Asteroids
Where the Stone Falls

WRITTEN BY LUKE ROUNDA

Intro by Ellison

After vaping the closest thing to a best friend I can remember with a stolen secret weapon, I must have blacked out from the shock.

No, not the emotional shock. The uncontrollable fusion reaction from his dying ship that sewed the surrounding asteroids together into the ultimate modern art piece.

Lots of weird stuff happens when you make a fusion drive cough a bit too hard: first, Jason Kain disintegrates like a marshmallow would at the core of the sun; then, Jason Kain’s ship crumples and fuses into a radioactive husk; then, I black out, while my ship goes for a ribcage-compressing tour of the asteroids, pinball style, courtesy of GAMDC’s fine AutoShield™ technology.

Tilt. I come to a bit later with a headache. When my spinning lifeboat isn’t facing the dying starship Poseidon, space is a pinstripe suit of vacuum and starlight. My headache is mostly induced by the sensation of tumbling backwards at high velocity, and aggravated as soon as I open my eyes by the occasional strobe of exploding rainbows in the distance, as bright even through my eyelids as that damned Three Star Smash.

I still don’t know whether or not the Alien supercruiser bothered to go to guns on the old king of the sea, or if she just skewered Poseidon through the midsection at a quarter C with her nose. In any case, the military’s attempt at securing chaos and putting in a space lane is going up like a million Hiroshimas right in front of me. The darkness makes it gorgeous and surreal to watch. My own personal supernova.

Actually, Admiral Harlow’s. I can’t start going around taking credit for my ex-boss’s actions, now can I? Hope he enjoyed it. Even I have to admit, as far as those things go, it isn’t a bad way to go out in order to be remembered by the select few military comptrollers in the Galactic Asteroid Mining and Drilling Corporation possessing “Deep Black” clearance… for as long as their memories last, anyway.

The prevailing space marine dogma has always been based around “don’t ask, don’t tell.” What people don’t know won’t hurt them... that’s our job.

Don’t ask, don’t tell – deny. Straight refutation. It flat out did not/is/will not happen. Denial is an ugly thing, but only if there’s something personal to deny. Like Nomad Ellison’s freedom to move freely about the colonies just trying to eke out a pension.

Of course, that would never be how the ‘casts would play it.

“Admiral kills ship full of colonies’ finest, self in godforsaken asteroid belt you’ve never heard of.”

Okay. Tragic, to be sure, but where corporate money and politics meet, tragedy is simply not an option. Especially for the radical breakaway division of the colonial militia that wants to X the Aliens prejudicially and immediately. (Of course, this is despite overriding public opinion and scientific evidence to support that doing so would result in lots of bodybags spread across dozens of colonized star systems in the path of the beasts’ seeming migration pattern.)

No one supports a good old genocide anymore, so the inbreds and psychos turned to xenocide instead to fill the void. The problem with this is that declaring total war on an entire species requires absolutely murderous dedication and way too many tax dollars wasted on obliterating something that, to the majority of the population, is little more than a passing curiosity that sometimes turns ugly and needs to be swept violently under the rug by local alien exterminators, be it a militia taskforce or some angry farmer with an armed gunboat.

The militia “divide and conquer” propaganda always makes sure to include something about “defending your home” against the beasts, who are always committing some horrible crime against humanity. A Super Saucer takes out a transit tug, and now no one in Orion’s Belt gets fresh cheese in for another month. Kill them! Herd them like cattle away from the supply lines! In effect, military propaganda is saying, “Grab a can of pesticide and meet me outside.”

The thing is, there’s a clear difference between quelling a plague of locusts and smashing a hornet’s nest.

But some boys just never grow out of that phase as children when smashing a hornet’s nest sounds like a top notch idea, and when the bugs sting them, they always blame the kid who said, “Hey, you might get stung.”

So, of course, the headline will read: “Dangerous asteroid smashing fugitive provokes Alien swarm, murders 5,000 patriots.”

Or some reasonable facsimile.

Newscasts are like lip gloss, puckered lips against bureaucrats and politicans’ pasty asses, feeding the known galaxy the correct corporate-sanctioned misinformation. It’s all a damned rumor mill, Colonial Broadcast News. Like a giggling schoolgirl bitch that just won’t shut up.

