The Sweetest Thing – Part 7

When the time comes for me to lay down my burdens and rest, I think my most enduring legacy will be this:

No matter how bad things got, no matter how much the world turned against me, I simply refused to give in.

I get it from my mother.  I couldn’t be more proud of that..

Writing, from nothing, and against the tide of my everything.  Because I’ve earned the right to my dreams, and I’m willing to bleed on the keys if that’s the price of victory.

The Sweetest Thing – Part 7 

The laughter died slowly, yet the looming conflict and specter of death gathered its toll as the journey neared its end.

The cliffs of the Isle of Lewis loomed ever larger, and on their edge were the batteries.  The endless, numberless batteries.

A hundred miles out, they sounded their protest at my approach.

Attacking the batteries head on was a good way to die.  They could churn out fire far faster and at much greater distance than anything even the craven Shamans deemed acceptable losses.  Yet they had one critical flaw, one I doubt even the Shamans would’ve known if it hadn’t been for their accidental success in Iceland.

My accidental success in Iceland…

The batteries of the United European Defense were simply ill-equipped to deal with skirmishers.

Normally, that wouldn’t be so bad.  Anything big enough to carry a nuke that could get the job done wouldn’t be agile enough to close on the British Isles in one piece.  Anything smaller could only carry one, possibly two, soldiers.  So really, what was the risk?

Then the enslavement waves, the addictions, and sensiopaths and kinesiopaths being used in tandem.  Exactly as I was being used now.  As Agnes was being used now.  It burned my eyes and my throat that because I had committed the sin of surviving a suicide mission, millions would die because of it.

I just wanted to live though.  I wanted my Agnes, and I couldn’t fight the Hunger without the meager doses of power I received from the Shamans.  For all their avarice, for all their vicious nature, a lack of cunning was not a weakness for them.

One person might not be able to do much, but a kinesiopath with a double dose of power and several food rations in her belly?  That was damage that would be almost impossible to match.

So far as we could tell, kinesiopaths hadn’t been available for the enemy at any point in the Great Conflict.

The starbursts of anti-aircraft fire began pouring in like an over-crowded fireworks display.  I burrowed into my senses, losing all grasp on time, on my body as a whole.  I was simply an extension of my sense of touch, my sense of sight, my sense of smell, and to the sound which reached me within my cockpit.

There was no longer a distinction between ship and pilot.  I traced my way past the barrage of fire with the effortless grace of a particularly gifted ballet dancer.  I gyrated the ship through climbs, dives, whirling loops, and all manner of evasive maneuvers that barely fit the description.  In the end, a tense few minutes later, I had closed the gap.

The wall of guns were in sight now, each no larger than the pod-runner under my control.  They had quieted, and even through my cockpit I could hear alarm sirens sounding the troops to the defense.  There was no way they could prepare for Agnes, however, and I wept tears of anger and regret and sorrow and fear as I brought her into the melee.

To be continued…

Tearfully,
Justin