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kalb's story
A journal rewrite by the VO's best writer Hortan
5000 kills.
Kalb was pinned down by the dual pressures of his own thoughts and painful awareness. The pain was permanently turning the night into day, nights filled by continuous nightmare. The lights of the suns of VO were as cold and distant as ever, always out of reach. Dark times, bloody memories, the screams of desperate pilots in their ships, haunted his mind with the force of a thousand decibels, thrumming through his veins, smashing into his chest, ripping his heart, sundering his ribs as surely as if he had been smashed by a samo-laden XC at full speed.
SYN had been his family. Brothers in killing! Their cruel laughter had filled the grey universe. Fragmented memories. Bloody memories. Of hanging around the home station, Sedina D-14. It had been a joke, everything had been a game that had transformed him step by step. Inevitably, into a bloodthirsty beast. Trophies from broken guilds had been streaming like pendants from his neutrons, his canopy the colour of arterial blood. His ship had smelled of death five sectors away. He had been shaking with the desire to inflict pain, to maim, to kill. The black-in-black eyes focused on something behind you, something other than you. But promising only the swift and certain death.
He had not been a pirate. He had not allowed anyone to barter money for their lives. Like a blood-crazed shark, he had been hunting for his own pleasure, hunting for the sense of hunting, fingers relentlessly depressing the trigger, pumping death into whomever he encountered.
Until one day. The harsh white glare of Sedina shone differently. A wave permeated his body like a sound, a wave that brought with it New Life. Like being touched by an Angel. His muscles had stopped working, his chest slowly clenched in massive pain, a pain that was framed by the new light of Sedina that seemed to be exploding into a thousand lights. He did not know what hit him. Perhaps a Divine hand. A God who is said to have existed in VO.
Confused, he kept hidden among the asteroids of Sedina for more than a year, hiding from other pilots inside ion storms. His Vulture was his home. He fed upon the scraps that his former comrades in arms left behind. Drank water from the ice-roids, their surfaces mirror-like and portraying his ship like an open wound in the reflection.
Intercepted pilot’s discussions, echoes of distant battle and innocent jokes from traders. The sorry bastards. Eventually his guild ceased to exist, his Vulture became obsolete. New pilots appeared to become traders, miners, police pilots or pirates in other guilds.
He tried to escape from the World, but the borders were guarded and too well defined- Tried to land on a planet, to hide among the settlers in but his Vulture betrayed him in the end. The wolf had become a Hyena, the predator was now a scavenger.
He couldn’t dock at D-14, the memories were too red and alive there, the posters of his face and ship still adorned the walls and cybernets, bounty posters of a scourge of Sedina. The memories that would force him back to the old life.
He frequently contemplated suicide, the hand straying to the self-destruction device but never quite finding the despair to do it. Always, the kindle of light inside him flared up and forced his hand away.
“Are you here?” he heard one day in the ship’s speakers. He kept silent; the signal from the approaching stranger had taken him by surprise. He turned the Vulture around and armed the neutrons. The computer displayed a mining vessel ten feet in front of him, piloted by a female pilot, name unknown. The ions in the storm kept them from seeing into the cockpits. His hands trembled on the controls, trembled with the desire to inflict pain, to maim, to kill, to unload his neutrons into the ship until it was no more. With massive effort, he managed to restrain himself. “Yes, I am here:” A guttural response, primitive, almost animalistic.
“Do you know where I might find some Heliocene? I have flown in this pea-soup for more than an hour and can’t seem to find any,” came the question.
“You are new, aren’t you?” he asked, his face contorted into a killer’s smile, a horrid mask of pain and death that was enough to kill off the weak at heart. “This is an Ice asteroid field. You have to find a rock asteroid field. Ask the miners, they have all sorts of secret maps and information like that.”
“So, what are you doing here in the fog?” the woman asked him. Idle chatter, meaningless banter, never been one of his strengths. He was a cold-hearted murderer, not a talker on the system chat rooms. He tried to find a suitable response and in the end blurted “I am a poet. I like the solitude.”
He found it hard to believe that he had been able to restrain himself for so long, being close to the mining ship without tearing it apart in a thousand pieces, spattering its insides on the roids, painting his ship in her blood and gore. After all this loneliness, something had changed inside him.
“Read me one of your poems,” said the woman. Kalb responded by feeding maximum thrust to his engines, losing her in the fog quickly. It could have ended there, it probably should have ended there, but the woman, probably unaware of Kalb’s past, searched for Kalb every day. Every time she found him, she would ask him, “Read me one of your poems.” And every time, Kalb would run, he who had always been the predator became the hunted.
At some time, Kalb stopped fleeing, they started talking every day.
"Keep your wings weightlessness in this universe, Angels!" Kalb one day wrote on an asteroid surface with pencils of neutrons. "Splendid! Splendid! Splendid! "Kalb heard in the headphones..."teach me to read poetry ", the woman continued.
