Audio Accompaniment - Sleigh Bells - Comeback Kid
He found himself looking away from the view, looking at the distant, shattered horizon and tried to concentrate on the numbers spewed up on the inside of his goggles. In training, they'd meant something valuable, readings for targets and the efficiency of the collectors. Right now, with the cold, black surface far below, it just showed how far his blaster had to fall if something happened suddenly. Having the plug pulled on your sim session was bad enough. Actually having a team have to burn their tanks just to get out into this wilderness and save your butt would be orders of magnitude more embarrassing.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Calliope's slightly distorted voice, glazed but not dripping with sarcasm, emerged into the cockpit, cutting through the cosmic background buzz of the scanners. With a few deep breaths, he finally slid the useless headphones off - They wouldn't find anything out here - and pushed up his goggles, staring down at the landscape below.
In the canyon, jagged crystalline shapes loomed, lit only by the sunlight that entered their jagged spires and bounced haphazardly down towards their shadowed bases. Nothing moved. Nothing even glinted, just a white to black gradient into the depths, punctuated by the occasional flash of reflected light, or the sinuous paths that looped through the shadows.
"Stasis." The voice was Magpie's, from the rear of the formation. Even his voice, Wreck thought, sounded jaded. No sarcasm, and no reverence either, just the plan fact. Wrecks shivered a bit; The flight's senior pilot reminded him of the landscape below, the color drained out of him on his previous sorties. He was right, though. Stasis. There wasn't any other word for it.
It had stopped everything. Motion. Sound. vibration. Color. They'd all been arrested, seized, and condensed.
Wreck wasn't sure how much he believed them, that the jagged wastes of the surface below hadn't always been this way. Expression had ruled. Tones and Notes once rolled through in nearly biblical floods, echoing through the crystals, the brightly colored sands and structures, geometry and architecture bristling and exploding with energy, inspiring others, an endless cyle - Until something else, something hungry, found the power in the thumping, rumbling world, and closed itself around it, muting everything, until everything became sparse and precious.
Wreck glanced unconsciously at the fuel gauges for the blaster. A visible gap at the top, he thought he could feel it slowly dropping, sliding away, even if the real speed of the drain would be nearly imperceptible.
But just to the side of his vessel's readout stood another, starkly empty shape. The reserve tank.
"Sooo." the conspiratorial whisper carried with it a grin he could almost see, and the control board lit up with Calliope's indicator. Before he realized what she was getting at, he saw the blaster roll slowly out of the formation, descending through the thin, static patterns of excess dust in the air. Monocolor sparks sprayed off the blaster's leading edge as she dipped and dove, the collectors opening. Down below her, Wreck could see, against the dark sinuous shape, points of light as each of the condensed notes caught the running lights from Calliope's craft. Like scorched bones assaulted by a six year old with a Bedazzler, the curving, twisting remnants of the last fight against the encroaching stasis stood like black veins covered in gleaming gems.
It's what they were out here for. But-
"You're supposed to be looking, Calliope." Magpie was stern but disinterested, going through the motions of flexing his authority with no real teeth. Wreck could hear the laugh, even if her comms were off as more bright, colorless sparks sprayed up from the descending blaster. As long as her shields held out and her blaster's energy kept up, the stasis wouldn't affect the sleek organic craft's operation.
Wreck hit the switch, and the blaster unfolded around him. Atmospheric resistance caught the expanding prongs of the craft behind him with a lurch that pushed him into the harness, much more painful than Magpie's reprimand. "Don't go off the res too, Wreck. We're just here to scout."
"I'm determining Calliope's position, uh, visually." he muttered, biting his lip.
Magpie acquiesced, sighing loudly over the comms. "Fine. Go keep an eye on her. Don't get lost, don't want your first sortie to end in a tow job."
"How about full tanks instead?"
Magpie snorted. "Sure. You kids go get into trouble. I'll wait."
Wreck rolled the blaster over, more struts folding and rippling back as the collectors opened to full bore. He slid the headphones back on, and realized there was more than just feedback in his ears. Something hummed noisily, just under his range of hearing. Then far below, a blast of red flared across the canyon walls, the gauges flared, oscilloscopes lurching to life. The waves should have been crystal clear, dulcet tones. Instead, ragged, straight lines tittered wildly. Then a burst of blue light, and heavy, square-signal thumps rocked through the headphones.
Wreck slid on his glasses, and with a sudden spiral of G-forces, slammed his blaster down in close proximity to Magpie's own, unfolded craft, a brief lull in the flying sparks sending the path below and the crystals around them into darkness.
A bright red warning flared on the goggles, and the altimeter blinked out to be replaced by the familiar efficiency readout. Now he was locked to the path, at least until, as the warning said, the structure ended, abruptly, in the canyon wall, around four minutes ahead. Sparks briefly flared off both ships, reminding them that time was the enemy. if they weren't mining, if the collectors weren't sucking up freed wavelengths from the stasis' unyielding hold, they were just burning gas to stay flying.
"Betcha can't fill the tank before we run out of road." Calliope teased over the comms.
Wreck could hear, distant and distorted, as Magpie sighed at the follies of youth. He could almost hear his flat, toneless reprimand.
He bashed the tracking systems into active mode, and his HUD lit up, bracketing the groupings of nodes ahead, just enough information to plot his route through the field.
Just because the old man couldn't handle risky dives like this one didn't mean two hotshots couldn't make a proper collection mission out of it, he figured.
"You're so freaking on." Wreck growled around a broad smile, and warmed up the blasters, locking them on the glistening gems ahead, before opening fire, light bathing the blaster's hull as a torrent of sonic energy, not unlike a bass chord, echoed off the canyon walls and spiraled into the blaster's collection scoop, dazzling, shifting colors slowly, but surely filling the tanks...
---
Why yes, this is Amplitude Fan Fiction. Deal with it. And then go back the Amplitude Kickstarter!
No comments:
Post a Comment