WIP: Good Works
Nov. 26th, 2008 03:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalI've been dragging my way through this story for about three weeks now. I seem to be stuck in the opposite of a Nanowrimo. Call it a Negawrimo. I just can't seem to get on a roll with a story to save my life and The Grind doesn't seem worth it right now.
I'll finish this one of these days, but not soon. For now here's what has been done.
Samaneous stared up at the gigantic, impassive stone face, the granite eyes staring off towards the rising eastern sun, the headfur blown back as if it was facing into a strong wind. He turned away and walked out along the giant’s arm, which was as long and wide as the cabin of a passenger shuttle, then across the hand, which pointed forward over the head of the great riding beast that the giant mounted. He raised his arms for balance, his dark robes flapping in the breeze as he walked out onto the pointing finger. The footclaws of his left paw dug into the hard granite for purchase as he slowly raised his right leg, the friction of his skin on stone all that was keeping him from a two hundred meter plunge to oblivion on the trailings below.
There was a quiet, strangled cough behind him. Samaneous turned his head to see Captain Kruken, the grey skinned leader of the creo strike team that had secured this strange mountain statue for the Dominion, standing on the giant’s wrist, staring at him with wide eyes. I’ve managed to frighten him. How amazing. “Yes, Captain, what is it?”
“The prisoners are gathered in the facility’s dining hall, sir, awaiting your pleasure,” the captain managed to report.
“Thank you, Captain. I’ll just be a moment longer.” Samaneous turned his head away to face the rising sun, its rays warming his black robes. Light on dark, he thought, half-amused.
“Sir,” Kruken said, suppressed panic obvious in his voice. “Could you… could you please stop doing that?”
“What, balancing?”
“Please sir, if you happen to be killed on my watch I’m going to have to explain it our Wise Master, the Varn Gene Mage. I doubt if he’ll be happy to hear that report.”
“Ah, true.” Samaneous relented, turning a neat pirouette on his footpad and walking back to the relatively safety of the arm and towards the flyer hovering near the face. “So what do you think of it?”
“What, the rebels? They were idiots to hole up here. There’s nothing of strategic importance around for at least a hundred kilometers.” They stepped aboard the flyer and strapped in for the short half kilometer flight to the complex of buildings that sat at the base of the statue.
“I meant this tremendous statue. Two hundred meters tall, in the middle of nothing. What’s it for? Who made it?”
Kruken shrugged. “Who cares? We’re just going to blow it up anyway.”
Samaneous sighed. “You have a mind very much oriented towards the practical, Captain.”
“Keeps me out of trouble, sir.”
The flyer landed in front of the dining hall, a very pleasant facility with airy wooden arches, huge windows and a large wooden deck that offered a magnificent view of the mountain that had been carved out in the shape of a human and his mount. The folk inside the wall weren’t terribly appreciative of the view, though. They were rebels that had been rooted out when a routine sensor sweep by a flyer had detected their cache of stolen energy weapons. A motley bunch, perhaps a dozen in all, dressed in a mix of faded camouflage fatigues and civilian clothes, sitting in chairs by the dining tables. A dozen more of their comrades were lying dead on the slopes of the mountain.
“Hullo, vixens and gentlemales,” Samaneous said when entered, clapping his paws to get their attention. “First things first. You are all now the guests of the Varn Dominion’s Department of Social Harmony, or at least you will be when Captain Kruken here can convince them to take all of you off his hands. If you’re all good little cubs, you should find yourselves back in normal society after a few years of reeducation. If you’re bad… Well, your stay will be much longer.” He put properly sorrowful look on his face. “I do hope you chose the more reasonable path. You expended a great deal of energy defending what amounts to a very large chunk of rock. Imagine what you could do if you directed that towards more fruitful pursuits.”
“Go to hell, tokalu,” a voice called out from the prisoners. He ducked his head to one side as a plastic condiment container flew past him to bounce off the window behind him. Several of Kruken’s soldiers raised their weapons at the group, but Samaneous waved them down.
