lovecraftian
Member
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2009
- Messages
- 6
Hello!
This is the first piece I've posted here; I'm eager to hear what people think of my writing style.
This piece is a few years old, but I'm still quite happy with it.
It's set in the SLA Industries universe, which is a sci fi/ splatterpunk roleplay setting.
I understand there are a lot of unexplained terms in the piece; races and technology not explained for example, but I'm just posting this here to see what people think of my style. If you'd like some clarification of terms, please let me know!
---
Tango.
Tango sat in the shelter of an ancient pillar from some long-forgotten building and watched the operative team pick their way across the Cannibal Sector below him.
All around, as far as his enhanced retinas could see, the land was a broken plain of grey and brown. Shattered grey buildings, centuries old, jutted from the dark brown mud, like rotten teeth from diseased gums. Here and there large pools of oily water rippled in the incessant rain that slashed down from the dark sky and in other places the rusting, shattered wreckage of vehicles sat in the downpour like gutted animals.
This place was a warzone, no matter what SLA told the public, Tango knew the truth. The Cannibal Sectors, just like the War Worlds of Cross and Dante, were places where he was to wage his war against the insurgents of DarkNight and Thresher.
Tango had no illusions that he would be thanked for his contribution to the war; the war he fought, he fought alone, and he had done since his platoon on Dante turned renegade and forced him to kill them all.
It seemed that Tango was forced to kill far too many people, nowadays. Not that he minded the killing, but it upset him how many traitors there were. If you weren’t SLA, you were a traitor. Even a child could be a traitor, and you couldn’t turn your back on a traitor; there was no telling who could be carrying a bullet with your name on it. There were no non-combatants in this war either; everyone had to choose a side.
Some civilians had once told Tango that wasn’t the case, that some people didn’t have to fight. Clearly they had been insurgents, trying to lull him into a false sense of security so they could ambush him in his sleep. Tango had killed them all, then he’d had to pacify the entire apartment block in case the traitors had brainwashed their neighbours. He’d felt bad about that; the apartments had been SLA property and burning them was obviously destruction of loyal territory. But it had been necessary.
That had been they day he’d stopped being an Operative and begun his crusade, starting with his ‘sentence’ on Dante.
Tango understood the need for secrecy on SLA’s behalf; obviously they couldn’t send him to Dante overtly and risk blowing his cover, so they disguised his assignment as a prison sentence. They’d even had the Shivers beat him and tattoo a prisoner ID code on his arm! Seamless, just the kind of professionalism he expected from the greatest company the Worlds of Progress had ever seen. He could almost hear Mr. Slayer giving him his briefing in person.
His time on Dante had been tough, there was no denying that. Tango could barely begin to count the number of times medics had put him back together, or the number of traitors and insurgents he had killed.
Once he had even had to force a traitor medic to stitch his leg back together before slitting the guy’s throat.
But then he’d finally served his sentence and he’d been told he could return to Mort. It was obvious that SLA wanted him back, to guard his beloved home against the cancer of DarkNight eating through it’s belly, and to root out traitors.
So he’d taken the first foldship home. They’d even let him keep his armour and weapons, although he’d had to kill the customs official to get them off the ship, but then the man was clearly having seditionist thoughts otherwise he’d have recognised Slayer’s top man and let him take his weapons from the armoury.
It’d been easy to find a part of Downtown remote enough to begin his crusade again, somewhere the traitors were so thick on the ground that he could reach out and grab one off the street.
He’d captured and interrogated forty, maybe fifty DarkNight agents that way, until SLA had sent operatives after him. Again more brilliant subterfuge, showing him the way to the Cannibal Sectors under the guise of a manhunt.
Once in the Cannibal Sectors Tango’s mission had again become clear, Slayer guiding his path as clearly as if he’d been pointing they way himself!
When he’d been an Operative Tango had known the Cannibal Sectors were the home of mutants, Carrien and mad ex-war veterans, but now he witnessed first-hand the gatherings of enemy agents and the traitors who came to meet them.
