Sunset City / God Bless us Every One
Light Despondent, chapter 8:
Sunset City / God Bless us Every One
Co - Authors / Editors
TB3
Rush
VoxAdam
Kizuna-Tallis
”And here, we come to the biggest flaw of the HLF.”
“Jealousy?” Scootaloo suggests.
“Overconfidence?” Babs offers.
“They’re total dicks?” Vinyl adds.
“Their insanity in hiring you?” snarks Dinky.
“Let’s just say I had an… impressive resume,” Kraber answers. “Funny you should mention that, though, cause I ended up having to be the fokking sane one a couple weeks from the rig.”
He pauses for effect.
“YOU?!” Dinky gasps.
“...What,” Vinyl says, bewildered beyond even including inflection in her voice.
“I know!” Kraber agrees. “It was fokking awful! I mean, there they are, planning to blow up a dam, and I’m just there saying ‘AM I THE ONLY ONE THAT SEES A FOKKING PROBLEM WITH THIS?!’ And then they go, ‘DO NOT INTERRUPT MY BEING INGENIOUS!’ while about to do some stupid fokking shit, like, I don’t know, using mustard gas that could blow back into the camp and kill everyone.”
“...I would have thought that was the thing you mentioned earlier,” you yourself say. “The… different levels of reality thing?”
“Oh yeah. Good points... all of you. Except for you Dinky. But anyway, I talked to Sebastian Irving about it, right after I tried that thermite gun,” Kraber says. He rarely talks about his friend “Said they promote people just for hating ponies.”
“That’s terrifying!” you say.
“It is. Sometimes, you get someone competent, like Galt, but most times, you get varknaaiers like Birch.”
“And now that I think about it, most HLF officers,” Aegis adds. “Which reminds me - wasn’t that why Angus Reid left the HLF?”
“Heh, yeah. He said that the old man in charge was concerned with their public image…” Kraber adds. “Which is where you see the flaws. The PHL promotes people for effectiveness, eccentricity be damned. Which is how I’m where I am now – Hauptgefreiter Kraber.”
“I gotta admit, it came as a surprise, but congratulations, bru. You worked hard for it,” Aegis says.
“Why thank you!” Kraber says, genuinely surprised, as if he’d never expected to hear that. He puts an arm over Aegis’ neck. “But the HLF’s the reverse, so you get clinically fokking insane people commanding the ranks.”
“...Like you?” Babs suggests.
“I’m bosbefok, not crazy,” Kraber dismisses her. “Besides… I wasn’t good at following orders, or organization back in the HLF.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed,” Babs says.
“I know, right? Turns out that exploding a newfoal’s skull with your mind is therapeutic…” Kraber sighs contentedly.
“Wha– HUH?!” Scootaloo gasps.
“We’ll go into that later,” Kraber says a little too quickly.
“Who is Birch, anyway?” you ask. “You mentioned him a while back.”
“This one kontgesig from the HLF that nobody likes,” Kraber says.
“Oh, I remember him!” says one ex-HLF woman, only just approaching the end of her teens.
“Where’d you see him, ah…” Kraber’s voice trails off as he racks his brain for the memory of her name.
“Elena Shapiro,” she explains, to Kraber’s thanks. “It was back in ‘21, over in Atlantic City. Typical conspiracy nut, believed in reptilians, chemtrails, illuminati-”
“-So, basically Lazarus from Deus Ex,” Kraber interrupts.
“-I loved that game! Probably gonna get ponified in a year, if he hasn’t been already. But the weirdest thing was that he believed that he’d seen ponies kidnapping people all the way back to 2016.”
“Actually, Kraber and you colts and fillies,” Zecora calls back, leaving her irritable and weakened charge out in the hallway, “I find that it might not be so silly.”
“Eish?” Kraber asks.
“Potions and medicine demand a test,” Zecora explains. “As you may know, the first version is rarely best.”
“But that would mean…. hmmm,” Kraber says thoughtfully. “Alright. It is pretty weird that nobody ever considers the test subjects. Anyway, he was a crazy, bosbefok guy that–”
Meanwhile, in the future…
November 18, 2023…
Kraber will be lying in a hospital bed with a cracked scapula and several torn muscles, along with a few minor injuries from the downright fokking awful train ride here. He has the stuffed animals he’s carried with him all this way. His nose is broken – amazing how he forgot that – and his eyes have dark circles under them, he’s trembling, his skin is almost gray, his eyes dart from side to side, his hair is lank and greasy… he looks almost dead. He’s dimly aware that something should hurt like hell. Thankfully, nothing major has broken, but Kraber will be in the bed more for rest than anything. Besides, Major Bauer, Lieutenant Trixie, Colonel (emphatically not ‘commander’) Renee, and Cheerilee wouldn't want him to be in that other Equestria. He and Aegis would be the first to admit it – Kraber would have a psychotic break as soon as he got there. Only an idiot would have thought he should go there. Still, he will have to wonder about... About Pinkie Pie. He'd liked her when he talked to her over the phone, in spite of his distrust of PER. So... What was the real her like? What the FOK was she going through?! Nobody deserved that....
Wait...
Suddenly, so many things about Maud and that bizarre fokking note in the PHL archives will make sense. While he hates the betrayal, he can't hate her. They’re not so different, are they?
He will decide he hates the queen more than ever – that fokkin teef saw some of the most trusted ponies in her empire just as assets, and made them into monsters just to ensure loyalty. Worse, she did it the most sadistic fokking way possible.
“Shouldn’t you be asleep by now?” Aegis will ask. They will be playing Warframe, and Kraber will be playing Mesa, having armed himself with a Brakk and Boltor Prime.
Aegis, however, is using Rhino. How fitting. He’s also armed himself with the Twin Gremlins and a Karak. The one from the game, not the common frankengun that Kraber's had the misfortune of using.
“I’m not sure I want to at this point,” Kraber will say, stifling a yawn.
“Hey, you said you’d sleep when you have time,” Aegis will reply. “And here we are...” he will cast one foreleg out, pointing to nothing in particular with his hoof, “We have time!”
“I know, I know,” Kraber will say. “It’s just… the kak I’ve seen…” he shoots one Infested ancient in the face. “I saw experiments. I saw the potion get made. I fokking saw Twilight Sparkle begging for mercy, as she experimented on people that... couldn’t have all come from after the Manifestation,” he’ll realize. “Son of a bitch.”
“Wait. So you’re saying that Celestia kidnapped people before the War, which means… which means... Birch…” Aegis will continue, similarly aghast.
And they will say in unison:
"MOTHER FOKKER!”
“Oh, the shit we two know, huh?” Kraber will laugh afterwards.
The stamping of feet on deck and the first distant gunshots drew attention fast.