One day they met in a sector without fog, moved the ships close together so they could look at each other through the canopy chainglass, illuminated by the lights of the controls. They didn’t separate after that. Kalb cleaned the ship, changed his clothes and shaved his long beard. He no longer recognised the old Kalb. He planned to land on a planet in Itani where he could still go unmolested. They could start a life together, a life where Kalb, the poet, could be rehabilitated. They dreamed these happy dreams for almost a standard month. While she recited what he had written, Kalb felt a cold hand from an earlier life stir and grab him by the neck. He felt the stinking breath of Death come close.
“Kill the Beast”, he heard in the speakers, drowning out her voice. Kalb’s reflexes, still as sharp as ever, took over and he dodged the deadly swarm of missiles that was speeing towards him. They thundered past and instead exploded all around the woman’s ship, immolating it with a sheet of fire, shrapnel and death. The mining vessel was torn asunder. Strat and three police pilots had in the desire to kill Kalb, emptied all of their weapons into the two ships. She never had a chance. The cops boasted about the slaying of Kalb. They boasted of the murder, while hiding behind the criminal laws and absolving themselves.
Kalb woke up after nearly two weeks in the roidfields of D-14. Maalik found him among the remains of his Vulture, the hideous damage upon it a testament to the misdeed of the policemen. Another pain had surfaced in his chest, a pin far larger than the previous. In his ship he kept the scrap of paper with a few lines written by a clumsy hand. Her hand, her poem. He frowned and put the piece of paper in his pocket. He mounted the trophies he had from the old ship and giggling like a madman, he wrote a message on the Universal chat, a message to all of them.
“KILL THEM ALL!!”
Kalb is back!
5000 kills.
Kalb was pinned down by the dual pressures of his own thoughts and painful awareness. The pain was permanently turning the night into day, nights filled by continuous nightmare. The lights of the suns of VO were as cold and distant as ever, always out of reach. Dark times, bloody memories, the screams of desperate pilots in their ships, haunted his mind with the force of a thousand decibels, thrumming through his veins, smashing into his chest, ripping his heart, sundering his ribs as surely as if he had been smashed by a samo-laden XC at full speed.
SYN had been his family. Brothers in killing! Their cruel laughter had filled the grey universe. Fragmented memories. Bloody memories. Of hanging around the home station, Sedina D-14. It had been a joke, everything had been a game that had transformed him step by step. Inevitably, into a bloodthirsty beast. Trophies from broken guilds had been streaming like pendants from his neutrons, his canopy the colour of arterial blood. His ship had smelled of death five sectors away. He had been shaking with the desire to inflict pain, to maim, to kill. The black-in-black eyes focused on something behind you, something other than you. But promising only the swift and certain death.
He had not been a pirate. He had not allowed anyone to barter money for their lives. Like a blood-crazed shark, he had been hunting for his own pleasure, hunting for the sense of hunting, fingers relentlessly depressing the trigger, pumping death into whomever he encountered.
Until one day. The harsh white glare of Sedina shone differently. A wave permeated his body like a sound, a wave that brought with it New Life. Like being touched by an Angel. His muscles had stopped working, his chest slowly clenched in massive pain, a pain that was framed by the new light of Sedina that seemed to be exploding into a thousand lights. He did not know what hit him. Perhaps a Divine hand. A God who is said to have existed in VO.
Confused, he kept hidden among the asteroids of Sedina for more than a year, hiding from other pilots inside ion storms. His Vulture was his home. He fed upon the scraps that his former comrades in arms left behind. Drank water from the ice-roids, their surfaces mirror-like and portraying his ship like an open wound in the reflection.
Intercepted pilot’s discussions, echoes of distant battle and innocent jokes from traders. The sorry bastards. Eventually his guild ceased to exist, his Vulture became obsolete. New pilots appeared to become traders, miners, police pilots or pirates in other guilds.
He tried to escape from the World, but the borders were guarded and too well defined- Tried to land on a planet, to hide among the settlers in but his Vulture betrayed him in the end. The wolf had become a Hyena, the predator was now a scavenger.
He couldn’t dock at D-14, the memories were too red and alive there, the posters of his face and ship still adorned the walls and cybernets, bounty posters of a scourge of Sedina. The memories that would force him back to the old life.
He frequently contemplated suicide, the hand straying to the self-destruction device but never quite finding the despair to do it. Always, the kindle of light inside him flared up and forced his hand away.
