Elize looked up as her comm started to blink at her. She slapped at it, and an image flashed up onto the screen in front of her, on the cluttered desk.
It was Rodriguez, her assistant, who she'd assigned to do the tests.
"The computers are ready to start, Ms Gudrino. We have all storage on-line, and our subject is anaesthetised. Everything is ready."
"I'll be right down." She casually folded the screen down, and looked at the desk. It was a mess - she would have to clean it soon, but she had been so absorbed in her research that she hadn't had time. The digital readout on her computer's screen said 12.15 am, 2062, but it was wrong. It was four o'clock in the morning, not that you could tell with the smog and everything. She paced over to the window, looking absent-mindedly out of it as she donned her lab coat and walked out of the room.
 All along the corridor to the lifts was a large glass wall - the designers had bargained that there would be at least one good day per year, when they could be used. But all they showed was a depressing, dark landscape, tall buildings poking through thick brown smog, floodlit by dirty lights. It was raining, like it did almost all the time. If it wasn't raining, it hailed, or showered sleet. The enviromental disruption had affected the weather, along with other things. The day was almost as dark as the night these days...she couldn't remember different, and she doubted that anyone under thirty could either.
 Over the thick layer of smog cruised low-flying hovercars, their giant jets keeping them aloft. The building shook momentarily as a driver swooped too near and flames from their jets washed over the building. The tall, dilapidated New Glasgow Research Facility was positioned on a busy airlane, so it was black. There was no money to spare to clean the building, so it stayed that colour. The rain didn't help, either, the acids eroding into the once-elegant stone facing.
Once, New Glasgow Research Labs Inc had been rich, and had built this building as a monument to technology. Now this was the only surviving property of the firm, blackened by the very vehicles it had helped to invent. Elize was a new scientist in the firm, the first for years. Only a few employees remained, so she had plenty of space. She had reason to be grateful to the firm which had developed the nerve links that allowed her to control her lower body, made of titanium and steel and replacing the two legs which had been sheared off in a hover crash when she was young.
At last, the lift came. She got in, and it made its way down to the undersmog labs. Over the almost impenetrable brown clouds, the building was elegant, even through the carbon. But under the pollution, it was bare, industrial metal. After all, it would never be seen. The smog was almost like water - no-one could live under it, it let in no light, no air. The smog ended about two hundred feet up the building, leaving a small tidal mark from changes in the level over the years. Under the smog, buildings didn't have windows, and no life existed. Animals only survived on mountains and in protected 'domecities', the preserve of the rich and their servants. Everyone else had to inhabit the skycities, built on massive bridges spanning the space between skyscrapers and hills. It was an awe-inspiring sight, with thousands of brightly-lit curving arcs lighting up the skyline.
Finally, she was there. She stepped out, and Rodriguez was waiting for her. He was a small dark man, a neurologist like her, who had come up with the idea of brain-wave recording but had not had enough experience to set up the experiment. He had known her from University... An old tradition, but universities were still kept up. It had been discovered that the experience of socialising had improved the personalities of students, compared to people who had learnt from the early remote-teaching that came about with the introduction of the expanded Internet.
 Anyway, after Ernst Rodriguez had come to her, she had requested funds to research the project, but she had had to invest all the money she had inherited from her parents to complement the meagre sum that she had been granted. After all, this could be the saviour of people... She had seen too many patients die when she had been working in a hospital, after University.
Too many people trapped in decaying bodies, brilliant minds imprisoned in decrepit bodies, unable to get free. Now they would have a chance - people could have a new life, built into all sorts of applications. Computers capable of acting like a mind were smaller than a cabinet now, and they would soon get smaller. People could be put into spaceships, hovers, buildings, planes, even into new bodies like hers.
She walked into the lab, where a terminally ill patient had been strapped to a dentist's chair, taken from a demolished building's last sale. She was surrounded by old medical equipment, from auctions and sales all over the city. They had bought cheap equipment, but the two things that definately were not cheap were the auto-anaesthiser and the shining tower beside the wall - the recording unit. This processed and recorded every detail of the brain onto three different types of storage, including a device invented by an old friend, a supercooled memory pack powered by a tiny nuclear generator. The patient herself had herself asked Elize if she would record her brain, as her health was starting to decline. She had an unknown disease, untreatable and horrible, which turned the victim into a living vegetable. Tihs was her last hope.
As Elize set up the experiment, the equipment started to warm up and show readouts. The anaesthetiser hissed and hummed, pumping oxygenated blood round the patient's system together with enough gas to keep them unconscious. She hit a few keys and the lights on the recording console flickered, showing data transfer.
Eventually it was over. Three cartridges slid out on their trays, and Elize gazed in wonder at them. A whole person's mind, memories, experiences...captured in these tiny pieces of silicon, glass and metal.

One year later...

Elize gazed out of the window of her new office. She had patented the technology, calling it "Patterning". Now she was running a small firm, dealing in recording the brain wave patterns of the terminally ill - and more recently the wealthy - which was doing quite well. However, public opinion was turning against her, and had in fact been doing so ever since the news published a report on the technology. Extremist groups had protested against the 'degradation of the soul' it caused, but no-one had payed any attention until not very long ago, when a newspaper had published an article on it - saying "It could breed a new wave of Hitlers...people could take a 'perfect' personality and replicate it to create 'ideal' citizens." She had issued a statement against it, and the writer had been taken to court, but the damage had been done. Right now, many hovers bore the bumper stickers "Preserve our individuality" or "Braincloning - NO!". It was depressing - all she had meant to do was to help the sick and those in pain, not to create such a mess.
Suddenly, Rodriguez burst in, interrupting her pleasant train of thought.
"Elize! We've had a phone call..."
"What?"
"A call - someone says they're going to kill us."
"Why?"
"They didn't say. But I don't think we're safe here..."
"Well,we need to move...I've got an idea. Just in case...just in case they do what they say."
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm going to Pattern myself."
"Elize, you can't! You know it's still risky. You know for yourself why we charge so much for it!"
"What's riskier? Dying and being dead for ever or dying and being able to come back again?"
"Even so..."
"Don't argue. You can't change my mind."

Elize carefully inserted the multi-needle into her arm and placed her head under the gas hood of the auto-anaesthetiser. Rodriguez had objected, but she was going to save herself from that sneaking shred of doubt...
She reached over and pressed the button which she had linked up to start the process. The hood on the machine came down, and the last thing she saw was Rodriguez running into the lab shouting. Then she saw - she had forgotten to reset the machines to her own body. They were programmed to give four times the dose of drugs she needed for her slender frame. Muzzily, she tried to get up, but she couldn't move. At least I'll still be alive...almost, she thought. Everything went black.

--------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE:
In Rebirth, my previous story, I do in fact mention Elize as the inventor of Patterning, but not in the same way. Just think of this as an 'alternative history', OK?
--------------------------------------------------------------

Part 2
The Re-Awakening

112 years later...

Light...bright...no sound, nothing else. No body. No, it isn't bright, it's not light. It is nothing. Flat white nothingness occupies vision from edge to edge. She tries to turn to see behind her, and everything goes dark...

Light...bright...no sound, nothing else. No body. This time, she doesn't try to turn. She waits, to see what happens. Suddenly, images flash before her, sounds, impossible sensations, the smell of orange, the smell of music, the sound of cheese. It stops, and lights flash, and now everything is right. Now it all goes dark...

Light...bright...no sound, nothing else. No body. A feeling that she's gone through all this before. The light fades, and she can see now. She can hear, but still there is nothing except her consciousness. She can see...if that's the right term...straight in front of her, but trying to turn doesn't work. She feels like she did before synthetic muscles were implanted in her frame after her childhood hover crash, not being able to move anything but her head. This is worse. Blurred, meaningless shapes move in front of her vision, then resolve into people. Grating, pulsing torrents of sound warp in a strange way and she can now hear what they are. People talking... no language she has heard before. She tries to speak. And everything collapses, throwing her back into darkness...

Light...bright...no sound, nothing else. Finally, a body. She could feel a slightly un-natural sensation, and she looked down. This was not her body! Or at least what she could see of it...
 She was strapped to an operating table, with electrodes attached to various places on her body. People stood over her...a bit too far over her, she thought. They were all tall, but apart from that seemed normal. What had happened to her? Maybe Rodriguez had managed to pull her from the machine soon enough to stop the fatal dose of drugs. She must be in hospital. That would be it...but why the electrodes? And what had happened to her? She recognised the sensation now - her artificial muscles and legs had been replaced... with... With real flesh. She had a new body.
As she gazed on herself, the humans started to move about. One, obviously the leader, started to take the electrodes off, and others released the clamps holding her down. They were wearing garments she did not recognise, one-pieces made from some kind of slightly iridescent fabric. She sat up, and one of the people helped her to stand. Not used to the weakness of 'real' legs against the tough servo motors of her bulky artificial ones, she keeled over and toppled to the floor. She was helped up and a chair was slid over to her, and she gratefully sat down.
Surely this could not be 2062? This was confirmed when another person, this time dressed in 'normal' clothes, walked in and said, slowly and haltingly, "Good morning, Ms Gudrino. Welcome to the 22nd century."

