Sci fi short

Howdy there. I belong to a Science Fiction writers site. They are having a micro story contest. Here is mine.

RIGHT and RIGHTEOUS

Gomer cycled through the lock, popped his suit. Pee stink, sweat, fear smell. The usual post op.

Me and Kestral droning, shield check, cloaking. Today ours better than theirs. Down capped the comms, bio med. Uplinked to orbital, sent the recon data. Death toll stats. Gomer had blighted big time.

Eighty years of this shit. War so big you couldn’t get your head around it, even with enhance and implants. Too fucking big, too grotesque. Planetary systems gone, suns blown, billions dead. Both sides. Bled white.

But no end. No compromise. None to be had. Why? Because both sides knew, I mean knew they were right. Big crime. Biggest. Blasphemy. One right, one wrong. Big wrong. All wrong. All or nothing.

And man, that is war isn’t it. Yeah.

Big gomer in the ultra son cleaning off. Me and Kerstal both knowing he was over. Ship out the next shuttle. Get a rehab brain wipe, maybe the tabula rosa this time.

Gomer was good. The best. Had been. Now, his bio med readouts fluxed into the red, his cerebrals were all juked to hell.  He came out red eyed and tranqued himself stone out. No blame. I was half there myself. Another two ops and I’d be in the scrubber.

Great thing about this war? All human. Well, human, biped, similar species anyhow. None of the exotics wanted in on this. They didn’t care.

The AI’s stayed out of it, too. Human ones and the extra terr’s. Couldn’t be bothered. They’d crossed the singularity forty humps back and weren’t even speaking to the species anymore. Nothing hostile. Designed warp envelope ships, built them, and adios suckers. Have a nice millenium. Jimmied out beyond the rim.

Shit, they were smart.

Kerstal was a cute fem. Hard ass. Gung ho. Had been. But you do the implants and the enhance and it wears. Instead of your two hundred revolves around the gas burner, you got thirty. If you were lucky. Mostly you died. Mortality eighty percent. Eventually. I mean you did tour after tour cause nobody wanted you after the morph. Only each other. Not human and knowing it. Shit.

So, Kerstal and me linked and did the cyber two head. Hours of it. Forgot the surge rips and the brain burn and those moments of terror when your suit link stuttered. We flew and fucked and became each other and a thousand other dances.

I tranqued and slept. Forty hours out. Banked the sleep neuro. I would need it.

Woke up, hooked up, pumped up, stims and nano brain bio enhance, sub linked and yacked with my suit, that shortly would be me. Heinlein’s old turd about troopers. Loved it. But this was neural meld.  All for one and one only.

The suit was remade every post mission. Max, latest tech, bio and hard. Weapons hot, nukes to pulse spitters, plasma and four d missiles.  You fused and had it all uploaded new to the micro.

Kerstal woke up just as I was suiting. Smiled.

Gomer was gone. The shuttle had sinced him back to the homey’s for a little dome cleaning.

I returned Kerstal’s smile. No need for words.

Closed and prepped and got up to go out and fight for the one true god. Hallelijah. 

My, how time does fly. They, whoever "they" may be, say time is a river. It feels now more like a wind, a storm, that rushes along, and like some magic spell, carries one from place to place, memory to memory without an intervening connectivity. Ah, but no long speaking about time. Let time be today.

No great long post this morning. Dim outside, a few badly needed shreds of winter hiding the sun. I hope, for the sake of the land, there is more to come. We are short here in the west, while the east continues to be pummeled by storm after storm. Snow in Atlanta. It will be a cold day and all that.

I am re-watching Game of Thrones. I do enjoy the writings and the complexities of plot. I also enjoy any book or series where the moral lines are blurred. The relativity of good and bad depending on one's position in the game. Very close to real life I think.
Ah, but breakfast, a late one albeit, does call and my stomach growls.

Dear readers, and I hope there are more than a few of you, I bid you good morn.

CPM

Wednesday evening. It could be any Wednesday. Cold out. Perhaps a spot of rain on the morrow.
I've been re-reading the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. If you don't know him, he is credited with inventing the Sword and Sorcery genre of of fiction.

He wrote over 500 stories and died at the age of 26. I find that volume of output, and many of these stories, the bulk of them, were published.

I've read other authors criticize his writing as puerile, or adolescent, but I reject such things. Who is to say these things? Some very famous authors have taken shots at him, but he died at such an early age, before he could mature, who knows what he might have created?

For myself, when I read his writing as a teenager, Howard, more than any other of his peers or those who followed, wrote with such fire, such intensity, at his best, he seemed to be writing of things he'd really seen, of fantastic cities and beautiful women and monsters and creatures of the outer cosmos, that he had experienced. Yes, he wrote for the pulps, an artisan, producing huge volumes at penurious rates to keep body and soul together. But, critics be damned whether named King or Moorcock, who published "legitimate" works with publishing houses, but despite that, between them they produced only a handful of books that had nearly the sheer pulse pounding impact, the visceral power of Howard's Texas based prose.

Say what you will about him, he was a true story teller. A yarn spinner, and by the gods he could make you feel the sweat in your hauberk, the blood pounding in your veins when you slashed and bled and sometimes died in worlds of his imaginings.

He is not as known as Edgar Rice Burroughs, or dozens of other writers of that era an style, but his creation CONAN, that singular character is ubiquitous, around the world his name has carried for all these decades. And for that alone he should be honored.

I too am a simple artisan, a craftsman whose work I hope will entertain you, excite you, carry you to places you might not otherwise have journeyed to. I don't compare myself to him or to any others.

I do know one thing, now in a different season of my life, having known the travails of outrageous fortune, of having had loves and lost them, had good and bad, flights of fancy and depths of despair, that as I go back through his stories, some of them, not all, but some, carry me still on dragons wings to the dark lands of the nether gods, to the green sward of ancient ruins where dragons lurk and beautiful women fight beside their warrior kings or thieves.

His works have fallen out of copyright, so many of them are available for free, and to ride on the wings of the dark beings without a tithe seems unfair, but such is the fate of those who create and go to dust, as all we must too. Read him sometime when youth fires your imagination and that damned idiot critic can be shut up for a short time. Then come and fly with these long ago written tales and enjoy the ride.

Blood and damnation they will pay afore yet I fall......