POV Call Sign: Six-by

POV Unit Type: space marine, Sect Most Vicious

“—DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

The surface of Debron IV is a terrifying place to be.

The world is dark and gray, bathed in an eerie almost glowing blue fog. The kernels detonated an eternity bomb before the sync, blasting everything in its kill radius to ash. The ground beneath our boots still smolders, the burned gray-black granules of grit remind me of sand but off-colored and rough, its texture almost sharp. You could shave with the grit of Debron IV and probably leave your face rubbed raw and bleeding.

We stand at the center of a large crater, facing the low sweeping horizon ringed by the mountains of ash. Piled high in towering drifts that gently slope away from the epicenter of the explosion. This is by design. The Krag, like fire, spread faster and stronger when moving up. They are most dangerous when attacking from below.

Mayhem broke loose all around.

Kraggits! Tech Level One skirmishers.

Small, thin, quick moving and quick biting.

They came in hard, as always. They stream from the Pelt in waves, an endless parade of enthusiastic killers desperate for the blood of a marine.

It’s hard to describe something so alien. Their—I wouldn’t call it skin—exterior. It’s an unnaturally hardened substance, like shale or rock or washed out bones. The closest thing I can think of is a stalagmite the color of an over cooked skeleton. Imagine horror and pain made corporeal, then melted and slowly dripped over millions of years atop itself one drop after another. Piling the torment into hideous misshapen forms completely devoid of reason and symmetry.

The runt-like things are roughly the size of a standard trash can tilted to one side. They have fourteen legs that make a scratching noise when they move and ten jagged spikes of varying size that they use to attack. Their bite is strong enough to pierce armor.

In small numbers kraggit are little more than a harassment force. But unchecked their effect can be utterly devastating. Sowing disorder and confusion, delaying the vurkers long enough to cripple the establishment of the supply chain and causing the base to collapse before its foundations are even secured. Mission Failure—humanity is dead.

BOOM! Hail, Hangman!

He devastates. The Ouroboros, sodomy lock thrown clear, a thunder spewing cataclysm spreading well fucked krag-asses all across the battlefield.

I swear he could punch a hole through the fucking planet with that monstrous thing.

Omen kneels beside Hangman, covering for the little guy with the big gun and ridiculous boots. A haunting specter, he is hunched over in a deadly slouch, holocauster barking Wrath-fire between the massive blasts of Hangman’s Ouroboros.

I took the hint and started firing—tok-tok-tok.

All signs of fatigue are long gone. Our pathogens dosing us with generous amounts of cowboy-the-fuck-up. I can’t feel my face. I might be smiling. I don’t know.

If I am, it’s not because it’s funny but because an endless stream of kill-every-mother-fucker-that-gets-in-my-way is ripping through my bloodstream, interfering with the normal operation of my nervous system. Making me feel…

I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like being let out of an unlocked cage at last… Time doesn’t slow down, my nervous system speeds up.

The pathogen-holocauster weapons platform is a simple, yet elegant piece of engineering. Each stimulus on the battlefield—say the sight of a Krag shitlord in desperate need of a glory killing, is detected by sensors in my eyes. Sensory neurons relay the message to my spinal cord, which routes the input not to my brain but back through my arm to my trigger finger, the response:

A happy caress. Tok. The energy-to-mass equivalencer of my holocauster converts another percentage of the remaining energy in my gencel to a pre-selected munitions type and it is propelled across the battlefield where something dies.

This is the world as it was intended to be.

Tok. Tok. Tok. A thing of beauty in my hands, Girls in White Dresses spits out spinner rounds. Tight spirals of death, insanely accurate. They go where I want, and I want them to kill.

Without thought, my holocauster and I are already tracking the next target.

The kernels who designed the system insist it must be this way. Hail engineering!

Under normal conditions, a full bandwidth signal can traverse my nervous system at two-hundred-and-sixty-eight miles per hour. This is thanks to the naturally occurring myelin sheath coating the axons that run throughout my body.

