The State of Your Sol: "Old Soldiers/ Never give up"
In What Was Once Utah
It was not even a particularly dry joke, their name. FatBlunt, the immortal pauper, the creator of the FB 32, the gun of the Democratic Federation: The Weapons' Designer of the Anarchist Menace. They should probably feel dirty, making as much money--or rather what money could get--from the fact that the FB 32 was present in dozens and dozens of stories and they had managed to sell off the rights to it in exchange for a cut.
But what did they buy with the cut? Immortality. That's all. The room was dry because only some of the rooms had air-conditioning, and the baking hot desert outside scoured away all their little sins.
One day soon they would die. They would choose it the way you choose to let go of a railing. It's still the fall that kills you, it's still gravity taking over and sending you plummeting down to earth. Steady there, Icarus, a man over a century and a half dead says, his hand at the small of their back, filling it as if God herself had made the two of them to fit together.
They look out over the balcony at the desolate wasteland and smoke what is not even called a blunt anymore. Names move on, half a year ago some corporate puke so in love with killing that she thought it a sorority that could overcome "simple political divides" had listened to them explain how the latest Ares gun was worse than the one before, and asked, "Did you used to be… overweight?"
Like that's the origin of the name: this rotund enby who is too honest.
They smoke, and they consider what it means to spend fifty years preparing to do something that won't matter.
They could be doing something else. They've got in a new gun: Ares makes a new piece of crap every year or two even if they don't think of anything new to add on to make it worse. Their comrades all hate them, since of course any criticisms they provide might lead to improvements on the guns used to oppress the masses. But Ares and all the others, they pay well for the immortality to let them keep on going, to buy this little house rent-free.
There are three air-conditioned rooms. First, the basement where they grow things that are no longer illegal. But also just flowers and plants, turning it into a hothouse so they can replicate jungle conditions for tests. They go down there sometimes, when the desolate desert which would have been the whole world (if not for the DemFed) grows too depressing even for an old enby considering their imminent death.
Then there's the freezer, where they test the guns used on cold worlds and in vacuum conditions. They go there sometimes when it gets too miserable.
Then the bedroom: the dry heat, even after all the medical treatment, got them coughing in their sleep. And they needed to preserve the quality of certain things, certain hidden guns and plans.
Everything else was exposed to the elements. They didn't have guests, they didn't have pets, they didn't watch much television or holovision or whatever the latest way of labelling it was. They sometimes went on walks out back, where the gun range was, and once every few years they'd go to the local town, just to make sure that any and all spies were still the same idiots that they were used to.
FatBlunt was a legend of sorts, but like most legends they were barely real on the best of days.
A tattered coat upon…
They took another hit, tried to relax.
It wasn't time yet.
It wasn't time for what they knew would happen. So they turned and went to their fridge, bathrobe trailing, body skinny and emaciated. They had extra Sollies even after the immortality that could have gone towards all sorts of things. They donated almost none of it: it wouldn't have value when the time came, and it'd draw too much attention to organizations. Once in a while, FatBlunt figured out where a shell game was being played, and donated a bit of money to that.
Once, oh, oh once, during the Black Summer in 2214, before it was ready, they'd gotten an entire sect of Undercover Feds War-Crimed by another group of Feds by making them think…
After that, they hadn't paid as much attention to where FatBlunt's money went. But they didn't want to alert anyone.
Fifty years ago, they had begun to work on the FatBlunt 70, Model 69. Let them have this joke: it is a modular gun that can be made in the worst possible conditions or in the greatest possible haste, each part remarkably hard to track and impossibly cheap. It is perhaps the best gun they've ever designed, the perfect insurgency weapon. They stole or replicated every actual advance in technology that Ares made that would matter for an insurgent, they turned it into a gritty dollar-store angel (and they were young enough to remember going to Thrift Stores to survive), but it would only be a surprise once. Then they'd start watching for its unique characteristics to track the parts, training for it in schools, all that crap.
They grabbed a can of Orange Juice, One Serving, Now With Blah Blah Blah and headed back over towards the balcony, taking out the cigarette. The taste of the two combined was indescribably bad, but it helped them focus.