“What’s going on Seafo–” blurted an older soldier with a shotgun and older equipment, rushing into the courtyard before taking stock of the situation. A UN patch shone blue on his shoulder.
He saw everything. The invading troops, Kraber and Lovikov… and the dead pony.
“Seafoam! YOU SONS OF BITCHES!” he screamed, unholstering his shotgun. “I’ll–”
Kraber’s LMG is lifted clear of his duffel bag, or perhaps the duffel bag fell off around the LMG. Instantly, he’s fanned the trigger and three blazing rounds through that man’s gut, leaving the varknaaier screaming, clutching his bleeding, crimson stomach.
The Battle of the Sorghum had commenced in earnest.
It would be hard for Kraber to ever describe the firefight to secure control of the platform. Not for the violence involved, no. Nor was it because of brutality, or some new cruelty visited on people, like his masterworks of disemboweling PER members (and then tying them to trees for wolves to eat, cooing as the adorable fluffy wolf pups nibbled on the stomach), or that time he pretended to dump potion on someone’s head and it was really… well, that wasn’t important.
“See, in action movies,” Kraber would tell a grouping of fillies and young adult mares a little over a year later, “...And most of my life, actually, firefights are choreographed long-range spectacles. Blood spraying everywhere. And the Conversion War, that’s pretty fokking large-scale.”
This… this was small-scale, at point-blank range for an MG2019, and it ripped them apart, punching massive holes.
Inasmuch as a firefight could be, it was an intimate affair, personal and tender.
As the HLF force inveigled themselves through the corridors and compartments, ponies revealed themselves, along with men and women holding shotguns. They placed themselves behind corners and barricades, weapons at the ready… only for the HLF to launch grenades and pipebombs at them, the shrapnel and nails inside shredding the poor varknaaiers and adding dashes of colour to the industrial grey of the platform’s decor.
PHL with combat vests (often festooned with glowing markers that showed them to be shielded) were priority targets, with grenades tossed at them. They hadn’t expected this - how could they? The typical HLF response to combat-ready PHL soldiers was simple. Toss out some of the nonlethal grenades such as flashbangs that hadn’t been all that prominent in the war, and take advantage of the lull to pour bullets into their skulls, legs, or areas with weaker armor, wearing down the shield under an avalanche of fire and improvised explosives. The armor was durable enough that aiming for center of mass was almost a moot point.
PHL shields were durable. Enough that you could empty a magazine from one gun into them without so much as a spark on the shield, if you were unlucky enough. But then, the combined weaponry of several Thenardier Guards and Menschabwehrfraktion at near-point-blank range, that was enough to give the scant few soldiers on the rig pause.
Best of all, the HLF had the element of surprise on their side when going up against soldiers. And, most of all, numbers.
The rig's workers were most, if not all, of the defenders. People in jumpsuits and fluorescent vests, with a museum’s worth of arms. Some had cheap milisurp, Century Arms weapons that John Fitzsimmons from Maine had told Kraber not to bother with, and some had things that might have been taken from actual armories, but those were the minority. Most were armed with pistols, hunting rifles and shotguns that had likely never been intended for actual combat, and still others had taken the target rifles and bird guns ignored by more fortunate folk. They were the firearms of the desperate majority who had been unable to acquire actual military-grade weaponry, and against HLF body-armor, many of them had all the stopping power of a wayward breezy.
“...My God, we barely have a real military here!” Kraber heard someone scream. “They’re just murdering workers! And us, if we don’t-”
Her voice was cut off, as Kraber saw a woman with dyed-blue hair falling to the ground choking, clutching a .45ACP-sized hole in her throat.
And so a pattern established itself. Advance into another room, receive sporadic defensive fire, return with extreme prejudice. The defenders were loaded for bear, and the aggressors were loaded for tanks. Kraber's .338 rounds punched through up to two, even three of the PHL kontgesigs at a time, leaving bloody ruin and glistening trauma in their wake, pink and purple and putrescent.
He barely even had to shoulder it – at this range, he could just spray, with no need to pray. Any round he fired would probably hit something.
And hit they did. So many people and ponies fell to the ground, clutching massive holes, screaming as Kraber fired… and fired… and fired again.
When the MG2019 ran out of ammo, he simply pulled out his .45 pistol and fired that, the .45ACP rounds punching through head after head. When that was done, Kraber tried for the revolver – headshots with that thing didn’t leave pretty little holes, all he could see were a few remnants of the lower jaw when he fired.
This was fun, wasn’t it?! WASN’T IT?!
“You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?” that new hallucination, Victory said, as Kraber slipped into another room. “Go on! INDULGE YOURSELF!”
She was holding her own pullstring in her hooves, and yanking it in tune to every dying scream and gurgle.
“Hi I’m Victory, the Pretty Private. Hi, I’m Victory, I’m your death. Hi I’m Victory, your pocket-monster psychopath, hi, hi, hi, DIE!”
“No, Kraber! This isn’t you!” the older newfoal screamed, screamed in Kate’s voice.
“HOU JOU FOKKIN BEK, JOU VARKNAAIERS!” Kraber yelled back, not sure if he was yelling at the PHL or the two newfoals in his head.
Shouldering the MG2019, he aimed for one PHL man’s knee, the round tearing through it and shattering a pony’s hoof as it exited on the far side. As added insult, Kraber strode up to the PHL man, and kicked him in the face.
“You fucking sonova–” the PHL man screamed, just before Kraber’s boot shattered his jaw again, cracking his skull against the wall. The pony behind him, a purplish-colored earth pony stallion, tried to jump up, but fell, the stump of his hoof oozing blood. He gritted his teeth and tried to move, but–
“Hi,” Kraber whispered, getting down on his knees in front of the pony and slipping on his brass knuckles. “I’m Viktor, the smiling psycho.”
Kraber drew back his fist and bliksemed the PHL man, fist driving into his skull. In the corner of his eye, he could see Victory applauding him, and rushed on, laughing hysterically.
“JOU FOKKING INVADERS! JOU THINK JOU CAN SCREW WITH US, JOU BLIKSEM?!” Kraber screamed, lashing out, gouging and punching, again and again.
His victims, pony and human alike screamed incoherently, and Kraber finished each by driving a razor-edged fist into their throats, feeling a grim satisfaction everytime something went squish.
“Oh!” called out Victory, offering out her own golden horse-shoes. “Do you want to try these out? They’ve got bladed tips and are perfect for this kinda fun. Course, you’ll need hooves, but we have just the medicine for that.”
“Stop it Viktor!” screamed the shade of Anka, her voice high and piercing. “Please, just stop this and listen to me!”
