The Family Business
By Empyreon
Some of my earliest memories are of my father telling me stories from his war days. He was one of the first TerraCon soldiers, you know, fighting to free our worlds and to defend the Confederation for Terran Unity. He may have gone on to be a master technician, living a simple, unassuming life with his wife and kids on idyllic Cybele, but to my young eyes he was always the war hero. I reveled in the stories he told me of rooting out remaining pockets of Utiran military forces, and dropkicking them out of TerraCon space until they could “come back and play nice with the rest of us Terrans.” I would watch in awe when he’d deactivate and detach his prosthetic leg to clean it from time to time, enjoying him retell the time when he went one-on-one with a “snot-nosed Sinker” during one of the many failed invasions of the Syncretic Legion. “Stupid kid got me in the leg, took it clean off,” Dad always said as part of his leg-cleaning mantra. He’d add with a wink, “But I got him in the head. Took it clean off.” I once asked him why he hadn’t opted for having the leg regrown like so many other vets had done with their battle damaged bodies but he’d just get this far away twinkle in his eyes and tell me, “Son, I earned this hunk of metal and I ain’t givin’ it up for nothin’.”
That’s how my dad talked about the war: ill-tempered boys tussling and posturing for territory, for dominance, or just to be left alone. I was older when I learned something more about the actual history of the War of TerraCon Ascendancy, when Idranna, Suvatar, and Gitane—the Three Provinces—grew tired of the Utiran Hegemony occupying their worlds and abusing their resources, decided enough was enough. The Syncretics were looking to oust the Utirans and introduce their own occupation of Earth and surrounding worlds, but the Three Provinces wouldn’t stand for kicking out one despotic faction just to welcome another.
At first I had trouble reconciling my father’s accounts and the history I learned from a textbook; which was it, a revolution for the sake of humanity or a schoolyard scuffle? I guess that’s how it all must look to my dad, in hindsight. He wasn’t much younger than I am now when he joined the cause, a fresh faced soldier unaware of the hells ahead of him. He doesn’t like to boast about it—hell, none of the vets I’ve spoken with do—but he was a participant in the Cadmean Insurrection, the event that kickstarted the TerraCon Ascendancy and put the Confederation on the map.
It really started long before my father joined up, though. Citizens of the Three Provinces, taking advantage of their positions as workers in factories and sweatshops to support the Utiran war machine, began to smuggle away weapons, ammunition, and other materiel, sealing them in secret underground bunkers on every planet in the Confederation. All of this was organized through the clandestine Thundercall network, an innovation of Dodeck technology that let the insurgents send secret messages instantly from planet to planet. Soldiers were mustered secretly as well, getting as much training in the use of the Minuteman servo-suit (itself a slapdash modification of civilian model servo-suits, but considered the granddaddy of the modern MAG suit) as time and opportunity allowed. Then each and every man was encased in a capsule, suited up in his Minuteman and decked out with guns, knives and ammo, and placed in suspended animation. The capsules were buried as well, and then everyone waited.
The official statement is that you don’t feel the passage of time while in suspended animation; you go under and come right back out. But there is that small percentage that inexplicably goes through what’s called ‘suspension terror,’ where you experience crippling nightmares and hallucinations that some people never came out of. They later found capsules where the soldiers had panicked, trying to shoot, cut, or blast their way out of their nightmare. The capsule became a coffin. Neither of those happened to my father, though. He said he dreamed, but it hadn’t been scary; he said he dreamed about us. It’s a preposterous idea, really. I mean, he and my mother were only sweethearts at the time; my sisters and I hadn’t even been born. He said he met us all, called us by name, and had good long conversations with the whole family. He said he told me then that I should go into the family business. Boy, did that upset me. In the first place I had no desire as a kid to become a master technician, the idea of going from house to house fixing furnaces, lawn drones and autocleaners just wasn’t for me. More importantly it was just creepy, talking to your kids before they were even born.
Any way, the time finally came when the Utirans, beaten back by the Syncretic onslaught, were reaching the limits of their attrition. The Sycretics were spending their own soldiers lavishly in a final push to take Earth when the TerraCon trap sprung. Our soldiers boiled from the ground, charged on the unsuspecting enemy forces, and freed our homeworlds from enemy occupation. My father came home, minus one leg from the knee down, and started his family.