However, wearing a pathogen, I am not under normal conditions. Instead, as the signal propagates down the axon in an ion cascade, the pathogen cheats—increasing the maximized discharge rate of motor neurons, amplifying the signal, insulating the pathway, removing redundant or irrelevant noise from the system, and ultimately increasing the potential conduction velocity of the nervous system.

Valhalla’s calling…

The mind doesn’t shut off. It moves out of the way. The pathogen slowly ramps up the rate of fire until we reach reflex state. It’s not a place, it’s a condition.

tok-tok-tok.

If the kernels are right, and they always are, my mind is now out of the equation. My nervous system has been successfully hijacked.

The last truly secure information pathway in the known Universe. The human nervous system.

My pathogen is special equipped with an experimental super-weapon-module. A one-of-a-kind marvel of now-lost-to-us technology salvaged from the wreckage of an advanced research laboratory long ago.

A blackbox of peekaboo logic peers into the immediate future, evaluating a dizzying spectrum of likely scenarios then pokes the resultant best-case calculations into multiple predicative speculative execution pipelines whose what-if logic pre-computes a response based on a quantum reading of the future.

The effect, if you believe the rationalists and their empty philosophical bullshit—which no one ever does—is that my pathogen-holocauster platform can kill targets in the slightly near future. With an unspecified and always changing definition of the word slightly.

Brainless shits who need a name to drop for everything call it neuromorphic wet-ware. I call it what it really is. My eyes. My nervous system. My insidious desire to kill everything.

And a great fucking gun.

Despite the obvious dangers as anyone who knows the joys of being lost in the depravity a merciless killing spree can assure you, given the opportunity, the tendency is to push it. As far as you can.

Murder! Murder! Murder! Nothing is coming off this battlefield alive.

Hence my smile. It’s great.

I am well aware that there is nothing special in what I do. Anyone wearing pathogen armor would do the same. By taking “me” out of the loop, I move faster. I react faster. I kill faster.

There are, of course, trade offs.

Severe ones.

Let’s not kid ourselves, no one gives a shit about me. What everyone back on The Good Shepherd reading this wants to know is…

What’s it like down there?

Sadly, I’ll never know. I’m destined to die a virgin. Still I’ve always imagined it’s quite lovely down there.

But down here, on this miserable little crapsack of a planet called Debron IV, the slow march of evil shit is creeping me the fuck out.

The first twelve hours planetside are supposed to be calm. Normally, the only units on the battlefield would be human. The Krag do not appear until after the first thredfall. Which under standard conditions, should happen [time frame 12 hours] after bringing the Trumpets online. We use this window to scout the battlefield, establish lines of defense and prepare for the thred to fall.

Once thred falls, and the Krag begin to appear in heritage-space the battlefield quickly turns into a hell-ground that only grows worse the longer we stay on it. As the thred cycles accumulate the Krag presence intensifies. Their units become more numerous, and more advanced as each thred cycle brings Krag reinforcements. More units, larger units, more powerful units, more intelligent and dangerous units. The danger progressively worsens each successive thred cycle.

I have read papers, written by idiot rationalists I don’t respect and don’t believe, who claim that because of the FTL nature of the Krag, when they are entrapped in the protective field of the Trumpets of Jericho they spend an eternity in horror and pain.

Good, let them suffer.

Would be my response if I believed them, but like I said… No one ever does.

The cold hard facts that have escaped their faulty logic and lack of understanding of what the word eternity means are readily apparent:

I am standing on a battlefield swamped with spooky nastiness whose eternity of suffering has ended.

I gave up obsolete thinking—bitching about other people’s absurd logic—a long time ago. Don’t miss it to tell the truth.

Something has gone horribly wrong—I have no clue what–but the Krag are everywhere, just seconds after our landing. There is no way the Algorithm would have sent Most Vicious into an active firefight.

Such weighty matters are no concern for me.

We won’t be able to contact The Good Shepherd and learn what went wrong until the next sync [time frame 12 hours].