But Kraber was beyond listening. Right now he’s managed to reduce one pony’s skull into a concave bowl, and is far from spent.
“JOU LIKE HURTING KIDS, HUH?!” Kraber screamed, feeling something crack, and the corpse’s skull splits, releasing the soft centre. “JOU LIKE HURTING PEOPLE THAT JUST WANTED TO FOKKING RUN AWAY?!”
Another punch.
“JOU FOKKIN POESNEUS!”
“You… you’re one to talk,” the shade of Emil sighed in disappointment. “You… you’re just scared little children, murders and rapi–”
“AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGH!” Kraber yelled, and headbutted a fresh pony, the spikes on his helmet impaling her eye. The mare screamed, a high piercing note that made Kraber’s ears ache.
“NOBODY! FOKKING! CALLS ME THAT!” Kraber yelled, pounding his fists into the earth pony. This was… it felt good, right?! IT WAS FOKKING SUPPOSED TO BE RIGHT! NOTHING WAS RIGHT!
Maybe if he pounded a corpse further into dust again it’d be fun. Maybe then he could finally feel like a hero!
Maybe... if he punched her again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again–
“Kraber…”
There was a voice screaming his name, but it didn’t feel unimportant.
And then a pair of hands caught his fist, twisted his arm behind his back, and forced him into a submission hold, breaking his focus… and slamming him face-first into the floor.
“I know who you are, you bastard,” the man hissed, and Kraber was thrown at a wall, choking as the wind was knocked out of him. He wheezed, and coughed up blood inside his mask as a booted foot slammed into his stomach.
Kraber could see the name written on his PHL vest - Imbeault. “Viktor Kraber,” he said. “They’ll pay me good for your body.”
Kraber headbutted him, and Imbeault looked stunned… if only for a moment, before throwing Kraber at another wall.
FOK! He was so strong!
Kraber was thrown out of the room, the door smacking against his back, as he tumbled back outwards. Oh, fok!
“Dodge… this…” Kraber said, as he rolled over, unlimbering his MG2019, and opening full-auto.
Now, strong as Imbeault might have been, good as his shields might have been, it was still a machinegun chambered for .338 Norma Magnum at close range. And aimed at Imbeault’s head.
Imbeault staggered back, the weight of bullets smashing against him.
“But how?! How the hell did you get that PHL-”
And finally, impossibly, a hail of bullets shredded through Imbeault’s skull. He swayed for a second, and crumpled down. His armor was mostly intact, but his head was a pulped mess, barely more than a few scraps of flesh attached to the neck.
“...Oh holy shit,” Kraber wheezed. “Thanks for the save. Except you, Lovikov!” he yelled.
“I’m your commanding officer, you sonovabitch!” Lovikov yelled.
“Then why…” Kraber coughed, blood dripping onto his vest, “Didn’t you shoot the kontgesig?!”
“You know, he’s right,” one Thenardier Guard said. “What the hell was with that guy?”
“We’ve gotten as far as the radio suite” called down one other Menschabwehrfraktion woman named Katrin, originally from Amsterdam. “They’re resisting pretty heavily!”
There was a scream, and a bang.
“What goddamn resistance?!” the newfoal asked in Kate’s voice. “They were just doing their jobs! They were doing something that’d help during Barrierfall! And you've refused to do anything like that! Oh,” the creature said in his voice, playing back what he’d said last night, “And if I'm near one pony, one of those fokking invaders that destroyed our home – then they’ll kill me. Ponify me! They can’t be trusted! I’m willing to bet they’ve done more to help humanity than you have in the last couple years!”
“Oh, don’t stress about it,” trilled Victory. “I mean, its all just more dead humans and traitors. You’re actually making it easier for Her Majesty by reducing the surplus population. When you’re me, you’ll thank yourself too! Keep up the good work.”
“Shut up…”, Kraber hissed as he walked in the direction of the Menschabwehrfraktion man’s voice, eventually finding himself in the radio facilities, a small cluster of soundproofed rooms, each broadcasting on a different frequency and topic.
It wasn’t a long distance - for all its size, the rig occupied a very small footprint, after all.
He practically waded through blood to get to this deck. Ponies, most of them pegasi, lay dying on the floor, some of them with their heads...
‘What manner of liberator does this?’
...their heads missing, blown apart by HLF munitions, the gray-pink residue of their brains spattered against the wall. Some were still alive, and two HLF members, a short man and woman with an AK74S-U each (Burton and Sarah Mallett) held a screaming pegasus down, sawing her wings off with a hacksaw.
‘Does this accomplish anything?’
One dead pony looked to be a foal, and Kraber’s heart seized up as, for a moment, he saw the foal he’d saved two nights before superimposed over her. Looking at him with pity again - not anger, pity. An ass-mark of what looked to be ballet shoes fitted for hooves, whatever they were called, was emblazoned on her flank, but when he walked past her, it… It wasn’t there. He turned around – had she only gotten a cutie mark on one flank? He turned around a little, curious, to find that it wasn’t there on that side either.
It wasn’t there! Okay, just a…. just another hallucination. He had to keep going but–
He remembered something. Something from back in Istanbul, a moment with Burakgazi. Right after they’d blown up the Bureau there...
July 29, 2019
Istanbul, Turkey
Right after the Istanbul Conversion Bureau bombing
A cafe with really good baklava
“Thanks for recommending this place," Kraber said appreciatively. "So... What was so important?"
"I found some textbooks,” said Burakgazi, the strange, stocky man that Kraber had met planning a completely separate terrorist attack on the Bureau, through the use of what seemed to be homemade chemical bombs. He was perhaps best described as ‘indeterminately brown’ – he looked Turkish, but there was a trace of something asian in his features, owing to one Japanese parent, which, he claimed, owed to the fact that Japanese and Turkish were very similar languages. He had somewhat wrinkled tan skin, early graying, prematurely receding dark hair, and a thick short dark beard that appeared to go out in every direction. “Textbooks from Equestria.” He looked to be somewhere into his thirties. It was hard to guess.
They were sitting at a cafe in Istanbul, looking on approvingly at the emergency services rushing by them, ready to rescue the Bureau personnel. Not much point, really – Kraber was half-tempted to stand up, take a look at the various mosquitos (as a Boston policeman by the name of Django Miller had termed the onlookers that flocked to a crime scene, back when Kraber was still in college) and others rushing to the site of their handiwork, and call out “STOP RUNNING, JOU FOKKING KONTGESIGS! THE HUMANS THAT RUN BUREAUS ARE FOKKING DEAD ALREADY!”
“Why the fok would you want to look at those, Mr. Burakgazi?” Kraber asked, disgustedly.
“Please. Call me Kagan,” Burakgazi said warmly. “We blew up that fokking concentration camp they called a…”
“You know, I’m Jewish, but the description seems accurate,” Kraber said.
