Petrichor - a novel in "open beta" - [M/f, minigiant, post-apocalyptic dystopia, slavery, military setting]
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@kisupure I remain deeply impressed by your ability to make the environment so compelling, rising above and rendering trivial the human-nak conflict. I also really enjoy how the hardship afflicts Gray and Rice differently.
Rice, and all the sons of the Algorithm, were an attempt at something new, and it was that newness that drew her to him.
This reminds me of a path-not-taken by the recent iteration of Battlestar Galactica. The Cylons are a very young civilization, and they look at humans with a weird mix of arrogance and deep insecurity. This story’s tropes encourage Rice to (seem to) have boundless confidence, and his knowledge of how the corpsmen are being farmed by the Naks keeps him from speaking freely around Gray, but he has to be aware of how precarious the whole setup is, and you have deftly hinted at that.
Of course, now I want to know how the new sentinel also knows the corpsmen by name. Has Rice been gossiping?
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@kisupure I’m very excited to see the continuation of this story! It has an excellent balance of sizey stuff and world-building/character development.
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I remain deeply impressed by your ability to make the environment so compelling
Than you! It’s a secret love letter to an area of California where I spent most of my life. And there are definitely some parts of San Bernardino that already look like a post-collapse desert wasteland lol, so it’s not hard to imagine. But for a fun fact, “the arroyo” is where JPL is currently located.
BSG was the first scifi series that felt really compelling to me, so it’s cool that you made that connection. It informs a lot of the stories I write about “things humanity makes” (and I write a lot of them/commentary about them in my non-kink creative life too!)
This story’s tropes encourage Rice to (seem to) have boundless confidence, and his knowledge of how the corpsmen are being farmed by the Naks keeps him from speaking freely around Gray, but he has to be aware of how precarious the whole setup is, and you have deftly hinted at that.
I was hoping for an “american classic” ending, the type employed by some of my favorite dystopia/warring cultures books (Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, Ender’s Game, hell even Grapes of Wrath). Shoot for the moon and all that! Characters are doomed but there’s still a vague hope for something better that you never get to see.
Has Rice been gossiping?
Ahh I don’t think I made that clear enough then - they’ve come back to where Fox used to be, located in a section prowled by a different sentinel. He was watching them for years.
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Part 4
“Think about what you’re doing.”
“I don’t need to.”
The other clone of Elliot Anders Rice was just like hers: quiet, clipped, and self-assured. In motion they both might’ve been unstoppable, and decidedly at rest, unmovable. Together they were a tangle of wills.
“You’re 386,” her Rice noticed. “How long do you have?”
“Another season.”
“Then why do you care if we live or die? Your service is almost done, you’ll be euthanized at the end of it. Let us go. Central won’t even know.”
“Because I’ve been alive long enough to come to get sentimental about things, 402. To like things. Want things. And I want to see the look on the your face when you get dragged away.”
The other sentinel shifted the slightest bit, which must’ve pushed the snake coiled at the base of the bush next to him into agitation. The sound of its rattle filled the air, and it was all the opening that Rice—R-402—needed.
The bullet tore through the other Anak’s neck, misting them both in a spray of red as he fell, gurgling and twitching for a moment before laying still. The snake elegantly fled.
There were shouts coming from the knot of corpsmen, but Rice spoke with only the slightest edge to his voice.
“That mistake cost him his life: ’Naks aren’t supposed to want things.”
“But you want things,” Gray said.
“Nobody’s perfect. C’mon!”
Rice rose to a crouch but Gray leaped up. She surprised herself when she stood between the Anak and three corpsmen quickly approaching with their guns drawn. Without thinking about it she already knew that running now would be a bad move. There was just not enough cover, not for hundreds of yards. But Rice seemed to think there was.
“Let’s go!” he said, looking as if he was prepared to physically move her.
“I’ll buy you time.”
“Buy me—!”
