OT: Hell is For Heroes.

[AgentZero]

I thought it was the children's version, 'Heck is for Heroes', toned down for consumption by the underage. Been watching loads of children's programming with my niece the last few days and seriously, anyone raised on that junk is in for a NASTY suprise when they bang into reality. Anyway, due to the aforementioned babysitting duties, I'm not sure if I'll get around to any updates before I get back to Dublin. That's Wednesday evening, so don't expect anything new before Thursday. I'm not saying I won't try to suprise you, but don't hold your breath.

Or, do. It'll be funny, trust me.

[JAFisher44]

I'll tell you what, I tried and it wasn't funny. So, come on and get some more writing done.

[AgentZero]

Bring Us More Pie!



�Frak,� murmured Alice some time later. �What the hell's that?�
Kagan glanced up at the view screen, while making a mental note to mind his mouth around the girl. She seemed to be picking up his bad habits with gleeful aplomb. �That would be Perth 9. Not the friendliest place in the galaxy, but it's where we need to be.�
Allowing Alice to busy herself with the docking maneuvers, Kagan opened up a communications link to the station. He keyed in a series of codes, then waited. Within a few seconds, a long stream of seemingly random numbers and letters filled the screen, and Kagan sat back with a sigh of satisfaction. She was here.

�Who was that?� Alice asked after the Daedalus had latched securely to the station.
�Just checking up on an old friend,� Kagan replied.
�Odd,� she muttered as she went about shutting the ship down.
�What's that?� he inquired.
�Well, the proper communications protocol for contacting someone on board the station would be seven-six-two-eight, or two-nine if they were on a ship docked with the station, but yours was nine-seven-four-six. Which like I said is odd, especially since civilian protocols stop at seven.�
�How-� Kagan stopped to allow a good frown to form. �How did you see that from there?� he asked slowly.
�Didn't see,� she informed him. �Heard. The little beeps it makes when you press a key.�
�But those beeps all sound exactly the same,� he pointed out.
�Nope,� she disagreed cheerfully. �Slight frequency difference depending on which row and what position the key is in. A one sounds like 'beep' and a nine sounds like 'beep'.�
�I couldn't tell any difference between your beeps,� said Kagan.
�No, me neither,� she agreed. �But the human vocal apparatus simply isn't designed to create such slight variations in frequency.�
�But the human ear is?�
�No, not most of them.�
Kagan's frown deepened to the point where it was in serious danger of becoming a scowl, and he turned back to the communications console and began alternating between pressing the one and the nine. After a few minutes, he resigned himself to the fact that there was no difference between the two, and that he was in love with a raving lunatic. A raving lunatic who'd also been completely right, he reminded himself. Deciding that was a conversation for another time, he tucked his sidearm into its shoulder holster and headed on to Perth 9 with Alice in tow.

The smell was the first thing one noticed upon arriving on Perth 9, and it wasn't a pleasant experience. The air was thick with the smell of unwashed bodies, vomit, excrement and other bodily products best not thought about. Greasy, filthy bodies squeezed past each other in the tight confines of the corridors, though Kagan and Alice were given some measure of space, thanks partly to Kagan's sleeveless shirt which showed off both his firearm and the long line of dates and places tattooed down his right bicep that identified him as military, and partly to the disproportionately massive sidearm Alice wore slung low off her hip.
"Why do we have to be here?" Alice inquired, trying to ignore the leers that no weapon in the galaxy would protect her from; women weren't a common sight on the station.
"Because a friend is here," Kagan replied. "Probably the only person who might know what the frack's been going on the last few days."
"What's he look like?" wondered Alice.
"She," Kagan emphasized. "Looks.... Terrifying."
"Oh. Dear," she muttered, casting her gaze around to see if anyone matched that description. Many adjectives came to mind to describe the crowd around her: Disgusting, revolting, vile, mildly disturbing, but none that could be considered terrifying, and definitely none that could be considered female.
"There," said Kagan, looking ahead.
Alice, being somewhat shorter, had to wait a moment longer for her first glimpse of Kagan's friend. The crowd suddenly parted, the slovenly workers suddenly trying to put as much distance between themselves and the woman striding purposefully down the corridor. She was tall, almost the same height as Kagan, and slender but she moved with a noticeable aura of barely restrained power, a sort of quiet lethality that Alice had to agree, was terrifying. Almost as much as her face, which was completely white except for her black lips and blacker eyes. As they drew closer, Alice realized with a sense of growing trepidation that the woman approaching them was not wearing any make up, that the disturbing mask was no mask at all, but bare skin. The woman swept her gaze across the corridor, and the filthy men filling it seemed to wither under her gaze. Alice felt a cold chill run through her as the woman's eyes fell upon her. A fearful knot tightened in her stomach, though she could think of no rational reason for it, Alice was stuck with the unshakable feeling that the eyes of Death itself were upon her.
She stopped in front of Kagan and extended her hand expressionlessly. He gripped it firmly, and the two of them pulled each other towards themselves, wrapping their free arm around the other's shoulders in a tight embrace.
"Alice, I'd like you to meet Saraea Azen," Kagan said.
Saraea nodded politely towards Alice. "A pleasure," she said.
"Eek," Alice said.

