The F.O.X. Project

Chapter 1: The Wastes

There was a slight chill in the air surrounding the puddle-strewn marshlands and the evening sun spilled down and bounced perfectly off of the dew drop tipped reeds around the Bunkhouse.

The Bunkhouse itself was a as slightly wonky sheet of semi-oxidised tin thrown over a wooden frame, with a splintered plank acting as a door at one end.

Trent was admiring the strange colours the sky turned as the sun dipped below the snow-dusted peaks of The Great North, a group of colossal mountains formed when two tectonic plates shattered and collided; including a piece of plate that completely snapped and flipped over onto the desolate landscape, forming the Arctic Shelf, or (as the locals called it) Gods great dinner plate.

Trent was disturbed from his tranquility when a young, dirt covered boy came up to him,

"Mr Derrewick, sir, your ship has arrived."

"Excellent!" Trent replied, still partially focussed on the sun just disappearing between the mountain tops.

He walked into the bunkhouse to gather his belongings. He wandered over to a scruffy, four-poster bed in the corner and slid a trunk out from underneath it. On one side it had a silver plaque bearing the name 'Drenedon Derrewick'. Everyone usually called him Trent these days though.

His heart twisted, he couldn't believe he was leaving. He never stayed anywhere particularly long, the Risdon family had been so nice to him but, sadly, he know he couldn't live with them forever.

He looked around one last time at the little stove in the centre of the room, his four-poster bed now stripped bare and the empty armour stand in the far corner. Then, he turned around, closed the door behind him and walked down a short flight of stairs to the open air landing pad.

The ship waiting for him was a shining new Citadel-class freighter. The kind that you see swarming the cloud-scraping tower blocks in the thousands of gleaming, overpopulated metropolises covering Vanet.

The sheer size of it made his mouth involuntarily drop open. It was almost twice the size of the little sky clippers that crawled across the low clouds in the early morning, like ships on a rolling white Sea.

The engines, humming so low it made Trent's back teeth vibrate, were primed and ready for take off. The pebbles and flakes of paint bounced on the reinforced endocryte floor as Trent marched towards the freighter.

Solid and proud, the freighter towered over him. He weaved his way past the first set of landing gear and noticed an open hatch in the belly of the ship. He clambered up into the hatch and (after tripping over a few cables snaking across the floor) came to a door with a blacked out window and a keypad.

As he approached, the door slid open with a pneumatic hiss, revealing a cramped bridge about one meter square but made so much smaller by the network of cables, control units and a large (for the room) cockpit.

Trent didn't need a Manuel or any tutorials. Or any guidance whatsoever. He knew how all of this worked, so he slowly ran his fingers along each button and lever making up the console responsible for all of the intakes, thrusters, steering veins, tethers and fuel lines on the ship.

After he had familiarised himself with the complicated controls he felt like he could pilot anything.

He started up the thrusters and the cockpit shuddered violently before smoothing out as the ship powerfully lifted itself off of the ground towards the long trail of smaller vessels all heading in or out of the neerest metropolis; Leat'D.

Leat'D is one of the smaller metropolises, spanning only about one hundred square kilometres but, despite its size, it is one of the tallest cities overtaken only by Glade, Macropolis (a massive conurbation) and Gyrophelesia, each much, much larger than Leat'D. Many other cities decided to go short and wide to prevent the sheer weight of the skyline from collapsing in on itself, claiming millions of lives like the Deigobajh Incident back in 2032. Still down as one of the worst construction related incidents in history.

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The streetlights flickered in the broken-up beams of darkness between the old, oddly spaced out factory complexes marking the far outskirts of Macropolis. The camera could also just see the low-lying freeway, which still bared cars driving along its cracked asphalt surface. The streets around it, however, were silent, except for the odd ruffian walking around and a man in his late twenties smoking a cigar by the road as well as a few pigeons nestled in a nook under the overpass.

Shortly after, a lorry horn was heard and a small, white, six-wheeled armoured box truck came barrelling down a slip-road, completely failed to turn at the T-junction at the end of it and (after hitting a lamp post) slid, on its side, to a stop among the scattering civilians. The man with the cigar did a slow clap and walked away from the scene.

About a minute later a creature got out of the back of the van and stood up. It looked about six feet tall with exaggerated, fox-like features. All the camera could see was it's outline. It looked around and then walked down an alleyway under the camera and out of sight.

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Trent slowly brought his ship down onto the endocryte landing pad. He Heard the loud clunk of the landing gear touching down and the hiss of the hydraulics as they eased under the weight of the heavy, Citadel-class freighter.

As Trent stepped down from the ship and onto the resin-glazed landing zone he heard a roar and ran to the edge of the pad to see what was going on.

He looked over and saw a huge, snaking Birail train crawling in underneath him. It has one smooth, continuous roof apart from the gaps for the couplings and the occasional 'engine car' with its diagonal-facing Hydroturbine engines.

One of these passes over him. The turbines glowed a neon blue and there was enough water vapour being released to make the aviators goggles on his head fog up.

He remembered seeing these passing in the distance back at the Bunkhouse, they were usually several kilometres long and, from a distance, looked like one continuous grey line moving across the cloud-dappled horizon.

BiRails carried everything from food and toys to furniture, vehicles and war machinery. They were the lifeblood of this age.

Trent called the company that he got the ship from, DCC. The phone rang for about a minute before a woman with a heavy Macropolis accent came on the phone.

"This is the DCC transportation division. How may I help you?"

"Hi, my ship is ready to be picked up," Trent replied.

"Can you tell me what landing pad your ship is on?"

He studied the huge painted letters on the ground,

"Landing pad Alpha Bravo Sierra - 227 Bravo." Stated Trent.

"Thank you, your ship will be collected shortly." She said, then ended the call.

He waited for a bit with the freighter until a carrier about twice its size swooped over from around a building and hovered above it for a second before six tow cables fired down from it and hooked themselves onto various points on the ship. The cables then tightened, hoisted the freighter into an area in the vessel and the ship flew off behind a large cluster of skyscrapers to his left.

Trent then went and made sure his stuff was all with him and he traveled over to his hotel via taxi. Although (due to the traffic) he soon realised that he probably could have walked faster..