The Dark Side of Light by Kenny Emmanuel EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Kenny Emmanuel
- Language: English
- Genre: Science Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Collector
The combat forward operating base, or FOB, dispatched us to the front
lines. Discarded us? No, they abandoned us. They trailed us, but not too
close because the battles we fought were dangerous. They were chaotic
and bloody.
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We’d begun as an army of eight, but lost three of our comrades two full
moons ago. The rest of us counted the days with scratch marks on our
vambraces, the digital forearm bangles used to communicate position,
status, and vital signs. We survived longer than anyone had expected and
couldn’t mark the aluminum further, not without compromising the
system’s structural integrity or damaging the LED display.
So we glorified the existing marks. Not we. Artificer. The chemical
composition Artificer developed caused the filled-in cracks to glow red.
One time, when we’d carried the caskets of our fallen through the FOB, the
other battalions quivered with fear at the sight of the jagged, red slashes.
Artificer made us look like monsters, which was a far better calling than
martyrs. We’d become devils under the moonlight—horsemen of the
apocalypse—Vanguards.
Our unit was infamous—feared by our allies and enemies alike. Both
maintained a healthy distance.
The FOB transmitted orders to our vambraces. They never called.
Meetings were always an email. Or a message. Both methods of
communication had been adorned with smiley faces every fifth word or so,
as if our patience for reading them expired at four. They didn’t want to
incur our wrath, and I didn’t blame them. We could’ve turned on the wouldbe FOB at any moment and erased them from history. Not without
casualties, of course. We were disposable, not immortal. They were neither.
They had families to return to—brothers, sisters, mothers—everything we
no longer had, except the earth. We all returned to the earth.
The enemy didn’t have a FOB. We never gave them a chance to set one
up. We relentlessly pursued them well beyond the dust-coated city we once
called home, after they’d come to claim what was left.
They resisted every now and again with chemical, biological, physical,
and psychological warfare. Slowed, but not deterred, we always pressed on.
What are you even fighting for? they asked after we’d ignored the
offerings they’d left behind, such as tanks of water because fresh water
became a scarce resource. We ignored the food and everything else they
deemed valuable, except their lives, which is what we wanted. We wanted
their lives.
I wasn’t a murderer. I was a tool that Artificer used like a weapon,
aimed and fired, similar to the weapon the enemy used to return my family
to the earth.
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