[Nostalgiarama] Do They Know Its The End Of The World?

[Booted Vulture]

With a tip of the hat to Shroomz and Siege, who recalled this and pulled it out from the archives with a search engine and I can only assume, deepest darkest black magicks: My very first SecSan gift: To Peregrin Toker. Set in the original Sovereigns of the Stars universe of hallowed lore...

Do They Know it's The End of the World?


25th December 2570
Terra Meridius Decimus, Colonial Space.

The world of Terra Meridius Decimus was dying. It had been for some time. First there had been the gangs, then the natural disasters, then the gangs causing natural disasters. And now to top it all off: the Brags were coming to nuke it off the face of the universe for some incomprehensible reason or another.

The skies, once a quite lovely shade of magenta, had now turned a sickly red colour, the colour of dried blood; the clouds were steel grey columns of ash that tended towards mushroomness. Its cities were ruined. Its building and streets were cracked and decaying and there were probably deadites and mutant rats forming in the sewers right at this very moment.

And in the midst of all of this, was a woman standing quite still. She was not a particularly large woman and was in fact quite skinny. Nor was she was particularly feminine looking woman, looking mostly like an overly curvy boy. The woman's name was, of course, Isabella Noguiera, and she was not a happy chappy. You might even say she was the least happiest chappy you were likely to meet in the foreseeable future.

Isabella was, quite notoriously in fact, a mercenary and had recently been given a job in the bounty hunter sub-sector of mercenarying had travelled to this planet.

But it appeared that the shit head she'd been chasing one Jonathan "Jack" Baylor, a small time arms dealer wanted by the Sovereignty in connection to the deaths (via anti-personnel mine) of around a dozen policemen and associated hardware, (to whit: three squad cars, two bikes and one very expensive law-enforcement robot) had well and truly vanished from the face of Terra Meridius Decimus. Damn him.

Of course it wasn't the Sovereignty that had hired Isabella, they had issued a far more general alert with a much lower bounty, it was ol' Jack's own mob connections that had approached her to track down their little liability. Isabella was just amazed the Mob wanted him brought back alive but she'd then figured they probably just wanted the pleasure of fitting him out with cement shoes themselves.

Isabella took a deep breath and tried to take stock of things. fuck that. She thought and rummaged around in the voluminous pockets of her rather cliché leather trench coat. She didn't particular like the coat or for that matter the wrap-around Sunglasses she was wearing tonight but the coat's pockets had negated the need to bring a suitcase on this little excursion and the shades covered up her distinctive Kasanarium blued eyes, after all she hadn't wanted to tip off ol' Jack about her arrival. More wasted effort apparently.

Life is just no fun sometimes. Thought Isabella as she finally managed to find what she was after and fished out a homemade Kasanarium spliff and lit it with a flare of psionic energy, (real fire just totally ruined the taste for her.)

Unbeknownst to our stalwart heroine, more proof of life's essential unfunness was advancing on her from many sides. For The world of Terra Meridius Decimus was dying and dying worlds bring out the worst in just about everyone. It was every man for himself, everyone woman and child for themselves, also. This leads to mobs, a break down of law and order and gangs of hoodlums. And several such hoodlums were advancing quickly on our not so helpless heroine.

"Hey girlie!" shouted out their self-appointed leader, a great big fat man who had all the elegance and grace of athirty-ton Acturian Mega-elephant with a bad limp, "Don't you know it's the end of the world?"

"Oh really?" Isabella muttered half to herself. "I thought it was Christmas."

The gang just looked at her blankly.

Colonial Shit hole, doesn't even know about Christmas.

That said, (or rather; that thought) Isabella's main memory of Christmas was that time when she was seven; when she'd been so intimidated by the prospect off a 'jolly' fatman slithering down the chimney to watch her sleeping that she'd broken into her legal guardian's 'home defence' cabinet and shoved three claymore mines (complete with highly illegal tripwire detonators) up her home's chimney. Of course she'd had to come clean about the matter three weeks later when stray pigeon detonated aid devices but the insurance company had, unfortunately, never believed her story on the matter.

Never the less these boys still took the turkey.

