This weeks fff. It's actually a perfecta, coming in (unintentionally) at one thousand words. In all the near fiction fff I've got stored in my trunk, it's the first time I've actually 'set foot' on the moon.
Please enjoy.
SERENITY VALLEY
There were fifty of the Serens, standing there in the field, golden grains and green grass swaying around their lithe bodies. Men and women from Serenity City, the first and last line of defense: bare-chested and dressed only in brightly colored loincloths and handmade headdresses with swords, spears and shields held in various states of readiness.
If you knew their tribe, and my time there had made me loosely familiar with them, then you understood that the paints and patterns which illustrated their bodies told stories of allegiances, families, hopes and fears. Their paints indexed them within the technosocial milieu that was their city.
But the paint was not only decorative: it was also ablative, designed to turn, for a precious few seconds, the lasers of their sworn enemies, John Laws in service of the Grand Jurist.
And the loincloths were not some obedience to some false god of modesty. The loincloths held such tools as they would take into battle: short stabbing swords, homemade grenades and laser pointers, which on the surface were safety devices, but turned into deadly weapons within the confines of the city.
Last, the headdresses, beaded and woven, were comms to link the Serens into a completed whole and, hopefully, dampen the effects of any stunners the Laws would employ.
I wore one myself.
I am Loc, a sworn Raconteur rendering service to the Committee for the Defense of the Moon and the story I tell is not my own. It is the story of those brave s’objects, those social objects, those free men and women who would lay down their lives in defense of their home and their idea.
I observe: I tell.
The Serens were well kitted in all manner of homebrewed weaponry. Their vending machines were controlled, as all of ours are, from earth and had long ago been shut off. Not that you could make anything as simple as a blaster in one of them; the request alone would trigger an inquiry from Earth. But the Serens were tricky makers. Before the vendees were shut off, the Serens stockpiled caverns full of foodstuffs, sheets of steel, consumer electronics and blast cotton. Their engineers, historians really, began fashioning what they could as soon as word reached the city elders: the Grand Jurist would enforce her subpoena and committed the John Laws to their first off planet police action.
The Serens chose to defend at the reception dome, which linked the surface landing pads with the warrens and caverns of the city below. They knew something of their foe: the Grand Jurist would strike with the humanity of a neutron bomb, wiping out the Serens while sparing the city. Cities, built at such great expense, are expensive: the people, fungible.
The John Laws began by forcing the airlock. The Serens had disabled the lock and piled what salvage they could manage in front and around it: those defenses melted, as the Serens knew they would. Out of the smoke and steam they came: not the John Laws, but their Enforces. Stick like quadrupeds, they entered through the airlock and spread off the walk way into the fields on either side. Communicating in clicks and whistles, the Enforcers began their slow walk towards the Serens. Against an Enforcer, a man, no matter how brave, was merely a subject for dissection.
The Enforcers stepped out of the high grass an into the flower beds decorating the center of the hall when first one, then another, stopped and sniffed. Their careless walk into the flowers triggered a defense: with a puft, the flowers began releasing clouds of pollen into the air. Pollen the Serens had tailored specifically to the genome of the Enforcers. The lead Enforcers began twitching: they fell and died in agony. Enforcers have enough intelligence to kill a man or too save itself: the survivors, sensing the danger, began a clicking, whistling retreat.
The Seren defenders cheered: let the Grand Jurist add biological warfare to her warrant!
But the lead John Law was made of sterner stuff: he overrode the instincts of his Enforcers and ordered them forward. Only one Enforcer made it across before dying at the feet of the Seren defenders: the rest lay in bulky heaps, legs and arms splayed.
“Forward; bounding overwatch,” barked the hidden John Law. The John Laws, in articulated armor with lasers glowing, flowed down and out the airlock. First in their tens, and then by the hundreds, they flowed into the reception dome. They took up positions behind and besides the corpses of the Enforcers: the John Laws had built their own defensive positions out of the bodies of their Enforcers.
“Find targets: engage at will,” ordered the John Law commander.
A hand pulled me roughly to the ground as the lasers sizzled overhead. I was staring into the face of one of the Seren defenders.
“Snap. That’s not good; they got a foothold, Raconteur,” she said. “We’re pulling back into the corridors. You first.”
As I began to object that my place as Raconteur was up here, observing, she shook her head and simply said, “Orders.”
Her orders took me down the defended corridors and shunted me into bootleg paths carved, obviously, without permission, by the Serens. She pushed me towards an airlock at the end of one of these and said: “There’s a suit and a buggy on the other side: be on it and begone.”
The rest, you know: the domes collapsed, taking with it the whole of Serenity City. In the General Peace that ensued, the bodies of hundreds of John Laws were found. Of the Seren defenders, only some thirty corpses were discovered.
My tale is over: this is what I saw.
But listen, Serenity City is not the only City guilty of hacking the systems and structures of earth, bleeding off whatever knowledge they can. Ask yourself, listener, is the fate of Serens to be fate off all our cities?
Information wants to be free: what will you do?
Comments