SPECTRE OF WAR

Chapter 1 - LORDES

Society collapses.

Turmoil in the lesser classes is immediately followed by the byproduct of depression and anger: strife which when festering long enough jumps the shark to outright war. Or so it was Lordes espoused while attempting an explanation on the finer points of proper financial planning to Watt and Leo. Standing guard outside the only permanent establishment on the icy planetoid designated NS-7 and being the only thee people on the entire frozen planet roughly the same size as Mars, any sort of conversation was desired as a salve against the poison of boredom.

"You see, people need money," Lordes commented, his hands outstretched towards a Lux military heater Watt procured from a maintenance shed. An irrelevant gesture but done in an off-handed way of building comradery with the two poor men who wore off the shelf Mizran military contractor armor. It was bad enough he wore Ushirian CLOTH, which cost more than both men would amass in their entire lives, the least Lordes could do was pretend to be on the same level as the two financial idiots.

"Need is a strong word." Watt peered at Lordes from beneath a scarf wrapped around his head, muffling his voice and hiding his eyes. A large snowflake drifted downward to land on the pedestal heater. The brief sizzle of water acting a lure to bring Watt even closer.

"Not really. Why do governments give all their citizens monthly stipends?"

"A stipend is a fixed monthly amount for a salary or allowance," Leo spoke up.

Lordes turned his head to the right to look at the short man leaning against a compact particle beam rifle like it was walking stick. The man didn't show much bother to the blistering cold, but Lordes guessed the mustache frozen solid with snot didn't feel too good. He, on the other hand, had to resist pulling at his collar to let free some heat his CLOTH created.

"Thank you, Mr. Dictionary, you have proved my point. Citizens get a salary just for being alive. Why? Because everyone needs money. We all just don't want it, we need it, like we need air to breathe—."

Lordes flipped his custom Stallion Smartrifle, SSR, to his shoulder as a falling tree crashed into surrounding forest. He stepped forward and left, around the pedestal heater, while his helmet extracted from the collar of his CLOTH in a series of dark gray interconnecting plates. Watt sputtered a curse, Lordes held up a hand for silence. With the Ushirian armor fully sealed, amplification of sound lay available to him. An option he used to hear the footsteps of fifteen humans and the hum of six flying drones; all making such a racket it was obvious none expected to find a mercenary able to afford the ridiculously priced CLOTH standing guard.

Lordes crouched down behind the stump of a tree that had fallen sometime far in the past, the frozen majority of the tree lying away from him. Moving a finger to hover over the SSR trigger, Lordes glanced over his shoulder. The left half of Watt's face erupted in a spray of blood that covered the snow like spray paint. Steam rose under hot crimson fluid while Watt's body collapsed where he stood.

Not bothering to mourn a person who refused to see eye to eye on any subject brought up over the past month, Lordes turned his head forward and grinned. Excited photons from Leo's Compact Particle Beam, CPB, reacted with the atmosphere, turning the beam a bright yellow that cut through frozen wood like a hot knife through a wet noodle. A cacophony of noise—steam hissing, wood breaking, enemy bullets and rockets fired—drowned out the movement of incoming hostiles. Compensating for loss of echolocation, the CLOTH AI took to tracking the trajectory of incoming projectiles; displaying trajectory arcs and lines with distance and speed information in a colorful chaos of lines that soothed Lordes' soul.

A yellow beam stabbed uncomfortably close over his head. He slid to the left and half-pulled the trigger, sweeping his SSR to the left in a L-shape then squeezing the trigger at the end of the L. A volley of eleven bullets roared from the barrel of the custom-made rifle. Each round locked onto a target. Bursts of light illuminated the forest as the rounds exploded against portable tactical shields Lordes naturally assumed a group so brazen to attack a location in the middle of nowhere would have. The perpetrators had to have assumed a complex that used as much energy as a heavily populated moon would have security. If said complex were guarded, the attackers wouldn't want to be injured so far away from medical help, which meant portable tactical shields. Lordes smiled, pleased at justification of his brilliance and the ability to show a bunch of assholes just why he poured so much money into customizing the SSR he gave the name of Dello.