Mirage - Part 5

Posted by Daniel Sharp / in Lore / 9 comments

[Read Part 4]

I’ve never used a servosuit before, though my third father and his team wore prototype models on their expedition in 2086. That was my first impression of Aegis – impossibly powerful men wearing metal plates on their bodies and translucent domes over their heads. The reality, for those of you who don’t get out of headquarters very often, is much less mythical. Standard Aegis soldiers are still wearing kevlar and camouflage, and the servosuits reserved for spec ops were barely worth the heartache they caused. Prone to locking up and highly dependent on battery life, the Hercules servosuits I knew were little more than mechanical braces attached to a soldier’s arms, legs, and back. They were small enough to fit under a uniform, but they allowed users to wear heavier body armor and they supposedly helped stave off fatigue. They were hardly bulletproof, which was why Professor Garza’s concern seemed unusual to me.

Mirage - Part 4

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[Read Part 3]

The chase is still a blur to me. I remember diving into the dark and humming insides of the dome, submerging in machinery as my thoughts had submerged into the binary survival code. There were quite a few stairs, and tiered catwalks rising up between the bronze gills of the air filtration system. The voices of our pursuers, and even the rap of their stolen firearms, were muted by the strange acoustics of the maintenance block and the buzz of ultraviolet particle separators around us. The encroaching desert hung in the air like an orange mist, sticking in our lungs and weighing down our every pounding step.

Mirage - Part 3

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[Read Part 2]

My boots crunched onto a loose dirt floor, and I rushed immediately out of the light cast by the trapdoor above. It was difficult to tell how large the cellar under the Temple was, since the only light came from the kitchen and from a string of three rudimentary lightbulbs along the wall leading to the cellar door. On the far side of the room, there was only darkness. I sank back into it, staying low to the ground and watching the trapdoor. Footsteps were pounding the floorboards over my head, and as soon as they cut out, Uriah Noskov careened through the trapdoor. He landed badly, and his momentum carried him into a roll across the dirt. His head swiveled around, letting loose a few black locks over his forehead. I reached out my hand and beckoned him toward the darkness. He scrambled toward me on all fours, and as he did so, I backed up into a stone object. It wasn’t solid earth like the walls of the cellar. It was tall and roughly twice as wide as I was. I thought it was a column, and that gave me an idea.

Mirage - Part 2

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I only caught a glimpse of the scene inside the Temple before the raider behind me thrust my head against a table, but in that glimpse I discovered the source of the blood that had dripped onto my ear. One of the retired officers was slumped against the wall with a swelling patch of red on his white undershirt, and his drinking partner was standing over him with senseless dead eyes. One raider had his weapon trained on the officer, and he was barking orders at him in modified Kyrgyz. I couldn’t see what sort of weapon he carried, or the fate of my own drinking partners, because I’d been bent over the table and all I could see, as the raider slung a thick rope around my wrists, was Uriah Noskov, bent over a table next to me for the same treatment. I did notice a voice that I recognized drowning out the raider’s shrill cries.

Mirage - Part 1

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[Read the Forward]

Mirage

By Thalia Gordon

You’ve heard of Terekat, but you’ve never heard it called by its real name. We called it Oasis. Sitting next to a dry lake bed at the outer edge of Zone 5, Terekat is as far as a town can get without leaving Minerva’s sphere of influence. Still, at the rim of sand and nothingness, legends were spun of the bacchanalian parties hosted there. General Fionn Okane had personally fortified the town and converted it into an Aegis outpost by 2093, and the residents were so grateful for Minerva’s protection that they were known to accommodate a soldier’s every whims. The General built a geodesic dome around Terekat to filter out dust in the air and protect it from raiders. His original plans to expand the indigenous town into a colossal city of the future had proven impractical, as I’d discovered in a seminar last year, where the General had displayed to us, with a touch of pride, the extravagant blueprints of his failed utopia.