This may become a full fledged short in itself, or it may just be used as a flashback in another story altogether. Still, for what it's worth, here's what the muse struck me with today.


-----------------------------------------------------
The gun in her hands jerked with recoil as shot after shot was fired into the advancing horde. Even after centuries of development, design and redesign, investments and the like the common hollow point remained in use. True, lead was only used for the cheap bullets now, and even those had propellant that would make gunmen and women of the past tremble in suppressed desire ... still, if you wanted to take down flesh, there were few things better. Oh, sure, you _could_ invest a small fortune in nanochine-loaded AP rounds that exploded inside the target, and their splintered remains drove themselves into vital parts of the anatomy on their own accord, but those were about the most expensive bullets you could buy, not to mention illegal nearly all over the place.

And the good 'ol dum-dums of the stone age performed as advertised even after all that time.

The effect they had on unprotected flesh was ... impressive is one way to put it, though many would say something different entirely.

The person firing wouldn't really give a damn about the aesthetic effects of her shots. She'd do pretty much anything to keep the abominations that the city's entire population, or most of it, had become. Getting eaten was _not_ something that rode high on her list ... not this way in any case.

And it had all looked like such an easy bounty at the beginning of the entire debacle. Just another 'bring em back' job like a dime-a-dozen others out there. No such luck when one morning the entire place turned into a bad 'Night of the Living Dead' offshot.

"Door's locked!" her partner shouted from behind.

"Well don't just stand there! Open it!" she shouted, switched clips, and continued firing. The corridor was starting to get entirely too cramped.

A muffled explosion from behind signaled that her partner had done her job, now she had to slow these thing down enough to ...

"Fragger!" a round object was lobbed over one of her shoulders, and she didn't even hesitate from turning tail and sprinting towards the door - now hanging open with the lock blown out.

"Bar it!" both women instantly pressed their backs against the door, jamming it into place. It wouldn't hold long, not with its construction and lack of actual lock (courtesy of some nitrocellulose derivate).

The entire frame, and floor, shook as the fragmentation grenade detonated in the hallway. The shockwave nearly blew the door, and them, to the other end of the room ...

Another door ... which flew open as a ragged looking figure in worn clothes landed inside, with the sound of bones breaking accompanying said landing. It lay there, sprawled at an unnatural angle, spine broken in half ... then groaned, did _something_ that made the bones pop back into place, and started getting up with a long, muffled moan. Scabbed blood covered what flesh could be seen in the numerous tears of the figure's coverings.

She wasted no time in sending a spread of bullets right into the chest and shoulder, sending the intruder sprawling against a wall. The head lolled for a moment, and all was still.

The women allowed themselves a sigh of relief, and the one with the gun popped the empty clip to replace it.

There was a breaking sound, and the door behind them suddenly acquired a few new holes. A pale, half crippled hand wrapped around her throat and her partner screamed as an ugly, disfigured head - hair and skin charred and split by heat and frag, shoved its way through after it, maw gaping ...

The loud rapport of a heavy sidearm firing in an enclosed space split the air, and the mutant's head was blown open like an overripe melon.

Still slouched against the wall, the bedraggled, sooty and blood-clot covered man had one hand up, and held in it a largish slab sided pistol. His other hand was massaging the side of his chest and shoulder, where the woman's shots had impacted.

Her gun was back up, loaded, in moments, before her eyes flew wide as she seemed to place his face. There wasn't even a moment to wonder what in hell he was _doing_ here in the first place.

"Vincent, you shoot me again and I swear, I'm going to stop being all cavalier and gentlemanly about all this goddamned shit. Trust me, you do not want that to happen." Griever muttered as he lowered his Colt and made to stand up.

-------------------

-s-h-i-n-i-n-g--s-p-i-r-a-l-
-t-e-n--y-e-a-r-s-

-e-s-p-i-r-i-t--d-e--c-o-r-p-s-e-

a short story of the Shining Spiral
by Griever
-------------------

----------------------------------------------------

Again, just throwing out ideas at random.

