The Fallen

Prose for the Fallen

Wide-eyed and terrified

Upgraded and modified

Tormented urge becoming amplified

By inhuman torture of needs denied

Prologue

Carly stood on the precipice at the edge of the clearing, looking down at the white river thundering past far below. Spray kicked up from the water as it tumbled over the rocky valley, obscuring the view further up into the mountains; across the valley atop the steep granite cliff the hills rolled away, gradually subsiding into the plains, empty, barren, abandoned, far beyond her view.

She remembered only a short while ago standing on the exact same spot, gazing at the rugged, serene beauty of the mountainside. And she had said to herself, right then, that she would be happy to spend the rest of her life there with Lonnie, under the fast-moving clouds and the chill, hard-edged wind, so clean and fresh and free of pollution. She had not considered at the time that some day, fate may bring her back to that very spot, and have her stand atop the cliff, feeling the cold breeze on her tear-stained cheeks, wondering just how much of that sentimental thought had been truth.

Fallen

Carly hugged the minigun close to her chest, struggling to keep its heavy barrel aimed away from her with one hand while the other scrabbled against the slimy concrete wall, desperately searching for a hand-hold. Her right boot skittered frantically against the slippery floor, leaving grey trails of bare concrete in the brown-green slime. Her left foot barely moved, sticking out from her leg at an obscene angle; she winced every time it touched the floor, trying to stifle her moans of agony.

Tears of fear and pain ran from her wide red-rimmed eyes down her soiled cheeks, painting thin pink lines on her muddy face. Around her lips and over them they fell; she blew hard each time she felt a droplet near her mouth, not wanting to swallow any of the grime that mixed with the salty drops. A bare hand found a small crack between two of the giant concrete blocks that made the wall. Her fast panting became one long laboured breath as she fought to pull her extra weight upright and wedge herself into the corner. She stood there for a moment, clinging to the wall while she regained her breath, closing her eyes for just a few seconds to clear away the tears and stinging toxic slime.

The noxious smell of toxic waste filled the air, but it was somehow more comforting than the rotten smell of death in the factory above. Almost human; smells like this could as easily exist in chemical plants back on Earth as here on this vile cesspool of decay, this nameless heavy ball of infested grey rock.

Carly had been part of the first wave of the counter-attack, one of the hundreds of marines despatched from the orbiting battleship. The ground-to-air defence mechanisms had been stronger than reconnaissance reports had shown, and many of the marines had been lost on that first drop. She was one of the survivors, crashing down alone into a heavily industrial region, far from the intended drop-zone around the enemy’s main reactor.

Carly’s progress had been slow but steady between the tall buildings and smoke-belching pipes, resistance low but tough when encountered. Enemy sentries were heavy and powerful, but slow to react; she had played on her advantage by losing them among the narrow alleyways and rusting gantries or diving in and out of cover to eliminate those forces that stood in her way.

A tracking device in her mobile mission computer had informed Mission Control of her location, and as she had passed another bleak factory set into a cliff her console bleeped, alerting her to a new objective. Mission Control had wanted her to enter the plant and sabotage the machinery within, immediately disrupting the enemy’s supply of battle-ready soldiers. Carly had found a utility entrance and made her way inside, but the plant’s security system was alerted and she had been ambushed and cornered.

Carly had taken a hit from a railgun: a solid uranium slug the size of her bunched fist had ripped past her torso at several times the speed of sound, leaving a visible trail of torn air and a sonic boom that knocked her off her feet. It had rebounded heavily from the metal post behind her and hit her shin, snapping the bone in two like a twig. Shedding her weapons and packs to escape quickly, Carly had disappeared into an empty waste pipe and slithered through the narrow tube to the sewers, to navigate the humming pipes and fizzing pools of the toxic waste plant beyond, all the way looking for medical supplies left at first aid posts.

A sudden sound brought Carly from her memory and she opened her eyes, staring towards the corner ahead of her – the only way in to her little dead-end hiding place. One of the vile creatures rounded the corner, knock knocking its way quickly towards her on thick metal legs. One arm was a bloodstained metal spike, the other a fat round club, dull grey in the dim half-light. A berserker – melee weapons only.

