Ok, so I woke up this morning to the best dream ever. Now normally I'll have a dream and remember it for about five minutes upon waking up only to have it slip back into the ether and be gone forever. But last night the dream I had was so spectacular that I not only remember it, I remember all of it.
Folks, I was an Imperial Space Marine.
I know right! AWESOME!!!! Don't ask me why I was thinking of the Space Marines because I have absolutely no fricking idea. I hadn't seen or thought of a spaceship, energy weapon, or powered armor all day long. And it was weird. Usually my dreams are disjointed messes of neurotic strangeness. This dream wasn't like that at all. It was a thought out story that made sense. EXCEPT I WAS THE SPACE MARINE!!!!! I could dream like this every night and die happy.
So here's how it went. I'm sleeping. Not in the dream but in my bed. I'm sleeping and minding my own business when bam!!!! There's a rectangular spaceship flying low over a dilapidated district in some city. The moon's providing the only light. No streetlights, headlights, nothing. Just dark. And then the camera pans around the ship and then inside and THERE I AM IN MY IMPERIAL SPACE MARINE ARMOR!!!! There's about forty guys sitting on two benches facing each other. Our backs are to the walls. It's like we're paratroopers getting ready to jump into Occupied France on D-Day. Nobody's saying a damn thing. We're just sitting there waiting.
Without so much as a sound or signal we all get up and walk towards the door. The ship has dropped low over the city and slowed to a near stop. Why we're not being picked up on radar or anything else, I have no idea. All I know is that nobody knows we're here. The area looks rundown like the Bronx in the 80s except all the structures look business and not residential. Nobody seems to be wearing parachutes. Besides, we're way too low for that. We're almost rooftop level. I do know that the buildings we are heading for are about a mile away.
The Marine in charge jumps out of the side door of the ship. The men on my bench walk single file towards the door and one at a time we jump out. When it's my turn all I can see is the moonlit blueness of the bombed out city. I jump at which point my grav pack activates. I had been wondering what that small backpack was. Evidently it's a small anti-grav generator that not only neutralizes a person's mass but can also propel them. Basically it's a high tech jet pack without the jet. All I know is that my ass was flying like fricking superman. We were zooming along together but not in any organized formation. The forty of us were just trying to stick together and get to the target. I was flying under bridges and between buildings. It was effortless and wonderful.
We approached the target building which looked like one of the buildings where I used to go to school. In fact it had been a school. Now it was just an abandoned piece of property. Or should I say mostly abandoned. As I flew over and past one of the buildings attached to our target structure I noticed something through one of the windows. It was an old woman. She was a squatter but looked every bit like a school marm from the 1950s. I could see directly into the large room she was living in. It was well lit and surprisingly neat for being inside a run down, abandoned building. The contrast of that with the dark bombed out surroundings stuck in my mind. It was like looking into a Hallmark card that had just been thrown into the trash. Fortunately for her, the room was entirely too well lit to be able to see us in the dark flying above. Several of us looked down and took note as we flew past. Nobody made a sound. Nobody uttered a word.
We were all flying in a more organized formation now. 10 rows of four. Once we got to the roof we spread out and landed. Our feet hit the concrete with complete silence. We'd done this a hundred times before. While everyone spread out to secure the area, our leader motioned for me to go with him. We were looking for something. This wasn't a combat mission. There was a single door on the roof that appeared as if it had been forced open a long long time ago and just left that way. While most of the men stay on the roof to secure our escape, the leader and I move inside and down the stairs. All the while making little to no noise at all. I remember really hoping that I don't run into that old woman. If I do, I'll have to kill her. No one can know the Imperial Space Marines had been here.
The Leader and I move throughout the building. We are so good at doing what we do that none of us even bother using the night vision in our suits. Just our instincts and the moonlight. As we move we check every room for targets that might be eliminated. Our intel had the building being completely abandoned. But, the old woman being there made all of us nervous. Or at least about as nervous as a Space Marine can get. If we messed up with one old woman maybe we messed up with something else.
