In war Man can find himself. In Peace Man can find War.


Do I remember the first battlefeild? Some people say they never forget that first time, not ever. A thousand battles, a thousand close calls are not enough to erase the memories of terror, exhileration, of awe at man's ability to destroy.

I think they are full of it. Maybe if you worship at the alter of death, if you have some sort of need for an adrenaline fix.  Do you know what I remember? I remember Deneb IV, a blast bolt passing through my hands and blowing apart the steering yoke of the ground car. I remember thinking about it, pulling the shards of vulcanized plastic from my arm later. They didn't go that deep, some of them didn't even draw blood... the armor stopped a lot I guess. But that wasn't my first battle ever, not by a long shot. Neither was Houra Primaris, where I caught a shard from a blown grav tank across the shoulder. Punched right through the armorplaz, almost took my arm. Hell, almost took my life. I remember the punch, the weird not-pain, lying on my back looking at a burning sky as someone burned off the chemical weapons with plasma clouds. I thought it was pretty.  That wasn't my first brush with death. Hell, I don't even have a scar from it. No memory of the injury remains but for the marks in my mind, the ones only I can see.

Why don't I remember the first time? It all blends together I guess. A blur, an unbroken line of the most inhuman conditions that anyone could find.

My people are survivors first. Survivors of what, you ask. Survivors of war. We destroyed ourselves with war, with ancient terrible weapons that no one could be allowed to possess. Our leaders thought that made us powerful, a force to be reckoned with. We were the new young turks in a galaxy where old serpents lay quisent.  They destroyed our weapons, destroyed them so totally that not even the worlds we called home could survive. Yet my people did survive, on the ruined shells of once verdant lands, proud warriors reduced to eking out a pitiful existance, surviving day to day, dreaming of revenge.

And we dreampt of war, dreampt of finding some lost missing chache of those terrible artifacts that had sealed our doom, of somehow smuggling them off world, taking them to the very heart of the viper's nest and showing them what it was like to have all you loved erased in an instant by some uncaring god.  And we hated them for what they had done. And we hated ourselves for what we had become.  

And a thousand years passed, and a thousand more, each more bitter than the last.

And I was weaned on this bitter tears. I lived a life of solitude among my own people, seperated from tenderness by the cold hearts we had, seperated from contact by skin of metal and plastic to protect us from the world that wanted our deaths for what we had caused, what we had wrought. I wore my first environmental armor before I could walk. I watched those who would have loved me, sheltered me in any other culture, stripped from my by an uncaring world, or hostile enemy tribes seeking the same scarce resources to survive. Do I remember who I fought first? Who I killed first? Probably a cousin, a kinsman who needed the same tainted water I did to make another day pass without a burning thirst.

At some point outsiders came among us, offered to pay us, to provide us with new better weapons if only we would kill their enemies for them. And we went out into the cold heartless black of space, into flying coffins of steel, and we killed. Some we killed had terrible magic's, blades of fire that cut down our best armored warriors, and we knew who they were, these demons. We had legends of how they had abandoned us to our cruel crucible of a world.

Other times we fought faceless men. We lived our lives unseeing our own brothers, yet we knew their faces by instinct. A lifetime of looking at helmets and armor taught us to see the way men moved. Yet these white clad killers were identical, no person motivated their arms. They were a challenge not out of skill, but out of numbers and fearlessness.

My benefactor remained true to his word for long enough that I forgot the burning wasteland, the hot radsand, the scouring wind that never ceased. I forgot the crucible, forgot the desperate struggle to simply eat my fill. But I remembered Death, remembered a war that had become all I knew. I remembered a galaxy of soft skinned men who cared nothing of my fate, of my people, of my history.   Of the hate I had carried so long I had forgotten what it was.

I remembered it. It was some nameless time after Houra Primaris. A city world, a three dimensional maze of death, where there were no friends and no enemies. Someone else had hired people of my world, and there was no way to tell ally from enemy, only missions mattered, missions and if you were lucky, your squad.  I took shelter in what had been some families home, the soft skinned residents long dead or fled, I knew not which... nor cared. It was a oasis of peace for those few moments I rested there. Until the soft cries started up.

Until then I had never seen a soft-skin baby, a child without armor, a baby who could look forward to a life without pain, without want. This war would pass and some other soft-skin would come and care for it. I knew pain like I had never felt. I knew jealousy, my hate so long riding my shoulder like some needy parasite goaded me.  I am not proud of what I did. I had pride before, pride in my survival, pride in my people, pride in my abilities. Now... now I knew shame. Now I knew guilt. Even among my people what I did in that quiet dark room was unthinkable.

Or so I thought. I do not know how it happened, I don't know what occured between the time the rage overwhelmed me and the time I realized I was no longer on that world, no longer fighting someone else's war.  I woke from a waking dream. A comrade, the closest my people came to friends or family, grunted that he was pleased I was fit to care for myself again.

  He congratulated me.

 Told me I had steel in me for what I had done. His hate for the soft skins was a reflection of my own. For the first time I felt sick, like I'd strayed to close to the Radsand, like the filters on my suit had gone bad and all I could breath was my own waste. I excused myself then.

I found myself faced with my 'master' or rather the one who represented them, who paid us, who commanded us. He was disgusted by me, I could tell, the blood still staining my armor, the stench of death around me.  He knew, and it only reinforced what he knew of my people. He wanted nothing to do with me then, and when I asked to be let go, paid my severance, he readily agreed.

I will kill, this is inescapeable. It is what I do. But I will not kill for others, will not fight their wars for them. Not blindly anyway, not for causes I do not know, can not understand.  Your people, many peoples of the galaxy, have something they call atonement. I don't know if that is what I seek or not. A more poetic sort asked me, when I told him this, as I tell you know, if I sought to wash away the blood of innocents from my armor... or if I wished to bury it under the blood of others so that I could no longer see it.

Poetry is not my strong suit. You want to know what I told him? You want to know why I tell you all this?

The child is dead and will not return. Perhaps I deserve death, perhaps some one will kill me for what I did, some outraged kinsman. I will not deny him the right to try, or the correctness of his act. But, until that day comes, I do know that I will not leave those who have squandered their fortunate lives unpunished.  I tell you so that you do not try to cry for mercy. I tell you so that you know that what that soft-skin, what that child could have been you could have been... but you did not. You have tried to become like me, but you only prey upon the weak. Someone has sought your death for what you have done, someone who cannot become death, who can not stain their own hands with righteous vengence.

So I do.  

good stuff Spike!

Thanks Mcrow.

I had a follow up from the outside perspective, full of the most over the top purple prosifying I could muster, but I had to go to bed before it was done, and the next day I just didn't like it enough to keep it alive, so I killed and ate it.

Interesting. But how is this either News or an Advert?