He couldn’t clearly remember how long he’d been in CS3 now, but it had certainly been a while.
Tango could feel his mind wondering, it happened from time to time. He thought it must be a result of the combat fatigue and stress he’d suffered on Dante. Luckily it was the only side-effect he suffered, unlike those poor bastards who really went mad following a stint on a war-world.
But back to the matter in hand.
Crawling out of the cover of the pillar on his belly, Tango slid down a slight incline to another ancient pillar, this one lying on it’s side half buried in mud. Tango rolled onto his back and carefully propped himself up with an elbow to look over the top of the eroded stonework, a sneer twisting his mouth beneath the muddy faceplate of his PP100 armour.
The operatives were still picking their way towards the ruins of an ancient skyscraper, totally ignoring SLA doctrine on the order of file. They were clearly DarkNight traitors; otherwise they would have paid more attention to the combat classes at Meny.
Checking about to ensure no other Sector natives were watching him or his prey, Tango picked up his GAK rifle and vaulted over the pillar, darting from cover to cover as he sped silently down the slope towards the squad.
He had no fear of being seen by his targets; the late afternoon sun was all but hidden by the pouring rain, plunging the sector into early twilight, and his armour, the little visible under all the mud, was painted in a custom camouflage pattern designed for the Sectors. Plus Tango had trained as a Kick Murder long before his time on the War World had honed his stalking skills to superhuman levels.
As he bounded over the terrain he switched his helmet vision spectrum from standard to IR, changing the terrain to a high-definition black and white landscape, streaked with red splotches that indicated heat. Up ahead the operatives in their armour made glowing beacons in his visor, the four of them strung out at absurd distances. The rear operative, a female Ebon from the outline and heat levels, was so far back from her comrades they would barely be able to see her.
Tango accelerated down the muddy slope, unlimbering his power-machete.
Abruptly, not three yards from the Ebon, the ground levelled out and as he hit the flat terrain Tango leapt through the air, machete whipping back and arcing forward again as he sailed behind the Ebon. The heavy, slightly curved blade crackled as the rain sizzled off the power field encasing it, and then there was the slight resistance and thick THOCK noise of the blade shearing through the girl’s neck.
Tango landed the other side of the path in a crouch, the Ebon’s headless corpse toppling into the road behind him. None of her squad mates even turned around.
Tango’s lips peeled back in a snarl, if he’d only suspected they were insurgent agents of the enemy before, he was certain now. No one trained by SLA could be that oblivious.
Still crouching, Tango ran into the cover of a low wall and sheathed his machete. Slinging his rifle around his shoulder, he reached into a pouch on one of his bandoliers and pulled out a red-striped bullet. Drawing his silenced pistol Tango pulled back the slide and slid the hotline round into the breech.
Leaning around the wall revealed the squad still picking their way down the muddy track, still oblivious to their missing team-mate.
Tango stood and, as calmly as walking into Slayer’s Crib, stalked slowly down the track behind the operatives.
The rear operative was either a human or a Frother, Tango couldn’t tell. He was wearing a suit of garishly painted red ceramic armour, with a power claymore strapped to his back and carrying a basic assault rifle with a number of sights and baffles fitted to it.
Taking aim on the small of the target’s back, Tango crept to within a few meters of the slowly advancing operative and fired, the round making a distinctive fizzing sound as it tore into the armour and overloaded the power systems. Smoke billowed out of the vents in the suit’s back and thighs, and the operative staggered to his knees until the exoskeleton shorted out and froze him into a half-crouch. A muffled scream came from within the armour, as the operative obviously realised what had happened and tried to warn his squad-mates.
Even as he squeezed the trigger, Tango darted across the path, vanishing behind a large outcrop of algae-streaked masonry before the paralysed operative even landed in the mud.