This was not the time.
Their bones ached at night, and the doctors all said it was psychosomatic, but by the ache in their bones and their weather-eye for revolt, this was just a "regular" Black Summer.
They would not release the 70-69 until a Great Black Summer, where it'd at least have a chance to spit in the Charters' eyes before…
They'd send a team, and probably even a big one, and better for it because they had body armour and plenty of guns even though they hated violence, hated that this was all they were good at making.
The team would gather, and they'd sprint out, leaping out into the air itself with guns blazing, and maybe they'd get one or two, but probably not. And then that's that. And if they were going to be taken alive, they had other ways.
They spit over the side of the balcony, over the side of the cliff, and watched as the big gob of orange spit hit the ground hundreds of feet below. Within a minute or two, the sweltering sun of summer would evaporate it, and it would be as if it was never there.
But FatBlunt was going to wait. Next year, or perhaps in a decade. When you were immortal, you had forever and then no time at all.
In Pacific City
There are six of us, all women, hanging in the virtual space of the chat. After so long, none of us really had names, just handles. Legendary words from so long ago. Kusanagi led us. Excalibur our second. Gram, Mistilteinn and Chun Jun, and me, Durandal. We are all cell leaders, old soldiers of the Infamous Voltairine de Cleyre Brigade.
"Alright." Kusanagi says. "Things will kick off May First. It seems like we're headed for a large, but not really exceptional summer. What do we have this year?"
We started off as soldiers of the Democratic Federation. Taking the fight for our homes into deeper time. Stay Behind Unit, if not as grand as all those conspiracy theories. Heavily Augmented. Made up of those most comfortable with that augmentation, ex-special forces, commandos, force recon. Bodies mechanised, immortal shells of carbon and metal, parts designed to be replaced as better ones became available.
It's been so long.
We're not here to brief one another on our operations. Such a structure would be too vulnerable. One of us might be turned. The chat might be compromised. The vast bulk of each of the brigades cell's activities is kept within the cell known only to the unit performing it. We're only here to talk about stuff that requires inter cell operation.
Mostly, I guess the Compact can figure out what we're doing though, because mostly it's going to be killing cops, and not a few informants and collaborators. After the Compact's takeover we spilled so much blood. Waded through lakes of it. Those days are gone. Now we just pick off the worst.
I'm so tired.
"Kusanagi. I have an op that needs inforwar support. Our agent on the inside says that Alcatraz has a serious overcrowding problem. It seems the Frontier War that the Corpocrats are carefully not reporting on has prevented anyone from being shipped spinward. We can bust quite a few people out in a raid, but we'll need to neutralise the facility's automated systems. My cell doesn't have the facilities for that. We could use your touch."
"Can we pull that together by May First?"
"I don't think so." I admit. Once, an admission like that would have cost me. That was before I understood just how long a century was. How long I would be fighting. That the Compact, that America, that the land and the sea and my consciousness weren't going anywhere. They were simply extending. "The police right now are mostly hunting for us. We'll want to wait for them to be distracted. I believe we should be able to launch around the nineteenth."
"Alright, that sounds good. Excalibur, how's the hog hunt going?"
In real space, I sit, a porcelain doll sitting on a memory foam sheet, my body swathed in a combat bright red and dark black, my weapons spread out before me, onboard computers plugged in and updating. I look at myself in the mirror.
Like everything else, I'm still the same.
In the Andes' Mountain Range
"Grandpa, got some sweets you'll like," Andrea says, holding out a package of cookies, looking at the man who is not her grandpa at all. It is a small room, but one filled with importance. It's one of the 'Tactical Thinking Rooms' that some use as a quiet place to fret and worry, and so there are displays all over. But they're all off, all but the handheld one that the old man was focusing on, one that showed a map. His expression is one of intense… well, to be honest, if she didn't know him it could be anything from constipation to sorrow, but it's actually how he looks when he's contemplating something exciting. When his wife came over from the North Andean Front, he looked just like that (ew.)