--
-Griever
'Still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees
When the moon is a ghostly galleon, tossed upon the cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding,
Riding, riding,
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.'

Cute idea.

> "Vincent, you shoot me again and I swear, I'm going to stop being all cavalier and gentlemanly about all this goddamned shit. Trust me, you do not want that to happen." Griever muttered as he lowered his Colt and made to stand up.

He sounds pretty pissed off, understandable seeing as how injued he was before he was shot.

> True, lead was only used for the cheap bullets now, and even those had propellant that would make gunmen and women of the past tremble in suppressed desire ... still, if you wanted to take down flesh, there were few things better.

Sounds akward, try rearanging it a little.

Can't find any other problems with this piece.

>He sounds pretty pissed off, understandable seeing as >how injued he was before he was shot.

Not entirely correct.

He'd been having a fairly rough time making it through the shambling horde, and had the misfortune of coming up against one of the more bizarre creatures to come out of Umbrella Corp's labs an hour or so before story time.

The bloodworms are pretty zealous about keeping their host alive and well - the T-virus isn't something he worries about catching - but getting injured still hurts, and he'd been pounced on by a Licker fairly recently. The thing took a chunk out of his shoulder, and tried to turn him into confetti before he managed to introduce it to the business end of a 10mm Colt2010.
He's feeling quite grumpy because of that, and because he'd been trying to get some R&R before everything went down (the planet is rather nice, mild in climate and not along many of the main spaceways) - ergo, he was packing light. His actual injuries were healed pretty quickly, but in that time they hurt something fierce.

As for the bullet seqment ... hmm, yeah. I'll redo that.


-Griever
Need to get the stuff about Caladan and all that done too. Dang.

>Even after centuries of development, design and redesign, investments and the like the common hollow point remained in use. <

you need another comma in there, specificly:

...investments and the like, the common hollow...

24890922 H-calendar
Neo-Edo

It had started fairly harmlessly ... well, harmlessly compared to certain other events that had been noteworthy in the life of one Lucas Kocinski ... or Griever ... or Katz ... or Gabriel Knight, or one of the various other aliases which the person in question had been using throughout his rather long and certainly rather odd life.

Though to be fair to the case in particular, the chain of events that led to his involvement in said case ... or should one say re-involved ... had been started a year prior. And he'd had a hand in that as well.

As they say, what goes around comes around. Frankly, he'd have been a great deal happier had this _not_ decided to come back and bite him in the ass. Unfortunately, few things did.

"Nice ... very, very nice." the man nearly whistled his appreciation. From where he stood he could see a somewhat blocky, night-black hull of a starship resting in drydock. Maintenance crews scurried from one side of the craft to the other, their zero-g equipment keeping the hard vacuum in which they were working off them and allowing for full mobility through a maneuvering thruster pack mounted on the back of each suit.

"I thought you'd like it," from beside him, a raven-haired woman said. She, unlike the man, was clad sharply in a beige business suit. She was one of those people who could make damn near anything look serious and even a little regal, no matter how rumpled. In a suit that had been made for her especially, one that was worth every nuyen she'd paid for it, the effect was very much intensified.

"I've seen the hull before, and the stock footage of what the model looked like when it was still in service ... but this is a lot more than I'd have expected the old thing had in it." he admitted with respect in his voice.

"Hope Shipyards were a little miffed that we didn't just let them have the hull, overhaul it, and stick it in a museum. They'd have paid handsomely for it too," replied Sylia Stingray, stepping up to the transparent wall that showed the drydock beyond. "You could have just bought an Asp or something in that direction you know. It would have been cheaper in the end, especially given what Hope named as the asking price."

"I just felt I was making a good investment with this." Griever replied, shrugging. "Let a guy have his bouts of eccentricity."