Shouts told him that the other two had finally realised they were being stalked. Sticking one of the AV stalks attached to his helmet back around the rubble showed him the two active traitors hauling their buddy between them, backing down the path back towards where he had killed the Ebon. The operative he’d shot with the hotline round was still frozen in position, making it awkward for the other two, a Wraith and another human, to drag him. Both had their weapons drawn and were scanning about in search of their attacker, but Tango was confident neither would see him.
Keeping his AV stalk poking around his cover, Tango bent and pulled a large rock out of the sucking chemical-tainted mud and threw it over the operatives, into the wreckage of a bombed-out APC. The stone landed with a series of loud bangs, and just as Tango had hoped both the operatives dropped their burden, turned and hosed the wreck with gunfire; the Wraith using a modified Blitzer hand-cannon and the other human with a shotgun.
Leaving the idiots to blaze away at the wreck, both howling enough to bring the entire Sector down on their heads, Tango circled around the pair from behind, ducking from cover to cover until he was crouched behind another pile of rust and decaying rubber that used to be a tank of some type. Both the operatives had their backs to him now, and to his slight surprise both had stopped firing and shut up. The Wraith had even had the sense to drag the hotlined human and himself into some cover behind a collapsed wall, while the other human cautiously sidled towards the now-smoking APC wreck.
This prey was far too easy for him, no test of his skills at all, and that bored him. It was time to finish this hunt and go on to find better quarry. Tango quickly scanned the area and formulated a plan.
Leaning around the left of the vehicle wreck, Tango fired a single shot from his rifle at the human peering into the ruined APC, hitting him clean between the shoulder-blades. The explosive-tipped round blew with a flat BOOM, a cloud of red gore exploding from the wound. The operative dropped to his knees, arms twitching spasmodically as he collapsed face-forward into the mud.
Darting right, Tango leapt, the servo boosters in his suit’s legs giving him enhanced lift; he easily cleared the wreckage he’d been using as cover. At the apex of his jump he came level with a relatively intact section of building, the base of which the Wraith was using as cover, with several sections of iron rebar sticking out horizontally where a floor had once been. Grabbing a section of ironwork, Tango swung himself and changed his jump into a graceful arc downwards, landing just behind the Wraith.
The Wraith, having seen his companion blown in half by the HE round, had stood and turned to face the direction of the attack, aiming his Blitzer with one hand while pulling a grenade from his belt with the other. But then Tango dropped from the sky not two meters behind him.
The Wraith whirled around at the sound of Tango’s boots smacking into the mud, his eyes going wide at the sight of the hulking veteran in his muddy armour hauling out a power machete, and in one fluid motion brought his pistol to bear.
The Wraith was fast, but Tango was faster, years of fighting having turned him into a killing machine. As the fat barrel of the revolver swung towards him, Tango brought his machete up, the power-edged blade shearing through the operative’s wrist like water. At the same time, as the operative was just beginning a keening shriek of pain, Tango grabbed the hand clutching the grenade and twisted, feeling the bones in the feline’s wrist shatter into pieces under his powerful grip.
Spinning, still holding the Wraith by one hand, Tango swung his victim like a ragdoll, slamming him into the wall with all his augmented might.
The blow spread-eagled the Wraith against the wall, the concrete behind him cracking into spiderwebs under the force of the impact. Behind his visor, the Wraith’s eyes rolled up into their sockets.
As the Wraith slowly slid down the wall, unconscious, Tango adjusted his footing, hefted his power machete two-handed, and with a mighty swing decapitated the Wraith with a single blow.
Turning, Tango wrenched the machete out of the wall and flicked water and blood from the blade. Still frozen in a crouch, the paralysed operative watched him from the nook his buddy had dragged him into, the eyes behind his visor wild with fear. A low muted sobbing came from him as Tango slowly advanced on his captive, rain dripping from the tip of his machete. A grin slowly spread across the veteran’s scarred face.
Interrogating traitors was a bloody business, but a necessary one.
It was a good thing he enjoyed it so much.