In the meantime, a whiny bitch is a weak element, and a weak element will drag the entire tribe down. The tribe will not tolerate this.

I keep my mouth shut and keep firing.

Senseless destruction.

I’m supposed to be thinking about the team, following orders, being a part of something bigger than myself. Doing my fair share to stave off Last Man Standing as long as humanly possible. Racking up contribution points towards the War Survival Effort. And of course, looking forward to those sweet, sweet rewards the Algorithm is convinced that I desire.

But the truth is … I never cared about this. Recognition. Being a part of the top rated fire team. Purpose. I never wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself. This was never my fucking dream. No one lives forever. All my friends are dead.

I was never so naive to think I could save myself or anything else.

Achievements are meaningless and always have been. The facts are you will die, and your body will rot where it falls. You will be forgotten. I outgrew those hero stories a long time ago.

For me life was never about the climb. I never cared about how high I could aspire. It was always how many of the motherfuckers I could take down with me when I fell.

Still firing. I am laughing, maybe even smiling as I do. It’s great.

Wearers of pathogens are not exactly known for being bastions of mental health.

… and I was a bit of an edge case to begin with.

Truth hurts.

It’s surreal. I might be traumatized. I’m not sure.

My mind is not right.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck…” The universal call for assistance on the battlefield.

Panic breaks out amongst the vurkers. Krag run amok amongst them. The vurkers haven’t even cleared their lander. Already hit with a wave.

I have no idea how the vurkers organize themselves. I don’t know shit about how they operate. All I know is they are here to build and harvest.

Someone in their ranks makes the call—management decision. They break into three teams.

One team continues to unload the landers. Double timing it. A war zone is no place for slacking.

Another team begins clearing and leveling the ground–preparing build sites is my guess.

The third team runs interference. Fucking hardcore, man. Those bastards are unarmed. They don’t even have joss pieces. The third team are spinning their builders. Slamming into the kraggit like mamma bears, trying to keep between the enemy and the other two teams.

Big Bro frantically signs to me. I sign back. Equally as frantic. We’re having a conversation. I wonder what we’re saying? He seems to like my responses.

He nods. Clearly satisfied.

BOOM! Holy shit!

Thunder claps in my ears as Big Bro slams his fists down on my shoulders. That was unexpected. It rings my bell, real good. Maybe we had a pep talk? If I wasn’t already paying attention I am now.

My mind clears. Understanding dawns on me. The vurkers! What the hell was wrong with me?

I lurch towards their landers. Too dangerous to use my holocauster. They’re too close to the kraggit. I’m not worried about missing the kraggit, holocauster rounds don’t miss. I’m worried about hitting the vurkers—kraggit aren’t big enough to stop a holocauster round. My shots would go clean through the kraggit and risk hitting a vurker.

Fortunately the kernels who designed the pathogen-holocauster platform understood this and designed accordingly for close quarters combat.

Razor-wire! The underside of Girls in White Dresses firing barrel is armed with it. Once engaged, the merciless buzz of the spinning razor-wire fills the air.

I advance on the kraggit, drawing the aggro. They leave off their assault on the vurkers, focusing on me.

They come, rushing over quick to their own doom.

All is destruction and violence.

Girls in White Dresses screaming louder, more painful and more effective than any insult I could ever imagine.

Spooring the enemy. Ichor slung across the battlefield marking their deaths. Vetch flung wide with an unpleasant strength. The harsh scratching of their rent bodies as razor-wire tears through them, splattering the rocks and dust with the bile-like ichor of their innards.

The evil part of my brain I reserve for moments like these lights up. Some ancestral remnant of the primordial ooze all life crawled from. The will to live—the resolve that something else must die so I will not.

Embrace the horror, embrace the madness. Hail gore! Embrace the destruction of the enemy.

Welcoming the wet sounds from their ranks. The splashing of whatever unwholesomeness they are made of, delighting in the clicks and clacks of their appendages grating upon the carcasses of their own dead. The vocalized screeches and skree! of their dying. The crunch and squish of those who come too close and are crushed beneath my pontoon boots.