He's hunched over the bench, his fingers poking and prodding at the device with the experience of someone who had done it his whole life, and he almost didn't look up when she set the bag of sugar cookies next to him, fresh-baked and smelling like Heaven.
He was a grizzled old man, with skin as dark as loamy soil, and with hair everywhere all over him. He was… ninety… three? She wasn't sure. He didn't have immortality so it was all healthcare and good luck that he was still able to help out. Mostly planning. "Check this out, kiddo."
His name was Pedro, though so were a lot of the names. Everyone called him Grandpa, because he was one of the oldest there, and the oldest that wasn't basically retired.
"It's Santiago?" Andrea half-asks, looking at it with a grown. Then she sees the line. "A… plan of attack?"
"Exactly! I know the word came down that the Council wants a 'limited offensive'" he says as he stabs the table. It's a back room in a mountain fortress dug out with Rhodes equipment, and so everything is a little bit rough, just like this hairy, excited old man in front of Andrea.
He would die for her, and she for him, because that's what it means to be part of the Andes Communal Resistance, a group which had nearly 150 years of history. They'd spent most of it getting beaten back, sometimes driven down to a few dozen members hiding out, but each time they'd come back. Maybe not always stronger, but she'd joined six years ago and that meant she'd been born on the outside, and she knew what they were across the whole region in the shadow of the Andes: legends, ghosts, rumours.
They'd never surrendered, they'd never entirely finally lost. All across the world essentially every other organization, even those tracing back to the breakup of the DemFed, had been refounded at least once from nothing more than a name.
There was the ACR. Called, by those who believed in it--believed, as if it were a story--the "Mountain Republic."
But that didn't mean she was going to just nod along to a crazy idea. "We can't possibly take it, and if we take Santiago we can't possibly hold it," she said.
"What about those new things we have? All those wonderful toys." Pedro grinned at the thought, and he had the right to since he'd done half the work for their particular 'commune' of the Republic, and helped several others do similar things. Simply put, they'd stolen a ton of the very best Ares gear, and the best part was that the underpaid and underfunded military bases they came from hadn't reported them gone. They could even use stolen fabbers until they were shut off.
"Once they discover we've stolen them, they'll just send the trigger to deactivate the fabbers. I guess we could cage them," Andrea said, with a shake of her head. "We have all the equipment, but getting more ammunition isn't going to be easy. It's why I think… let me see that."
The map device was supposed to update for the weather, but that was a way to let people track things, and so this version was just a basic map with topographical and other functions, and so she quickly manipulated it to show the lines of attack which would take them near Santiago. "See, like that, Grandpa. We gotta spook them, hopefully force them into a confrontation so that we can do the plan. You know the plan. You wrote the plan."
"Well, what about that friend of a friend of a friend who said 'Now's the time for boldness, take chances.' You know, the word that's come down the chain, Andrea, from people I trust with my life, . Yeah, the plan's good but we should go further. Yes, seizing a bunch of Ares tech and fabbers to use some of that FRM-cracking work we've been labouring on for… oh God, has it been a decade?"
"Yeah, it's almost done, and then next time…"
" Yeah, that's good, but you know what's better? Victory. Right here. Right now."
Andrea took a breath, and opened the cookies. "Come on, have one old man. If we survive… remember our slogan, I know you remember it: Never Conquered, Never Surrendered. If we can get through another Black Summer, but with all the tools to fight the next one with cracked Ares tech just a decade or two out of date, stuff from the outlying bases… lost in the smoke and fire. If we do that: There's the path, there's the way to the next Great Black Summer being the end of the Charters."
"Maybe you're right… but I'm not gonna drop it, kid. Have a cookie too, you're a growing girl," 'Grandpa' Pedro said, munching down on the sugar cookie with a smile. "You need the energy, if you're going to fight this great victory in a few decades."
"It will come, as long as we keep trying," Andrea said, and Pedro nodded, repeating their catchphrase under his breath.
"Never conquered, never surrendered."
But often beaten.
AN: the first and third are from
@The Laurent and the middle from @BiopunkOphesia