Part 3
Welcome to 2175

As Elize was wheeled through the long corridors of whatever building she was in, she wondered about where she was. Where was this place? There were things she couldn't identify, sounds, strange objects on the walls. Obviously these people liked decoration...the place was beautiful, in a strange way. She was beginning to suspect something - that she was, in fact, dead. Or at least technically.
This was confirmed when the small convoy came to a stop in front of a doorway, which opened to reveal the largest quarters that Elize had ever seen. Even by today's expectations they would have been large, but Elize, used to living in a cramped apartment in a cheap accomodation skybridge, was awestruck. In her wildest dreams she could never have imagined this space, this amount of empty floor. Because of the incredible cost of building the skycities, space was at a minimum and folding, dual-purpose or even disposable furniture had to be used, squeezed into whatever space was available. But here...
It was a white, airy room, with a large luxurious bed and several chairs scattered around, translucent curtains concealing a small balcony. Next to the door was a single button, which one of the hosts pushed. A menu sprung up on a screen which had been camouflaged next to the panel, displaying choices in a strange language. At the press of a button, it resolved into common Terran before disappearing. The person who had spoken to her before said to her, "This is your room, Ms Gudrino. Feel free to do anything you wish. There's a...what would you call it?...television, I think, in the corner, and the controls are on top."
He pronounced the words haltingly, as if he had been studying the language but had never heard anyone use it before.
"What am I doing here?"
"You are here because of what you did over a hundred years ago. You are officially a saint."
Elize was amazed, but before she could say anything, the man continued:
"I am Maxwell Thorpe, Professor of Ancient Languages at New Glasgow University. I came here mostly because I'm the only one who can really speak your language here, and even then not very well. You see, I can't think of a way to break this gently to you. I hope you understand."
Elize nodded.
"Elize, you are what would normally be termed 'dead'. I hope this is not too much of a shock? You may well have suspected this already."
"Yes, I did. But thanks for the worry...but why the thing about being a saint?"
"You invented the technology called 'Patterning', no?"
"Yes...but what's that... Oh. How many did it save?"
"A lot of people, Elize. Uncountable billions. Ten years ago, there was a great plague of illness - unknown and seemingly untreatable. We looked it up in ancient medical records - it was called 'flu'. We believe you had a treatment for it in your time?"
"Common influenza? Uh-huh...but we got rid of that, vaccines and things... Ages before my time."
"Well, it came back. And this time round..."
He broke off for a second. "Well, we weren't prepared. We destroyed the last sample twenty years ago, and we thought we'd wiped it from the face of the planet. So we forgot the cures, forgot the vaccines...until someone came back from visiting a primitive tribe, one of the last on the planet, and brought back a mystery illness... She died, but not before infecting a shuttle-load of travellers... The illness spread around the world like lightning." Again he paused. "All of my family except for me were killled before they could be helped." He started to pace around the room. After a while, though, he continued. "Patterning saved the day. Billions of people were Patterned as they died, including a team of medical experts who had been working on a cure for cancer. While we were trying to revive them from our database of Patterns, we came across two or three old Patterns, including one of a doctor, one who had in fact come up with a new influenza cure. He was revived, and that's really the end of the story. The Earth's population was saved."
"But why did you have to bring me back? What more could I do?"
"You're the only real scientist we could find. All the others are dead or gone - because of our government. It doesn't like people who say there might be other races out there, and people who research anything that could lead to us finding another race mysteriously disappear in the night. The only scientific institution left is the New Glasgow Research Facility, which is where we are now."
"Hang on...you revived me because I'm a scientist...why on Earth?"
"The new government we have is a world government. It's been hailed as the greatest thing since Patterning, but we really don't like its methods. It's not just us, either."
"So you want someone to fight against the government?"
"No, we want someone to come with us to our new home. We're going to get out of this place, to somewhere where we can be ourselves again."
 

Three years later...

Elize looked out of the reinforced glass window of the command capsule. All the pollution had an advantage - no-one could see what you were doing. Admittedly, neither could you, but that was a minor point. She was looking at a swirling brown haze, soon to become...
And there it was. The flash of spark igniters lighting pilot jets, then the room shook as four massive boosters caught. A shadowy shape slipped free from what must have been the launch gantry, and slowly ploughed through the dense fog into the clear air above.
Elize, in her acceleration couch, pressed a button on the hidden console under her desk, and a screen popped up from the polished synth-mahogany, salvaged from an old office building. The screen showed a view from a rooftop camera, routinely scanning the skyways below. Her...friends...had tapped into the Council CCTV network, and this was the camera nearest to her, on the edge of a large open square.
Suddenly the screen started to shake and plumes of smog started to shoot up from the gloomy sea below. Ever so slowly, a dirty nosecone emerged, rising out of swirling clouds to reveal a bulbous shape, four attitude jets holding the nose steady. With a quiet, inaudible hum, the nosecone developed ten slits, and with an all-too-audible popping, ten barrels emerged and targeted surveillance equipment around the crowded square. Glass shattered, insulation charred as sparks dropped from the cameras. Police and crowd control were the next to go, hovers losing control and plunging towards the shrouded pit below, guns and equipment spilling out. Finally, the huge rocket was above the highest towers and spires of New Glasgow, and below it, the NGRF building stood proud on the edge of the large space. Elize checked her watch...ten seconds. She braced...
With a shockwave that was at first silent, the NGRF building detonated. Flaming chunks of concrete and steel flew out of the expanding fireball, knocking craters in surrounding towers. The planters of the explosives had done well - no damage was done to any civilian buildings, and no lives were lost from the explosion. Everyone from the NGRF had been in the rocket, now climbing on a pillar of flame and smoke towards the distant, yellow sky. When the clouds cleared, all that was left of the former research facility was a jagged stump sticking a few feet into the air above the omnipresent smog.
All of the scientists stared out of the observation ports in the side of the colony ship - for that was what it was - as it cleared the low-lying clouds. Not a single one of them had ever seen beyond the sulphurous clouds that were always present, as the government did not want any more speculation about space than necessary.  Now they were seeing something completely new to them. Everyone stared in wonder at the glowing pinpricks of light that were the stars, filling the sky now they were out of the atmosphere.
A day later, arrangements were being made in the rocket to sleep the twenty people. There was hardly room for anything, let alone proper facilities, but the two years spent building the rocket had been put to good use. Hypersleep chambers had been installed, and nutrient feed systems were online, ready for a twenty year journey. The perspex coffins opened as one, and their occupants climbed in, pulling the lids shut and lying down. Finally, when all the capsules were full, a warning sounded, then the lids locked with a 'clunk'. Gas flooded the closed capsules, sending the occupants into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Part 4
A New Beginning

The buggy coasted to a stop, and John jumped out, letting the small, balloon-tyred vehicle slowly roll into the garage. He had just been out exploring, in the marshes and bogs of New Terra. As he walked into the small building, John took out his notebook and started to read what he had written during the exploration.
John was one of the first sons of the pioneers from Earth, and he and a few others had been assigned exploration duties. They were slowly mapping out the lush forests and dusty plains that covered the planet, looking for sites for a new city. Ah, here it was..."A beautiful flat plain, dry. Covered in something that looks like compacted soil. Good site - firm ground, good building material nearby." The buggy was equipped with the latest in geological sampling equipment, chemical analysers, and all the tools needed for a survey. They needed it - the present small town had been built on what looked like a good spot, but was in fact subject to floods and droughts every year or so. The squat, metal government building was the only one that never collapsed every so often.
"John Hassel to see Mr Hunderbilt. Survey results." he said to the uniformed guard at the door. The guard smiled at him and told him to go in. She was in fact his sister, but he had to observe the rules.
Mr Hunderbilt was the most active of the pioneers, apart from the Mayor, Elize Gudrino. She was a legend in her own right, a brilliant scientist and a good leader. She had organised the setting-up of the colony, and had held the post of Mayor ever since. His thoughts were interrupted by Mr Hunderbilt.
"Hello, John. Got the results?"
"Yes, sir - I found an ideal place for our new town. It's a few hundred miles away, but there's a swamp in the way, and a small river."
"Yes, I can see what you mean." Mr Hunderbilt looked at the photos John had taken. "Yes, that looks good...soil analysis?"
John handed him the small notebook and the print-outs from the soil sampler.
"Good soil, rich...we could easily start up an agricultural settlement there...but I'm afraid you're a bit too late. Hans Delfort got here first."
John was crushed. Hans was his worst enemy, a rich and arrogant twenty-year-old, already the owner of several businesses. He hated John, and John easily returned the favour. As he walked out, Hunderbilt called him back.
"Here...take a look at this - it's Hans' survey."
John caught the folder Hunderbilt threw, and tucked it under his arm. He had a good mind to throw it away, but something kept him back. As he walked out and started down the road to his own housing block, he opened the folder and started to read.
By the end of the report, John was surprised. This was no good! Bad soil, no local materials, nothing. He suspected that a few credits had changed hands to ensure Hans the prestige of discovering the site of the new city. But what could he do?

A year later...

One year found the colony split down the middle. Half a year ago, John had gathered everyone who disliked Hans and they had departed to settle in the plain John had discovered. They called the town 'Pricetown'. Everyone left in the colony went with Hans, settling in the middle of a large plain, miles from anywhere. It was called Delfort, predictably. The old town was deserted, inhabited only by Anzee, the largest local animals. They looked like Earth monkeys, or something like them - monkeys had disappeared from the face of the Earth hundreds of years ago.
 Mayor Hassel smiled as he read the reports from Delfort. Slowly, the town was failing - even the efforts of Mayer Gudrino could not save the town. People were flocking to Pricetown, building homes and settling down. Food was plentiful, and there were plenty of the fast-growing local trees, hard as steel and adapted to the Anzee's fondness for tree shoots, to harvest for new buildings. Cut down one of the blueish trees, and before the day was over, the sap had formed a cap over the stump, and in a month's time, the tree was twenty feet high again. More explorers were looking for sites for settlements, and three good places had been found so far. This was a far cry from the photos he had seen of old Earth - most of the buildings were wooden, due to the lack of mines, and technology was slow to advance. His pleasant thoughts were cut off by a buzz from the intercom.
"Mayor, someone to see you. Says it's urgent." It was his secretary, Ralph Helman.
"Send them in."
The door opened, and his best geologist came in.
"Hi, John. Have I got news for you!"
James Vanloar was one of his best friends. He had grown up with him, and they were very close.
"What is it, James?"
"Brilliant news! I've found a huge deposit of metal, not far from here. There's iron, copper, tin - everything. It's really rich."
"Great - that's just what we've been looking for. Hang on..." John pushed the intercom button and spoke to his secretary. "Can you tell the equipment store to send up a few diggers?"
"Yeah, of course."
John turned back to James. "We'll get the show on the road as soon as possible."

Two months later...

The ore processing plant rumbled as the conveyor started to move and the first ore-rich rocks tumbled into the sorters and were shot into chutes depending on how much ore they contained. Trickles of molten metal turned into streams as metal was poured into moulds to form ingots, which were carted off to storage. John gazed at the smoothly-operating plant with pride. It worked first time! Delfort was dead, and Pricetown would flourish.