Burakgazi breathed a sigh of relief… then he made a noise of disgust. “Was that bad to you, eh?”
“It was fokking Dachau in there!” Kraber exclaimed. “Praise the Lord and pass the thermite. But… why textbooks?”
“Well, I cherish knowledge,” Burakgazi said. “...Eventually, your knowledge of where to get thermite grenades. But I even cherish knowledge from goddamned gluesticks. They’re quite fascinating, really. Apparently, ponies have something called alicornal tissue – it’s thaumaturgon-superconducting...”
“Did someone read Perdido Street Station when they came up with that?”
“....Huh. That is weird. Still, I suppose it’s a good name for the particles that alicornal tissue can interact with. Damn, you’ve read that book too?”
“I love that book! New Crobuzon… amazing city, but I wouldn’t want to live there. I do like the point Mr. Mieville makes about criminals being marked for life…”
“It’s really not all that different when you get down to it,” Kagan agreed. “Anyway – turns out those ass-marks they have grow out of super-concentrated alicornal tissue pockets in their flanks – sometimes in other places, but that’s rare – and marks them with the skill they’re best with at, what they’ll be happiest with… No damn clue what it’d be. Usually it activates by the time they’re eleven.”
Kraber staggered against a blood-spattered window, against which sleeting sea spray was hurled by the wind, his head reeling. The navigation lights of ships on the ocean below danced in strange orbits, as he tried to comprehend the body before him. There were sporadic firefights all over the area, some of which were on the boats below. Let the kontgesigs come. He wouldn’t mind.
It had a cutie-mark. So that meant it wasn’t a newfoal – newfoals were always part of the PER or what have you. He’d shot a ch–
‘You fokking lying hypocrite…’ he thought, only for an unwelcome voice to finish the thought.
“You did this two days ago, and you laughed!” giggled Victory, the Pretty Private. “You stupid, stupid human! But don’t worry…” she said, waggling one hoof back and forth like a mother chastising her son, one of those STUPID FOKKING PSYCHOLOGISTS THAT TREATED HIM OR HIS KIDS LIKE SHIT! “You can forget this if you just go pony…”
“Don’t listen! Viktor… this isn’t doing anything!” the other newfoal pleaded in Kate’s voice. “This is your last chance for reclamation! There’s only so long before the PHL and the U.S armed forces slaughter any HLF that don’t surrender, or before the HLF do something so terrible that the police might just decide you all resisted arrest! They know you, Viktor!”
“Then,” Kraber said, looking uneasily at the remains of yet another pony, pinned to the wall with what looked like a railroad spike, “I have to fight, if the PHL will resort to-”
“It won’t be them that resort to despicable things” the other newfoal interrupted. “It will be you. You’re already doing them! You know what happened to that mare named Sutra Cross, Kraber. Surely you heard it on the radio?”
It was the first time the newfoal sounded so…. real. So powerful. So much like it was just next to him…
Kraber’s eyes darted around, not sure where the voice was coming from. Maybe the PHL would get him for this raid. Maybe they wouldn’t. But… moments like this… there was only so long the authorities could justify ignoring the HLF. And he’d have to be bosbefok, fokking crazy, to believe he’d get out of this with no consequences.
… If he lived, assuming the PHL or Lovikov didn’t kill him, what then?
Nothing, not even those fokking annoying hallucinations, had an answer.
All was silent, save for the sounds of Lovikov and various other ‘brothers and sisters of the liberation’ roughing-up the civilians in one of the radio rooms. There were no screams, not at this stage. He could hear the sounds of fists striking flesh, and dry sounds that...
Were those made by people? What few ponies were left on the rig didn't have long to live.
Looking and feeling a little gray, Kraber stepped through and surveyed the scene.
Yeah, no screaming. There came a point when it became impossible for the victim to scream.
“What kept you?” Lovikov asked, in what Kraber hoped was a joke. He didn’t answer.
“Well, Verity, your informant did us well again,” Flamel said. “Not sure I trust her, but she certainly got the job done.”
“Verity has an informant?” Kraber asked, surprised.
“None of your concern,” Verity said, a dangerous edge in her voice.
“You… sons of bitches…” one woman hissed through her remaining teeth, only to contract in shock when Lovikov shot an earth pony who had been laid out beside her.
“Now,” the Russian asked levelly. “Can I broadcast from this station?”
“You… You killed Shortwave,” the woman whimpered. “He… he was my f–”
“Ah, get off it,” Lovikov said dismissively. “Ponies aren’t your friends. I just did you a favor.”
“Favor?!” the woman yelled. “FAVOR?! You bastard, he had foals! He smuggled them out of Equestria, just to–”
“Kraber?” Lovikov asked. “Persuade her.”
This… this was what Kraber did. This was what he had to do… he was HLF, he reassured himself. He was protecting humanity…
Which was why he punched that poor woman in the face, knocking her to the ground and leaving her clutching the bloody hole in her face that had been her mouth, wheezing and whimpering in the agony beyond mere screams.
Ja, that was some fine-ass fokking protection.
“Now…” Lovikov said, pointing down at the woman as if the finger he had to her face was a gun. “Can. I. Broadcast from here?”
“YES!” she gasped. “We were on the air when you attacked! We still are!”
“Good,” Lovikov said, and pointed his pistol to her head-
“Hey! Stop that!” Verity yelled. “We still need some hostages! Not that you and that crazy bastard left many to work with…”
“Fine,” Lovikov sighed, sounding like nothing so much as a petulant child. Shoving him none-too-gently aside, Verity changed places with him, holding her sidearm to the poor woman’s trembling head, as Lovikov stepped up to the console and started to speak.
“I’m sure all of you brainwashed sheep listening into tonight’s scheduled propaganda have wondered who we are,” Lovikov said smoothly. “Well. We’re not your salvation – that’s a shitty excuse. You’ve had enough salvation. No, we’re your LIBERATION!”
He paused for effect before continuing. “If you heard our attack ‘live’, then know this. We have waited as you welcomed in those invaders, those fucking gluesticks. The ponies, the zebras, the like. We are the Human Liberation Front. You’ve now heard with your own ears what we are capable of. And unlike you–”
“...is it really for the best if we’re guilting them?” Mariesa wondered, earning herself a stern look from Verity.
‘We’re on thin ice’,Kraber realized. Then, unbidden: ‘Oh God, what if we’re… what if we’re just a distraction for the Thenardiers? Would Galt throw away one of his best infiltrators for a bigger score - are we just a diversion, a distraction for the PHL?’
“Of course you’re disposable,” laughed Victory, who was dancing up and down in the bloody cavity that had been Shortwave’s abdomen. “Sticks and stones break human bones, but newfoals never worry.”