Sigma Delta vanished without a trace from GAMDC’s hit list, mirroring their public statement to the gigglebitch that “it is no longer of any interest to the company.”

All those little foxholes filled with experimental weaponry carved out of the bigger rocks beg to differ.

But there’s no yellow tape around Sigma Delta, no one screaming bloody murder except the pissed-off delivery boys who were promised a smoother joyride through Never Never Land. As far as the masses are concerned, the only crime committed here was the crime of inconvenience.

Hyperspace lives up to its name, but it isn’t magic. Not the way we can use it, anyway. Slamming into a space rock at non-physical speeds will kill you before you throw that lever down… perhaps literally, if you want to get all quantum philosophical about it. Hyperspace couriers would have been overjoyed to have a hole right through the center of that whole mess of rocks, what some of us smashers like to call the “Greek Tragedy” – from Alpha Omicron to Sigma Delta to Psi Omega, it’s all leftovers from a little old Alien get-together, a mind-bogglingly huge expanse of chewed-up minerals that block transit for gold-diggers, businessmen, various forms of colonial royalty, and delusional Saganite tourists everywhere.

We could have saved hours not having to plot a path all the way around. Profits could have skyrocketed for everybody... especially me and my asteroid casino founded on company cashout and hazard pay.

I still really miss that last paycheck. But right now, I’m tangoing with my left-side wing pylon, doing just fine without it, really, and looking for a good escape route.

I pick my way back out the way I came in, a few quick stops at refueling and repair depots nestled in the bellies of the bigger stones serving to essentially tape my dying ship back into working order, and I make use of the quaint little database network set up by my ex-employers to try to find a good place to run to.

It helps to put things in perspective, being an asteroid smasher. I have to think, every single rock I didn’t completely vape just spun off in ten different directions to become ten different catastrophic navigational hazards light-years away from whatever belt I was tying off. Where the stone falls, no one can predict, but one thing’s for sure: it doesn’t take a whole iceberg to stop most people.

I look up Quick. Apparently, as far as the military knows, he’s still alive and working the hydrogen mines on New Switz. So, I spend a couple sweat- and paranoia-soaked weeks kiting back Upspin from outpost-to-orbital-to-camper, not shaving, wishing every time I walk down a crowded promenade that I had the cred to afford a clinical fingerpainting from the freelance surgeons in masks selling their services to the desperate and foolhardy.

The shockwave from Poseidon didn’t catch up with me until the last leg of the trip. Then one day, my boat is gassed up and I’m tanked up on stimulants, celebrating the apparent obliviousness of everyone, and suddenly it’s assassins everywhere. Crawled out of the floor like heat-seeking roaches. Oh, hey, everyone. I’m Nomad Ellison, and I’m worth more than you.

I made it to space against all odds. You would expect a lockdown on the part of good-natured traffic controllers. No. Everyone was busy figuring out the “incident” on the main drag which left the street shops shot up with blaster fire. But hey, ask my boat’s gun. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

I guess these guys figured that they could jump me together and overwhelm me with numbers, split the money later, which is standard operating procedure when you can’t decide if you want to tackle alone someone supposedly responsible for the destruction of a starcruiser. For all their planning, though, they picked a spot to jump me that happened to be right in the middle of a debris field. Whatever else they say about asteroid smashers, the fact remains: no one has the balls to fly faster or more recklessly through a bunch of rocks.

And that was it. That was the last stop I had to make before settling into the old new frontier that is New Switzerland, Eugenica.

The name is a bit of an inside joke among the pseudo-intellectual historians around here. It’s a peaceful hideaway for thieves and murderers, religious psychos and cultists. We call it New Switzerland because of the guns. We know we’ve all got them, and we’re living in one of the many big ones planted in the ground. So, just like in old Switzerland, no one gets hurt.

Okay, that’s a lie. But you can’t deny that the name is catchy.

It rains twice as much as it should here. The weather system really seems to avoid the chunk of New Switzerland that was blown away before my great grandfather was in diapers. Half the planet is a gaping gunshot wound, or something equally traumatic to witness from space, all lopsided and wrapped in dirty coal-colored clouds. Like someone caved Luna’s face in. It’s a big electrical soup over on the “other” side, “here be dragons” and all that shit. So no one sane does more than look at it from space. But for the side of the planet still unruffled, it’s more like New Seattle.