“Now, now. That’s not going to do anyone any good. Captain Kruken, be a good fellow and escort these individuals to the detention centre for a change of clothes and a hot meal.” Not to mention a delousing, body scan and interrogation. The manzi research team assigned to create a human compatible interrogation drug were still in the research stage, unfortunately, so the latter would have to be done the old fashioned way if they were lucky. If they were unlucky, perhaps one or more of them might be graced by the Varn Dream Stalker.
As the prisoners were shuffled out under Kruken’s suspicious eye, Samaneous grabbed the shoulder of the one that had thrown the condiment bottle at him. “Leave this one to me for a moment or two, would you, Captain?”
Kruken smiled. “Like a shock stick, sir?”
“I won’t require anything so crude I should think. Just put some restraints on him so he won’t be throwing any more sauces at me, eh?”
Kruken obliged him by locking the rebel’s arms behind his back with numb cuffs, which disabled the wearer’s nerve impulses below the wrists, leaving his hands worthless, nerveless lumps, complemented by a more conventional set of leg irons.
“Come with me, young man.” Samaneous put a hand on the rebel’s shoulder and guided him outside onto the large dining porch. He sat the fellow down on a white painted steel chair, and took one himself, leaning back and taking a good look at his captive.
The morning light highlighted the bruise on the side of rebel’s coppery skin. His face was young, perhaps nineteen or twenty local years old, with a beak-like nose that resembled the one on the giant towering above them, straight black hair and dark eyes. A frightened man, no matter how impassive he tried to make his face. Humans might lack a vulpine’s mobile tail or ears, but their scent told a deeper story if one was perceptive.
“What’s your name, young man?” The young man stared back at him in stubborn silence. “Well, I’m Samaneous Sharpears, and I work for our Wise Master, the Varn Gene Mage.”
“Not my master,” the rebel finally said. He unbent slightly and added, “My name is John Crow.
“Well, I wish the circumstances were more pleasant, Mr. Crow, but I’m glad to make your acquaintance anyway. Though I confess we’ve given you reason not to make you feel the same today. What was that word you called me, by the way? It wasn’t programmed into my translator bug.” As he kept up the innocuous chatter, he tapped the earpiece nestled against his hearing canal.
“Tokalu is Lakota for “fox”. It’s what you look like,” Crow explained.
“Oh, those little hunting creatures. I’ve been told about the resemblance, though I can’t see it myself really. My genetic ancestors more resemble those African humanoids… ah, what are they called? Mountain gorillas, that’s it, except with faces like these.” He tapped the side of his muzzle.
“Doesn’t matter. You’re still freaks, all of you.”
“I can’t really claim you’re pleasant to my eyes either. Be that as it may, would you mind terribly telling me what you were doing, making your encampment here? You’ve got us quite puzzled over that. As my colleague Captain Kruken observed, there’s nothing worth fighting over for kilometers.”
Crow glared at him. “Are you blind? We were fighting over that.” Unable to point, he nodded in the direction of the mountain/statue.
Samaneous gave an apprizing look. “Are you saying it’s a strategic point? Was there a weapons depot there that we missed? All Kruken’s troopers found was a body in a tomb at the base. I thought that meant it was some sort of religious structure.”
“It’s not religious. It wasn’t even built by a Lakota. A white man and his family made it to honor Crazy Horse.”
It took Samaneous a moment to puzzle over the phrase “white man”, until he realized it had something to do with the humans’ strange obsession with skin tones. “Who?” he asked.
“Crazy Horse. He fought the white man when they invaded our lands and never made treaty with them. When he could fight no more though, he surrendered and was murdered.” Crow spat at Samaneous’ feet. “We won’t make the same mistake. We’re never giving up the fight.”
“Young man, you can’t win against the Varn Dominion. Your world is just one among the dozens they control, and they will not release a green garden such as this.” He sighed. “And in the end, you fought over nothing. Captain Kruken is going to set a charge at the base, probably in that very convenient tomb, and blow it to so much gravel.”
“You can’t do that!” Crow shouted. “It took nearly a hundred years to build it!”