His paranoia was mounting – he hadn’t been this wound up since that time in that subway with all the newfoals where there could have been a newfoal behind every corner.... And now Lovikov...
… Lovikov already planned to shoot him, and was acting under orders from Defiance command.
And if the PHL came, if by some miracle the government acquiesced to the HLF’s demands it was incredibly unlikely that they’d get away without consequences...
“Die by hand or die by hoof, or shed your doubts and be me. All your cares just melt away, when you drink Her mercy…”
“-we have not forgotten what Equestria has done! We have not forgotten our families and friends being ponified, our homes destroyed! Unlike some of you...” Lovikov continued, disgusted.
“A newfoal’s life is full of glee, why die to stay human? Embrace I’m your destiny, and murder all your creeeewmen.”
“...there shall be no be peace between us and the ponies, not until every last pony is dead. You have seen what ponies have brought to this world – they cannot be trusted! It is the end of the world, and madness to trust those that have brought so much suffering!”
It is a stirring speech, and this is a hell of a victory…
It’s the rant of a zealot and this was nothing even approaching anything that can be referred to in the same space as a triumph of any kind. It’s a massacre…
“Both wrong, foolish mortal mind, this is to our glory. Simply slaughter all your kind, that’s our scripted story…”
No, Kraber unravels, trying to nail down the voices in his head. He was trying to ascertain what they were accomplishing here? Wishing that they could do something bigger than hunkering down in the woods and just killing PER?
This was that greater destiny. This raid. It will be his epitaph, his legacy...
And yet… something didn’t ring true.
“A wise man,” Lovikov said, “Would trust in humanity. Which is why we, the HLF, have taken over the Sorghum Exile oil platform, just off the coast of Maine. We have hostages at gunpoint - and we will slaughter all of them, and bombard Portland if our demands are not acquiesced to within twenty-four hours. Firstly, we demand the release of Michael Carter, who is being held unlawfully by lackeys of the Equestrian column. Secondly…”
“Don’t worry – it gets better,” Kraber says. He pauses a second. “Well, no. I get better, trust me. But not by much.”
He stares down at you and all the terrified foals, and realizes, for the first time, that he may not exactly have the best judgment when it comes to storytelling. Or at all.
What a way to spend Christmas Eve...or the last night of Hanukkah...or the first night of Hearth's Warming… it really got confusing when the ponies starting lighting their own menorahs!
“...you kids sure you want to hear this part of the story?” Kraber asks, visibly concerned.
“Well, I don’t know about them, but I do!” you say. “I asked why… I wanted to know how you got to the PHL… but I have to know.”
“You’re sure? I mean, I end up hitting rock bottom three times in about four weeks. It’s pretty fokking bleak,” Kraber says. “‘Cept for the part where I meet Aegis…”
“Go ahead.”
“Do I get to narrate this story when I come in?” Aegis asks.
“Absofrigginlutely,” Kraber says, clapping a hand on the back of Aegis’ neck. “Remember what you said about me hogging all the screen time… on interviews?” he added hastily.
“Ah, yes… you kinda do.”
“Sorry about that. And don’t worry, you’ll get your turn,” Kraber says. “For now, we’re still on the rig. Anyway, Lovikov’s speech, about freedom and honor and safety among all those dead people, it–”
“Hauptgefreiter Kraber?” asked a white earth pony mare with a wavy blue mane. “That laptop you asked for is here.”
“Ah, okay. I’ll get back to that later then,” Kraber says. “I’ll be back in a few, then – I’ve got an apology to make.”
“To who?” you ask.
December 25th 2022 in New York dawned without the stereotypical fall of snow, except over Central Park, where some PHL pegasi had driven away the rainclouds (Thunderwing from the Stampede Fleet has released an academic paper, hypothesizing them to be a consequence of various atmospheric magic used with little thought about their effect on Earth, and blamed Queen Celestia’s shortsightedness) and, with their innate magic, conjured a winter wonderland.
“Come together one and all,
In the giving spirit,
Gifts abound here great and small
Joyously we feel it…”
From a makeshift hospital-cum-prison at 55 Central Park West, Verity Carter can not only see children and foals frolicking in the park, but hear the rising sound of voices singing in harmony. There is a church right next to the building, and from it comes the glorious carols, defying the horrors of the war.
“Blessings sent us from above,
Guide us on our way.
We raise our voice as we rejoice,
Bow our head and pray.”
Right now, she wishes she could just step on that church… squash it with her monstrous new hooves. Trying to drown that out, she awkwardly turns on a nearby radio. The first station’s playing something that sounds like pop-influenced house, and she can’t figure out how to turn its knobs with hooves, (How the hell did ponies manage so much without hands?) so she just sighs and tries to sink her head deep, deep into the pillow.
To add insult to injury, she can still hear the carolers outside.
“A miracle has just begun,
God bless us everyone…”
‘A miracle’, that’s what the doctors had called what had happened to her. They all insisted she should not have survived that level of exposure, that the dosage should have left her a gibbering wreck of cancerous tissues. Then again, according to Viktor, “that sort of kak’s a fool’s game worrying about. We’ve all been exposed to magic at one point or another, and if the Queen hadn’t been talking gara out her poephol, we’d all be masses of fokking tumors,” so it wasn’t as remarkable as people would have you think. While Kraber is trying to work in PHL medical, and steadily gaining traction as a reliable surgeon and medic, nobody’s willing to test his hypothesis on account of it being scary. Or so she’ll be told by ponies such as Wildfire.
She shifts restlessly in her bed, and feels the fur that now covers her body tickle against the blankets. The hairs are short, dense and glossy, except for on the back of her neck and the small of her back, where they grew out into a flowing mane and tail…
They’d had to secure her head in place to prevent her trying to chew that last appendage off with her own teeth, but then it wasn’t like she could pick up a scalpel and slash her wrists in her current state.
“To the voices no one hears,
We have come to find you.
With your laughter and your tears,
Goodness, hope and virtue…”
Lying there on her back, she curls into a ball, hooves tucked up under her chin, and weeps. It is Christmas Day, and in an instant she had lost everything, and is now alone. Trapped in enemy territory, in an enemy body, naked and exposed.
“Let me die…” she sobs. “Just please, let me die! Haven’t I lost enough?!”
And then somebody knocks on the door. Her head snaps to one side as the newcomer lets themselves in, and feels her huge new eyes narrow.
“You… it would have been you…”
Kraber honestly half-expected her to fly into a rage, but instead the freshly-baked mare tied to the hospital bed just begins to make snuffling sounds, a kind of DMZ between laughter and crying that only a pony’s vocal cords could quite manage.
