Art Pact 68


My unique ability (capacity? resilience?) made me the only one who could be dropped into the blast area safely. I don't know whether high command had a backup plan other than throwing lives at the problem, but life had given them a lemon at just the moment they needed a glass of lemonade, so they poured the sugar on me pretty thick.

"You're the perfect"--little pause--"person for this mission," they told me. "Your skills are what we need, and you'll be helping to save lives in the long run."

There was the phrase they love the best: in the long run. In the long run, of course, nothing they did there would matter. It didn't matter the last time I woke up, it wouldn't matter the next time. But they couldn't think that far ahead. I shouldn't have been able to either, but for some reason I could. I wondered if I should talk to someone about that. An expert. The idea was incongruous in a way that I suspected would have been funny if only I could experience humour.

"You have the chance to be a hero," they told me as they were loading me into the plane. I stood on the cargo ramp and nodded, although I knew - and I suspect most of them knew - that I did not want to be a hero. Perhaps it was for the benefit of the others - the first and most obvious backup plan, the soldiers already sitting in the lifter's cavernous interior. I supposed that that must be it. If I didn't succeed, they'd have other poor saps jumping out of the circling aircraft, men and women who unlike me would be just as susceptible to the bomb's effects as the unfortunate bastards on the ground. They'd have to be rammed full of their own patriotism and pride just to give them a minute or two on the ground. It wasn't heroism that made me jump, but a bit of cold maths: better that I do this than they kill another forty or fifty people on the off chance that one of them might be able to get to the control enter in time.


The jump itself was pretty simple - they gave me some extra padding around my vitals and a pair of retro-boots, me being beyond the design parameters for a parachute. The plane swooped down to about five hundred meters - they expected top of the residual cloud being two-fifty - then they just opened the cargo doors halfway and with no ceremony I stepped off the edge and looked down. They'd managed to get me close to the financial district, so I used little bursts from the retro-boots to aim for the top of one of the larger buildings. After falling for about a hundred meters I managed to get square-on to the drab gravel-covered square at the top of the skyscraper, then the rest of the drop was spent burning the boots like crazy. They were powerful, but I still hit the roof fast - so fast that my feet went through it then the rest of me, and I was treated to a crazy view of wires and ducts in the maintenance level before popping out into a penthouse office with a crash and a pile of rubble that had followed me down the hole.

"I'm down," I reported. There was a brief burst of garbled nonsense from the communicator that I interpreted as a confirmation, and pulling myself out of the wreckage I stepped to the window just in time to see the plane zooming away over the city's tranquil skyline. It was the most peaceful place I'd ever seen - still, quiet, the only movement on the streets below the gentle swaying of trees in the breeze. I'd expected the bomb's effect to be more dramatic. I turned up the gain on my ears. There was a gentle sobbing coming from somewhere in the room, and I scanned around before locating the source.

"Are you here to punish me?" he asked. He was wearing a pin-striped suit - as most people did here, he like something out of an old movie. He was curled up in a ball under his desk. I suppose I must have looked pretty intimidating.

"I'm here to stop a missile," I told him. "I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to leave."

"I deserve it," he said quickly. "If that makes it easier for you."

I didn't know what to say.

"I thought about something I said to my daughter," he continued. "I told her that she and her boyfriend probably didn't love each other. Why did I say that?"

"I don't know," I said. He began to cry. "I'm going to leave."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Art Pact 176 - In Memory

We gathered at the side of the road, one by one drifting in from who-knows-where. We didn't see, didn't know that another one of us had arrived until there was suddenly one more of us standing there, looking down at the metal. We didn't speak, either. Other people passed around us, but to us they were just grey ghosts in the rain. None of them had been there, so none of them mattered. They might have stared at us, might have cursed us for a minute as they came upon our little gathering stuck solid in the flow of pedestrians like a plaque in a blood vessel, but to us they barely existed. We came in, one by one from who-knows-where until all eight of us were we-knew-where, and all eight of us looking down at the metal and thinking our own cold thoughts. Seven was the last to arrive, as usual. Looking down at the metal I saw her shoes first, elegant black things with a high-heel filled in as is the style. Next to her Three: messy trainers. Next to him, Two in flat pumps. On
Read more

Art Pact 115

"Oh the worst thing about it was just the terrible cold," she said, peering out into the street. The bus pulled up at the lights, stranding her directly in front of an old man in a plaid cap who stared in through the window blankly. He was the same age as her father, but much thinner - a grey raincoat covering up a bony frame that somehow managed to impress itself on the clothes above it in the form of angular eruptions at the shoulder and elbows. From the long sleeves of the coat extended bony wrists that ended in hands white and pink where the strained handles of overloaded orange plastic bags cut into the flesh of his fingers. He looked like a special effects skeleton that had somehow escaped from the studio, donned a hat, and gone out shopping at Sainsburys. On the other end of the line Donovan muttered something trite about the temperature at which it would snow, and she nodded absently, forgetting that he could not see her. The old man looked up, staring directly int
Read more

Art Pact 34

The company stalked through the ruins, every eye among them searching the jagged outlines of the fallen palace. Commander Falcris, in the head of the column, felt the psychic pressure of the troops behind urging him on, wanting to run through the remains of the building and away into the unknown plains on the other side. The impetus was so strong that he let his sword slide a hand's width out of its scabbard so that he could grasp the blade directly, focusing on the unpleasant sharpness of the steel to keep his mind strong. He deliberately began to step more slowly, braking the others. He considered calling for help, but the sky-box had been pulsing red since mid-day, the sign the machine gave when it was hungry. Davin, his third in command, had all of the machine-water, and his lance were all the way at the back of the group. Falcris did not want to leave his position to Lieutenant Lemma. The troops would be sprinting out of the ruins before he'd got halfway back to the carri
Read more