Lunar’s Armor

  • 3 Pages

Phoenix Rebirth, another technology brought to you by the Microsoft Union of companies, and by the technology of the fiftieth century. It costs a whopping, 50,000,000,000 Dollars for a single tube. But such a tube can be reused thousands of times; it is humanity’s current key to immortality. Once a tube is created all you need is an account with M.U. so they can store your memories, they implant a few chips in your brain, so that all of your thoughts, everything you feel with your senses is recorded. Then you simply die in an accident, a interplanetary war, and they clone you with a DNA sample taken while the chips being implanted.

It’s a fairly simple process. Some use it for travel, just eject yourself into space. And have yourself reborn at the station nearest to your destination. Don’t worry about having chips implanted again, because in fact their already there, it’s much easier to grow a clone with the chips than implant them. Additional services can be done also, a permanent hair color alteration, breast size, Height, anything you desire, for a fee of course, you can have altered DNA saved to your account, and changed anytime you wish. The charge will automatically be taken from your bank account.

The ship vibrates strangely.

Lunar looks up and presses the chime for the intercom, but doesn’t get a response He sighs, Then turns to the poorly maintained passenger window, opening it with a pry-bar. The dam thing was too rusty to open by hand.

It’s a small ship, one of the extremely high priced science vessels, with a few small fighters surrounding it. Uninterested, Lunar closes the window, now even more plagued with boredom than before. This cheap cargo-ship, was transporting his Armor. Lunar was planning to enter some small time championship fight over there.
He looks back to his hand-held P.C. And accessed the instructions his Armor had come with. Armor, the current top of the line space weaponry, faster than a fighter’s heavier weaponry. But such power was wasted on gambling for the richer inhabitants of the universe. “Nobles” The name was refereed to with disgust and awe, Bob Gates is a Noble, since he controls all but the outer rim tournaments, and businesses. Lunar rubbed his chin and sat back into his seat. And slept the rest of the trip, back to earth.

Now, Earth isn’t the mainstream planet it was back in 4000. When space travel just became profitable. Jupiter was terraformed. And since there were rare minerals there, a new kind of Gold-rush started. The metal was black colored… and about a hundred times harder than diamond. Jupiter was all mined out, so The miners moved on while the merchants sold the stuff to earth and built a colony on a planet in another star system.

Armor was made out of the black metal. With integrated life support, weapon and propulsion all held with about a fourth of the armor’s size. People customized their weapons. Most of the near useless lasers that they were first created with, were the first thing to be removed. Ammo pockets, power cores, booster jets, all kinds of modification were added to Armor.

Neo-America had already begun the struggle for dominance in space. Arming Armor with weapons to destroy warships and other Armor.

A few hundred years later, Armor had been changed significantly from modifications by another race. Who began using our own weapon against us. We deemed these creatures the others, humanoid creatures that looked just like us. So humans killed off quite a few of them until treaties were signed making wars stop.

Armor was demoted to little killing fests Humans called tournaments. The nobles began gambling on tournaments, sponsoring certain pilots. There were no limits to how you modified your armor, or against killing pilot and scavenging their armor for parts to put into your own Armor. A few centuries later, Tournaments grew more popular by the day.

Rebirthing was created. Nobles and their little teams started using it.

The armor pilots are separated by skill, age and the quality of their armor. Lunar is the lowest of the low, referred to as a Launchie.

Lunar sighed, looking at his rank…. His competition was in the same boat, and probably hasn’t even spent as much time training as he had. Lunar turned off his P.C. then pushed and held the chime button. He could hear the blaring noise through the locked steel door, and finally he got an answer.”

What? You want an in flight movie or something?”

Lunar took a deep breath. ” If you let me get myself to earth, and bring my stuff and put it in my quarters, I’ll double your payment.”

There was loud laughing on the other side. “Are you an idiot!? I’m only taking you there on the small amount your paying me because I got something to do on earth anyway, I’m not going to run any extra errands for you.”

Lunar frowned. ” Fine, but I want out. I’m taking my belongings and armor out for a spin, but you can still be sure that I’ll win the first match, so my payment should be covered by your winnings.”

“Fine, whatever. Just remember launchie, You better win the first match.”

Lunar stretched for a few minutes, then walked over to the cargo-bay door, where his armor lay waiting. He looked at himself in the reflective metal, smiling at his face. He hair color was almost the same color as the sterile looking silver metal.

A bit darker, because it was a greyish silver, And because he hadn’t had the opportunity to bathe in a while. Most naturals (naturally born not a clone or created in a lab) didn’t have such odd colored hair. Lunar was the son of an “Other” and a human.

The door slid open with a hydraulic sounding whoosh, and without artificial gravity, he propelled himself to a large strapped down container. He pulled the container open, and revealed his armor. It looked like a junker. Something an idiot had put together out of unsuccessfully scavenged parts. Technically, that’s exactly what it was

His father, the white-haired being that had been a junk-smith for a 60 years, which is long, even to “Others” because they only live ten years longer than the average, one hundred year, human life-span. A junk smith was a spare parts man. They collected old machines, spare parts and run mostly legal part trading businesses.

His father scavenged this piece of work. from several tournaments. It was worth more than the average cargo-ship. Ones with automatic windows.

He floated down, and pushed gently on the open hatch button. Two hydraulic whooshes later he was snuggling into the pilot’s chair, fingering the mind-link headset. Armor isn’t controlled with joysticks. It connects to your mind, and it becomes an extension of your own body, so having good reflexes is half the challenge, the other is skill.

He commed the okay signal to the cargo-ships owner. The bay opened, Lunar slid the visor/headset over his eyes and flew out of the bay towards earth. Most armor isn’t made to enter and exit atmospheres, but Lunar had a really great junk-man as a father, a junk-man who happened to be really good with modifying Armor.

As his Armor flew into the atmosphere, he changed the booster angle so his decent slowed. The black humanoid figure caused a large wave and a sharp hiss of steam as he sank into an ocean,

Lunar walked along the bottom of the ocean, jumping over ravines and checking his armor’s guidance system, looking for the blinking red dot on the map that would signify the championship headquarters.


More Strange Sci-Fi…

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One of our mystery contributors. He had a website on "freewebs.com" which is no longer available. Lunar's Armor as posted on theweirdcrap is actually chapter one of a longer tale. We don't know if he ever finished the novella, but I think he was off to a good start, despite a few grammatical errors.

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