“So… sniff… you’ve come to mock me?”
“No, Carter…” he says softly, and takes a laptop computer out from under his arm. “I’mma be honest. I felt fokking awful about what I did to you while I was telling that story.”
“You? Regret?” Verity asks incredulously.
“I mean… that was just fokking sadistic. So I brought you a Christmas gift.”
“You’re Jewish…”
That’s rich, coming from a girl who lies somewhere in the middle of a spiritual three-way involving agnosticism, Catholicism and the Prophet Joseph Smith.
“Well, then it's a Hanukkah gift... The spirit of the holidays transcends religion, my sister Tania always said. I’m also the man who’s managed to secure you a call with your father. And besides, Hanukkah ends in a day or two. So why not?”
“Wha... Oh… thank you Viktor…”
She sniffs back a tear. Though she’s not going to hug this man – it’s Viktor Kraber, after all.
“Thank you…”
The laptop is set up with a military-grade teleconferencing program. It had taken some work, but with a bit of effort he had been able to convince PHL High Command to allow Verity brief access onto the channels reserved for secret negotiations with the HLF. Despite their mutually opposed ideologies, the two bodies still maintain a few avenues of contact, for discussing the terms of prisoner exchanges and such-like. Originally, back when Lyra was alive, that had been meant for discussing potential alliances, PER activity, and enemy troop movements. There’d been contacts in the HLF, stand-up-people you could trust to work with you, that considered the destruction of PER more important than racial animosity.
The last time these channels had been used for their original purpose was during Agua Caliente. Most of those contacts had filtered into the PHL by now, and any hope of cooperation had long since died out.
But now, they're being fired up again.
He sits beside her and works the keyboard for her, raises the back of the bed so she can see. She begs him to not turn the webcam on as he opens up the connection, is put through to HLF HQ, (wherever that is) and searingly curses and browbeats his way into a conversation with Michael Carter, doing an almost dead-on impersonation of Robert Carlyle putting on a Scottish accent so thick that she has to wonder if the HLF on the other end are intimidated from its incomprehensibility, the profanity, or the pugnacious cause-ah-fuckin-well-sais surety in his voice.
“I never knew you could put on a scottish accent that convincingly,” Verity says.
“Ah, it’s an old habit,” Kraber says. “Ah played Begbie awhoil back at some theater down in Boston.”
“Wait… would this be the one where that woman went into labor and–” she pauses. “Oh.”
“Ah kept in practice in case ah had to go on the run,” Kraber continues. “Like that time back in college I burned down that-”
It is fortunate that they are then interrupted.
“Verity… is that you?! Oh Christ! I was so worried about you when you failed to report back in.”
Mike’s ragged expression of relief is almost painful for Viktor. He remembers a man who, with the voice of an impassioned preacher, called hellfire and brimstone and damnation down upon mankind’s enemies. What he sees now is not the man who had stirred armies with his rhetoric, but a tired and concerned father, aged before his time. He looks almost ancient.
“I’m… I’m okay Dad...they’re, they’re treating me well.”
“They’d better be! Let me know what their demands are and we’ll set you up for release straight away. Do not tell them anything except your ID!”
Kraber knows Verity is adopted. The sheer physical differences between the hispanic girl and her black father shows as much. But the sheer amount of love in the room could have fed an entire Changeling hive.
“Dad...there’s, something else...I had an accident on my mission.”
“Father, mother, daughter son,
Each a treasure be.
One candle’s light dispels the night,
Now our eyes can see…”
The touching reunion between a father and daughter had been enough to stir his own treasured memories of fatherhood, and for a second none of them had been soldiers anymore. Just people…
“Okay… I’ll show you what happened. Just… please don’t hate me, Dad.”
“Yuir sure ye want him tae see this?” Kraber asks gently, keeping his voice low and Scottish-accented. He felt it was best if Carter not realise just ‘who’ was supervising his daughter. There was bad blood between them, even before Kraber had left the Sorghum…. and the Great HLF Exodus had only made things worse. A lot of people directly blame Kraber for gutting the HLF ranks. Still, that was something to be proud of, wasn’t it? “There'll be no going back.”
“Who is that?!” Michael Carter demands. “If you've done anything to my daughter, I'll–”
“Ah promise ya – Ah daid nothing,” Kraber says. “She’s fine. Ye just have to trust in us...”
“Trust? In PHL?!” Michael Carter asks, as if the very thought is an absurdity.
“Just promise me,” Kraber says. “Promise me tae listen.”
“I will promise nothing until you show me my daughter right now,” Michael Carter commands.
Kraber inclines his head to Verity, visibly worried. There’s a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, that something’s about to go to kak.
Verity nods, and Kraber reaches over, slides his finger along the touch-pad, and ‘taps’ on the ‘camera’ icon.
The side-window opens, and Verity’s image appears in it. The stubby muzzle and expressive eyes, hazel with a touch of blue. The dark mane and brown coat.
The pony that Verity has become.
“Burning brighter than the sun,
God bless us everyone.
A miracle has just begun,
God bless us everyone!”
Carter’s reaction is slow. He has expectant, worried joy for the first nanosecond that he sees Verity - no, that’s not how he’d think of it, he’d think “The pony in the bed.”
There is a pause. Seconds? Minutes? Hours? It’s hard to say how long, and they all maintain eye contact, staring at each other. There is an incredulous look up at Kraber, the realization that he must have been the scottish-accented man. Clearly, Carter wants to demand that Kraber, the Great Turncoat, their Judas, tells him where his daughter is, and where this mare is. He’s in denial, the shock to great for him to even make demands...
...Which disappears as Verity breaks the ice with all the subtlety and delicacy of an artillery shell hitting a frozen lake and causing an avalanche.
“Dad, please, it’s still me! I swear, I’m not a newfo–”
There’s no sudden shock or recoil from his camera. There’s just a hint of confusion, a moment of recognition. Then denial. It's like that time Kraber had gone skiing in Tuckerman's Ravine, and watched an avalanche in the making. For a moment, the surface was icy and impassionate. Then, movement -– it collapses, cascading downwards in a multitude of shapes, running the gamut of shock, to denial to anger, to horror. Kraber can see a few glimpses of the man he once was as the man's face falls. The color drains, and he looks like he is about to cry as far too many men and women in this war have ever cried. For a moment, he’s a simple, grieving father, and anyone who doesn’t know the Carters may think they can reason with him.
No.
… And then the other man’s face hardens, contorts into a scowl that Kraber has seen all too often mirrored in spilt blood.
BLEEP!
The connection is closed. Mike hung up on her. She won’t accept it at first, pleading for Kraber to call back, to check and make sure the Wifi connection didn’t just happen to fail at that moment.