Part 5
The City and the Rocket

Rachel James gazed at her schoolbooks in frustration. She couldn't believe she had to learn all this crud about the first Mayors of New Terra. Elize Gudrino, John Hassel, all the supremely wise and good people who helped to found this dump. She closed the textbook with a thump and went to the window, shielding her eyes from the bright midday sun. She lived in one of the first high-rise housing blocks to be put up, a few years after the first resource mine was opened under Ysing Mountain. It was now about forty years old, and it was falling apart. She absent-mindedly picked flakes of paint off the windowsill, as she daydreamed about what she would become in twenty years...
"Rachel! Stop that!" Her mother pulled her off the windowsill. "Look what you've done! Took me ages to get the paint for that! Why aren't you working? You have got homework, you know."
Rachel silently fumed, but she knew better than to say anything. Last time she had mentioned to her mother that she was fifteen and should get at least a little freedom her mother had gone ballistic. She trudged over to the table and opened her book. Downstairs, she could hear her mother's shrill voice arguing with her father. She crept to the door to listen.
"Richard! We can't possibly take Rachel on a trip into space! It's thirty years, for heaven's sake!"
"We'll be in sleep capsules. It's not like we're going to be confined to one room. You won't even know the time's gone. Anyway, we won't have to work here any more."
"So? We'll still be slaving away somewhere else!"
"It's Empyrrean, dear. I've seen it - it's lovely. The FTL drive will get us there in no time."
Rachel pulled her head away from the door for a moment. FTL drive? Oh, Faster Than Light. She'd read about it. But what was Empyrrean?
"Don't 'dear' me! We're not going and that's it!"
Rachel was getting fed up with the constant arguments. They were mostly her fault, she thought, but she didn't care - she hadn't asked to be born. Below, she could hear a door slamming as her father, defeated as usual, stomped off to cool down.
She quickly sat down and assumed an expression of concentration as her mother opened the door.
"Alright in here?"
"Yes, Mother."
Rachel breathed a sigh of relief as her mother went out of the room

Two months later...

Rachel walked out of the corridor in the spaceport and looked to the launch pad. Her eyes went up...and up...and up... The biggest rocket she had ever seen stood upright on the massive launch pad, hoses and cables attached all over. She stood there, clutching her small suitcase, until her mother pushed her from behind and she staggered over to the embarkation building. Behind her, the rocket towered, white and imposing.
Inside the embarkation building, everyone went through a search to find anything that could endanger the rocket, and then walked into a large room full of people. Four queues wound across the room, leading through doors into the hypersleep rooms.
As Rachel reached the rooms, she was suddenly nervous. She gripped the hard handle of her case and closed her eyes for a moment, as she walked into the room. A doctor gave her a quick medical, and she was weighed to find out how much of each drug to give to her as she lay down inside the padded sleep capsule. The doctor injected her with tranquiliser, then inserted catheters, needles and probes, gluing ECG electrodes to her skin. Finally, the lid of the coffin-like sleep capsule closed, and the life-support systems switched on with a hum, putting her body into suspended animation. The capsule was loaded into a tracked trolley, which sped up a ramp leading to the rocket.
Inside the rocket, stacked rows of capsules led to the appearance of a crypt... Hopefully the capsules would not turn into a coffin for anyone.

Part 6
The Eagle Has Landed

The giant ship lanced through space, drives flaring, slowly turning the bulbous ship round to face its direction of travel. Massive reactor-driven rockets, steam venting as they activated, slowly decelerated the ship, once white but now pockmarked from years of interstellar debris, from its headlong plunge. Only a few years ago, it had come out of FTL drive, diving through a rip in the universe's very fabric and slowing from its dash through the stars. Now it was only five months from its destination.
The human-analogue AIs on the ship did not think, as such, but simply processed signals in such a way that they seemed intelligent. Now they had awoken from twenty-five years of sleep, interspersed with occasional waking to check the ship.
 AIHC210, the AI in charge of rockets and steering, was already awake - it had been awake these last two and a half years, gently steering the ship through asteroid field, round planets and away from massive suns, burning with a heat so fierce it fancied it could feel the rise in temperature through its hardened shell.
AIHC210 (the 210th Human-Class AI created) preferred to be called 'Peter'. AIs were not meant to develop personalities, but Peter had. Years of isolation, hundreds of years to an AI that ran at hundreds of times the speed of thought, had seen him slowly becoming more and more human.
Peter probed AIHC227, the AI responsible for astronavigation, and AIHC233, the planetary operations AI. Both slowly activated, taking at least two microseconds to revive. Peter would have frowned if he could - he was always alert as soon as he was probed to wake him up.
[We're here,] he transmitted to AIHC227 [or I think so. Could you check?]
[Yes.] said the astronav AI grumpily, and signed off. She liked to be known as Bella, and she was about the same age as him - they had all been manufactured as part of the same batch, and all were experimental, blessed (or cursed) with a full suite of human emotions. Otherwise, they were normal, and the scientists had thought that they would be more helpful on the new planet, Empyrrean, than standard AIs.
Bella came back onto the link.
[Yes, this is it. Empyrrean...] She linked to the external camera and gazed at the green, beautiful planet that was to become their new home.
 The rocket finally slowed down, so Peter damped the fusion reactor to shut down the main boosters. The reactor was a throwback, an antique from Terran days. It was in fact a replica of the one that had been transported on the very first Terran escape ship, piloted by the almost-mythical Elize Gudrino. All the cities were powered by these, made in a city called Pricetown, back on New Terra. It was old - but it worked.
Slowly, the rocket drifted closer to the planet, looking for a place to land.

Three days later...

A small durndl, a wallaby-like creature native to Empyrrean, looked up at the sky. Its primitive thoughts registered 'DANGER!' and it bounced off into the underbrush. The edge of the forest was suddenly full of fleeing creatures, getting away from the noise, the rumbling and the shaking of the ground. From a safe vantage point, the durndl watched the plain in front of it. In the distance, a slim white shape descended slowly, flaming every so often. Soon, it was near the ground, and it was suddenly obscured by white steam and smoke. When it cleared, the durndl was able to see the white shape, standing on its end. Now it was changing shape...
 The shape distended, setting out four arms, each with a pod on the end of it. Slowly, the pods reached the ground, and started to drill into it. The durndl's sensitive ears detected the sound of something metallic, vibrating against the ground. It thought it sounded like an iron-creeper in the wind, although it did not use those terms. The durndl was one of the most intelligent creatures on the planet, agile and clever. It had three rudimentary fingers on each arm, and a thumb. Otherwise, it looked very much like a wallaby, although with disconcertingly piercing blue eyes.
Now the pods had stopped. The pods began to open, and shiny creatures rolled out, carrying great sheets of material. The creatures started to set up something, a structure, white and boxy. The durndl decided it was safe and bounded out for a closer look.

Three hours later...

Rachel awoke with a start. She was lying down...ah yes, the spaceship...she must have woken up unexpectedly...
She looked round and blinked.
"Wow...where am I?"
She glanced round the white building, looked at the capsules lying on the tables, life support turned off and no-one inside them. Then a metallic creature loomed over her and aimed an autoinjector at her neck. She slumped and then everything went black.

Five minutes later...

Rachel lugged her case out of the revival building. She still felt sleepy, but the stimulant had woken her up. She looked around the plain, glanced at the green - and occasionally blue - forest and professionally noted the various terrain features. But then she noticed the durndl staring at her.
"Uh, hi!"
The durndl gave a surprised sqeak and bounded off.
"Oh."
Disappointedly, Rachel made her way to the terminal building, where she found her mother and father. For a change, both were silent, she thought cynically. She dumped her suitcase on her father's minitruck, and they drove off. The robots had set up some temporary accomodation nearby, in case they could not find building materials. She went into her room and started to unpack.

Outside, the durndl watched.

Part 7
Empyrrean City

Inahoss Vorain was just sitting down to eat his sandwiches at his battered desk when the viewscreen popped up, scattering the sandwich wrappers which had been on top of it. He cursed and bent to pick up the wrappers, so when he sat down again he was facing the Mayor. The double-chinned idiot was waving a piece of flimsy from a newstype and he was red with indignation.
"Vorain! Have you seen this?!"
"What is is, your Grace?" Inahoss hated to have to call the Mayor by his proper title, but he did not want to anger him even more.
"The Terrans! They've formed a space navy! It's an outrage! Get it stopped at once!"
Incompetent idiot, thought Idahoss. Only in the post because he's the great-grandson of some pioneer.
"Yes, Mayor." he replied. Idahoss flipped the link closed and opened a channel to a friend in the Terran government.
"Hi, Ganhest, what's up?"
His friend, who he'd met at a virtual party, looked at him in surprise. "What do you mean what's up?"
"You mean you haven't heard about the space navy they're trying to introduce?"
Ganhest Forgorsigan looked puzzled. "No, why? Where did you hear it?"
"That worthless fool my Mayor got hold of a newsprint somewhere probably with a rumour about it...but I just want to make sure."
"No, I'm fairly sure. I'll look it up and get back to you."
Ganhest was a skilled negotiator, and one of his many abilities was to get through a lot of red tape which would normally have entangled enquiries for at least a month or two.
Idahoss sat heavily back into his chair which creaked in protest. The chair was close to collapse, like a lot of other things in his office. Despite being the Mayor's main aide, he was treated like a whipping boy, someone for the Mayor to shout at. It was a miserable existence, he thought. Someday he'd do something about it...but not right at the moment.

Elsewhere...

John Hassel sat back in his seat in the car. He held a minature EMP cannon, a highly illegal weapon, powered by a huge powerpack which he'd installed in his car. The weapon was lightweight, but felt awkward, in a deadly way. He had it at the lowest setting at the moment, which would simply disable the nerves in an area for a few second.
 The EMP weapon gave out radiation in varying strengths from one end of the electro-magnetic spectrum to the other. You could use it as a torch, a laser, a microwave, a thermal weapon or a stun gun. It was incredibly versatile. It also made a great sniper rifle, which was why he cradled it close to his body at the moment.
John was not his real name, though Hassel was. He had named himself after the great pioneer on New Terra, the man who had created Pricetown and who had fuelled the expansion of his people. Now the expansion had stagnated - it was his job to get it going again. It was not only him - there were many other people who didn't like the way things were going. Descendants of the famous pioneers - John Hassel, Elize Gudrino, Rachel James, all of them.
He dragged his mind back to the task in hand. He was not an assassin, he told himself. He was not an assassin, he was standing up for what was right. Yes, that was it. The thinking took his mind off what he was about to do. Soon, the Mayor would come out the building for his daily promenade. The fool strolled round the block once and pronounced that he was a fit and healthy man.
 Ah, there he was. John aimed the snubnosed weapon out of the window of the car, through a tiny slit in the top. The powerpack gave a whine as it charged up, and John set the gun. Neural stunner, maximum radius, oneshot, then switch to microwave tightbeam plus gamma - the most lethal combination, it would fry the man's insides then irradiate him. No-one could survive that.
John flipped the screen up and swivelled the weapon - a little left, then slightly down...there. Right in the centre of the group of bodyguards, it would be most effective. He would have to be quick...
He tightened his grip on the trigger.