I rip through the last of the kraggit drenched in a bloom of vetch and ichor.

I find myself face to face with one of the vurkers.

Up close like this I can see through the protective visor of his builder. He’s an old fella. His eyes are wide—looks like he’s seen the Antichrist.

He was one of the mamma bears that had been protecting the others. His builder’s been scratched to shit, but he looks alright.

I bump his fist in salute. Fuck yeah! Good looking out for.

The other vurkers are cheering. Everyone loves dead Krag.

No time wasted, on some hidden signal I didn’t catch the mamma bear team melts away and rejoins the others doing normal vurker shit.

Explosions, not of fire, surround me. Dead kraggit and pieces of dead kraggit, blast past and among us. Showering us like shrapnel.

There are rankers on the battlefield.

Shit. Rankers are Tech Level Two units. They shouldn’t be on the battlefield until after the second thred cycle. What the fuck is going on?

“Towers! Bring down those towers!” It’s Big Bro.

Rankers are an augmentation unit. And therein lies the danger. The can combine existing Krag into larger, more powerful units and structures. Already they’re piling the skirmishers into a defensive perimeter. Transforming the small and abundant kraggits then stacking them into lofty spires towering over the battlefield. The reach of the towers is extensive. And their ability to inflict damage and sustain punishment is far greater than individual kraggits.

BOOM! Hail fuggin Hangman! His pace quickens. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Hangman bursting volleys of rapid fire.

It’s a miracle—we caught a break—and it’s a good one. The rankers must not have realized we have an Ouroboros down here already. Stacked like that the spires make an easy target for Hangman’s cannon and he blasts barrage after barrage into them.

The Krag are taking heavy losses now. With each collapsing tower they lose far more units than they can afford to.

The fight is turning, the rankers realize their mistake.

As desperate to live as we are to kill them, the rankers are hurling the kraggit at us. The kraggit skeletons explode on impact, shards of whatever the fuck the alien bastards are made of cutting and slicing and making mincemeat of whatever stands in their way. Sharp punctures that can bite through pathogen armor and kill a man.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The rankers are pulling the plug. Throwing everything they have at us. The lunatics.

Takes one to know one. I feel my lips peel back and my grin widens involuntarily. A death’s head grin. It’s great.

Forced to retreat, the rankers pull back into the protective confines of the Pelt. Seeking to change strategy. To hide, whether to await stronger units and reinforcements and counterattack in strength or to save their sorry asses I do not know.

Big Bro is launching signal flares. Globes of red and pink float softly into the sky.

Shit. That means something. I’m supposed to know what. I’ve studied this. Front-line tactics. I struggle to recall what Big Bro’s signal means. No dice. My mind is too far gone. It happens.

I don’t know what came next.

Must have been knocked on my ass. Maybe one of the rankers got a lucky shot in?

Big Bro is shouting at me, his voice in my ear, shouting at me “Get up! Get on your feet!”

His face slick with sweat. Intensity holds his eyes. His eyes hold mine.

“Six-by.” He pulls me to my feet. “You’re okay.”

He’s flashing orders at me.

I have no idea what he wants. Good communication skills are not part of the job description.

He points to Omen, already disappearing into the darkness of the Pelt.

Holy shit. I’m not terrified. I’m petrified.

Big Bro’s voice betrays nothing, his face the color of a man. “We’re gonna hunt those mother fuckers down.”

Wait, no.

“It’s time.” Big Bro sounds convinced. “We’re gonna tear those mother fuckers apart.”

He’s pushing me forward. The only thing left behind are the echoes of my laughter. Already fading.

This is the battlefield. There is no place for the fallen. When one of us falls another helps him up. If no one is there, then too bad. Boo hoo. You can always crawl. Life will never be fair. No exceptions.

We’re heading into the Pelt. Krag territory.

That’s Bad Juju. Real bad.

We’re really gonna do it. We’re gonna—