“Get down, there’s a ‘Nak behind you!” shouted one of the corpsmen.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
There was a change in their posture, she noticed, as they “blinked”; Corps slang for that moment one was confronted with something new and sudden, taking the brain a moment to reorient itself.
“Gray?”
“I said get down!”
“Harper, don’t shoot him!”
“It is you!”
There was no mistaking that dark skin gleaming in the sun and head of short, sculptured hair, and he pushed his way past his two companions to surge forward and envelop her in a crushing embrace.
“Where’s Finch?”
The question interrupted his happiness, and he didn’t hide the pain. “Finally got what she always wanted. Made sure to tell me she got six of ‘em on her way out.”
Gray knew exactly what those words meant. Their friend’s dark desire was so obvious that even the old sentinel could see it through a pair of binos. When Harper let her go, he produced Finch’s tags from a stained pocket, and she nodded.
After putting them away again like the precious things they were, he finally let his tense gaze drift upward to Rice, then downward to the body bled out onto the sand. The others quickly joined them, weapons raised, and Rice lifted his empty hands in the universal gesture of non-hostility.
“Gray,” the sentinel growled.
“Is he your… your prisoner?” Harper sniffed cautiously at the air. “Where’s the squeeze?”
“There is no squeeze.” She grabbed him by his tattered sleeves then, suddenly buzzing with wild energy. It was becoming clear, now, and Gray had to tell them as quickly as she could, before this perfect moment of strangeness ended. “He’s helping me get out of the Southland, Harper. It’s bullshit here, all of it. I’m going… going where I can get freedom without a mark. Please, you have to come with me." She turned to the other two now standing by, filthy and shocked. "All of you!”
But the report of a sider filled the air, its bullet finding flesh, and everyone ducked as Rice pitched, clutching his shoulder. They turned to see a lone captain staggering in their direction: Wesson.
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Good for Finch.
Rice(-402) letting Wesson get the drop on him has got to hurt more than the round in his shoulder.
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Part 5
“She’s a traitor!”
Gray set her jaw and knelt down to get a better look at the giant’s wound. It wasn’t quite as bad as it could be, bullets doing less damage to him than another human, but it was still painful, and Rice was starting to sweat from where he sat propped up on the ground.
The captain moved like he was drunk on shine, Gray noticed. As he drew near, there was something else that seemed odd about him; his uniform was cleaner than the others’.
“They’re fucking.”
“At least I wasn’t assaulting,” Rice panted with a smirk at the corner of his mouth.
“And you!” Wesson snarled, turning to the Anak with a strange combination of rage and dissociation in his voice. He seemed frustrated by the fact that the massive man wasn’t howling in pain. “You fucking started this all, you disgusting… You’re like animals, aren’t you? Go into heat and start rutting against anything that moves.”
He turned to her, and she could see it in his face: the effects of the sweet liquor. He took a step closer. “You sold us out, you lying, traitorous whore.”
Gray’s first impulse was to deny him, to explain how Rice had gone out of his way to try and prevent this…
But Wesson, shaking, did the miraculous thing: sider pointed at nothing, he reached into his pocket to grab the flask again, fumbling one-handed with the screw cap. Gray’s eyes narrowed.
“You’ve been drunk this whole time, haven’t you?”
Wesson was torn between getting his next fix and winning the argument with her, but in this state, it was looking like he wouldn’t get far with either. He cursed under his breath and in a moment of brave indignance she snatched the flask from him.
“Let me help you with that, sir.”
Gray opened it and poured its contents out onto the ground. Wesson cursed again, loudly this time, as she threw the flask away.
“You didn’t fight at all, did you?” She turned to the gathered corpsmen. “How many of you saw him?” No one answered. “How many of you saw this scumbag fire a single shot or lead a single man?”
“I was there,” he growled.
“Where were you, cap?”
“I was there!”
“You were cowering in the mud, I can see it on your uniform. You don’t deserve to call yourself a corpsman, Wesson, and you never did.”
The silence was deafening before it was interrupted by Rice’s slow, deep laugh.