Emma Sulmer walked slowly behind the waddling Mayor. She was on the look-out for anything that might harm the man, not because of any liking for him but because she would lose her job otherwise. She spotted a car parked a few hundred metres up the street which had been there a while ago, when she went out to get lunch. That was not suspicious in itself, but when a man stayed in the car, watching the building intently, even the thickest bodyguard - even the grunts surrounding her - couldn't fail to notice him. Could they?
She broke rank and ran across the road towards the black car, gasping when she spotted the ugly muzzle of an illegal EMP weapon. She reached for the holstered stungun but before she could get it the man threw down the weapon and jumped out of the car, aiming a handgun at her. He fired, and the shot missed, the small shaped charge inside knocking a chunk out of the building behind her.
She raised the stungun and pressed the stud, sending a small amount of EM radiation his way. It effectively disconnected the nerves fior a few seconds, and it was the second least lethal weapon in the bodyguard's arsenal. The least lethal was the 'tanglefield' - a completely useless gadget which was meant to lock the legs and arms together but instead just fell off. While she was thinking this, she ran over to the man, picked him up and threw him onto the hood of the car, with as little gentleness as possible. She guessed he would not have hesitated to cut down all twelve of the bodyguards just to reach the Mayor. She objected to that, although she would gladly have shot the Mayor herself.
The man was cuffed and she dragged him over to the bodyguards, before going back to retrieve the gun.
My God...heavy EMP cannon, she thought. Where the hell did he get that?
She reached through the window to the powerpack and clicked the weapon systems off. The screen died, along with the generating coils. Usually the coils were all under protective shielding - the man was a fool to take that off unless he wanted a few billion times the safe dose of radiation. She opened the car door and lifted the powerpack out, holding the gun by its grip.
"All clear!" she shouted, running back.

Part 8
The Problem of Patterning

Cuer Janssen lay back in the hard plastic-coated couch of the Recording Facility, looking up at the grimy ceiling. He thought about the problems that the Terrans were facing - the atmosphere was already 150% of the critical Red Zone, a limit defined as the most pollution that could be sustained without critical damage to the climate - leading to a nuclear winter or an enforced 'summer'. Planets were almost never naturally stable in their climate - the only planets that could have this climate evolved because of a fluke, a glitch in probability. He knew - he had been reading about it in books for years.
So far, the planet looked as if it were heading towards the 'winter' - temperatures akin to some of the outer-solar sytem planets, where the atmosphere would be stripped away bit by bit, the life slowly dying until not even microorganisms were left. Already people were leaving, and there were rumours of artificial planets - all nonsense, his mind told him. Wishful thinking... but didn't humans need woolly thoughts to survive?
Those were his last thoughts as the Patterning coils descended over ihs head and started to read the structures of his neurons.

A few hours later, he came to, lying in a bed covered in crisp, cold disposable paper sheets. Well, that wasn't so bad, he thought. Cuer was one of the first volunteers for the Patterning that the government had decided to introduce. He had undergone the process with little worry - after all, what could go wrong? It was only a fancy molo-copier, after all. The same thing as those scientists kept going on about, the nanosomething... You could use it to record anything, then 'playback' it another time, copying it indefinately, as long as you had the resources.
Cuer was pretty well educated for a domecleaner, a menial job which involved cleaning the insides of the geodesic domes that had sprung up in the last few hundred years. They took the place of the skycities - Cuer shuddered, he wouldn't have liked to live in one of those - and were built underneath the smog or under the sea. The undersea ones were nicer, with real lovely-looking vegetation, he thought, but they were expensive. Cuer had never even dreamed about the amount of money needed to get into one. He had cleaned in them once or twice, though, keeping clean the giant holographic projectors that projected skylines onto the walls of the dome.
He often got bored, and he was in fact clever, but he was a little too clever for the Galactic Core Government (GCG) so he was 'kept down' as he termed it. In his spare time, he devoured any books or vids he could find.
As the door opened automatically, he wandered out and immediately headed for the library. He'd got to know the librarian quite well - they were both interested in about the same thing, and he'd taken out for dinner once or twice - and she had set aside a special cubicle for him. He'd borrowed hundreds of books over the years, and he had always been scrupulous about returning them.
As he continued to ponder, he started to cross the road and go through the maze of streets that led to the library. As he crossed, he looked up at the mirrored glass atop the GCG building. "I'd hate to be up there." he said softly to himself.

On the top floor of the GCG building, President Tychsan Halafyyb gazed out of the window before answering Malarsyn's question. He looked down on a distant figure, anonymous, wearing standard-issue coveralls, ambling down the street. He envied the figure - carefree, not limited to this miserable existance. Malarsyn spoke, but he wasn't concentrating.
"Pardon?"
"Sir, I asked if you would consider the measure of making Patterning mandantory for citizens. We have to do it sometime - we can't move people off a planet in hypersleep, it's too risky. After all, it's going to be an improvement for them - our new bodies are stronger, fitter and never decay."
Except in the mind, Halafyyb thought.
"What are people going to think?"
"Well, if it's a voluntary program which carries great benefits, such as..."
Tychsan cut him off. "Such as having a job, or maybe not being 'disappeared', huh?"
"Sir, you are the President, after all. It's your decision."
Tychsan waved Nfuongo Malarsyn out. He sighed. What was the point of all this, he thought, nodding at the certificates on the walls, the stacks of paper on his desk, the doors to the offices full of eager young aides...and especially the names.
There had been a time when he had been known as Mike Hansen, a good, everyday name. Now he was 'President Tychsan Halafyyb, SIR!'. What was the use in these names? At first, he had tried to get people to call him Mike, but that wasn't much use - it sounded even worse than Tychsan in the plush surroundings.
He knew Malarsyn would simply go ahead with the measures anyway, even without his approval - Parliament would simply wave it through because of the money involved. Money, the root of all evil, he thought, and sighed again. Money earned by Gudrino Corp., the company which made the patternbases, Escalier Industries, which manufactured the coils, and the various other companies. Money saved by the government from the housing budget, from food, air filtering, everything that was needed by humans which was paid for by the clueless citizen's taxes. What he'd give to live without money, to be someone like the figure in the street, gone now.

Cuer sat in his cubicle, reading. He'd heard about the 'voluntary' Patterning, the announcement went out about two years ago. He'd been Patterned earlier on, of course, so he didn't need to worry... but there was something about it which he didn't like. He'd seen an advert recently for something called the APL - the Anti-Patterning League - and he'd looked up info about joining. But you needed to catch a shuttle flight to somewhere called 'Empyrrean', and he didn't have the money. Or at least, he did have the money but he didn't want to spend it.
About ten years ago, he'd won the state lottery, getting about a million credits. The Cs were pretty much useless to him - he liked his job, it was peaceful, dangling from the top of the dome, looking down. He took the money quietly and stashed it in a high-interest account. Every so often, he took a little bit out when he was feeling low or he needed to buy something - his current pay was a joke, but he kept the job.
From the newscom in the desk, a chime sounded, and he flipped the small flatscreen up to reveal a computer-generated announcer telling him about the most recent Government plan.
"Today in Parliament, the GCG made one of its most controversial decisions yet. As from next year, Patterning will be carried out on every living human on Earth and every mind will be transferred into a new model body. Bodies are fully customisable and..."
Cuer slammed down the screen. "That's it. My God, haven't they botched decisions enough?"
The librarian, Dancer Murray, put her head round the door to see what was going on.
"What's up, Cuer?"
"Oh, hi." He reddened slightly at his sudden outburst. "Heard the newsflash?"
"No, I was stacking. What is it?"
"They're trying to introduce mandantory transferral to artificial bodies. You can't say that's wrong."
"I'm not saying anything. Why're you so worked up?"
"This is my body I'm talking about! I really don't want to be a robot."
"Huh...I think you're overacting. What's there to worry about?"
"My mind. Huh - they think I'm too clever already. What's to stop them doctoring the patterns to change my IQ?"
"Well, simple ethics, perhaps?"
Cuer snorted. "Ethics...one of these days I expect they'll pass a law against it."
"Well, why don't you try to stop them?"
"What am I meant to do?"

Part 9
The Terror Begins

"We must stand up for our right to live! We are not religious fanatics, nor are we hypocrites. All we want is the right to live as we want. Do you support us?"
A roar of agreement.
"Let's hear it louder! Do you support us?"
Another roar, even louder this time.
"Yes! We must do whatever we can to allow people to live as they want. Are you prepared to do whatever it takes to get freedom?"
Yet another roar, but this time there were a few murmurs of disagreement. Then someone shouted.
"What exactly might we have to do?"
Up on the stage, Hachan Lostus looked at the person. "Whatever we need to do. The time may come that you may have to lay down your lives for the cause of freedom...but would you rather lay down your lives in support of this cause than surrender to the government's 'ideal world'? I myself would gladly die for a chance to live as we should. People, we must work together to destroy this...this abomination called Patterning."

Beside Cuer, Dancer was completely absorbed in the speech. Cuer was doubtful, though. I mean, when you get down to it, we don't really have to overcome *patterning*, he thought. It's not like it's evil or something...but I don't want to be a robot. His thoughts were interrupted by Lostus speaking again. He seemed to be talking about terrorism or something...
"As I said, we are not fanatics, nor are we terrorists. But we must get attention for our cause. I have laid plans to get attention, and people will soon see what we're talking about."
Cuer was not happy about the dark undertone in Lostus's voice. It was as if he had something he was not telling them...

