Grim Citizen: Part 2
A desperate war leads to the creation of an abomination.
Lyon is thirty five. They are losing and he is tired. Tired of losing.
He needs more men, more resources. More of every single damn thing he can think and as the cold coffee goes down his throat, he curses the Hammers above him. Advancing with each generation, they are one step ahead of him, always. The commanders have all fallen and through the process of elimination, he finds himself among the top brass. A bunch of other frightened orphans like himself, all trying to play the part of macho men.
But there is hope. It’s a stubborn thing with all the tenacity of a weed refusing to die. Alexei brought it to his desk the other day. A new breed of Angel that could take on the Hammers of Gemini and let them take back their planet.
At first Lyon thought it looked ridiculous. A machine with far too many arms and far too many legs. A Frankenstein beast moving like a hybrid between a spider and centaur. Each of its limbs is a weapon of some sort, from mining drill to scavenged disintegration rifle.
“It’s too big,” said Lyon as he shook his head. It made the Hammers look human sized. “One pilot could not control all of this.”
Alexei smiled. “No. No. Of course not. But maybe two, or even three. Just let my team work on it. We don’t even need much. Just give us the dead Angels. The ones that get destroyed in battle beyond repair.”
“None of them are beyond repair.”
“Oh, please,” he replied in a mocking tone, his accent thick. “Some of the Angels can barely even move anymore after their fifth tour. Those parts are better fit at giving us a chance at real victory. We aren’t asking for much, Lyon. Just scraps.”
Lyon lets out a deep sigh. “Fine.”
The years go by. The losses keep piling up and Alexei becomes known as the Reaper Man. If he showed up, it meant your Angel was going to get its wings clipped. Rumors began to spread that Alexei was a traitor, feeding secrets to the enemy and sabotaging their Angels in an attempt to end them from within.
Lyon knows it’s all bullshit. The enemy knows everything they need thanks to Gemini. Double agents are a thing of the past when you perfect torture.
Gemini had recently developed the Ka Stone. Their pursuit of immortality had yielded spectacular fruits, including the digitization of the human mind with 99.99% accuracy. Some partnerships with some synthetic body Corps here and some bought politicians there, and now anyone could live forever. Which meant only the wealthy few could afford the luxury.
The wealthy few and prisoners of war of course.
Lyon remembers the first time one of his men brought back a Ka Stone. A computer chip no bigger than a standard CPU. They plugged it in an isolated environment, disconnected from their main communication network out of fear that inside lurked a virus. There was no virus. Only the unending screams of a twenty two year old Angel pilot. In the beginning Lyon had his best programmers and psycho-surgeons try to fix them. See if it was possible to provide therapy and save the digitized souls of his men.
None of it worked. They just screamed and screamed and screamed. Occasionally they even spouted sentences, but that was the extent of what the therapy could manifest.
One day Alexei asked to be included in the Ka stone research.
When Lyon turned to him during a therapy session, expecting horrified features, all he saw was the biggest smile on his face. It took all his strength not to punch him then and there.
“Why are you smiling?” asked Lyon, his voice even.
“Victory is in reach.”
Alexei requests all the collected Ka Stones from the last five years. Lyon vetoed his request, stating Alexei is over-reaching as head of the GC Project. He’s then overruled when Alexei requests the council’s input, where Lyon loses eight to one on relinquishing the Ka stones.
Lyon finds Alexei in a hallway afterwards.
“What do you plan on doing with them?” asks Lyon.
Alexei grins, his yellow canines in full display. “Giving them a second chance.”
It’s Christmas Day when the Grim Citizen is launched. It’s their last stand. They’ve been pushed back to the north pole of their planet and Lyon finds some solace in the fact they’re having a white Christmas.
He sips on his peppermint coffee as he watches the holo-projector. It’s his favorite and Lyon figures it will most likely be the last time he ever drinks it.
Outside the fortress walls are eight Hammers. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. They are Gemini’s newest line and they are walking commercials to the defense contractors watching from orbit. Bulky and sleek, their oxymoron design is second only to their simple anti-matter rifles. Lyon’s seen what they’re capable of. The nine Angels sent to counter them lasted a total of two minutes.
Two minutes was all they needed.
The Hammers hear the beast before they ever see it. A single scream. A young woman’s desperate cry for help, but impossibly loud. The Hammers are on standby. Unnerved, but ready.
Another scream, this time a man’s. The Hammers cock their rifles as they begin a circle formation in the snow.