The operative began to howl.
This is the first piece I've posted here; I'm eager to hear what people think of my writing style.
This piece is a few years old, but I'm still quite happy with it.
It's set in the SLA Industries universe, which is a sci fi/ splatterpunk roleplay setting.
I understand there are a lot of unexplained terms in the piece; races and technology not explained for example, but I'm just posting this here to see what people think of my style. If you'd like some clarification of terms, please let me know!
---
Tango.
Tango sat in the shelter of an ancient pillar from some long-forgotten building and watched the operative team pick their way across the Cannibal Sector below him.
All around, as far as his enhanced retinas could see, the land was a broken plain of grey and brown. Shattered grey buildings, centuries old, jutted from the dark brown mud, like rotten teeth from diseased gums. Here and there large pools of oily water rippled in the incessant rain that slashed down from the dark sky and in other places the rusting, shattered wreckage of vehicles sat in the downpour like gutted animals.
This place was a warzone, no matter what SLA told the public, Tango knew the truth. The Cannibal Sectors, just like the War Worlds of Cross and Dante, were places where he was to wage his war against the insurgents of DarkNight and Thresher.
Tango had no illusions that he would be thanked for his contribution to the war; the war he fought, he fought alone, and he had done since his platoon on Dante turned renegade and forced him to kill them all.
It seemed that Tango was forced to kill far too many people, nowadays. Not that he minded the killing, but it upset him how many traitors there were. If you weren’t SLA, you were a traitor. Even a child could be a traitor, and you couldn’t turn your back on a traitor; there was no telling who could be carrying a bullet with your name on it. There were no non-combatants in this war either; everyone had to choose a side.
Some civilians had once told Tango that wasn’t the case, that some people didn’t have to fight. Clearly they had been insurgents, trying to lull him into a false sense of security so they could ambush him in his sleep. Tango had killed them all, then he’d had to pacify the entire apartment block in case the traitors had brainwashed their neighbours. He’d felt bad about that; the apartments had been SLA property and burning them was obviously destruction of loyal territory. But it had been necessary.
That had been they day he’d stopped being an Operative and begun his crusade, starting with his ‘sentence’ on Dante.
Tango understood the need for secrecy on SLA’s behalf; obviously they couldn’t send him to Dante overtly and risk blowing his cover, so they disguised his assignment as a prison sentence. They’d even had the Shivers beat him and tattoo a prisoner ID code on his arm! Seamless, just the kind of professionalism he expected from the greatest company the Worlds of Progress had ever seen. He could almost hear Mr. Slayer giving him his briefing in person.
His time on Dante had been tough, there was no denying that. Tango could barely begin to count the number of times medics had put him back together, or the number of traitors and insurgents he had killed.
Once he had even had to force a traitor medic to stitch his leg back together before slitting the guy’s throat.
But then he’d finally served his sentence and he’d been told he could return to Mort. It was obvious that SLA wanted him back, to guard his beloved home against the cancer of DarkNight eating through it’s belly, and to root out traitors.
So he’d taken the first foldship home. They’d even let him keep his armour and weapons, although he’d had to kill the customs official to get them off the ship, but then the man was clearly having seditionist thoughts otherwise he’d have recognised Slayer’s top man and let him take his weapons from the armoury.
It’d been easy to find a part of Downtown remote enough to begin his crusade again, somewhere the traitors were so thick on the ground that he could reach out and grab one off the street.
He’d captured and interrogated forty, maybe fifty DarkNight agents that way, until SLA had sent operatives after him. Again more brilliant subterfuge, showing him the way to the Cannibal Sectors under the guise of a manhunt.
Once in the Cannibal Sectors Tango’s mission had again become clear, Slayer guiding his path as clearly as if he’d been pointing they way himself!
When he’d been an Operative Tango had known the Cannibal Sectors were the home of mutants, Carrien and mad ex-war veterans, but now he witnessed first-hand the gatherings of enemy agents and the traitors who came to meet them.