But there is no response. And with one exception, which would not come to light for a long time, that was the last time ever that Verity Carter ever spoke to her father.
Kraber himself later receives a message from Mike in the classified mail.
‘You South African pigfucking traitor. I will find you, and end you, and the fucking golem you made out of my little girl... I will kill you, chop you into pieces, and feed them to the neighborhood dogs while you’re still conscious!
Yeah, to say Kraber is mad is putting it lightly, having effectively just watched a young woman become an orphan. No, worse than an orphan, cut off from everything she held dear. She’d just been declared dead to everyone dear to her heart, and nothing, none of what she’d grown familiar with over the past few years, would ever accept her.
It had been his calm that surprised her at first, three words which were muttered – no, snarled – under his breath yet contained all the warmth of a blizzard at the height of winter:
“That fokking kontgesig.”
“Come together one and all,
In the giving spirit.
Gifts abound here great and small,
Joyously we feel it.”
It’d be doing Viktor a great disservice to say he’s not very good at offering comfort. Rather, he’s just… out of practice, and he hates that fact so much. He thought of himself as a father back in the HLF, so without that… what is he? Is there anything left of who he was before the War? So as Verity cries her heart out, grieving for the family she has now entirely lost, he tries defaulting back to the mindset of a soldier.
“You can join us…”
That cuts her sobs off, and she sits bolt upright in the bed, her restraints tearing right out of their mountings, defenceless against her sheer equine strength.
She stares at him, not saying a word. The blue specks in her eyes seem to blaze. Kraber, glad to at least see her no-longer weeping, repeats himself in greater detail.
“I hate to say it,” he says, trying to delve on what fatherly calm and nurturing he’d mustered when Peter had scraped his knee, or when Anka had hurt herself skiing, when one of the PHL’s foals or war orphans had done something similar. “The HLF won’t take you back. And even if they do, it won’t be home.”
She is shaking.
“I’ve fokking seen it,” Kraber continues. “Do what I did, and join the PHL. They became my family – you saw how all those ponies liked me back there. And Aegis, he’s a right solid bru. They can be your family too…”
She hits him, actually rips her way out of bed and cocks him across the jaw with enough force to knock him back across the room. The door collapses under his weight, and before Kraber can even response, he’s being born back again by her furious blows.
“How dare you! HOW FUCKING DARE YOU!”
It’s actually the toughest fight he’s had in a while. Neither of them are armed, but that has never proved a handicap before.
“AFTER EVERYTHING YOU’VE DONE, YOU TREACHEROUS CUNT! AFTER ALL THAT, YOU ASK ME TO BETRAY THEM!!”
Viktor isn’t holding back either, or going easy on her. His fight-or-flight response is heavily skewed towards one side of the spectrum, and frankly, being attacked tends to elicit only one response from him.
He kicks her in the face.
She stumbles back.
“I’M GOING TO KILL YOU! YOU AND ALL THE DAMN GELDOS! THEY’LL TAKE ME BACK WHEN I TURN UP WEARING YOU AND RENEE’S SKULLS AS FUCKING HORSESHOES!”
“JUST YOU FOKKING TRY!” Kraber yells, and kicks Verity in the face again.
“Why do you keep doing that?!” Verity yells back.
They managed to trash the ward. An oddity of newfoal transformations that Kraber has noticed is that the ‘wetware’ for their new bodies seems to come pre-installed. Verity is just the same, despite her unique circumstances, and she is punching, dodging, weaving and bucking as if she’d been born on four hooves. Still, they’re evenly matched, remembering the old HLF hand-to-hoof combat maxim that ‘It’s only an unfair trick if it doesn’t work,’ Kraber managing to suplex her and throw her into a wall at least once.
In the end, she manages to pitch him down a fokking staircase, just before three security guards manage to ponypile her and stick her with enough sedatives to send a enraged hippo off to slumberland.
Kraber is honestly stunned. If Verity hadn’t have been stopped, he would have almost certainly have ended up dead, and even barring that she still managed to dislocate both his shoulder and jaw, concuss him, and break three of his ribs, without him even laying a single incapacitating blow on her. She’d just ignored the pain, even though the average newfoal would have suffered a critical existence failure by this point. The pehrer itself becomes the stuff of legend and behind-his-back sniggers. Not that anyone would mock him about it to his face – they know what he’d do to them.
He’s there though, when Verity wakes up. In truth, he’s wrapped in bandages in the next bed over, and tripping on some kind of morphine alternative Zecora prepares from ‘dragon hibernation hormones’.
The first words she says are ‘thank you’. The fight, it seems, was cleansing for her. Aegis, standing next to the side of Kraber’s hospital bed, is relieved to see him alright, and glowers at Verity.
“Father, mother, daughter, son,
Each a treasure be.
One candle’s light dispels the night,
Now our eyes can see.”
He’s not convinced her to switch sides however – the old loyalties, and there’s much of them, have not been beaten and starved out of her like him. The HLF loyalty in Kraber that other HLF try to capitalize on hasn’t existed since August.
In fact, she will run off to try and shack back up with the HLF within a month or two. And so, come February of 2023, Kraber, Aegis, Johnny C, and Fiddlesticks will be sent to retrieve her from some hole-in-the-wall snowy town in Appalachia.
She shall come back willingly, tail between her legs, humbled by her experiences and the knowledge that there’s no place for her in the HLF. Even then however, she still racks up record stints in the brig, never quite able to let old grudges die…
‘V for Vendetta’, the others will come to call her, in time.
But as they lie there, reminiscing and laughing over past victories (the details of which are really disturbing to the ward staff) as Aegis lies against the wall on a huge pillow, reading a new China Mieville book, the music of the church’s evening chorale wafting through the windows, they do at least find some common ground.
And the seeds of doubt are at last sowed in Verity’s mind.
“Viktor… why did you defect?”
“Remember the Sorghum?” he grunts through a steadily healing jaw. “It was too fokking much.”
“Burning brighter than the sun,
God bless us everyone.
A miracle has just begun,
God bless us everyone!”
Merry Christmas, and Happy Hanukkah.
“You never did finish that story about how you left, though,” you say, trotting into Kraber’s hospital room, alongside Amber Maple and Rivet, Aegis’ foals.
Or in your case, happy Hearthswarming.
“Oh, get the hell out of here, you fucking–” Verity snarls halfheartedly.
“You okay, uncle Viktor?” Rivet asks, staring up at the hospital bed. “We were worried when we heard about that.”
“Ah, don’t worry, I can barely feel a thing!” Kraber reassures Rivet.
“That’s disturbing...” Amber Maple says.