A third scream. A child’s voice.
The ground under them cracks open. The Hammers fly into the air, but Mars is too slow. A multitude of robotic hands grabs its red leg preventing lift off.
“Get the hell off me!” says Mars’s pilot. A panicked voice echoing from his Hammer’s speakers.
The Grim Citizen only pulls harder and so Mars is dragged into the abyss. It disappears into the newly formed hole, where the pilot’s screams are married with the sound of whining metal.
There is a silence that follows, the only sound the steady hum of the other Hammers’ thrusters.
Then the screams return. A terrible chorus of the dead. An entire nation crying out in pain.
A cacophony. A requiem.
It leaps from the hole like a trapdoor spider, impossibly fast for its size. It is a marvel with ten thousand arms, a mass of metal corpses and dexterity. The hammers open fire, anti matter rifle laser beams shining with white-black energy that broke a law or two of physics in the name of efficient death. They claim three arms, but Grim has thousands more and from one of them appears a rail-spike launcher. It skates through the ice, a blur of finger crawling limbs, and shoots the launcher. It bursts through the air with simple beauty, channeling the primordial strength of the first spear, before it goes through Venus’s head. She falls through the air before landing as an explosion that shakes Lyon’s bunker.
Half the Hammers panic and begin to blindly fire towards Grim. This was not how it was supposed to go. Their prey was not supposed to fight back.
Grim lets out another chorus. Another terrible amalgamation of lost souls, each screaming in nails-on-chalkboard harmony. It jumps towards Neptune, who’s made the mistake of being too close to the surface. He tries to swing his sleek sapphire sword and cut off their connection, but Grim pulls hard. The Hammer’s leg falls clean off, a rain of metal and wires falls towards the planet. Grim keeps ripping, keeps tearing like a young child fascinated by a fly’s wings, until Neptune has been reduced to scrap metal.
Jupiter and Saturn attempt to cut away at Grim’s own legs, but they are ankle biters compared to it. From the mass two arms reach out from Grim’s countless legs and pull the two Hammers into Grim’s embrace, where their pilot’s screams join the choir.
Mercury, flanked by Uranus, spots some semblance of a head on Grim. A black sphere towards its center mass covered in red twitching eyes. They dive, before Grim grabs them both from the air. From Grim’s many arms appear two Lindite drills.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” screams Jupiter.
Saturn squirms in Grim’s grip. “We just graduated! Please just-”
The drills go through them with profit driven ease, broken apart as simple as the surrounding stone in a Lindite vein. They combust into a black cloud and from the smoke, golden plated Earth bursts through. He slices the drills apart in one clean cut.
“Mercury, on me!” shouts the pilot with indignation only large amounts of money can buy. “Cover me! I’m going for his core.”
Mercury in all his silver splendor dives in. “You got it, cap!”
A mass of arms move towards Mercury, but it spins with two super heated blades, melting Grim’s arms apart like butter. Earth sees his opening, diving down through the makeshift tunnel of grey gunmetal, towards the countless red eyes beneath. He lets out a battle cry, attempting to drown out the inhuman screaming that broke through his mech and into his skull. Then with one final push, plants his sword down into the core like the Excalibur of old.
“It’s over,” says Lyon between a sip of coffee.
Alexei laughs. “Not quite, old friend.”
Grim’s screams heighten and begin to shake the ground. Earth’s pilot begins to notice his ears bleeding.
“Why?” he thinks to himself.
It’s the last thought he ever has. The core’s countless red eyes all focus on him, before he’s turned into Swiss cheese by an array of laser blasts.
Mercury tries to fly away, but Grim’s arms grab his swords, before using them to cut his head clean off.
Uranus is the last one standing and he is smart enough to follow in Mercury’s footsteps. He blasts off towards space, moving at remarkable speed for a Gen 6 tank class Hammer.
Grim’s many arms begin to part way counter clockwise. The core is no longer being hidden beneath the mass, instead it becomes a sunflower’s central disk, glowing with untamed red energy. It almost feels intimate, but Lyon can’t look away. He knows what happens next and fears if he doesn’t see it, then it will not become real.
The red lasers condense into a single focal point, becoming a red pillar of crimson light reaching past the planet’s orbit. The Gemini ships try to move and prepare for hyperspace in a desperate attempt at retreat.
Impact. The Aeneas night becomes day.
For three weeks the sky rains molten metal.
For three months they celebrate victory.
Three years is all it takes to ratify their independence.
It takes three decades to get rid of Grim.