“Shut up!” Wesson cried, and fired another sloppy shot into the sentinel’s leg. The giant grunted, hissing and biting back his pain. But she could see it in the cordage of his neck pulled tight as a tent skin and the sweat now dripping down his face. Gray was livid, the floodgates to weeks of grief and rage intoxicating her in a moment of unadulterated fury.
She tackled the captain to the ground. With the brass’ liquor in his veins, it was easy enough to take on the larger man and wrestle his weapon from him. In seconds she had his sider, and was pointing it with two shaking hands at his chest. The man under her fell still, and he stared at her with those cloudy blue eyes. Blinking.
Air sheared in and out of Gray’s nostrils, and sweat prickled at the nape of her neck. Her blood burned.
“Harper,” Wesson said. “Help me out here. You gonna let her do this? She betrayed me. Us."
Harper was silent.
“Douglas?” he tried.
Douglas was silent too.
“Somebody needs to get this goddamn dirty retrainee off me! That’s an order!”
Gray pressed the barrel of the sider to Wesson’s breastbone. “Tell them what retraining is.” He hesitated. “Tell them where you were sending me, you coward!”
He couldn’t and he wouldn’t. She looked him dead in the eye.
“It means being given to the Algo, doesn’t it? That’s where the good specimens go, isn’t it captain?” She turned to glance at the others. “I didn’t betray anybody, the Corps gave me to that sentinel!”
Taking her eyes off him had been a mistake, because he wrenched the gun back from her and pointed it right between her eyes. There was bloodlust on his face this time.
But Rice was quick with his uninjured arm, and Gray jumped at the louder gunshot. Spasming, Wesson fired a single shot into the air, missing Gray, before falling limp.
Quickly, she tended to Rice, whose injured arm and leg were held stiffly out before him.
“Do we have a medic?” she asked.
Harper shook his head. “No.”
She swore, and wiped the sweat from his wide brow. Their eyes met and he tried to get up. “What are you doing? You’re in no shape to walk you giant motherfucker.”
“Not the first time I’ve been shot,” he grunted. “And this one—“ He patted his oozing wound on the outside of his thigh. “—Was worth it.” Rice was able to get himself upright enough to balance on a rock and catch his breath. After a moment, he found his stash of little white pills and popped two.
Douglas was the first to interrupt. “Is it true, Gray?”
Another corpsman, a fifth-year named McGill, added: “Yeah, why would they do that? The ‘Naks, they…”
“Need humans,” Rice finished.
Gray swallowed. “Just like Corps needs an enemy.”
The group stood in silence for a while.
“We can’t stay,” Harper said, holstering his weapon. “When the battle turned, we were all told to rendezvous here, then shelter at Camp Jay until new orders came from Alpine.”
“We’ve been here since this morning but no one else has showed up. We’re not sure how long to wait.”
“Camp Jay is another ten miles west,” she said. “With injured it’ll take you two days to get there. And that’s if you’re not jumped.”
Harper sucked in a deep breath. Gray saw his shoulders stiffen then slump.
“Are you the ranking corpsman now?”
He nodded. “Come back over with us. There’s a bit more shade over there. The… sentinel can come too.”
Gray emptied Wesson’s pockets while Harper and McGill looted the dead Rice. She found a wad of fridays, some real money… and a pouch of tobacco. Douglas took his boots and she was about to stand up when she decided to grab his tags. Then, like the flask, she hurled them with all her might across the flats, and the last she saw of them was high in the air as they shone briefly in the sun. No one would know who this body once belonged to.
“C’mon, Gray.” Harper put his arm around her shoulders and turned to Rice. “Not that we can help, but can you walk?”
“I’ll get by.”
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@kisupure It wouldn’t have played well with the corpsmen, but Gray deserved to take Wesson out.
All my M/f stories and discussions can be found here.
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@olo I knooow. But Rice was only doing what she’d asked him to do in the end.
In the other ending, she was actually going to have to confront Finch first, and kill her. But Wesson was always going be done in by the big guy.
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