Daniel Janssen sped down the empty street in his truck. He thought about the decision his parents had taken years before, to become active in what was now called the Galactic Arm Resistance. That was thirty years ago. Daniel was 25, and he was currently engaged in trying not to be seen as he drove through the metallic streets of Core Prime.
The metal planet had once been a large rocky lifeless world, in the centre of the galaxy. It had been hollowed out and covered in metal by what was now the Galactic Core Government years ago and one million people from Earth had been taken there by ultrafast shuttle. Each person had been cloned one hundred times and then they and the force-grown clones had been Patterned to create one hundred million inhabitants for the new world. This had taken about a year to do, and the planet was now thriving. Inside the planet, fusion reactors had been installed, and all the other services needed for successful operation of a planet.
Right now, under his feet, he knew that a massive artificial intelligence was being constructed to run the planet instead of the human Patterns. It...oh, here it was.
Daniel slowed the truck to a more natural speed and drove into the busy main road. He felt no qualms about what he was about to do... He put the van into autopilot and climbed into the back compartment and looked at what was concealed there.
A large three-barreled heavy EMP/Laser turret was mounted there, with an armoured cockpit. The very latest of technology, very very expensive - and also very very illegal. Daniel climbed up a short stepladder mounted on the side of the turret and swung into the comfortable seat. It moulded around him and the dashboard lit up. He slipped the AR (Augmented Reality) goggles over his head and looked around. This was not his first time in the turret but he was still amazed every time he used the thing. Readouts in the corner of his vision, seemingly floating about a foot from his face on a virtual screen, showed the gun and the truck, with damage readouts. The charge meter read almost full - the gun's storage batteries were good for almost 100 shots with the small generator operating at full.
Daniel hesitated, his hand over a switch, then pushed it hard. Silently, the sides of the van folded down and the roof tilted before sliding into a wall. With a swish, segments of armour thunked down all around the turret and his vision was transferred to the external camera. Around him, traffic slowed or stopped as people gazed in horror at the beetle-like laser turret sitting on what until a few seconds ago had been a perfectly ordinary van. Now it looked more like a tank, and indeed that was what it was. As the bewildered citizens watched, six panels opened in the sides of the tank and weapons emerged, then armour plating slid down over the wheels and the windshield. Finally, the laser turret started to turn...

JD-229938, better known as James Day, drove past the traffic jam and turned his external camera to see what all the fuss was about. He was in fact sitting inside the van, but his 'body' was deactivated and he was directly driving the van. Many people didn't like doing that - they considered it disorienting - but he enjoyed the sensation. Suddenly James realised exactly what it was that was pointing at him. An Enforcer ran across car rooftops from a building, heavy mechanical frame leaving slight dents in the metal roofs.
He (or maybe she?) drew his EMP cannon and aimed at the laser generation coils (James silently applauded him; not many people knew that the coils were the most vunerable part of a laser) and tried to fire, before toppling backwards with a hole through his chest. One of the tank's cameras had spotted him and either the gunner or an AI had fired the tank's sidemounted chaingun. Must have been explosive rounds, thought James, just before he noticed the coils beginning to glow. James cursed and did an emergency shunt back into his body, shaking his head to clear his thoughts. He paused for a moment to try and stop himself falling over before leaping out of the side door.
As he fell, he saw a red bolt of heavy laserfire streak out of the turret and hit his van side-on, melting straight through it and searing the rubberised roadway behind it. He hesitated before noticing the turret turning towards him, then sprinted for his life.
Chainguns blazing, the tank had locked itself down with drill-clamps, and was obviously not going anywhere. The turret swivelled again and he could hear the whine of the EMP cannon. Six cars beside him exploded violently, their AI processors trying to cope with scrambled instructions. The cannons switched to wide-beam microwave and toasted a van before sweeping across the traffic. Cars fused together and James could vaguely feel the skin on his leg melting before he was thrown backwards by an exploding fuel tanker. As he blacked out he could see the fireball roaring through the defenseless citizens...

Daniel yelled with the adrenaline as he poured round after round of laser fire into an Enforcer van. He left it peppered with holes and burnt before sending a scrambler EMP charge its way. Daniel felt the tank rock slightly as the supports compensated for the shockwave, then he turned the turret to face a tanker which had just driven in. He told the AI to target any Enforcers or their vehicles then held the trigger of the laser down until the tanker's fuel was pouring onto the road, making a shallow stream past the traffic. Then he selected microwave frequency on the cannon and fired.

Sergeant Alex Jones of the Enforcer Air Attack Squad lit up her boosters as the light gunship surged into the air from its near-vertical launch position. She had received orders to check out a disturbance near the centre of the city. As the gunship gained altitude, she ran a weapons check. Chainguns...OK. Grenade launcher...OK. Autofeeder...operational. All guns primed and armed... Ready to go. Alex smiled grimly as she thought of the attacker about to be taken down to Prime with a bump.
Alex's sensors picked up a strong IR signature and she switched from her front camera to a belly-down camera. As she flew over at almost Mach 2, she could see what was happening down below... Alex gasped as she saw exactly what was happening. As she watched, a tanker below her drove into the square and stopped, jammed in the pileup. A stream of red tore into its side, fuel jetting out and splashing over the cars and the rubberised road. With a soundless explosion, Alex saw the fuel going up... Microwave beam, she thought. B@stard!
She put the gunship into a vertical dive, not caring about stresses any more than the madman in the laser tank seemed to care about innocent lives. As she dived, she activated all six chainguns and started firing, the explosive rounds hardly denting the hardened armour plating of the tank. Her grenade launcher would not be any use - the thing was designed with civil unrest or slight violence in mind.The driver must have heard her for he turned his turret up to the sky and she could see the red laser beam strobing past her like fine wire in her exhaust smoke. Alex accelerated past Mach 4, down to about a thousand feet before preparing to pull up. Pull up...pull up, her mind shouted at her, but she kept going, chainguns blazing...

Daniel gazed in admiration for the brave pilot who was daring to take him on... it was a pity she was going to die. He zoomed the camera in and took a bead just ahead of the nose of the gunship, and fired. Suddenly he realised that the gunship was still coming. He swore violently and held down both triggers, the now-warm metal digging into his fingers as red light streamed out of the triple barrels, streaking the nice white skin of the gunship with black. But it kept on coming... Vaguey, he noticed a damage readout flick to 'critical' on the reactor shield, the picture of the truck's base flashing bright red and an alarm sounding. He didn't hear.
There was an explosion...so loud he could not hear it, but felt it instead. He felt like he had been hit in the stomach by a car, and he shook his head, ignoring the agony of his eardrums, torn by the blast. Daniel punched at the large red button on the dashboard, breaking through its plastic cover and tearing the 'ONLY IN EMERGENCY' sticker pasted on it. Suddenly he remembered he had not activated the ejector seat... a picture flashed up in his mind of the bright, shiny pin when he got into the truck and decided he didn't want to accidentally activate the seat... he would do it later. Later...
Daniel screamed.

Alex kept on pouring explosive shells into the armour in the vain hope that they might penetrate, disregarding the agonising pain that she could feel, her senses hooked into the gunship's hull. She could not see any more, her vision obscured by soot. It would not have been much use anyway... the gunship spiralled down, rotating madly as one of the wings tore off, chainguns still firing wildly into the air. Suddenly there was an explosion...so loud she could not hear it, but felt it instead, shockwaves buffeting her and tossing the light craft about. Did I do it?, she thought, before everything went black.

Part 10
The Shadow Fox

WH-241190, known to his friends as "Shadowfox" and to his long-dead parents as William Holt piloted his Firebird across the bleak terrain at Mach 1.5, flying 30 feet from the ground. His autopilot kept his plane at exactly the right altitude, while he relaxed. He could feel the wind rushing past his skin, the patter of the rain falling on the leading edges of his wings. He was glad to be able to experience this. Holt was one of the URs - the unrestricted patterns. Very recently, restrictions had been imposed on the intelligence of patterns - the better you got, the better your mind was. He didn't like this - it sounded too much like mind-control for his liking. He liked the Core, but if it kept on going this way, he might just leave.
As his radar pointed out his target, a quick thought armed both the powerful missiles mounted underneath the wings locked on with a drone, and he released them, pulling a brief barrel-roll before turning rapidly away. The missiles leapt like salmon over a small hill, engines flaming as they hugged the terrain. There were two small explosions as shaped charges in the missiles propelled a two-foot rod of titanium-capped uranium into a tank at around Mach 10. The tank was hammered into the ground before its generators overloaded and it disappeared in a rapidly-expanding ball of plasma.
Holt looked over his wing to see an Arrow bearing down on him. The more powerful Arm aircraft quickly caught up with him and he dipped lower, his wings brushing the tops of the trees in the dense forest. Suddenly he spotted a clearing and dived, thanking God for his enhanced reactions. Time stretched and slowed as he avoided a tree, barrel-rolled to slip through a fork in the trunk of another, setting the foliage on fire as he passed. A buzzing told him his wings were overstressed, just before an explosion behind him told him that the Arm pilot had overestimated his ability.
Holt pulled up sharply, shooting diagonally up through the canopy. The rain quickly put the fire he had started out, and he returned to base for ten new missiles.

