They did not believe in being bound by marriage, by love between a man and a woman for life. Instead, they believed every women they met was fascinated by their very wondrousness. This was enlightenment and reason, and disagreement was reactionary prudishness, the enslavement of reproduction to outmoded moral codes.
So, Luisa fell on her knees as the man ran toward her at an easy lope, and prayed for deliverance.
Her prayer was answered.
A bright light, pinpoint, but blazing greater in fury than the
Sun of Newton System came closer, and both Luisa and her would-be rapist knew that an angel had come for him.
“Push it.” The flat order echoed through the bridge, and the nav officer shoved the nozzles which mixed anti-matter and matter open to their greatest aperture. And the Seeker of Things slammed forward, kept from slaughtering its crew by the inertial damper fields.
“We’re going in on the plane of elliptic.” Kevin Largos spoke, and felt at his black velvet collar which covered a stiffening board that gouged at his throat. He was not used to his duty as a first lieutenant with the Seekr, but he had served as security on the Mary Piper, and so he had some notion of proper military behaviour.
“They wil be…” Expecting us, he thought to say.
“They are primitives, mostly. In this system, they have barriers to catch us, but not in front of the supposed Kuiper Belt, and despite the lack of evidence they still fudge their data to make an Oort Cloud appear. This makes it easier for us to sneak in.”
And so it was that the ship plunged undetected into the Veranek Solare System, until Luisa and the courser saw its drive flame. And then men in powered battle armor leapt off, and began to search for datafiles stolen centuries ago. The huntsman raised his legal gun to one of them, and that man obeying the dictates of training shot him down with a plasma bolt leaving Luisa to watch wide-eyed with praise to God as the shiny metal angels bounded away after striking down the thug with their sword of flame.