“Are you here?” he heard one day in the ship’s speakers. He kept silent; the signal from the approaching stranger had taken him by surprise. He turned the Vulture around and armed the neutrons. The computer displayed a mining vessel ten feet in front of him, piloted by a female pilot, name unknown. The ions in the storm kept them from seeing into the cockpits. His hands trembled on the controls, trembled with the desire to inflict pain, to maim, to kill, to unload his neutrons into the ship until it was no more. With massive effort, he managed to restrain himself. “Yes, I am here:” A guttural response, primitive, almost animalistic.
“Do you know where I might find some Heliocene? I have flown in this pea-soup for more than an hour and can’t seem to find any,” came the question.
“You are new, aren’t you?” he asked, his face contorted into a killer’s smile, a horrid mask of pain and death that was enough to kill off the weak at heart. “This is an Ice asteroid field. You have to find a rock asteroid field. Ask the miners, they have all sorts of secret maps and information like that.”
“So, what are you doing here in the fog?” the woman asked him. Idle chatter, meaningless banter, never been one of his strengths. He was a cold-hearted murderer, not a talker on the system chat rooms. He tried to find a suitable response and in the end blurted “I am a poet. I like the solitude.”
He found it hard to believe that he had been able to restrain himself for so long, being close to the mining ship without tearing it apart in a thousand pieces, spattering its insides on the roids, painting his ship in her blood and gore. After all this loneliness, something had changed inside him.
“Read me one of your poems,” said the woman. Kalb responded by feeding maximum thrust to his engines, losing her in the fog quickly. It could have ended there, it probably should have ended there, but the woman, probably unaware of Kalb’s past, searched for Kalb every day. Every time she found him, she would ask him, “Read me one of your poems.” And every time, Kalb would run, he who had always been the predator became the hunted.
At some time, Kalb stopped fleeing, they started talking every day.
"Keep your wings weightlessness in this universe, Angels!" Kalb one day wrote on an asteroid surface with pencils of neutrons. "Splendid! Splendid! Splendid! "Kalb heard in the headphones..."teach me to read poetry ", the woman continued.
One day they met in a sector without fog, moved the ships close together so they could look at each other through the canopy chainglass, illuminated by the lights of the controls. They didn’t separate after that. Kalb cleaned the ship, changed his clothes and shaved his long beard. He no longer recognised the old Kalb. He planned to land on a planet in Itani where he could still go unmolested. They could start a life together, a life where Kalb, the poet, could be rehabilitated. They dreamed these happy dreams for almost a standard month. While she recited what he had written, Kalb felt a cold hand from an earlier life stir and grab him by the neck. He felt the stinking breath of Death come close.
“Kill the Beast”, he heard in the speakers, drowning out her voice. Kalb’s reflexes, still as sharp as ever, took over and he dodged the deadly swarm of missiles that was speeing towards him. They thundered past and instead exploded all around the woman’s ship, immolating it with a sheet of fire, shrapnel and death. The mining vessel was torn asunder. Strat and three police pilots had in the desire to kill Kalb, emptied all of their weapons into the two ships. She never had a chance. The cops boasted about the slaying of Kalb. They boasted of the murder, while hiding behind the criminal laws and absolving themselves.
Kalb woke up after nearly two weeks in the roidfields of D-14. Maalik found him among the remains of his Vulture, the hideous damage upon it a testament to the misdeed of the policemen. Another pain had surfaced in his chest, a pin far larger than the previous. In his ship he kept the scrap of paper with a few lines written by a clumsy hand. Her hand, her poem. He frowned and put the piece of paper in his pocket. He mounted the trophies he had from the old ship and giggling like a madman, he wrote a message on the Universal chat, a message to all of them.
“KILL THEM ALL!!”
Kalb is back!
:) buddy
Aye, kill 'em all! :D
Whoo Hoo! About damned time you got your ass back in game!
Gulp... I think I'm in for trouble... Damn, I'm an evil bastard. Cool story, Kalb and Hortan! However, I am not a "policeman", "police pilot", or "cop", but if I can deal with being portrayed as mustache-twirling evil, I suppose I can deal with being portrayed as a cop. Heh.
Not to be a wet blanket, but shouldn't this be in the RP subforum?
Nice story, by the way, and welcome back!
Nice story, by the way, and welcome back!
Nice.
You know, the thing about kalb... he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be living... until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The space turns red, and despite all the poundin' and the hollerin', they all come in and they... rip you to pieces.
It doesn't seem to be for the RP forum.
It's just a non-regular "I'm back" message, longer and very lyric.
It could be posted on http://www.agonia.net for that matter :)
Nice to see you're back, I might return at some point as well...
It's just a non-regular "I'm back" message, longer and very lyric.
It could be posted on http://www.agonia.net for that matter :)
Nice to see you're back, I might return at some point as well...
It's going to RP now.
Hi kalb.
Someday I will re-enter the universe and come back to kill you repeatedly.
Until then,
Leebs
Someday I will re-enter the universe and come back to kill you repeatedly.
Until then,
Leebs