“And it’ll take less than a hundred seconds to bring it down. Unless…” he paused, “you can give me a reason not to do it.”
I'll finish this one of these days, but not soon. For now here's what has been done.
Samaneous stared up at the gigantic, impassive stone face, the granite eyes staring off towards the rising eastern sun, the headfur blown back as if it was facing into a strong wind. He turned away and walked out along the giant’s arm, which was as long and wide as the cabin of a passenger shuttle, then across the hand, which pointed forward over the head of the great riding beast that the giant mounted. He raised his arms for balance, his dark robes flapping in the breeze as he walked out onto the pointing finger. The footclaws of his left paw dug into the hard granite for purchase as he slowly raised his right leg, the friction of his skin on stone all that was keeping him from a two hundred meter plunge to oblivion on the trailings below.
There was a quiet, strangled cough behind him. Samaneous turned his head to see Captain Kruken, the grey skinned leader of the creo strike team that had secured this strange mountain statue for the Dominion, standing on the giant’s wrist, staring at him with wide eyes. I’ve managed to frighten him. How amazing. “Yes, Captain, what is it?”
“The prisoners are gathered in the facility’s dining hall, sir, awaiting your pleasure,” the captain managed to report.
“Thank you, Captain. I’ll just be a moment longer.” Samaneous turned his head away to face the rising sun, its rays warming his black robes. Light on dark, he thought, half-amused.
“Sir,” Kruken said, suppressed panic obvious in his voice. “Could you… could you please stop doing that?”
“What, balancing?”
“Please sir, if you happen to be killed on my watch I’m going to have to explain it our Wise Master, the Varn Gene Mage. I doubt if he’ll be happy to hear that report.”
“Ah, true.” Samaneous relented, turning a neat pirouette on his footpad and walking back to the relatively safety of the arm and towards the flyer hovering near the face. “So what do you think of it?”
“What, the rebels? They were idiots to hole up here. There’s nothing of strategic importance around for at least a hundred kilometers.” They stepped aboard the flyer and strapped in for the short half kilometer flight to the complex of buildings that sat at the base of the statue.
“I meant this tremendous statue. Two hundred meters tall, in the middle of nothing. What’s it for? Who made it?”
Kruken shrugged. “Who cares? We’re just going to blow it up anyway.”
Samaneous sighed. “You have a mind very much oriented towards the practical, Captain.”
“Keeps me out of trouble, sir.”
The flyer landed in front of the dining hall, a very pleasant facility with airy wooden arches, huge windows and a large wooden deck that offered a magnificent view of the mountain that had been carved out in the shape of a human and his mount. The folk inside the wall weren’t terribly appreciative of the view, though. They were rebels that had been rooted out when a routine sensor sweep by a flyer had detected their cache of stolen energy weapons. A motley bunch, perhaps a dozen in all, dressed in a mix of faded camouflage fatigues and civilian clothes, sitting in chairs by the dining tables. A dozen more of their comrades were lying dead on the slopes of the mountain.
“Hullo, vixens and gentlemales,” Samaneous said when entered, clapping his paws to get their attention. “First things first. You are all now the guests of the Varn Dominion’s Department of Social Harmony, or at least you will be when Captain Kruken here can convince them to take all of you off his hands. If you’re all good little cubs, you should find yourselves back in normal society after a few years of reeducation. If you’re bad… Well, your stay will be much longer.” He put properly sorrowful look on his face. “I do hope you chose the more reasonable path. You expended a great deal of energy defending what amounts to a very large chunk of rock. Imagine what you could do if you directed that towards more fruitful pursuits.”
“Go to hell, tokalu,” a voice called out from the prisoners. He ducked his head to one side as a plastic condiment container flew past him to bounce off the window behind him. Several of Kruken’s soldiers raised their weapons at the group, but Samaneous waved them down.