* * *
I signed up, when the time came; there was never any question about it. Veteran benefits aside, I had been raring to join the TerraCon Guard since the first story my father told me. I went through training, worked my sadsack body into TerraCon fitness standards (not that it was that bad to start with), and learned to say “yessir!” I served my term on the frontiers, patrolling the TerraCon space and fulfilling assignments in Dodeck security. I was a Guardsman in every way but the way that mattered: aside from a police action involving some Danceran refugees attacking a group of Syncretic pilgrims from Cruciger, I never once fired my gun; I never once experienced real combat.
So when my term was completed I signed up again. Though it hadn’t been formally organized until recently, you could argue that the MAG Corps has been around since those first Minuteman soldiers emerged from the ground in the Cadmean Insurrection. Maybe that’s why I joined them instead of extending my time with the Guard: to echo what my father had done; to fight the weapons he had when he fought.
The MAG suit is a real marvel, a far cry from the makeshift Minuteman of thirty years ago. You’re sealed up in your own little world inside, a world of lights and sensors and servos. It takes a little getting used to, but after a shakedown shift with a team of technicians adjusting straps, tightening bolts, and calibrating pressure sensors, a MAG suit fits you like a second skin. I don’t know much about nuclear physics, but I know the suit’s magnox fusion cell is cutting edge stuff. They say the suit can run a decade on its cell; the rest of the suits systems—the sensor suite, locomotors, waste reclamation filters—will break down long before the mag-cell dies.
But MAG Corp training isn’t all about getting acquainted with the suit. They run you through a whole other level of conditioning—they want the best of the best of the best, see? Whether you’re blasting targets with a nova gun or have nothing in your hands but a blunt K-bar, as a MAG Marine you know ways to kill a man they never teach the TerraCon guard. There’s a reason they call us “dangerous men.”
I graduated just a few weeks ago, with an earned rank of Lance, thanks to my experience in the Guard. I’ve already got my assignment: A Company, 2nd Platoon; “Parasca’s Prowlers.” I met Lt. Parasca at graduation parade. My parents met him then, too. Father was pleased to learn that the lieutenant is a Gitane. “Good sign,” he said. “I met plenty o’ Gitanes among the Minutemen. They got war in their blood.”
He clapped me on the back, told me how proud he was of me, then took me aside from the milling Marines and their families to speak with me privately. “I want you to come home, Simon. Come back with all your limbs, if you can, but come back with stories. Tell them to your sons so they can know what’s made the Pyatt name a proud one.” That mischievous twinkle got in his eye when he said, “After all, you’re in the family business.”
By Empyreon
Some of my earliest memories are of my father telling me stories from his war days. He was one of the first TerraCon soldiers, you know, fighting to free our worlds and to defend the Confederation for Terran Unity. He may have gone on to be a master technician, living a simple, unassuming life with his wife and kids on idyllic Cybele, but to my young eyes he was always the war hero. I reveled in the stories he told me of rooting out remaining pockets of Utiran military forces, and dropkicking them out of TerraCon space until they could “come back and play nice with the rest of us Terrans.” I would watch in awe when he’d deactivate and detach his prosthetic leg to clean it from time to time, enjoying him retell the time when he went one-on-one with a “snot-nosed Sinker” during one of the many failed invasions of the Syncretic Legion. “Stupid kid got me in the leg, took it clean off,” Dad always said as part of his leg-cleaning mantra. He’d add with a wink, “But I got him in the head. Took it clean off.” I once asked him why he hadn’t opted for having the leg regrown like so many other vets had done with their battle damaged bodies but he’d just get this far away twinkle in his eyes and tell me, “Son, I earned this hunk of metal and I ain’t givin’ it up for nothin’.”
That’s how my dad talked about the war: ill-tempered boys tussling and posturing for territory, for dominance, or just to be left alone. I was older when I learned something more about the actual history of the War of TerraCon Ascendancy, when Idranna, Suvatar, and Gitane—the Three Provinces—grew tired of the Utiran Hegemony occupying their worlds and abusing their resources, decided enough was enough. The Syncretics were looking to oust the Utirans and introduce their own occupation of Earth and surrounding worlds, but the Three Provinces wouldn’t stand for kicking out one despotic faction just to welcome another.
At first I had trouble reconciling my father’s accounts and the history I learned from a textbook; which was it, a revolution for the sake of humanity or a schoolyard scuffle? I guess that’s how it all must look to my dad, in hindsight. He wasn’t much younger than I am now when he joined the cause, a fresh faced soldier unaware of the hells ahead of him. He doesn’t like to boast about it—hell, none of the vets I’ve spoken with do—but he was a participant in the Cadmean Insurrection, the event that kickstarted the TerraCon Ascendancy and put the Confederation on the map.