[JAFisher44]

Woot! More Hell is for Heroes. I like it. Good imagery on the dirty, slovenly station. Hopefully your writers block has broken.

One criticism. I don't feel that you really conveyed the terrifying aspect of Saraea very well. She just didn't feel terrifying to me. I don't know if she is terrifying because of her appearance or maybe she just radiates terror or something, but a quick line or two describing what exactly makes her terrifying, maybe in the form of inner dialogue from Alice or something, would clear it up.

Hopefully we will see some more Hell is for Heroes in the NEAR future.

Joshua

[AgentZero]

Yay! Critism! I like critism. Makes for better stories, methinks. I've added a couple extra lines to better explain the terrifyingness of Saraea, and the full scope of her scariness will become apparent as the story progresses.

[JAFisher44]

That was much better. Thank you for clarifying her terrifying demeanor.

[AgentZero]

Welcome....



Without another word, Kagan and Saraea turned and headed back towards the Daedalus. Alice, for her part disappeared into the crowd, reappearing to cast an apprehensive glance back at the two every time Kagan started to wonder about where she'd gotten off to. They reached the ship considerably faster than they'd left it, thanks to the wide berth the crowds continued to give Saraea, the two of them ducking slightly as they passed through the airlock door. Kagan glanced backwards, waiting for Alice to board before he sealed the doors. When she failed to materialize, he cast an anxious look up the corridor and slammed his head into the airlock door from the start of finding Alice looking back at him.

"Fracking son of a fracking frack!" he snarled. "Don't do that!"
Alice watched him impassively for a moment longer before turning the same gaze towards Saraea. "What happened to your hand?" she asked with innocent curiosity.
Saraea glanced down at her seemingly entirely flesh and blood right hand and flexed it gently. "I lost it during the Corporate Wars," she said. "How did you know?"
"When we were walking back to the ship you brushed it against a pipe that was one hundred and forty seven degrees Celsius and didn't even flinch," Alice replied. "That and the noise."
"The noise?" asked Kagan irritably, still rubbing his head. "Prosthetics make the same amount of noise as normal flesh and blood. In other words, frack all."
"No," Alice replied slowly, as if speaking to a particularly slow child. "They make noise. And her right hand makes a different noise to her left. Mechanical. Squeaky. Almost distracting." She stood still for a moment, staring off at a point in between Saraea and Kagan's bewildered faces, as if lost in deep thought. Then, she shrugged suddenly, dismissing whatever thoughts she'd been having. "No matter," she decided. "I'm filthy. Grubby men and all that. Going to shower." With that, she stripped off her admittedly reeking clothes and tossed them to Kagan. "Probably want to burn those," she advised before strolling down the corridor and disappearing around a corner.
"How does-" Saraea finally managed.
"Don't know," Kagan admitted. "I'm still trying to get passed the beeps thing."