“Now, now. That’s not going to do anyone any good. Captain Kruken, be a good fellow and escort these individuals to the detention centre for a change of clothes and a hot meal.” Not to mention a delousing, body scan and interrogation. The manzi research team assigned to create a human compatible interrogation drug were still in the research stage, unfortunately, so the latter would have to be done the old fashioned way if they were lucky. If they were unlucky, perhaps one or more of them might be graced by the Varn Dream Stalker.
As the prisoners were shuffled out under Kruken’s suspicious eye, Samaneous grabbed the shoulder of the one that had thrown the condiment bottle at him. “Leave this one to me for a moment or two, would you, Captain?”
Kruken smiled. “Like a shock stick, sir?”
“I won’t require anything so crude I should think. Just put some restraints on him so he won’t be throwing any more sauces at me, eh?”
Kruken obliged him by locking the rebel’s arms behind his back with numb cuffs, which disabled the wearer’s nerve impulses below the wrists, leaving his hands worthless, nerveless lumps, complemented by a more conventional set of leg irons.
“Come with me, young man.” Samaneous put a hand on the rebel’s shoulder and guided him outside onto the large dining porch. He sat the fellow down on a white painted steel chair, and took one himself, leaning back and taking a good look at his captive.
The morning light highlighted the bruise on the side of rebel’s coppery skin. His face was young, perhaps nineteen or twenty local years old, with a beak-like nose that resembled the one on the giant towering above them, straight black hair and dark eyes. A frightened man, no matter how impassive he tried to make his face. Humans might lack a vulpine’s mobile tail or ears, but their scent told a deeper story if one was perceptive.
“What’s your name, young man?” The young man stared back at him in stubborn silence. “Well, I’m Samaneous Sharpears, and I work for our Wise Master, the Varn Gene Mage.”
“Not my master,” the rebel finally said. He unbent slightly and added, “My name is John Crow.
“Well, I wish the circumstances were more pleasant, Mr. Crow, but I’m glad to make your acquaintance anyway. Though I confess we’ve given you reason not to make you feel the same today. What was that word you called me, by the way? It wasn’t programmed into my translator bug.” As he kept up the innocuous chatter, he tapped the earpiece nestled against his hearing canal.
“Tokalu is Lakota for “fox”. It’s what you look like,” Crow explained.
“Oh, those little hunting creatures. I’ve been told about the resemblance, though I can’t see it myself really. My genetic ancestors more resemble those African humanoids… ah, what are they called? Mountain gorillas, that’s it, except with faces like these.” He tapped the side of his muzzle.
“Doesn’t matter. You’re still freaks, all of you.”
“I can’t really claim you’re pleasant to my eyes either. Be that as it may, would you mind terribly telling me what you were doing, making your encampment here? You’ve got us quite puzzled over that. As my colleague Captain Kruken observed, there’s nothing worth fighting over for kilometers.”
Crow glared at him. “Are you blind? We were fighting over that.” Unable to point, he nodded in the direction of the mountain/statue.
Samaneous gave an apprizing look. “Are you saying it’s a strategic point? Was there a weapons depot there that we missed? All Kruken’s troopers found was a body in a tomb at the base. I thought that meant it was some sort of religious structure.”
“It’s not religious. It wasn’t even built by a Lakota. A white man and his family made it to honor Crazy Horse.”
It took Samaneous a moment to puzzle over the phrase “white man”, until he realized it had something to do with the humans’ strange obsession with skin tones. “Who?” he asked.
“Crazy Horse. He fought the white man when they invaded our lands and never made treaty with them. When he could fight no more though, he surrendered and was murdered.” Crow spat at Samaneous’ feet. “We won’t make the same mistake. We’re never giving up the fight.”
“Young man, you can’t win against the Varn Dominion. Your world is just one among the dozens they control, and they will not release a green garden such as this.” He sighed. “And in the end, you fought over nothing. Captain Kruken is going to set a charge at the base, probably in that very convenient tomb, and blow it to so much gravel.”
“You can’t do that!” Crow shouted. “It took nearly a hundred years to build it!”
“And it’ll take less than a hundred seconds to bring it down. Unless…” he paused, “you can give me a reason not to do it.”