He couldn’t clearly remember how long he’d been in CS3 now, but it had certainly been a while.
Tango could feel his mind wondering, it happened from time to time. He thought it must be a result of the combat fatigue and stress he’d suffered on Dante. Luckily it was the only side-effect he suffered, unlike those poor bastards who really went mad following a stint on a war-world.
But back to the matter in hand.
Crawling out of the cover of the pillar on his belly, Tango slid down a slight incline to another ancient pillar, this one lying on it’s side half buried in mud. Tango rolled onto his back and carefully propped himself up with an elbow to look over the top of the eroded stonework, a sneer twisting his mouth beneath the muddy faceplate of his PP100 armour.
The operatives were still picking their way towards the ruins of an ancient skyscraper, totally ignoring SLA doctrine on the order of file. They were clearly DarkNight traitors; otherwise they would have paid more attention to the combat classes at Meny.
Checking about to ensure no other Sector natives were watching him or his prey, Tango picked up his GAK rifle and vaulted over the pillar, darting from cover to cover as he sped silently down the slope towards the squad.
He had no fear of being seen by his targets; the late afternoon sun was all but hidden by the pouring rain, plunging the sector into early twilight, and his armour, the little visible under all the mud, was painted in a custom camouflage pattern designed for the Sectors. Plus Tango had trained as a Kick Murder long before his time on the War World had honed his stalking skills to superhuman levels.
As he bounded over the terrain he switched his helmet vision spectrum from standard to IR, changing the terrain to a high-definition black and white landscape, streaked with red splotches that indicated heat. Up ahead the operatives in their armour made glowing beacons in his visor, the four of them strung out at absurd distances. The rear operative, a female Ebon from the outline and heat levels, was so far back from her comrades they would barely be able to see her.
Tango accelerated down the muddy slope, unlimbering his power-machete.
Abruptly, not three yards from the Ebon, the ground levelled out and as he hit the flat terrain Tango leapt through the air, machete whipping back and arcing forward again as he sailed behind the Ebon. The heavy, slightly curved blade crackled as the rain sizzled off the power field encasing it, and then there was the slight resistance and thick THOCK noise of the blade shearing through the girl’s neck.
Tango landed the other side of the path in a crouch, the Ebon’s headless corpse toppling into the road behind him. None of her squad mates even turned around.
Tango’s lips peeled back in a snarl, if he’d only suspected they were insurgent agents of the enemy before, he was certain now. No one trained by SLA could be that oblivious.
Still crouching, Tango ran into the cover of a low wall and sheathed his machete. Slinging his rifle around his shoulder, he reached into a pouch on one of his bandoliers and pulled out a red-striped bullet. Drawing his silenced pistol Tango pulled back the slide and slid the hotline round into the breech.
Leaning around the wall revealed the squad still picking their way down the muddy track, still oblivious to their missing team-mate.
Tango stood and, as calmly as walking into Slayer’s Crib, stalked slowly down the track behind the operatives.
The rear operative was either a human or a Frother, Tango couldn’t tell. He was wearing a suit of garishly painted red ceramic armour, with a power claymore strapped to his back and carrying a basic assault rifle with a number of sights and baffles fitted to it.
Taking aim on the small of the target’s back, Tango crept to within a few meters of the slowly advancing operative and fired, the round making a distinctive fizzing sound as it tore into the armour and overloaded the power systems. Smoke billowed out of the vents in the suit’s back and thighs, and the operative staggered to his knees until the exoskeleton shorted out and froze him into a half-crouch. A muffled scream came from within the armour, as the operative obviously realised what had happened and tried to warn his squad-mates.
Even as he squeezed the trigger, Tango darted across the path, vanishing behind a large outcrop of algae-streaked masonry before the paralysed operative even landed in the mud.