"'Bouts' he says." the woman gave a soft laugh. "You never told me you had ties to the Company."

The Company, or rather, the Black Company, was a mercenary army for hire that had its home counter-spinwards of Neo-Edo, in a patch of territory unclaimed by any single government or power that extended between the Darkvoid and the Core. In a way, their home system - New Khatovar - was one of the ports in the area in which you'd have a fair chance of _not_ getting robbed, places like some of the worlds in the Caprician Cluster aside. They hired out under different banners, be it Corporate or minor nobility from some of the Power around in the Silesian, Haven and Taiidani Sextants, and had a reputation of being one of the toughest forces for hire out there. Also, one of the meanest. Rumor and hearsay said that they were so good because they didn't show any scruples in being more ruthless and meaner than the opposition they'd been hired to defeat.

"I know a few of them. One's a talented Ship Captain, so he's got a wee bit of pull. You're referring to how I got the milspec h-drive I take it?" he affirmed.

"Yes. That was rather unusual. But it came right on time. With everything else already in there, the ship will be quite a bit more than it looks like from the outside." was the response.

"Speaking of which, how's the mainframe handling the stress?" concern could be heard in his voice, to someone who knew what to look for at least.

"It's up to specifications. A few of my more trusted tech-heads are combing through it, looking for anything in the crystalline matrix that could cause any sort of irregularity, but after the third time I doubt they'll find anything." Sylia inclined her head towards the ship. "Kasumi is handling acclimation well enough. She dealt with the sensory input ... well, that was _very_ unusual in itself, since she claims she'd been human once. She must have had a very disciplined mind."

"Or whatever made her into what she is gave her one in the process." Griever sighed. Kasumi had been someone he'd ... met would be a rather inadequate word for it. Acquired would be too impersonal. What she claimed to be was the spirit of a young woman that had been trapped inside a technomagical construct made from an alloy that, in all honesty, nobody who'd seen in had ever encountered before. The small, black sphere that had been her home for the better part of several hundred years (spent in a state of something akin to hibernation, if that applied to bodiless souls) was as close to indestructible as they came. At least from what they'd discovered during their tests.

She was also one of the kindest people he'd ever encountered.

Why in the nine hells and thirteen heavens she'd decided she wanted to become the operating system and majordomo AI of a starship, and one that was if not bristling with armaments then at least more than adequately prepared for a major scuffle, he'd never known and would likely never find out either.

"In any case," Sylia went on, her voice showing a little awe. To one who knew what to look for. And he was certainly qualified, given the length of time he'd known her. "She's dealing with the whole thing rather well. A _very_ disciplined mind, since it took her about four days to manage the input and another six to become accustomed and good at command processing. If I hadn't seen it, I'd not have believed it. What she did was basically learning to work another body completely from scratch, and she did it in a little less than two weeks."

If anyone were qualified to judge that, it was Sylia. The woman had been running a corporate behemoth for more than a few years, a legacy her father had left her when he decided to go wholly into research again, and was as well versed in her company's forte - cybernetics, mind-machine interfaces, synthoids ... the works - as some of the more talented scientists she had working for her.

"The work will likely be done in a week." she said.

That wasn't exactly what started it, but it was part of it. At least, the means for involvement had been given. The actual beginning came to a head almost as soon as the craft in question was done with the drydock testing.

***

"How did it go?" the young man asked, wiping his hands as he stepped back from the gutted bike that stood in one corner of the small machine shop. Mackie Stingray was a few years younger than his sister, and hadn't taken up any position in the family industry. He preferred to look at life as an opportunity for study, and had discovered that he was still too much of a free spirit to let himself be tied down to one place like that. Still, he was very skilled in dealing with electronics of almost any kind, having that uncanny Stingray knack for it, but he actually preferred not to delve deeper into that and had settled instead for more hands-on work. Bluntly put, Mackie was a mechanic and engineer, and damn proud of it. Unlike his sister and their father, the former having found her place on the corporate stepladder and political plane and the latter in research and often purely theoretical ponderings, the youngest member of the family was happiest with his head and hands stuck upside the hood of any sort of vehicle.