Yolanda Powell felt something crunch beneath the sole of her armored environment suit. She froze, willing herself to look down, but far to aware of the hefty dose of sedatives it had required for her to stay in control of herself the last time something had gone crunch, and she'd glanced down to find she'd trodden on a child's skull. Eventually, she managed to force her eyes downwards and breathed a sigh of relief as they fell upon a large piece of ceramocrete poking up through the ashes. She pushed on, and soon reached the crest of the hill they'd been climbing for the last hour. She stared into the valley below, and knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was only the deadening effect of the sedatives coursing through her veins that allowed her to retain any semblance of composure as she beheld the remnants of her home. What had once been a thriving metropolitan colony, home to fifteen million souls was now nothing more than a blackened scar on the valley floor below. Everything had been reduced to soot and ash, just like everything else on the entire surface of the planet. She heard a choking sob over the comlink and turned her head to the right in time to see Lieutenant Liu crumple to her knees and press her head to the ground. Her entire family had been here, Powell knew. Grandparents, parents, husband and children, all now nothing more than ash drifting through the valley. She left Liu to the attention of Ensign Jones, knowing that in her emotionally dead state, she was more likely to make things worse for the lieutenant than she was to help. Instead, she turned her head to the left, to her Exec, Edwin O'Shea and knew she should feel guilt as she looked upon the expression of horror on his face. The sedatives she'd taken were a luxury afforded to captains only, and aside from O'Shea, no one on the ship even knew they existed.
"Why?" he whispered. "Who? How?"
"It's only the last two that concern me, Ed," Powell said grimly. "Why can wait until we've tracked down the bastards who did this and decorated their ships with the intestines of her crew."
Edwin's admonishment was cut short by a cry from Liu. "Captain!"
Powell turned to see the Lieutenant on her feet and pointing at something down in the valley. She turned the zoom on her suit's visor up to maximum and frowned at the strange object in the dust below.
"O'Shea?" she inquired.
"I know, ma'am," he said resignedly. "What the hell is that?

Kaelan O�Shea flicked a switch and the Defiant transited from the chaos of null-space into the very depths of Hell itself. Missiles and weapon fire swarmed about him and he cursed quite creatively as he forced his nimble ship to duck and weave its way to a relatively safe portion of space. It was only then that he turned his ship's powerful sensors on the maelstrom behind him.
"Well now," he said in surprise. "That just ain't right."
A massive Tauren fleet swarmed around the colossal ship Kaelan had been tracking for the last six days. Unrelenting fire poured down onto it's massive hull, and answering fire poured back just as savagely, but the unfathomably big ship continued relentlessly towards the planet ahead of it. Kaelan turned his sensors towards the planet itself, and got another less than pleasant surprise. It was inhabited, heavily so, and they energy signatures his sensors were picking up were unmistakably Tauren.
"What are you lot doing with a colony this far out?" he wondered. "And how'd you get it so big without us noticing you, hmmm?"
As he watched, an entire squadron of Tauren light cruisers bore down on the colossus, firing madly, but rather than pull out to execute another run, they continued forward and suicided themselves upon it's hull. Kaelan scowled. The Taurens were just as unlikely to perform such an act as humans, and if they were willing to take such drastic measures, they must be trying to prevent something very, very bad. He hadn't long to wait to discover what the Taurens were so desperate to avoid, as the alien vessel reached whatever range it needed to reach, and two incredibly bright, incredibly large beams of light flashed outwards and slammed into the planet. The burst lasted a mere few seconds, but the effect was devastating. A massive wave of fire plumed outwards from the epicentre of the blast and raced across the planet with incredible speed. As Kaelan stared in absolute horror, the colossus began to accelerate, it's task complete, it headed rapidly for the outer reaches of the solar system to make null-space transit. Numb with shock, Kaelan was only motivated to action by the fact that the beast was heading towards the same part of the outer reaches of the solar system that he himself was currently occupying. Acting on pure instinct, he brought his small ship around and flashed into null-space, bringing the Defiant up through the hyperspace bands a little bit faster than was really safe as he set a course back for Terran space, with only one thought running through his mind.
'What the hell was that?'

[JAFisher44]

Nice! Super-huge mystery ship of DOOM! You have to love it. Sorry, but this time I don't have any criticisms for you. Oh, wait, yes I do. It isn't long enough. I want more.

[AgentZero]

Thanks, it's so nice to have a fan. Fans would be nicer, but hey, whatcha gonna do. I know it's a bit short, but that's part of my fiendish plot to break down my writer's block. Bounce quickly between threads to move the story along, then go back and flesh them out later.

BTW, any English Majors or fellow writers out there feel like being the 'editor' for the story?

[Puke]

what am i, chopped liver? you have more S's on your Fan, they just dont always have usefull things to say.