Shouts told him that the other two had finally realised they were being stalked. Sticking one of the AV stalks attached to his helmet back around the rubble showed him the two active traitors hauling their buddy between them, backing down the path back towards where he had killed the Ebon. The operative he’d shot with the hotline round was still frozen in position, making it awkward for the other two, a Wraith and another human, to drag him. Both had their weapons drawn and were scanning about in search of their attacker, but Tango was confident neither would see him.
Keeping his AV stalk poking around his cover, Tango bent and pulled a large rock out of the sucking chemical-tainted mud and threw it over the operatives, into the wreckage of a bombed-out APC. The stone landed with a series of loud bangs, and just as Tango had hoped both the operatives dropped their burden, turned and hosed the wreck with gunfire; the Wraith using a modified Blitzer hand-cannon and the other human with a shotgun.
Leaving the idiots to blaze away at the wreck, both howling enough to bring the entire Sector down on their heads, Tango circled around the pair from behind, ducking from cover to cover until he was crouched behind another pile of rust and decaying rubber that used to be a tank of some type. Both the operatives had their backs to him now, and to his slight surprise both had stopped firing and shut up. The Wraith had even had the sense to drag the hotlined human and himself into some cover behind a collapsed wall, while the other human cautiously sidled towards the now-smoking APC wreck.
This prey was far too easy for him, no test of his skills at all, and that bored him. It was time to finish this hunt and go on to find better quarry. Tango quickly scanned the area and formulated a plan.
Leaning around the left of the vehicle wreck, Tango fired a single shot from his rifle at the human peering into the ruined APC, hitting him clean between the shoulder-blades. The explosive-tipped round blew with a flat BOOM, a cloud of red gore exploding from the wound. The operative dropped to his knees, arms twitching spasmodically as he collapsed face-forward into the mud.
Darting right, Tango leapt, the servo boosters in his suit’s legs giving him enhanced lift; he easily cleared the wreckage he’d been using as cover. At the apex of his jump he came level with a relatively intact section of building, the base of which the Wraith was using as cover, with several sections of iron rebar sticking out horizontally where a floor had once been. Grabbing a section of ironwork, Tango swung himself and changed his jump into a graceful arc downwards, landing just behind the Wraith.
The Wraith, having seen his companion blown in half by the HE round, had stood and turned to face the direction of the attack, aiming his Blitzer with one hand while pulling a grenade from his belt with the other. But then Tango dropped from the sky not two meters behind him.
The Wraith whirled around at the sound of Tango’s boots smacking into the mud, his eyes going wide at the sight of the hulking veteran in his muddy armour hauling out a power machete, and in one fluid motion brought his pistol to bear.
The Wraith was fast, but Tango was faster, years of fighting having turned him into a killing machine. As the fat barrel of the revolver swung towards him, Tango brought his machete up, the power-edged blade shearing through the operative’s wrist like water. At the same time, as the operative was just beginning a keening shriek of pain, Tango grabbed the hand clutching the grenade and twisted, feeling the bones in the feline’s wrist shatter into pieces under his powerful grip.
Spinning, still holding the Wraith by one hand, Tango swung his victim like a ragdoll, slamming him into the wall with all his augmented might.
The blow spread-eagled the Wraith against the wall, the concrete behind him cracking into spiderwebs under the force of the impact. Behind his visor, the Wraith’s eyes rolled up into their sockets.
As the Wraith slowly slid down the wall, unconscious, Tango adjusted his footing, hefted his power machete two-handed, and with a mighty swing decapitated the Wraith with a single blow.
Turning, Tango wrenched the machete out of the wall and flicked water and blood from the blade. Still frozen in a crouch, the paralysed operative watched him from the nook his buddy had dragged him into, the eyes behind his visor wild with fear. A low muted sobbing came from him as Tango slowly advanced on his captive, rain dripping from the tip of his machete. A grin slowly spread across the veteran’s scarred face.
Interrogating traitors was a bloody business, but a necessary one.
It was a good thing he enjoyed it so much.
The operative began to howl.