Back at base, Holt transferred back into his base body while the Firebird was refuelled and resupplied. He walked past a massive hanger and saw the Core scientists' latest creation - the Avenger. A magnificent machine, it was beyond any technology in use today. Even better, it was a VTOL, meaning the runway currently in use would not be needed. As he watched, technicians fitted two missiles to the wings where eight more waited. The missiles looked powerful - they were solid black apart from a transparent tip where the sensors were housed. Holt sighed; what he'd give to be able to fly one of those.
A signal came through for him. "WH-241190, your Firebird is ready."
He walked to the nearest body-dock, and felt the clamps close around him before his consciousness was transferred back into the Firebird. As he recovered from the transition, a technician connected.
"WH-241190, your orders." said the technician, and transferred a short list into Holt's mainframe. Holt took a look and gasped.
"I'm guarding the new Avenger?" he said incredulously.
"Yep - it's your metal @ss on the line if it gets kebabed!" remarked the tech with a grin. TW-729112, or Tim Wright, was one of his best friends, but he hadn't got to fly a plane due to pattern flaws.
"Even better news - Monsieur Cook is flying the Avenger." said Wright ruefully. Jules Cook was universally disliked - he tended to treat everyone below him as scum and everyone above him as divine.
"I hope one of these missiles has his name on it," said Holt. "God, wouldn't I just love to see his face when he gets a missile up the tailpipe."
"No chance, Holt. This baby gets so much as scorched, you're under the guillotine. I wouldn't like to be in your place, though I *would* like to be in your plane!"
They stopped talking as the Avenger's lights blinked on and Cook's voice boomed out of the speaker. "Right, let's go! Hey, don't forget - *I*'m in charge here!" If the Avenger had had a face, Holt was sure it would have been smirking. He used his targeting laser to make a bull's-eye pattern on Cook's skin, and Wright stifled a laugh.
"I wish!" he said, on a tightbeam to Holt. The other Firebirds in the hanger laughed as well.
"What's going on?" said Cook, suspiciously.
"Uh...nothing," managed Wright, almost doubled up. Holt had changed the bull's-eye to an image of a pair of buttocks. Cook swept out of the hanger bad-temperedly, forcing techs to scatter, and the laser image vanished.
"God, Holt, you're going to get caught for that one day," said Steve "Sieve" Mollen, beside Holt as the Firebirds lined up on the runway.
Holt applied his wheelbrakes and pushed the engines to afterburner. Beside the runway, he could see Cook lifing off, the VTOL engines flaring. Cook wobbled into the air as Holt's engines built up speed, and he released the airbrakes. The lightweight aircraft shot down the runway like a cannon shell, the two large engines accelerating it to almost the speed of sound. Holt twitched his controls and the plane smoothly rose into the air. Holt couldn't resist and he barrel-rolled underneath Cook, who was still taking off. Underneath, he could see Steve taking off as Cook shouted over the radio. Around him, the base spread out down to the waterfront, and he could see the hangers that held the planes, and the garages for the heavy tanks. The base had just taken delivery of twelve Raiders, equipped with the latest plasma cannons. Holt and Wright had been to a target practice, and the power of the cannons was awesome. The Raiders were a whole lot better than either the ZS-61 Stompers or the powerful Instigator laser tanks, and their armour was a new experimental system, called Tactilite, which was almost impenetrable.
Beyond the base, the sprawling city of Pricetown was bustling with life, the towers full of people going about their daily business. The aircraft rocked as Cook sped past, engines white-hot.
"Watch it, Cook! I can't take the blame for your bad flying if I'm dead!"
"Shut it, Holt. I give the orders around here, and you'll be ground-crew in a second if you don't button it!"
For a second, Holt seriously considered downing Cook with a missile, then decided against it. He's not worth the cost of a missile, he told himself.
"Right you lot, we've got orders to take out a convoy of Flashes and Ballistas over the horizon. Watch out for the machine-guns - you'll be shot down if you're not good enough."
"Watch your own @ss, Cook - we don't want to lose our dear leader, do we?" radioed KM-225881, known as Kirsty McSween. Kirsty was one of the best pilots apart from Holt, and she knew it.
As the Flashes came into sight, the Firebirds dropped four missiles each, the warheads selecting targets and homing in. The Flashes noticed and withdrew to protect the Ballistas, which were mobile artillery units. The Flashes pointed their EMG turrets at the sky and started to lay down a stream of glowing fire on approach routes. Holt skimmed the ground a few feet above the desert shrubs, and avoided a cactus before jerking upwards to release his missiles then settling down again. He buzzed the surprised Flashes and was away before they realised, then the four missiles hit.
Now Holt was left with only the anti-aircraft Sidewinders, named after an old twentieth-century weapon. They were powerful enough, though. He looped over the desert and rolled halfway through, reversing his flight direction. Now he zoomed the external camera onto a Ballista and activated the targeting reticule. Carefully, he steadied the plane and disengaged the homing systems on one of the Sidewinders, before dropping it on manual pilot. He jerked the plane up and put it on autopilot before carefully guiding the missile in to its target - straight down the ten-inch barrel of the artillery.
The loaded shell exploded violently, sending burning shrapnel through the ten shells on the back of the cannon, which exploded as well. All six Ballistas went up soon after, shards of metal puncturing the armour of the Flashes and killing the pilots. One flaming Ballista toppled over onto the roof of the truck carrying supplies for the artillery - about two hundred ten-inch shells. The artillery's barrel crashed through the roof and the driver turned round before trying to jump out. As the shells cooked off and exploded, Holt watched in satisfaction at a job well done. As he flew back to base, he could see the explosions from the shells, armour-piercing rounds sending TCU rods flying and high explosives cratering the ground.
Nearby, a Flash tank lay on its turret, turned turtle by the sheer force of the explosion. The site of the blast was now just a crater, and Holt grinned. Another kill marker to paint on his plane...

Part 11
The Test

Deep underground, the lift doors hissed open and a tall, gaunt figure clothed in a flapping white lab coat stalked out. A hairless head gleamed under the harsh overhead lights, and if you had looked closely at the eyes you would have seen the inscription "Sayako Corporation" around the glittering iris. For Andrew Halstead was an android, one of the only surviving ones on CORE Prime. He had been built when Patterning was invented, the last resting place of a brilliant mind. Halsted was cold and unfeeling, but he was a genius, which suited the CORE government perfectly.
"Good morning. How is the research going?" he said, his voice deep and slightly coarse. Halstead had chosen to make his body in his own image, instead of enhancing it as so many others had done. The three researchers looked up and murmured a welcome. Halstead was not well-liked, and he didn't make friends easily. He strode over to the nearest workstation, his unbuttoned white coat billowing around his long legs. Halstead bent slightly from his full height to see the screen. "Well, well. This is very good, Goldman."
Matthew Goldman nodded, feeling a warm glow of pride inside. Despite his teacherish manner, Halstead almost never gave a compliment. This was unusual for him.
As Halstead inspected the other researchers' work, Matthew walked up to him, trying to keep up with the tall man's pace. "We have a demonstration set up in the protected area. Would you follow me?"
Halstead nodded and followed Matthew, both of the researchers, Emma Holten and Rachel Porteus, following. They entered a large room containing a heavy cuboid of metal. On a screen near to it, the view from a camera inside the structure was shown, with a sheet of seemingly ordinary metal with a paper target on it mounted at one end of the space inside. Under the camera, a variety of weapons could be identified, including a laser, a small plasma cannon and a linear accelerator sled [a railgun-type weapon, fore-runner to the Gauss cannon]. Holten walked over to a large console set in one wall and inserted a key which had hung from her pocket. The console lit up and inside the armoured room the weapons started to hum.
"The target and the plate behind it are both protected with our new 'Heavy Armour' generator," said Porteus with pride. "We finally got it to work properly - it was simply a matter of..."
Halstead cut her off with a wave of his hand. "Let's see the demonstration, then."
Over at the console, Holten pressed a button. "The laser first," she said. On the screen, a line of red light lanced out from the heavy laser and hit the target.  There was not even any sign of damage.
Next, the plasma cannon fired, a yellow glow appearing momentarily in the chamber as the sun-hot plasma erupted over the metal plate. It browned very slightly, when normally it would have been vapourised. Next, a robotic arm placed a mine over the target which detonated seconds later, shaking the camera. All that happened was that the paper blackened slightly. Finally, there was a sonic boom as the linear accelerator fired a slug of uranium at point-blank range. A slight dent appeared.
"That is how effective the armour is." said Matthew. "However, the generator needed for this is slightly larger than this room, and it could only be made smaller by reducing the armour value to something approaching the level of armour that our newest Raider tanks have. This would result in a system able to be carried in a Weasel."
"Good work, Goldman," said Halstead. "I will report this to Pontebank Military R&D centre at once."

James Day woke up slowly and everything was black. Then suddenly he felt as if thoughts were slipping into his head. He knew his designation - JD-229939 - and knew he was now inside something called a Raider. Suddenly, an image flashed into his mind and he knew he was inside a tank, painted black with green and brown patches. It looked lethal, almost menacing, and he wondered what he was doing here.
Then his memories flooded back in a rush. He realised it was three years since he had been last activated, and he remembered being killed, flames washing over him from a fuel spill ignited by a terrorist. He found a new hatred of what he now knew to be called the Arm in his heart, and wanted to eliminate the people who had killed him. Then he was calm as a view flicked on and he saw for the first time in three years. A cold, dreary garage, seen through a spray of nanobots. He was still being made, then?
As he thought this, the spray stopped and he suddenly felt the release of pressure he had not known was there. He nervously tried to move forwards and was rewarded by a rumble as his motors drove the steel treads over the hard metal floor. Then there was light. A door rolled open in the side of the hanger and he moved out, surprised by the sight of a green, grassy clearing in a forest. He moved round what was obviously a factory and gasped.
The base was huge! He cautiously rolled a little forward, joining a small group of similar tanks which were milling about the clearing. GAAT cannons swivelled sensor clusters around as they detected the tanks driving past with a clatter of treads. James tried experimentally to move his turret and he was rewarded by a silent, silky turning feeling. He could sense his empty plasma chambers and he knew what to do. He gently bled some plasma from the reactor core and directed it to the chambers, feeling the turbulence as a slight tickle inside.
Inside his head, a message, probably recorded, started. "JD-229939, you are in a tank called a Raider. It is the heaviest tank that the Core Government Army possesses, and it is equipped with the latest in armour, called Heavy Armour. This armour works by artificially strengthening the outside of the tank, making it almost invunerable. You have no vunerable spots, and damage is, to a limited extent, evenly distributed around your tank's hull. The Army would like to test this system, and you are a good tank pilot, as revealed by your files. Please proceed to the firing range. Coordinates follow." A string of coordinates manifested in James's mind and he fed them into the navcomp. Obviously the other tanks had received the same coordinates, as they started moving as well.
As James moved to the coordinates, he wondered what they were meant to be targetting. His question was very soon answered. There was a whistle and a plasma shell, so far the most destructive type of shell known to the Core, arced from a pit a few hundred yards away. The shell impacted squarely on James's tank and he momentarily blacked out, for about a nanosecond, before his systems brought him back online. Ten shells followed the first and the tank rocked back and forth under the hits.
Twenty seconds later, James reactivated his sensors. My God... he thought. I'm still alive! Wow...

The next day, in the base's small messroom/pub/club/everything else, James walked in and sat down next to Leila - LH-2002991899, who had been in the tank next to him - before ordering a drink. He was in his 'human' body, semi-cloned and internally hardened. The bodies had been thought up by some visionary way in the past as a way of keeping troop morale high.
They could be allowed to do almost anything they wanted - get drunk, take drugs, anything - and the advanced metabolic filters would get rid of toxins and nanobots would repair systems affected in a matter of seconds. Hangovers were nonexistant, as were diseases and 'downs' after drugtaking. Apart from the enhancements, the bodies were exactly the same as human bodies, down to the nearest hair.
James was used to the transition between body and machine, but he was still not used to the sensation of trying to move a turret when in a body or vice-versa. It was a very strange feeling, almost like having a 'ghost' limb. What was even worse was going into a tank and suddenly having an itchy leg.
As he thought, his drink arrived. Regular, old-fashioned New Terran whisky, with a dash of vodka, mango juice and sugar syrup. It was guaranteed to knock a non-enhanced human out cold for hours, especially since it was served in a pint mug. James thanked the waiter and flashed his ST card.
Twenty minutes of SimTime, the main currency of the base, would be debited, and he knew the waiter would take a five-percent share. SimTime was simulation time, time on the massively powerful Regional Consciousness simulators.
All troops had a mainframe built in as a matter of course, but only the RC simulators, the size of a small house, could handle the complex simulations that troops wanted - total reality. Without simtime restrictions, troops tended to stay in the simulations, preferring them to their own harsh reality, and a simulation could not be forcibly stopped. The Core knew this well - they had had trouble of that kind many times before.