Carly’s good foot slipped from under her as she let go of the wall to grasp the top handle of the minigun. She let out a scream as she sank heavily to the hard slimy floor, laying round after ear splitting round into the approaching brute. Sparks flew from its metal limbs, blood spat from its thick hard flesh, but still it powered quickly towards her, surprisingly steady and unstoppable as a locomotive on its hard feet. Carly’s scream became a moan of frustrated despair as the harsh tat-tat-tat of the minigun became a quiet whine and the barrel span freely, gun-smoke curling out from its works in little vortices.

Quickly she dropped the gun, crying out as its hard weight landed on her broken leg. Her right hand dropped to her holster, searching for her pistol – fully charged for herself. Deftly she unfastened it and swung it towards her head, but the berserker was already bearing down on her. Her arm instinctively covered her face as its thick club swung at her head, driving her limb into her face with a sudden sharp pain and a sound like crunching bone. Her sight faded quickly to black, leaving nothing but the pain, then the memory of pain, then nothing at all.

***

Lieutenant Graham gazed at herself in the mirror, admiring her own body. Despite the fear running through her veins, she hadn’t forgotten how long the voyage out had been, and how long it would be before she got back home, and off the cramped battleship. The tiny female bunkroom held fifty women, all tightly packed together. The shift rotation meant more than half the room was occupied twenty-four hours a day, with waking crew members giving up their bunks to those who were just finishing their shifts. That meant the washroom was pretty much always in use too, as was the communal latrine. The most privacy a woman had on the ship was under her sheets, three feet away from the women either side of her.

The voices of some of the mid-shift crew filtered through the sound from the shower jets, quiet and subdued in the current situation. Bright yellow strips illuminated everywhere, constantly reminding Carly of their location, their yellow alert status, tugging her back to reality as she looked at her body, wondering what had made her want to do this.

Of the hundred and twenty women on board, she alone would be blasting headfirst to the surface tomorrow with the men, lying face down in the little pod as it powers towards the ground. There she would find a moment’s privacy – there would be a twenty-minute prep-time after the pod was locked shut, and the ten-minute journey through the stratosphere to the ground. A pang of intense excitement hit her as she considered what she could do alone in the pod – a fantasy only, but exciting none-the-less.

Carly realised she was starting to tingle between her legs just thinking about possibilities, tormenting herself more than necessary. She quickly glanced at her nipples in the mirror, standing proud over her small ripe breasts. Her eyes moved slowly upwards to her face, studying her features: it was no wonder the men called her ‘Kid’. On the ship she was their pet, their little girl – at twenty-three she looked youthful, with her big brown eyes and girlish face, her slightly protruding top lip, and her wavy brown hair that hung past her shoulders when it wasn’t tied high in uniform.

Her eyes began to drop again, over her breasts and down her toned belly to her hips, accentuated by her height. She didn’t need to turn her body in the mirror to remember the perfect roundness of her buttocks, blending delicately into her legs and falling away to the steam on the washroom floor.

At 5’4” she was probably the shortest female marine to ever be placed on a battleship platoon. She knew how much the military respected her abilities over her size, which was maybe why she felt so appreciated, and so at home with her male counterparts. She knew from their fun picking and their jokes that they greatly respected her too, just as she did them. She knew each and every one of them would stand up for her on the battlefield, just as she would for them, if it ever came to that.

Carly could hold her own, of course. She was trained in the use of all sorts of weaponry, from handguns to light surface-to-air missiles to tanks, and she had experience in the field – she had served in the Cuban crisis before being transferred to the Space Corps, then in the asteroid belt on a peacekeeping mission. She was certainly no stranger to action; she was often reminded that she had fired a rifle in a real-life situation, something many marines had never done in recent peaceful years. But her real expertise was in engineering, not fighting. Fully qualified from college, Carly was always confident she could repair pretty much anything that had ever worked. Every battleship platoon had a Battlefield Engineer, and on this ship, that was Carly.

