Category: Short stories

Part II – Futuristic version – SciFi.

Special Marine Hua Jin rides through the lanes, the ancient Harley she stole from the Autarch Voss, straining against the tug of Voss’s traction beam, and the noise of the gathering ion storm, her left arm trailing behind her like a rag in her slipstream, a pattern of needle points in her rapidly deadening shoulder, where the darts from the Dzarb caught as she cut through their line. Her black uniform flaps noisily in the wind, as fronds from the roadside vegetation slap against her thighs. Tucked in her breast pocket below the gold and red dragon insignia of her unit, nestles the thumb drive containing the data Voss needs to set the planet-breaker device in motion.

A Dzarb soldier drone rushes from a hedge, its grasping tentacles and slavering bi-fold maw full of intent. Jin drives straight over it with her engine thundering.

With a crooked grin on her face, she yells, “Hell yeah, no-one messes with the corps.”  

“Defeat, when it came, was like a pall of smoke hanging over our heads, lowering our horizons,” Yeltsin said, sitting back in his chair, one boot on the boxwood table in the centre of the otherwise empty room. He lit a cigarette and took a deep draught, the livid scar near his mouth pinching into a white line as he inhaled. “That’s why we did the things we did. You would too. Anyone would.”