New Switzerland is a pretty graveyard. Her sister planet rises up pink over the corals every once in awhile, and the kalopsia is even worse than the kind you’ll get chewing too much morstua root. The reef desert is just outside of town, separating each and every one of the Gun Cities, some kind of morbid art project that would be better with beached whales and the like. But there’s no beach anymore unless you think of the ground itself as the beach, and that’s getting to be a stretch even for an optimist. Oh well.

The beached whales could be the guns, I suppose. Big, black, ominous, corpulent warts growing out of the ground every few hundred miles, strategically placed by “the best minds who ever lived,” or so the saying goes. They’re so huge you can see them all around on a clear day. It isn’t as impressive when you live under the shadow of one, day in and day out – when the city you live in is an oversized blaster plus life support system, itself.

Let’s get one thing clear, here – no one knows how the hell these things work. No one has ever fired a shot off of New Switzerland (or any of her similarly equipped sisters out there in-system) since before my great grandfather learned to wipe. In fact, we’re all sort of hijacking the pyramids, so to speak. The guns are the main focus, but they’re only one component in the power grid that we keep running. The city is totally self-sufficient as long as the gun is powered—food, water, repair from the most severe of the storms, it’s all taken care of by the big black guns.

The irony would kill my great grandfather with laughter, I’m sure.

If it seems strange and crazy, it’s because it is. Blame some ancient Earther folk who decided a long time ago that Earth just wasn’t intelligent (or peaceful) enough for them or their children to be living on. No ordinary four billion year old ball of dirt is fit for the careful product of our loins, they said, and they up and left in ships slower than paint and uglier than the real pyramids for this special somewhere that they could settle down and build huge guns in peace.

“Engineered for pilgrimage,” some like to call the Eugenicans, and it’s actually a rather apt description for a group of crazed misfit geniuses smart and capable enough to build up their own society decades from home, but human enough to blow themselves to hell as soon as the issue of “dumb territory” versus “smart territory” came into play again. Someone’s always stupider.

Weird cults have sprung up all across Eugenica. No written record – those crazies literally just kept it all in their heads – but direct descendents almost worship their great grandfathers as failed gods because of what they did leave. And those damn tourists have absolutely no sense of humor about anything. After all, why would a demi-god need to laugh? The truly funny thing is that these freaks can’t figure out anything their granddaddies built any better than the rest of us outcast leeches. Don’t tell it to any of them, but I tend to think that it’s because they’re all results of “imperfect” breeding after Eugenican society as we still love it collapsed, culture-wise. All of us here are leeches. Only some of us are embarrassingly self-righteous parasites.

There are also initiatives (hatched mostly from Earth-based interests, predictably) to “close down” the planets as historical landmarks and open them up to museum tours and such. Luckily, it will never happen. Eugenia is widely regarded as a back alley hellhole to Earth riddled with “nanotech deathtraps.”

Society figures that if some psychotic wants to dive nose first into that, it’s easier and much cheaper than prison, anyway. Bounty hunters – the chickenshit ones – don’t like it much, but that’s life. Even if they venture this far back towards Sol going after their mark, there are dozens of Gun Cities to scour on each of the Eugenican moons. Even still, there’s fear of the real psychotics hunting the criminals into exhaustion. Anyone who’s willing to slog through the sewer looking for one rat in particular is driven entirely by greed, and greed is the most powerful in the entire spectrum of human emotion.

Yeah. I live in fear. I’m not afraid to admit that. Frankly, I was surprised Quick survived as long as he did out here in the mines, and even though I haven’t seen any hint of assassins lurking around watching me, the question mark noose hangs there in the air.

Oh well. If I die here, I’m already famous, at least – a household name of ill-repute, which is much more highly regarded out here than being some asteroid smashing idiot that literally smashed into an asteroid.

Doesn’t mean I have a deathwish. I never wanted to go slumming again, but that’s where the stone falls. Fame, it’s a motherfucker.

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AUTHOR'S NOTES

"Intro" is only the prelude to Where the Stone Falls. Setbacks (otherwise known as school, work and miscellaneous other recreation) have prevented me from completing further installments to my satisfaction, but rest assured, I am at work on them, and they will be written by me.

Comments and criticism are welcome.