Carly watched her breasts rise and sink as she took a deep breath. Tomorrow she knew she would be facing a new kind of enemy; something more deadly and evil than the Space Corps had ever seen before. Something that had already found Earth, caught them off-guard, and slaughtered them. She felt an angry and bitter wave wash over her, remembering the scenes of chaos where the landers had struck ground – but now they were on the counter-attack, prepped and ready, hungry for blood.

***

Warmth seeped into Carly’s skin, gradually burning the feeling back into her body. Slowly her eyes opened and they too felt warm, as if surrounded by heat. She blinked awkwardly, realising she was submerged in some kind of thick pink liquid, lying on her back staring up out of a clear panel to a clinical ceiling beyond. A dark swirling above her gradually came into focus as her hair, loose in the fluid.

The weight of her lungs suggested they too were filled with the liquid, although she didn’t seem to have trouble breathing. Perhaps it was one of the new super-oxygenated regeneration fluids that the military were experimenting with. She slowly turned her head, wincing at the cramps in her neck. The rest of her body seemed unwilling to move and she decided to leave it alone. Tilting her head forwards she saw that she was completely naked, floating oddly in the large clear vessel.

With a sudden shock she realised her right arm was missing below the elbow, ending in a stump of chiselled bone. It looked as if some work had been done to close the bone neatly, although it seemed rather odd to her that the bone hadn’t been shortened so that her skin could be closed to cover it. A small metal frame was clamped to the bare bone, extending forwards almost to where her hand should be. Tied to it were four thin tendons, held taught like guitar strings. As she tilted her head she saw they ran back to the open flap of skin; a darker tissue within looked like muscle, stretched tight by the tendons.

Carly let her gaze wander down to her left foot, and that too was missing. A similar arrangement of metal framework held tight her Achilles tendon, presumably to stop it from shrinking under lack of tension. Carly began to wonder what was happening; she had never heard of these practices before.

She began to piece together the last few moments of consciousness, after she’d taken the hit that had broken her leg and had crawled into the sewers. Slowly she remembered slithering backwards into the slimy dead-end, she remembered clawing her way up the wall while staring fixedly at the corner. She remembered the charging berserker, running out of ammo and reaching for her pistol to kill herself before she was captured. Then she remembered the blow to her arm, the instinctive reaction that had probably saved her life even when she had sought to end it.

A nearby computer bleeped loudly as her heart rate fluctuated suddenly: as consciousness began to fade, Carly realised she was in an enemy medical centre.

***

A sudden bright light made Carly open her eyes. She was aware that she had been sleeping lightly for some time, somewhere between dreams and reality, a bizarre half-life of nausea and sweat, discomfort and pain. Now she was blinded by the harsh red light, obscuring all but the very periphery of her vision, and deafened by an electronic whistling in her ears.

Gradually the light and sound lessened and Carly became aware of her surroundings. She tried moving her arms and turning her head, but the only response was a cramping pain that made her cry out loud. But she was surprised when no sound escaped her lips – it appeared that she had only limited control of her eyes, and nothing else.

Fear pounded through her body with the rapid beating of her heart, clouding her mind, poisoning her thoughts. The helplessness of being unable to move gave rise to images of her helplessness to resist the enemy, now that she was being healed for whatever purpose they had for her. Irrepressible thoughts of a future of tortured mutilation crept unwittingly into her head, threatening to overwhelm her very conscious self; her head began to spin and her vision became clouded and unclear for a short moment. Almost immediately Carly awoke again with a start, suddenly clear and calm, her heart pounding quietly like a background sound.

Carly looked around, trying to keep her mind occupied to drive away the overwhelming images that still played in the back of her head. She realised she was suspended upright, ankles, wrists and head locked back against the wall. She could feel the heat from the dark concrete against her skin, she could feel the softness of her hair hanging on her bare shoulders, she could feel several hard objects pressing into her skin across her chest, on her abdomen and between her legs. Unable to look down, she tried to ascertain where she was.