It really started long before my father joined up, though. Citizens of the Three Provinces, taking advantage of their positions as workers in factories and sweatshops to support the Utiran war machine, began to smuggle away weapons, ammunition, and other materiel, sealing them in secret underground bunkers on every planet in the Confederation. All of this was organized through the clandestine Thundercall network, an innovation of Dodeck technology that let the insurgents send secret messages instantly from planet to planet. Soldiers were mustered secretly as well, getting as much training in the use of the Minuteman servo-suit (itself a slapdash modification of civilian model servo-suits, but considered the granddaddy of the modern MAG suit) as time and opportunity allowed. Then each and every man was encased in a capsule, suited up in his Minuteman and decked out with guns, knives and ammo, and placed in suspended animation. The capsules were buried as well, and then everyone waited.
The official statement is that you don’t feel the passage of time while in suspended animation; you go under and come right back out. But there is that small percentage that inexplicably goes through what’s called ‘suspension terror,’ where you experience crippling nightmares and hallucinations that some people never came out of. They later found capsules where the soldiers had panicked, trying to shoot, cut, or blast their way out of their nightmare. The capsule became a coffin. Neither of those happened to my father, though. He said he dreamed, but it hadn’t been scary; he said he dreamed about us. It’s a preposterous idea, really. I mean, he and my mother were only sweethearts at the time; my sisters and I hadn’t even been born. He said he met us all, called us by name, and had good long conversations with the whole family. He said he told me then that I should go into the family business. Boy, did that upset me. In the first place I had no desire as a kid to become a master technician, the idea of going from house to house fixing furnaces, lawn drones and autocleaners just wasn’t for me. More importantly it was just creepy, talking to your kids before they were even born.
Any way, the time finally came when the Utirans, beaten back by the Syncretic onslaught, were reaching the limits of their attrition. The Sycretics were spending their own soldiers lavishly in a final push to take Earth when the TerraCon trap sprung. Our soldiers boiled from the ground, charged on the unsuspecting enemy forces, and freed our homeworlds from enemy occupation. My father came home, minus one leg from the knee down, and started his family.
* * *
I signed up, when the time came; there was never any question about it. Veteran benefits aside, I had been raring to join the TerraCon Guard since the first story my father told me. I went through training, worked my sadsack body into TerraCon fitness standards (not that it was that bad to start with), and learned to say “yessir!” I served my term on the frontiers, patrolling the TerraCon space and fulfilling assignments in Dodeck security. I was a Guardsman in every way but the way that mattered: aside from a police action involving some Danceran refugees attacking a group of Syncretic pilgrims from Cruciger, I never once fired my gun; I never once experienced real combat.
So when my term was completed I signed up again. Though it hadn’t been formally organized until recently, you could argue that the MAG Corps has been around since those first Minuteman soldiers emerged from the ground in the Cadmean Insurrection. Maybe that’s why I joined them instead of extending my time with the Guard: to echo what my father had done; to fight the weapons he had when he fought.
The MAG suit is a real marvel, a far cry from the makeshift Minuteman of thirty years ago. You’re sealed up in your own little world inside, a world of lights and sensors and servos. It takes a little getting used to, but after a shakedown shift with a team of technicians adjusting straps, tightening bolts, and calibrating pressure sensors, a MAG suit fits you like a second skin. I don’t know much about nuclear physics, but I know the suit’s magnox fusion cell is cutting edge stuff. They say the suit can run a decade on its cell; the rest of the suits systems—the sensor suite, locomotors, waste reclamation filters—will break down long before the mag-cell dies.
But MAG Corp training isn’t all about getting acquainted with the suit. They run you through a whole other level of conditioning—they want the best of the best of the best, see? Whether you’re blasting targets with a nova gun or have nothing in your hands but a blunt K-bar, as a MAG Marine you know ways to kill a man they never teach the TerraCon guard. There’s a reason they call us “dangerous men.”
I graduated just a few weeks ago, with an earned rank of Lance, thanks to my experience in the Guard. I’ve already got my assignment: A Company, 2nd Platoon; “Parasca’s Prowlers.” I met Lt. Parasca at graduation parade. My parents met him then, too. Father was pleased to learn that the lieutenant is a Gitane. “Good sign,” he said. “I met plenty o’ Gitanes among the Minutemen. They got war in their blood.”
He clapped me on the back, told me how proud he was of me, then took me aside from the milling Marines and their families to speak with me privately. “I want you to come home, Simon. Come back with all your limbs, if you can, but come back with stories. Tell them to your sons so they can know what’s made the Pyatt name a proud one.” That mischievous twinkle got in his eye when he said, “After all, you’re in the family business.”