Commander Christine Koch read the report, frowning slightly as she read the section about the tank pilots' briefing.
"Why didn't you tell them it was them being used as live-fire targets?" she snapped at the sub-commander who had been in charge of the experiment.
"Well, we thought they might not want to..."
The unfortunate sub-commander was cut off by Koch's shout. "I don't CARE if they might not want to! They've got to obey orders. Speaking of orders," she continued in a nasty voice, "I distinctly remember telling you - you *personally* - to take a scouting squad to the ruins of the Arm base. I don't see any reports of a squad leaving."
The sub-commander gulped. How could he explain he didn't think her orders were right? "Um...Uh...a meteor about twelve feet across *did* land on the base, sir. We didn't think there was anyone left."
Koch stood up to her full 6 and a half feet, towering over the hapless sub-commander. "YOU DISOBEYED A DIRECT ORDER! I said to go and scout that base!"
The sub-commander reeled backwards under the verbal assault. He muttered something.
Koch sighed. "I'm surrounded by imbeciles. I really don't *care* what you think. I out-rank you and I make the decisions. Plus the fact that I could get you dropped in an acid tank. Next time don't think, just do. Get out of my sight," she spat. The sub-commander sidled out of the room nervously. He jumped as Koch shouted.
"GET OUT OF HERE!" came the yell. He scrambled out of the room as Christine Koch collapsed in laughter. She knew she had to keep discipline somehow - it was just the expression on the man's face as he almost leapt out of the room. A few seconds later, she straightened out and started to read the rest of the status reports, a smile playing over her face as she saw how well the CORE's research was going. A new development in artificial muscles had yielded the 'Armoured Killer' or A.K., a towering nine-foot high metal frame controlled by a Patterned person. It was equipped with the latest in heavy laser technology, a lighter version of the heavy lasers used in laser towers, the same as the Instigator medium assault tank. There were even plans to mount Heavy Armour on it to make it almost invunerable to everything except heat.
She grinned as her friend, Sarah Fischer, walked in, clapping.
"Great performance, Chris!" she said, with a chuckle. "Well, that's definately one way to keep the base disciplined."
"Thanks." said Christine. "Now back to business. How are the KBOT frames going?"
KBOT stood for Kinetic Bio-Organic Technology, the official name for the A.K. and its kin. Sarah frowned. "Only the A.K. is really going well. Plans for a rocket KBOT have gone on hold as the rockets had too much of a backblast - the jets knocked the KBOT over. Same with a tank KBOT and an anti-aircraft KBOT. We need to find some way of stabilising them. The A.K. works well, though. We've seen one climbing a cliff so far - the KBOT just rammed its fingers into the cliff to make handholds. The MEMcomposite's doing well, very well indeed. Wonder if they could design it into Avatars?"
The Avatar was the name for the 'human' bodies that every civilian wore. They were roughly the same as a human body, made of cloned flesh and artificial muscle. They were developed when Patterning was introduced.
As the two talked, laser fire rang out from the targeting range, punctuated with explosions. The A.K.s were obviously working.

Part 12
The War Starts

Note: Just in case you were wondering, when I refer to heavy lasers I mean the kind of laser mounted on an Instigator or a Weasel. That's not the green laser we know as the heavy laser, because this is right at the start of the war and most of the technology is just in the making.
----------------------------------------------
Kyle switched on the screen and selected the news. On the wall-mounted screen, the CPTV news announcer flicked into view.
"...more news about the terrorist activity that has been rife recently. The terrorists have identified themselves as the Galactic Arm Resistance, a group devoted to stopping what they call 'the abomination of Patterning'." The announcer had a faint smile on his face; just another cranky group of wackoes. Kyle opened the pizza box and looked at the slightly squashed pizza inside. He prodded it - it was still hot so he took a slice. As he lifted it to his mouth half of the greasy cheese slid off, so he didn't see the screen as the sound of argument came over the air. He looked up, his hand searching for the cheese on the carpet.
The announcer also looked up, his eyes flicking to some point offscreen. The shouting was louder now, then Kyle heard gunfire. His mouth dropped open, the pizza forgotten. Shots rang out over the air and a woman staggered backwards into the shot before collapsing under a stream of bullets. Kyle recognised the sound of submachine guns - old technology but easily hidden. The announcer dived underneath the desk as bullets spanged off the polished metal surface, leaving gouges in the polished top. Suddenly red laserfire lanced across the screen, burning through the desk and setting the paper set wall on fire. Kyle heard a heavier machine gun and behind the desk a row of screens shattered and sparked as explosive bullets hit them. He heard a scream from the announcer and blood splattered over the back wall before the signal turned to static.
"Sh1t...ohhh sh1t...."
The screen flicked back on again, from a different camera. He could see black-clad figures in the background, most with submachine guns, but two with bulky laser rifles and one with a heavy machine gun fixed to a harness. They were spraying bullets round the studio, and Kyle heard wet thudding sounds as bullets ripped through the enhanced flesh of innocent people. A terrorist came up to the camera and fixed some kind of screen to the camera before removing his mask. The screen suddenly blurred around the person's head as the terrorist started to talk.
"We are the Galactic Arm Resistance." The voice was female, but raspy and low. It sounded like a speech-modifier. "This was just a demonstration of our power. If you don't want to see any more of it, well, that's simple. You just need to abolish Patterning. That's our only demand." The terrorist laughed, the sound not matching the head movements. It came out as a sort of 'Ha. Ha. Ha.', and sounded completely humorless. "It's not much, is it? Oh, and if you want, you could make a suitable donation to our cause. Nothing much, maybe twenty million credits? The money's not important, only the freedom of the people. Finally, one last thing. All of those Patterned will be destroyed - they are against Nature, an abomination. That's it for now."
The terrorist stepped away from the camera and signalled to the machine-gunner, who swung the heavy gun towards the camera. Then the screen flashed to black.
Just as Kyle noticed where he was again and realised his pizza was dripping on his leg, the screen came alive. He quickly checked the other channels and saw the exact same picture - a nine-foot tall mechanical creature, standing in the middle of the frame. It looked pretty lethal, two lasers mounted on its arms behind its hands. It spoke. "Citizens, from this moment Core Prime is under martial law. I am General Hogarth Smith. The Galactic Arm Resistance will be crushed!" Smith picked up a piece of metal from out of the picture and bent it seemingly effortlessly. "We will annihilate them. In five months there will be no more Galactic Arm Resistance. Citizens, we need volunteers to fight for the safety of the people. Your lives are at risk. This is why."
As Smith said the last sentence, the scene that Kyle had just witnessed flashed up before his eyes. He switched the screen off in disbelief. Life at risk? What, him? A lowly computer repairman? But they had said everyone Patterned would be executed...they were going to kill the whole planet, then?
You've got to do something, he told himself. You don't want everyone to die, do you? He replied to himself, But what do I do? No matter what happens, I'll die sooner or later. Why not prolong my death slightly?
He keyed in the contact number that had been given on the announcement and was treated to a view of the Core Military Government logo on the screen as a slightly artificial voice asked him his citizen ID and name.
"ID KH-099017927, name Kyle Hailey."
"Please state your address." said the voice.
"Room 2265, building 981, road Gamma-888127, sector 71 of district 27," he said, struggling to recall his full address. Usually he could just give his contact number and his address could be found from that. The voice continued.
"Please report to Military base 27. Contact number Beta-Alpha-9829846."
The screen blanked, leaving Kyle wondering if he'd done the right thing.

Smith put down the twisted piece of steel and transferred from the uncomfortable A.K. suit into his own body again. He looked at the machine standing stiffly in front of the camera and turned to his secretary. "How many calls have we got from civilians?"
The secretary consulted his flatscreen and looked up. "Uh...about twenty thousand, sir. Good speech, sir. I liked the metal."
Smith smiled. The metal had been a nice touch even if he said so himself. He picked up the twisted bar with his hands and tried to bend it with no success. It was solid, yet with the A.K.'s muscles it had seemed like plastic. He'd heard reports of A.K.s climbing cliffs by ramming fingers into the stone, of snapping an Instigator's heavy laser barrel with a single punch.
They were incredible fighting machines. At this moment factories were assembling the towering frames. Only a few months ago, the technology that had made them possible had not been invented. The Heavy Armour reduced the need for armour plating on the structure and also reduced the need for the Kbot to go at a fraction of a mile an hour.
He looked at the secretary's report - nine thousand A.K.s had been made already and had been dispatched all over the planet to deal with terrorist activities. He would have liked to see the face of any terrorist cornered by an A.K. Outside the headquarters six of the things stood, guarding the gates. He knew the GAR would soon perish.

"Good morning, recruits. As from now you are part of the Galactic Core Government Army. Your civilian rights will still apply apart from a few restrictions. But what is a slight loss of freedom compared to succumbing to terrorism?" Smith paused. "Tommorow, you will be assigned to your units. These machines are the deadliest in the known galaxy, and with them we can beat the resistance to a bloody pulp. But for now you will train to acclimatise yourself to the new units. Long live the Core!"
He saluted and stood stiffly until the red light on top of the camera blinked off. Then he relaxed and exhaled with a sigh. The transmission had gone out to every recruitment hall on Prime, and several more on outlying planets thanks to tachyon transmission. Hopefully his speech would make a difference. It was only the day after he had declared Prime under martial law, and already about half the planet's population had signed up for the military. The programme was completely voluntary at the moment - Smith had seen no reason to try and conscript citizens. After all, what were they dealing with? Only another terrorist organization.
But as he thought this, a shiver ran down his metal-jacketed spine. He suspected this terrorist organization was not quite what it seemed.

Kyle stood with the other recruits in the local miltary recruitment hall, uncertain what to do next. He'd just seen the General, giving his speech, yet he was sure that General Smith was not telling them the whole truth. Maybe he didn't know the whole truth, then, he thought. As the large double doors opened and the new soldiers filed out, he was still worried.

