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crantzWrote a bit of dweeby Sci-Fi/potential horror while I was waiting for someone to log on and play with me. It's a better version of something I came up with when I was seventeen and actually read outloud in front of people, omg. They said it was very nice and that made me happy and thus is not a bad memory. The end. I've been doing this on writtenkitten.net and enjoying the many kittens I receive.
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There is an open secret in the upper management of the military. That secret is this:
When they won't do enough for a court martial, there is a way to deal with bad soldiers. You send them to Famine Crow Station.
The station, named after a famous warship that led a decisive battle three hundred years ago, is a dumping ground. Soldiers that go into come out three ways: Retired, court martialed, dead.
It was most often the third one.
Its current commander was Commander Alo Qarras whose anger issues had led to a quiet promotion and re-assignment on Famine Crow. Her desk was in disrepair with one broken screen, and on the wall behind her chair was the outline of a body in the semi-melted hull.
Things didn't get repaired on Famine Crow unless it was life threatening. The military didn't have enough troublemakers to staff a whole station of dead men walking which suited them, even if it was inconvenient to the dead men.
Qarras had nothing to do with the body outline, minus it being the source of her new command.
No one knew what had happened. It had been ruled as a freak accident, murders weren't usually followed up on Famine Crow, which didn't mean someone wasn't punished. But most often things were ruled as suicide or accident.
There were a lot of suicides. A lot of suicides that didn't look like a human could have done it, but they weren't accidents and they couldn't have been murder. Murder required investigation, accidents less so. But suicide required none and the station was so understaffed, well...
If you asked Qarras, she would say the station was full of so much death and every bad thing humanity could produce that it had a life of its own and it wasn't a nice life. If you asked some of the crew, they'd say there were ghosts.
If you asked Kare, the ship's only gunman, he'd say there were beasts in the walls and that's what the scurrying and clanking was at night. But nothing could life in a place without anything to eat, so no one listened to Kare. Besides, he was small and irritating. He'd ended up on Famine Station for talking off to a particularly short-tempered captain one too many times.
Kare was Hindi, which meant that he was only six feet tall. Qarras, average height for a woman, towered over him at nine feel tall. She'd given up trying to intimidate him. He was one of the few she'd met on the station that knew he'd been sent there to die and being almost child-sized to the rest of the crew held no fear for him in the face of that.
Qarras and Kare had a camaraderie that wasn't very friendly.
Six hundred years ago, humans had mastered genetic alteration. At five hundred years it had been used so widely humanity was changed in many ways. Today, it was banned, but humanity's evolutionary path had been changed irrevocably.
Physicals alterations were the easiest and most popular at first. More strength, more size. As the years and advances went by, even the face of industry changed, as certain vehicles and tools were no longer needed.
While humanity widely embraced this new world, some groups held out. The majority were religious, seeing heavily altering the body beyond how it had been intended as a disgusting interference with the plans of their creator(s). The Amish and Hindu people are the ones most talked about in the history books.
But even religious convictions aren't much in the face of not wanting your children left far behind in the world. A secret trade in a few of those communities, of alterations that could be taken away from sight and left no physical changes but instead left mental, did swift business. As the decades went past, while the rest of the world grew stronger and larger, some communities suddenly began breaking records.
Intelligence, reflexes, motor skills, they surpassed the others. When questioned, community leaders would simply say: "We just try harder."
And those that stuck to their convictions became remnants of the past.
There is an open secret in the upper management of the military. That secret is this:
When they won't do enough for a court martial, there is a way to deal with bad soldiers. You send them to Famine Crow Station.
The station, named after a famous warship that led a decisive battle three hundred years ago, is a dumping ground. Soldiers that go into come out three ways: Retired, court martialed, dead.
It was most often the third one.
Its current commander was Commander Alo Qarras whose anger issues had led to a quiet promotion and re-assignment on Famine Crow. Her desk was in disrepair with one broken screen, and on the wall behind her chair was the outline of a body in the semi-melted hull.
Things didn't get repaired on Famine Crow unless it was life threatening. The military didn't have enough troublemakers to staff a whole station of dead men walking which suited them, even if it was inconvenient to the dead men.
Qarras had nothing to do with the body outline, minus it being the source of her new command.
No one knew what had happened. It had been ruled as a freak accident, murders weren't usually followed up on Famine Crow, which didn't mean someone wasn't punished. But most often things were ruled as suicide or accident.
There were a lot of suicides. A lot of suicides that didn't look like a human could have done it, but they weren't accidents and they couldn't have been murder. Murder required investigation, accidents less so. But suicide required none and the station was so understaffed, well...
If you asked Qarras, she would say the station was full of so much death and every bad thing humanity could produce that it had a life of its own and it wasn't a nice life. If you asked some of the crew, they'd say there were ghosts.
If you asked Kare, the ship's only gunman, he'd say there were beasts in the walls and that's what the scurrying and clanking was at night. But nothing could life in a place without anything to eat, so no one listened to Kare. Besides, he was small and irritating. He'd ended up on Famine Station for talking off to a particularly short-tempered captain one too many times.
Kare was Hindi, which meant that he was only six feet tall. Qarras, average height for a woman, towered over him at nine feel tall. She'd given up trying to intimidate him. He was one of the few she'd met on the station that knew he'd been sent there to die and being almost child-sized to the rest of the crew held no fear for him in the face of that.
Qarras and Kare had a camaraderie that wasn't very friendly.
________________________________
Six hundred years ago, humans had mastered genetic alteration. At five hundred years it had been used so widely humanity was changed in many ways. Today, it was banned, but humanity's evolutionary path had been changed irrevocably.
Physicals alterations were the easiest and most popular at first. More strength, more size. As the years and advances went by, even the face of industry changed, as certain vehicles and tools were no longer needed.
While humanity widely embraced this new world, some groups held out. The majority were religious, seeing heavily altering the body beyond how it had been intended as a disgusting interference with the plans of their creator(s). The Amish and Hindu people are the ones most talked about in the history books.
But even religious convictions aren't much in the face of not wanting your children left far behind in the world. A secret trade in a few of those communities, of alterations that could be taken away from sight and left no physical changes but instead left mental, did swift business. As the decades went past, while the rest of the world grew stronger and larger, some communities suddenly began breaking records.
Intelligence, reflexes, motor skills, they surpassed the others. When questioned, community leaders would simply say: "We just try harder."
And those that stuck to their convictions became remnants of the past.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-22 11:35 am (UTC)And that's why I want to know more about them.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-22 01:51 pm (UTC)eeee. Thank you!