Bloody Philistines

Still the Gang didn't seem to be interesting in broadening their intellectual horizons.

They charged. Well two of them did. The leader just stood back and smirked: clearly the voyeur in world the senseless violence. And the last one fancied himself subtle and was edging around behind her.

Isabella sighed. These fools really didn't know what they were dealing with. As a galaxy-roving Mercenary, she naturally qualified as a light arms locker. (Only without the porno posters, photos of people's Signicant others/pets/Brats and half opened packs of OrGazmo.)

Still these thugs were hardly worth the bullets or even the minimal aura needed to blast them away with her Psi-gun. Not for some one with her skills at least.

The first thug swung with the predictable one-two left-right swings, Isabella blocked them, and then swung the edge of her hand into his throat. He stumbled back gargling incomprehensibly.

Isabella decided to take the initiative with the next man, jabbing towards his face before he could strike and forcing him to shield is face, the lashing out with a steel-shod boot that caught him in the solar plexus and prodded upwards under the man's ribs then retracted, dropping him to the grimy tarmac wanting nothing more than to vomit his weasly black guts out.

But Isabella's most deadly boot was not done, it didn't even touch the floor before stamping down and around on the first man's right knee first as he'd been trying to get back into their little back alley rumble. The was a horrible sound halfway between a crack and ripping noise.

That was probably enough to keep him out of the fight, so Isabella's follow-up punch that crushed the youth's nose was just adding insult to injury.

Isabella took another drag of the spliff held in her off hand and grinned. "Count your lucky stars little boys, at leas-"

The third guy finally jumped her from behind. Running straight into Isabella's rapidly moving left elbow. Isabella was a rather skinny woman, and had no end of trouble about it from her fashionably fat childhood associates, and thus had extremely sharp elbows.

The poor boy folded up from the impact to his guts and dropped as the left elbow as swiftly applied to the back of his head. (After all there was no way Isabella would waste her Kasanarium by punching the boy with that hand.) "At Least I don't wear the High Heels, no?"

Then Disaster struck.

Isabella felt a colossal impact on her left temple, and fell hard as the leader of the gang, made it clear why he was the one in charge. The fat bastard had moved impossibly fast, seriously it was like the porky fucker was on HoverBlades or something.

The gang leader tried to follow through, to smash Isabella's unpretty head against the floor and spray her brains over the tarmac, but he hesitated at the look on Isabella's face. He hesitated. Just for a millisecond. But he still hesitated. Survivors never hesitate. In that millisecond he saw just three things: First was Isabella's face. It was contorted in a rictus of untellable anger. The left lens of her shades had smashed and her eye glowed with an unholy blue light. And to top off she was crying blood. He freaked.

The second was the business end of a small revolver.

The third and final thing, bore a certain to the whole of his life. It was flashing.

The cold hard slug impact the Boss's face scant millimetres below his right eyeball and tore a rather eccentric path up through his brains and out the back of his hard in a miniature spray of blood, unused brains and bone fragments.

Isabella cursed and pulled herself to her feet. She gazed at the revolver she'd telekinetically pulled out of her boot. It was smoking.

Waste of a goddamn bullet.

She saw her spliff. It had rolled into the damp gutter.

Waste of Kasanarium.

She looked at the blood and ash streaked sky.

Waste of a whole goddamn planet.

Rubbing at the small (but profusely bleeding) cut under her eye, she tucked the gun away in one of her limitless pockets and walked out of the square, heading back to the space port. Then she remember it'd cost her a shit load to get off the doomed world. So she shared one last thought with the bloody scene of violence. "I'm never gonna get paid."

[Shroom Man 777]

I like it. Isabella's weirdo monologue encapsulates just how awesome SOTS is. On one hand you've got spaceships going pew-pew at each other, as well as standard sci-fi fare CEID stuff, on the other hand you've got flippant irreverent humor and weirdo cultural assholity and weirdness and Wild Space whackiness. And lots and lots of ultraviolence!

Your writing style is also quite amusing. Quite a few clever one liners here. Happy chappy!

[Malchus]

Wow, this has indeed been a nostalgic day. Isabella Noguiera and SOTS in two different stories by two different authors!