We finally make it to a room with a console at the far end. The room is dark as is the console. With me covering him, The Leader attaches a small cylindrical object to the board which causes it to light up. It's a communication console. The school had it's very own hyperspace transmitter that was still functioning despite having been abandoned a long time. We had to send a message out. We had to let our comrades know that were were still here and what our orders were. Our ancestors had fought our cousins from Earth a generation ago. The hundreds of thousands of captured fighters were marooned here when the Earthmen defeated our invasion force. Instead of sending us home when the war was over as was the custom, they made us prisoners then slaves. Our invasion was not one entirely of conquest. We came to enlighten and free the people of Earth from the tyranny that enveloped their worlds. But once we pushed them back to their home, their leaders became desperate and deactivated the hyperspace gates that connected them to the rest of the cosmos. We have been seperated from our brothers for more than 80 years. Not only were the gates deactivated. They were altered in such a way that no other gate in the universe could open a wormhole into the Earth star system for 10 light years in any direction. Rather than be conquered, they shut themselves off to the stars. They denied themselves and their citizens their birthright.
For 80 long years we've been waiting for rescue. Our Leader overheard from one of his slavemasters that an Imperial Dreadnaught had been engaged by Earth forces just outside of the orbit of Saturn. It apparently had a special engine that didn't rely upon hyperspace gates or wormholes to travel faster than light. It seems we were not forgotten. Our brothers had been working very hard these long years. They are returning to bathe our enemies in the fire from their plasma launchers and the radiation from their missles. Finally our mission will be completed. It is imperative that they know that we are still vigilant and ready to fight. They need to know that our warriors passed down their culture, virtues, training, and heart to their sons and daughters who now long for a home they have never seen. Sons and daughters whose fondest wish is to fight for a thing that they have never experienced.
As our Leader sent out the call and awaited a reply, I watched and made sure that no one approached. It had been three weeks since we stole this ship and executed the crew. Some of them begged for mercy and how much they loved their wives and children. Fuck 'em. We spaced the whole lot. It's a fast death but not as fast as a bullet, and we needed to conserve those. Besides, it took years to get this particular slave "cargo" together. Getting side tracked by a little mercy just wasn't an option. Besides, it isn't like we were ever showed any. At the time our little band was supposed to be terraforming Mars but instead we returned to Earth, the seat of all human tyranny.
The console made a slight beeping sound and the Leader extracted the power module. We had a reply. We had a mission. I've never seen our Leader smile, but he was grinning ear to ear. And so was I. But our joy was short lived. We heard a siren in the distance. No, not a siren, an alarm. Apparently this place wasn't as forgotten as we thought. Unbeknown to us a security guard stirred several buildings away. He lived in one of the buildings in exchange for watching the property at night. Usually the worst of his troubles were wild dogs, kids, or homeless people looking for someplace to sleep. He tolerated the old woman because she reminded him of his mother and cooked him the occasional meal. Well, that and she was so damn jittery that she was more reliable than the alarm. Most of the electronic security didn't even work. And what did was sometimes unreliable. He got dressed, not being in any particular hurry to chase off some homeless jackass that decided to use one of the classrooms as a toilet. His phone was already ringing. Yeah, it was the old woman. She was going to raise a fuss over this one. He figured he should probably answer it.
While the guard was procrastinating, myself and our Leader were hauling ass. We weren't even concerned with maintaining any kind of stealth. We pretty much figured the alarm shot that all to hell. Within three minutes we made it to the roof without seeing a soul. As we shot into the sky we could see a plasma fence had activated at ground level all along the perimeter of the building. It wasn't much of a concern to us since we were airborne and racing towards our ship at a pace not nearly as leisurely as the one we took getting to our target. Just before flying through the airlock, our Leader looked to me and said, "I erased the communication logs. They should just think it was a false alarm. That's if they don't dig too deep."
The guard now fully dressed and walking across the courtyard between the buildings looks up thinking he saw something in the moonlight. He curses out loud figuring it was a bird and maybe even being the very reason why he is awake and working instead of being asleep and working. Once he reaches the alarm box he inserts his key, puts his hand on the reader and deactivates the alarm. He thinks long and hard about just walking back to his bed instead of doing a room by room search to try and find what triggered the security system in the first place. He yawns, looks at his watch, and goes back to bed. "Screw the old woman and that fucking bird," he says as he drowsily stumbles back to his shack.
That's when I woke up.
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