The next Iron Fic will be held this coming Sunday.
The competitors are:
consulting-corellian-time-lord
and
jillyfae
It will be held at 12:00 GMT Sunday the 21st of October - which is 11PM in the Australian Eastern states, 2pm Germany and 8am American EST. According to your Chairman for this week, mrsalenko, anyway.
The light green grass in the field on the far side of the depot rippled in the wind as I stepped off the transport. It was an astoundingly pretty day out. The others on the transport disappeared into the streets, which were oddly empty, as I waited for my parents. I looked around, my hair escaping some of its bun to blow across my eyes.
I hadn’t been home in a long time. In fact, it’s been so long that I’d forgotten how beautiful it was in the colonies. I got used to living among the elegant spires of the London megalopolis while I attended Oxford.
I waited until I finally decided they weren’t coming to meet me, but I didn’t worry. Determined to enjoy the day, I took a deep breath of unprocessed air and began to walk. It was just a few kilometers through town, and maybe I could catch a ride on one of the farm transports like I did when I was a kid. Emboldened by this nostalgic thought, I smiled and took a deep breath of the unprocessed air. The day wouldn’t be spoiled if I had a say in it.
It was nice to stretch my legs. I spend so much time standing or sitting in labs, and then on my vacation I spend more than a week on a transport that sleeps fifty in bunks. The sun and wind felt so good that I broke into a trot, my bag jouncing on my shoulder.
Not too far from the station, I saw a gathering of Alliance soldiers outside a prefab. They were talking excitedly and waving their arms to something in the distance. One of them held up a rifle to look through the scope. I glanced where it was pointing and saw nothing but a few dark clouds.
One woman seemed to be in charge, her black hair knotted perfectly at the base of her neck. She had beautiful eyes, and my interest in her grew, pulling me closer. She wore full armor, so not in my division. I’m no soldier. But this did her no disservice in my eyes; I like a strong woman.
“Hi there!” I said. They turned around and looked at me. “I’m Comm Specialist Samantha Traynor. What’s going on here? Anything I can do to help?”
The beautiful black-haired woman stepped forward. “I’m Lieutenant Williams, and we’ve got a situation. We’ve lost contact with the south side of the colony. Total blackout. We could use a comm specialist.” She pointed into the prefab. “There’s a vidcom in there with a full orbital relay connection. See what you can make out, it’s all garbled. We need to call for backup. There’s no telling what’s going on.”
“Yes, ma’am!” I ran into the prefab, my heart thundering in my chest. My parents lived on the south side. No wonder they hadn’t come.
Behind the bunks and the kitchen, the comm equipment was, thankfully, top of the line. Probably just installed. My fingers flew over the controls as I took stock of the situation. It took only a few minutes to discover the scrambling frequency and clean up the vid relays.
“Lieutenant!”
Williams ran up behind me and watched the vid with a horror equaling my own. “My God,” she exclaimed. “What are those things?”
What looked like huge insects flew over the screen from every direction, blackening the feed. Through the waves, we saw hideous monsters taking people frozen like statues and stowing them in pods. Rows of the monsters were marching, coldsleep pods floating alongside them, undoubtedly carrying colonists.
A furious buzzing came from outside. We ran to the doorway and saw the swarms coming down on them. One dove into the Lieutenant’s chest, but she caught it and held it up. It was mechanical. The sun overhead was blotted out and we both looked up to see an enormous swarm coming down on us.
“Get down where they can’t see you!” Williams shouted. “I’ll protect you!”
I ran back into the prefab and looked around. Shots sounded in the distance, making me flinch. The door to the prefab shut and locked behind me. The emergency lights flickered on, bathing me in unnatural red light.
I thought of my parents, poor farmers on the other side of town. I knew they probably hid in the cold cellar when storms came. They could survive. But these other soldiers – what could I do to help them? The comm relay. There must be something.
I scanned the frequencies, seeking something that she could exploit. The static transmissions were broken by the occasional scream and the sound of weapons fire. Through it all, I could hear the patterned hum of AI transmissions. I could pick it out easily.
I ran a quick diagnostic of the signal and determined that the flying insects were controlled by a simple homing signal, designed to pick out human life signs. It was a simple enough algorithm, one I could have written first thing in the morning, even before I drank my coffee. Was there some was I could exploit that?
Perhaps I could set it to look for other life forms, but that could take too long. It had to be simple and it had to work for all of them at the same time. From the sounds outside, they were already on top of us. I worried about the pretty lieutenant and her squad for a moment, then shook it off and turned back to the comm station.
The ground shook, knocking some papers off a shelf above me, fluttering around me like snow.
Snow. Cold. That was it.
I jumped to the next station, the one that altered the frequency of the orbital emitters. I turned them onto the colony. It didn’t even cover a quarter of the area, but I knew our best chance at survival was to preserve the Marines outside. They could protect civilians against the monsters that roamed the streets.
With a silent apology to my dear parents, wherever they were, I focused on the area where I knew the team was last, right outside the door. I checked the vidfeed and discovered that they had only moved about a block away, firing at the enemy. Relieved to see that there were some civilians behind them, cowering in the shadows, I turned back to the second screen to make the hack.
It took longer than I would have liked to hack the simple code. There were a few hidden layers of security, but the devices themselves must be expendable enough to not waste a lot of resources on security. There were certainly enough of them.
Once I was in, though, all I had to do was change a single entry. For average body temperature of the target species, I entered the value of absolute zero. I smiled gleefully as I keyed in the command sequence, whipping my head around to view the results in the vidfeed.
The insects in that area went up, straight up, headed for the closest source of sub-zero temperatures: space. The lieutenant and her squad gazed up in wonder for a moment at the spectacle before the lieutenant shouted an order and turned back to the line of approaching enemies.
I had a wonderful time, taking what joy I could in swinging the small circle of hope around the colony, looking for people to help. I didn’t save everyone that day, but I saved some.
They gave me an accomplishment badge for that, can you believe it? Me, who works in a lab! Usually only fighting soldiers get the special badges, things like “dropping a Mako from orbit” or “saving a crew member”, but I got one of my own that they made up just for me.
It says: “To Samantha Traynor, who valiantly turned an enemy’s weapons against itself, saving her home colony and parents”.
Tonight I, Abstract, am participating in IronFic. I'm competing against Pestomonkey, a writer who's work I'm very familiar with. We're evenly matched in experience and in passion, though she's stronger in the technical stuff like grammar and punctuation. Though I'm no slouch, there are gaps in my education.
Besides being herself a technical editor/writer, she's good at writing things that people like to read, particularly romances. It's a safe bet that she'll bring something knockout to the judges' table. She makes you fall in love with the main character.
I'm good at quick problem-solving with any kind of writing because of the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of my work as a web content developer, which may give me a bit of an edge in a competition. I prefer to write action-oriented, psychological thrillers. It usually takes me three drafts to get a story the way I want it, so we'll see whether I can pull off something that will be pleasant to read in the time allotted.
We're equally prolific and equally passionate about the craft, so no clear advantage there. I'd say we're well matched, so I'm looking forward to seeing what happens tonight and to reading what she puts together.
May the writing gods be appeased by our performance tonight!