“Well, it could be worse,” Kraber shrugs. Though the movement is a little tender for some reason. “You know that little things like getting thrown down stairs or being stabbed are just minor fokkin annoyances.”
“Trust him on this,” Aegis suggests. “I’ve seen him get shot in the head with a 9mm and just lose a tooth and get pissed off.”
“I’m glad you’re alright though,” Amber Maple says. “I wanted to see you light the menorah for Hanukkah!”
“Wait. Don’t you have menorahs too?” Kraber asks, confused.
“Yeah, but that’s for Hearthswarming! I wanna see what it’s like for Hanukkah!” Amber Maple explains.
Not for the first time, Kraber is struck at just how similar and yet different Equestria and humanity really are.
“Okay,” Kraber says. “I think I have some candles around here…”
“Can I hold one and light it?”
“When you’re older,” Aegis says. “Right now, you’re… a little too small to be lighting a menorah.”
“Shutupshutupshutup…” Verity muttered.
“Sssssh,” Kraber says, distractedly running his fingers across Aegis’ red bandanna, the one concealing the scarring the car-bombing back in England. “Ssshshshshshsh. I made her a promise, so I’ll keep it.”
“I gotta admit, I’m curious about the rest of the Sorghum too,” Vinyl says, walking in. “I brought some get well wubs too…”
She levitates a box to him, and Kraber unwraps, wincing slightly.
“A new Die Antwoord album! Thanks so much!” Kraber laughs, ruffling her already messy electric blue mane. She smiles, her eyes bright under the sunglasses.
“Okay, Aegis I understand,” Verity says. “But why her?”
“Well, we both ended up on punishment detail, and had to wash the dishes together,” Kraber explained. “I didn’t like it at first, but… well…” And a grin breaks out across his face.
“...Fok, I forgot it too,” Kraber groans. “I love that song, but I just can’t…”
“Dammit, I hate that too,” Aegis adds. “You just love a song so much… but you can’t remember that one lyric, and you fall apart or you have to sing gibberish…”
The three of them look at each other and break into laughter. “Ah… that was a great fokking day too…” Kraber reminisces.
“You never finished your story, Mr. Kraber!” you remind him.
“Oh yeah….” Kraber says. “Where was I?”
“The speech Lovikov was giving,” Amber Maple says.
“Oh yeah. Well, anyway, that speech–”
“Speaking of which, can it come after the King’s Speech?” Aegis asks. “I spent a lot of time in Britain, so I’d love to hear it.”
“I was in England once,” you add. Your mother, who’s come by to say hello, adds that it was to see Lyra herself, though they were delayed by a car-bombing. And Mr. Aegis, that huge earth pony adds, “Wait, could I have met you?” and says one of those adult words that mares like your mother don’t want you to say.
“Yeah, I liked London!” Amber Maple agrees.
Now that they mention it, Amber does seem familiar.
And there’s a chorus of positive remarks to the effect of yes, yes. Let’s listen! from both ponies and humans alike. To be honest, Kraber was going to listen anyway. He’s met enough englishmen, and fooled enough scotsmen with his imitation of Francis Begbie that it’s hard not to feel something about this.
Besides, there’s english blood in him, from a long, long way back. So why not?
“Why the fok not?” Kraber shrugs, reaching over for the radio that had so vexed Verity’s hooves.
And so, in their way, they kept Christmas well. Even Verity.
And as Dancing Day was heard to observe, “God bless us, every one.”
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I said I'd review this before New Year, and even though I'm often iffy with punctuality, keeping promises is something I strive for.
Chapter 1
I'm afraid there's no way I can slice it. This chapter simply takes forever to get to the point, with more than a third of it taken up by an overly verbose setting of the scene. Perhaps the impact is lost a little on me, due to the fact I'm already familiar with the grim future world of Spectrum, but after being told for thirty paragraphs how badly screwed Earth and New Hampshire are, I honestly start wanting to leave them to their sorry fate.
These are the kind of details which work better when they're woven into the background over the course of the narrative, rather than delivered in an infodump. Not that purple prose is necessarily a story's downfall, though – Mieville raised a good point saying it could be part of the fabric of the story, something which Peter Watts recently described as "stained-glass writing".
On the plus side, Viktor Kraber stole the spotlight during his brief appearance in the main story, and the raw energy of his characterisation transfers well here once we finally get to see him in action. This is a man who comes across to me less as a full-blown psycho than a geek playing a psycho (half the time). Can't say I've seen many characters like that in fiction lately. It's fun to read.
I should also commend the ballsy move of writing a scene where he kills a family of prisoners. Right from the first chapter, this brings back home the reality of what he's doing, regardless of "pet the dog" instances such as letting two other potential victims go in an earlier scene. Here's the moment that would be a moral event horizon if the culprit didn't feel so guilty over it...
Chapter 2
You're not fooling anyone, y'know.
Beyond that, I appreciated the inclusion of some pre-war silliness and light-heartedness to the narrative. Mood shifts are hard to pull off without provoking whiplash, nor can I truthfully state that Spectrum has always done it well, yet this one somehow worked for me, probably because of how believably it felt like what drunken students would get up to.
... Then more of the good old Spectrumverse nightmare fuel serves to effectively evoke the horror of the Conversion War. Only thing to be said there is to express gratitude at how one does not live in Kraber's world, whether inside or outside...
Providing further insight into Viktor's past and psyche makes this, I believe, the best of the three chapters published so far.
Chapter 3
Negative part first; this chapter needed more polish. I realise it may seem hypocritical of me to say that when I'm listed as an editor, and it's true, I could have done more, but I was busy writing Joy to the Worlds at the time.
If I can make up for it by offering some useful advice, here it is. Tone down the all-caps. Writers have many other, often better ways of conveying anger. A description of the character's body language, for example. Personally, I prefer to cap only one or two words for special emphasis.
But overall, this did a fine job of showing rather than telling the reader the extent of the HLF's hypocrisy in their treatment of their fellow man. And although human!Verity is less interesting than her pony incarnation, I still felt for her when she got disowned by her father after the change.
While the risk looms of the plot getting lost under all the shifts in times and places, we haven't yet reached the point where it's unmanageable. Kraber is what keeps this story together; if you stay focused on his varying stages of intensity based on what point of his life he's at, you'll be on the right track.
Happy New Year!
~Vox
5443607 Thanks so much for telling me all this
- I'll make sure to implement it later. And possibly rewrite chapter 1... it is a lot of exposition, after all.
EDIT: Not counting stuff with Johnny C, the exposition comes out to 6 pages, (which = 12 in the average paperback, I think) which would be too much for even the biggest China Mieville fan. Which would be me. So - gonna work on that laters.
5443607 Also, thanks for the high praise of chapter 2.
5488931 Eeeyup, it is.