"She handles like a charm," Griever replied as he passed by the younger man.

"And I bet the ship isn't shabby either," said young man grinned.

"Oh har, it is to laugh," came the grumbling reply. "Now would you mind telling me why in the Nine Hells _my_ Bullfrog's sitting there half-dismembered and looking like someone had taken a chainsaw to the chassis? I've seen traffic accidents look more appealing."

"I've seen traffic accidents that look more appealing than this _thing_ you call a bike did before I started with it." Mackie grinned, wiping his hands on a rather tattered piece of something that had once been a towel ... possibly.

"People today. No sense of aesthetics." the older man shook his head disgustedly as he solemnly stared at what had once been his hoverbike.

"You're saying that as if _you_ ever had one to begin with," the younger Stingray snerked.

"Hey, I do too have one. It's just ... unique," Griever admitted sheepishly.

"Sick, twisted and totally unsuited for public display? Yeah."

"Have you been keeping up with your training?"

"Umm ..." for an instant a look of pure terror shot through the young man's features, and he desperately grasped the closest alternative to continuing _that_ line of thought. Sure, he'd known the other man for pretty much most of his life, but there were some things that weren't safe to discuss with him around. "... So, I was thinking of getting a _proper_ powerplant in there instead of the powercell-clusterfuck that's running this coffin right now."

The addressed studiously ignored the awkwardly executed change of topic and turned to give Mackie a _look_.

"I _liked_ that powerplant!" he protested. "It was quiet, it was cheap to run, it ..."

"Gave the bike a rough speed equivalent to that of a slug?"

"... I think you're failing to grasp the obvious here, Mac." he went on, unperturbed. "That or you think everybody _else_ is a speed freak just because you're one. You know ... you'd better tell me _now_ what _else_ you were going to do to the poor thing."

"Poor thing my ass, that frame would’ve been made a favor if a steamrolled decided to take a drive over it." Mackie muttered and then, louder, said. "Well, we had some surplus duralloy leftover from the 'mover protos being cobbled together by the R&D types, and a spare plasmacaster that was supposed to have been patched into a bodyguard-chassis boomer before _that_ particular project got changed over into something else entirely, and a few solid-fuel boosters I'd _originally_ thought to hang onto the company aerodyne ..."

"I was right, you're not graspin' the obvious ... this isn't a godsdamned _fighter_ or a combat aerodyne or even a rapid-response assault bike! It's just my freakin' ride! If I wanted that kind of transport all the time I'd just patch a gravkit to Ol' Foureyes for Goddess' sake!" exasperation was audible in his voice. "What you're doing is like ... like trying to arm and armor the "Kitty Pride!" ... what's with the guilty look? No. You _didn't_?!"

"Noooo ..." Mackie looked very guilty for a second. "Notyetanyway."

"Read my lips ... don't _touch_ that ship, or the bike. Put it back the way it was."

"Oh come _on_. It's a bucketfull of potential goodies you're laying down!"

"No. I just know you won't stop until you've gone totally overkill. Sometimes there _is_ such a thing as too much firepower."

"Blasphemer."

"Wouldn't be the first time." Griever shrugged indifferently. "So put it back, now. Or I'll get you out of company work for a week and see what you've learned when I was gone, armed and _unarmed_, no suit."

Mackie blanched.

"Okayokay. I'll put it back. Sheesh. There's just no pleasing some people."

-----------------------

short exchanges, some exposition, nothing much ... and all my mojo managed to have me pump out. *sigh* I need to regain my center ...where'd I put those Torment CDs?




--
-Griever
'Still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees
When the moon is a ghostly galleon, tossed upon the cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding,
Riding, riding,
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.'