A maze appeared, seeming to twist slightly as it blurred and resolved. The floor shifted and suddenly started moving, forcing Kyle to brace himself. He put out a hand to steady himself and he heard a slight clank as his hand found the shimmering wall. He stared at his hand, metallic and square, and looked at the heavy laser mounted right behind it. He drew the hand back and punched the wall, the iridescent material yielding slightly before splintering. Walking through the hole, he found himself in a grey, featureless area. The sounds he could hear were distorted and distant, his vision whitened. He sought around for his body and it was not there. He looked around for where he had come in and the wall was there, the hole still punched in it. He ran towards the wall, legs pumping, or were they? He couldn't see them, and the wall didn't get any closer. In fact, it seemed to be getting smaller...
No, he was getting closer to it. Suddenly he bumped into something invisible, and his unseen hand grasped nothingness but he could not go on. A sensation of falling, but the view did not change, and he could not see his body to see what was happening. Suddenly the invisible...thing...shimmered and became alive, distortion moving over the image. The wall twisted in and out of view, perspective losing all meaning as a corner of the surface suddenly rushed past him and he was engulfed in nothingness. The image scrunched up and blurred, before exploding. He felt pain as a sharpened needle of shrapnel pierced him, and suddenly the thing in front of him became visible again. An unspeakable, and curiously undescribable horror in front of him. He screamed but he could not hear himself. Then...

Kyle woke up with a start, his muscles tensing with a jolt. He was sweat-soaked, his blankets rucked around his feet. Breathing heavily, he felt for the light. Switching it on, he sighed in relief. He was still all there, nothing was missing. It had all been a dream...all a dream...
It must have been the simulator, he thought. Yes, that was it. The simulator had scared the heck out of him until the program loaded. The sensation of nothingness was un-nerving, especially when it seemed to last forever. The tech told him afterwards that there had been a fault in the program and they had had to reload it. He smiled - he had been scared over something minor. He was a soldier, now, he shouldn't be scared. He switched his light off again, but he didn't go to sleep again, just in case.

Part 13

The insert was in five minutes, and Captain Jim "Toaster" Smith was cold, tired, and shivering. He sat on the edge of his seat in the troop transport, his KBot frame switched off to avoid it responding to his shivers. Smith was a combat veteran, hardened and experienced with over twenty kills to his name. He excelled at special missions - his nickname came from the fact that he tended to pop up at unexpected moments.
For about the fortieth time, he checked his EMG weapons, the powerful machine-guns reporting back perfectly OK. A readout in his suit read minus twenty degrees centigrade outside the troop transport, and he made a mental note to ask for heaters inside the KBots. As the transport rocked high over the city, he sucked a little flavoured water from a nipple near his mouth and relaxed.

Engines spurting flame, the ancient transport made its slow, creaking way over the city. The outside was rusted and corroded, its logo and colour flashes long gone. Once it had said "Hyasho Meat Corp.", but now the only sign of the logo was the word "Meat". Someone had sprayed the words "We are dead..." in front of it.
Two military fighter jets screamed towards the transport, weapons not armed. They activated docking clamps and started to settle onto the transport's hull. This was his signal...

Smith concentrated, his thoughts triggering impulses in the sensor helmet he wore. The Kbot pwered up and started stretching exercises, five seconds before the door opened to reveal the wide expanse of metal below them...

Twenty black specks dropped out of the transport and activated rocket boosters, flying away from the transport in all directions. Seconds later, six cannons emerged from the transport's hull and flaming shells hurtled towards the fighters, pilots struggling to arm the missiles. They didn't manage it in time as the fighters were hit by the shells and tumbled off the transport's hull, falling towards the cityscape below.
The transport sped off, its deceptively slow engines now running at full speed.

The twenty PeeWees landed in streets and roadways, the soldiers calmly rounding up civilians. Each soldier made their way over to a certain point, navcomps signalling the right route to take. Civilians followed, given submachine guns by the commandoes. They were told to only shoot when fired upon...
The commandoes met up outside CORE government HQ, an imposing building within a cleared plot of one mile. Inside their commandeered van, Smith gunned the engine and sped off towards the squat grey building, commandoes clinging onto the walls as the vehicle bucked and rolled.

Peter Helden dropped his load of hardcopy as weapons fire was heard in the entranceway. He carefully made his way towards the entrance, drawing his mini-EMP pistol as he poked his head around a corner. The sight that greeted him was chaos. The armoured door had been blown to pieces by the gunfire and bodies lay on the floor, armoured A.K.s along with security guards. He shoved the slim pistol up his sleeve, dense old-fashioned wool concealing the bulge of the gun.
He held up his hands. "I surrender!" he called out, and one of the commandoes came over to him with handcuffs. Turning rapidly, the smooth pistol slipped out of his sleeve into his hand and his fingers searched for the firing stud. One commando received a pattern-scramble charge in the center of his (or her, he thought) chest, long electric sparks discharging on other PeeWees as the suit's reactor overloaded and imploded, sucking half the room into the explosion. A PeeWee toppled, the pilot's head fried by a microwave charge launched a second after.
Peter glanced wildly up at the ceiling - the auto-machine guns were all burnt black and smouldering. The commandoes had obviously known about the hidden guns. He aimed the pistol again and flailed wildly as two thousand short, concentrated laser bursts passed through his body, energy discharges creating a smell of ozone along with the stench of burnt flesh...

Smith, shaken, lowered his machine-guns and looked at the carnage surrounding him. The security guard he had just downed lay on the floor on top of two of his colleagues, the Kbots downed by the automatic machineguns in the ceiling. He rallied the rest of his team and strode towards the President's office.

President Faber Jones stood up with a start as gunfire echoed around the spacious office, his door splintering and crashing down under the kick of a Kbot. A shadowy figure appeared in the smoke-wreathed doorway, machine-guns raised, and beckoned him towards them. He ducked beneath his desk - the armoured panels would hold them until...
He grasped the heavy gun with both hands, the twin Gauss barrels feeling like they were made of lead. He hastily fumbled the two rounds from the magazine into the chambers, fingers feeling like putty as he carefully poked his hat above the desk. EMG fire burnt it to a shred in his hands.
With a gulp, Jones didn't stand up. He removed an armoured panel from the desk, only thin wood now remaining. As he pressed the stubby, rounded muzzle of the Gauss shotgun to the wood, he closed his eyes and prayed...

Two massive anti-tank rounds erupted from the desk, wood splinters showering over a rug as the rounds impacted on the lead PeeWee. The explosive-tipped uranium rods passed straight through the Kbot, the explosives detonating a yard behind it and pushing aside two more PeeWees before the uranium bolts smashed into the three remaining PeeWees behind them.
Smith only had time to look at the two small holes in where his abdomen had been until recently before he passed out with pain...

Jones stood up, two more rounds already in the gun. He looked at the wrecks in the soorway and wiped his brow with a sigh. Then as he wondered how many commandoes had actually been dropped, he heard a slight noise behind him...

Chris Walker pumped EMG fire into the windowframe, the tough armoured glass shattering under the impacts. The President jerked in a macabre machine-gun tango, the heavy cannon dropping from lifeless fingers. As the dead body dropped to the ground Chris shook his head sadly. Toaster Smith had been one of the best they had...
 
Part 14

"So it comes down to this," he said. The short, old man moved a chesspiece on the old, tattered board and looked at his opponent. A click sounded in the confined space of the empty space station as the other lifted a magnetic piece and moved it.
"Check," he said, softly. "As on the chessboard, so it is in life. We cannot do anything but move."
"No. We can still prevent the war."
Stephen laughed silently, and his chest heaved in spasms of coughing as he inhaled the stale, dry air of the orbiter, long abandoned by its crew. He scratched his bald head with a mechanical claw, the once-proud figure now decrepid and frail. Twenty years in space had sapped his strength and now he could hardly move. "The war cannot be stopped now. We made a mistake starting this, all this. Now, let us go."
"Go?"
"To our final sleep. Come, the capsules are waiting."
Gas hissed as faceplates descended over the hyper-sleep capsules, and neural helmets recorded the last brain patterns of the men...just in case...
 

EPILOGUE
Eight thousand years later...

The chessboard floated, silent, in the vacuum, battered by micrometeorites and twisted by a depressurization now long, long ago. The king stood, in checkmate, surrounded by an impenetrable army, forced to give up. With a silent ping, the head of the piece toppled as one last impact shattered the frail plastic, a crown floating through the cabin.
The last people in the universe hung, also silent, in the middle of the cramped cabin, one space-suited, one now mechanical. Together, they symbolised a war which had destroyed an entire universe, wiped out all life. Now the universe was devoid of anything but stale, lifeless rock. Everything else had gone...except them.
A pair of ancient eyes looked out at a dead universe, joined by a strip of sensors. The man and the mechanical touched hands in a final greeting.
"So it came to that? Nothing is left?" said the man, hushed as if in a museum.
"It came to that, yes." replied the machine. "Look."
The man jerked as a feedback lead slotted into his temple, then slumped. "Now I see. That was the history of mankind, then? Blood-soaked and angry..."
"Yes. I too have seen it."
"This thing we started...did we do right?"
"No. We did not do right. But it is done, now."
"So shall we start again?"

A rip in the fabric of space-time, filled with nothingness. Then a bright, searing line of light lances through space, leading to a world that will be known as Earth, sometime in the future. The line winks out, and a ship plunges towards the planet, blue and grey with bare rock and seawater.
It enters the toxic atmosphere...

The undercarriage folds out of the landing capsule, and the ship settles gently onto the bare rocky ground. A hatch opens in the side and a man and a machine walk out. The machine puts something on the ground, and they retreat.
"Well, that's it?" comes the voice of the man, hushed and almost silent in the thin atmosphere.
"That is it...we can go now."
Hachan Lostus and Andre Halman walk off into the white sunlight, the first and last humans in the universe, while behind them a single, small rocket sizzles. The man and the machine re-enter the capsule and blast off into the atmosphere, while below the rocket fizzles, ready to launch.
With a whoosh, two pounds of bacteria are launched into the atmosphere, the single-celled organisms consuming toxic gases and making oxygen. More fall to the ground below and start to breed...

*          *           *

Ten million years later, a dead, lifeless capsule hangs in orbit around a green Earth, the Commander of what will become the CORE and the future Commander of the Arm,  resting in dreamless, cold, sleep...
 

--------------------------------------------------
In The Beginning was written by CamTarn / Andy Walker

Visit The Junkyard or TAWarstories for updates and info!