The room was a small cube lit by an ominous red light, bright yet unclear in the narrow spectrum. Every object in the room was a red shade – the walls were rough and straight, made from big blocks of darkly coloured concrete – sea blue or military green, she could not tell in the red light. Banks of computer screens filled the opposite wall, displaying what looked like vital signs. One screen displayed a graphical wire-image of her body in red, showing her missing forearm and ankle. Various yellow wire-frames were superimposed over her body – a long box shape covered where her right arm should be, and a girder with a mechanical ankle replaced her left shin. Down her right leg were various yellow wire patterns, and a thin box covered her sex. Carly doubted that it was displayed to protect her modesty. She wondered whether the yellow images represented mechanical devices that had been attached, possibly permanently, to her body; without the ability to turn her head, she could not be certain.

It was the smell that gave away where she was – still in the hands of the enemy. Their stench was everywhere, putrid like rotting flesh, making her stomach knot and turn over inside her. She wished she could move a little, just to point her head downwards in case she threw up – she had visions of choking on her own vomit. Her nausea was caused by a combination of the smell and the constant, heart-pounding fear of being helpless in the enemy’s hands. She tried to take deep breaths, but realised that her lungs were also not responding to her mind – she was not breathing at all: presumably a machine was oxygenating her blood.

A door at the left of the opposite wall slid quickly open and two medical technicians entered, metal feet clicking on the bloodstained rubber carpet. Their legs were thick metal girders with backward-facing knees, giving them an almost satanic look. The legs met at fat robotic hips, which seemed to join directly into a thick bony spine covered by thin, red skin. The skin thickened and yellowed as it ran up their naked torsos, reddening and blistering where it neared their shoulders, which looked as if their arms had been forcefully removed and replaced with delicate titanium limbs. One of the technicians demonstrated its multi-jointed dexterity by clicking rapidly away at a keyboard, its head pointed upwards at one of the screens.

Their skulls were covered with thin, blistered, hairless yellow skin, which ended around their forehead and cheekbone. Their faces could almost have been human, yet they were bare boned, round-eyed and grinning widely, showing a single upper and lower tooth, curving the length of their mouths, thin as a razorblade.

The technicians seemed to communicate through a series of computerised bleeps rather than through speech – she doubted they had much vocal ability without lips, wondering if they even had tongues. Each had two canisters strapped to its back with pipes running into their abdomen through blistered red scabs of flesh, indicating that they probably didn’t eat through their bony mouths.

The technician at the console tapped some buttons and Carly fell heavily from the wall, landing painfully on her right foot and some kind of support on her left. She struggled to maintain her balance but fell forwards, hitting the hard rubber mat with a thud.

As she tried to pick herself up a cold metal hand touched her shoulder, gripping her far more delicately than she thought possible but so firm that she didn’t even try to struggle, and lifted her effortlessly to her feet. She stared breathlessly in to the eyes of the medic, which looked impassively back, its lower jaw slowly opening and closing very slightly as it stared at her.

Staring back at the horrific vision of mutilation before her, Carly felt her lungs begin to ache. They burned with need for oxygen, as if she was holding her breath, but she still had no control over her muscles. She felt a dull pressure on her back just below her shoulder blades through what had previously felt like scabs but now more like hard implants – a series of mechanical clicks resonated inside her chest and she began to breath freely again with a deep laboured inward gasp.

Carly was suddenly aware that she had control of her body, and gingerly felt the floor with her bare right foot. Strangely she could still feel the very texture of the rubber mat through her left foot – which she was sure she didn’t have. She glanced down uncertainly, afraid of what she may see. Below her knee was a thick metal beam, dull and light like machined titanium. A dextrous ankle was attached to its end and to her body by a line of electric cables that disappeared under her skin and into the back of her knee.

The two technicians turned to face the door and began to march quickly away, indicating her to follow with a gruff command from a robotic voice box. Too afraid to disobey, Carly followed the technicians out of the small room and into the dim corridor beyond, following them for some way through the stench and stifling heat until they reached a row of cells with darkened forcefield doors. They stopped at one cell and the forcefield switched off long enough for Carly to be thrust gently inside by the delicate metal hands of a technician, before it started again with a hum, locking her into the room.