Moving on....

I'm moving away Blogger to my own website at www.craigmcneil.com where I'll continue posting short stories for your entertainment. I hope I'll see you around.

C. Craig R. McNeil

Random Excerpt from A Gathering of Storm Clouds

“Come Stern, let us survey our domain,” waved Hausser, spinning on his heel, heading for the great glass elevator that led down to the lower levels of the moonbase.

Silently Stern followed, wrapped in his thoughts, dreaming of the day when the swastika flew over the capital cities of the world. Hausser shared a private smile with himself. Stern was useful as an attack dog but he would never learn the true reason for the German invasion of Europe. Land? Pah. Land was nothing. Power was the true goal; total and utter complete unbridled power. Already the Nazis were so close to achieving their goal. The Core had been most useful in providing them with world destroying knowledge. There was already some talk within the Thule Society about doing away with the Core as the German scientists felt they had extracted everything they could from it. Hausser thought that this was a particularly short sighted view and that the Core had much much more to teach especially to the initiates of Thule.

Hausser’s personal rocket ship was waiting for the two men as they strolled down the long sloping ramp into the dimly lit hanger. Hausser liked to pilot himself, delighting in the sophistication of the controls and sensitivity that allowed him to guide the circular plate like ship with such precision. The four person glass bubble cockpit set in the middle of the machine provided excellent visibility and an unrivalled all round view. The shining silveriness of the craft was marred only by the standard swastikas etched on each side, dark scars of hatred polluting the clean lines of the ship.

Despite seeing it many times since his arrival on the Moon, Stern still found himself awestruck at the sheer scale of the air tight dock within which the small ship sat. It was one huge hanger partly built under the surface with the roof opening out into the airless space above. Only the twinkling of the countless stars, like diamonds on a velvet cloth, gave away the fact that a forcefield kept the precious atmosphere sealed within the building. Stern often wondered at the hanger’s purpose. Their rocket ships came and went from the multitude of launch pads on the surface. Even here he could feel the vibrations of one landing. So what was the point of this hanger? The Core itself had designed the moonbase, providing the Nazi technicians with the specifications and blueprints. Only once Hitler himself had agreed to abide by them would the Core release its hold on the technology that would win the world for the Third Reich. The hanger itself was fairly isolated being approachable only by air or via a monorail train system direct from the central station at the hub of the base.

At the far end of hanger, Stern could see a collection of dim beams of light shining on a motley crew of stunted humanoids and several giant, twisted mammoths working on the beginnings of a structure. The skeleton frame already several tens of feet high. A guard of Khadrae was positioned at the half way mark to fend off any curious Germans. Stern doubted that even Hausser would be able to get past the Khadrae. The Core had made it clear that several sections of the moonbase were off limits even to its allies.

“Stern! You’re daydreaming!” The harsh tones of his superior cut through the Sturmbannführer’s musings. He climbed into the saucer like craft, strapping himself in tightly knowing that Hausser was an enthusiastic pilot. Enthusiastic but not necessarily skilled.

“What’s on your mind Stern?” asked Hausser as the small ship effortlessly and silently rose into the air with only a slight wobble, the underside illuminated by the sickly green light glowing from a small hole that contained a power crystal. A brief crackle of blue electricity snaked across the surface of the ship as it passed through the forcefield into the dead atmosphere of the Moon.

Stern’s normally grim demeanour almost slipped. Daydreaming was not an activity a man such as Stern did, it being such an illogical bohemian thing to do. He was almost embarrassed. Stern crushed the emotions with grim efficiency.

“I am merely wondering at the logic of allying ourselves with something that uses such crude unclean monkeys to do its work,” answered Stern as he looked out over the cratered yellow-grey surface of the Moon below.

Hausser barked out a short clipped laugh. “Slaves, Stern. Slaves! Those Eskimos are to the Core what the Jews are to us. Subhumans to be enslaved, to be subdued and utilised for the greater glory of the Reich! Slaves are useful Stern. This moonbase would not exist but for the generosity of the Jews. After all their money, gold and hard labour ensured our success! Never underestimate how much the Reich relies on the Jews, Stern. They are dogs, of course, but useful dogs, like Alsatians for example,” Hausser nodded, agreeing with himself.

The spaceship flew over the rocket port and its array of blackened circular blast pads most bearing the weight of a towering red rocket of the 1^st Raketengruppe of the Luftwaffe. The rocket port was sunk in a large crater separate from the moonbase. Cloaked in eye wateringly sharp shadows, the port was surrounded by a serrated mountain range the port was safe from prying eyes both on the Moon and from the vibrant blue Earth above. Long ant like lines of supersoldiers threaded from the nearby monorail station to the rockets. Even a man like Stern felt relieved to be in the spaceship, far away from the unnatural supersoldiers. The creatures made him feel uneasy and inadequate, their sheer raw unadulterated power and rage barely kept in check.

Stern noticed Hausser grinning that manic deaths head grin of his. “Magnificent isn’t it? The British Empire is doomed, shuttling about in their ineffectual, cumbersome, unwieldy dreadnaughts. That is the future down there Stern, the future! Small numbers of heavily armed, highly trained units. As the Britishers collapse into a terminal decline, helped by the Reich, so shall we Germans, a new Aryan race, flourish and conquer!”

Stern merely nodded as Hausser brought the craft round in a wide circle over the stately lines of rockets. On the peaks ahead thirteen flagpoles held proud Nazi banners still in the airless void, briefly glimpsed as they flew low over them and up into the atmosphere overlooking the sprawling base below. The central observation tower was by far the highest point of the base with everything else consisting of concrete tunnels connecting low domes of glass and the finest Krupp steel from the factories in the Rhineland. It had taken many years to construct the city, starting from a single launch pad and a geodesic glass dome for growing food before quickly expanding with dormitories, laboratories, huge numbers of barracks and slave labour pens springing up seemingly at random. Only from in the air could it be seen that the sprawl was a deliberate act of planning, the observation tower forming a hub from which eight spokes of concrete and glass projected themselves, each as straight as a die. It had been commented on more than once that such a symbol was linked to chaos, where all directions were taken and there was no one way. Stern put it down to superstition and rationalised it by stating that such symbols meant different things to a being as old as the Core.

On a flat plateau nearby a veritable hive of activity clustered around stubby sections of metal tubing hung on crane like hoists. Balloon tyred vehicles and uncountable numbers of slaves surrounded the deceptively small sections of tubing carefully hauling them into place, guiding them so they lined up to create one long narrowing cylinder. It was a slow process despite the low gravity of the moon. Each tube contained finely polished mirrors and burnished bronze and each surface had to be perfectly aligned to produce the desired effect. Once a power crystal was introduced into the delicate gold and silver tapestry of the engine at the rear of the cannon, the power of the basic tubes and glass was magnified a million fold producing a finely focussed beam of light. A small, very basic proof of concept prototype barely the size of a shotgun barrel had produced an energy beam that had lanced through the frontal armour of a Tiger tank and out the rear like a white hot sword through a slab of butter. Hausser could barely contain his excitement at seeing the effects a full scale model would have. Stern knew that Hausser planned to support each cannon between two rockets and fire them at targets on the Earth’s surface. Stern wondered briefly how they would aim the weapons accurately but he doubted that would be a major consideration. The Fuhrer himself wished to be present at the firing of the first cannon. The sheer scale of things was almost too much for Stern to take in. Once the British were safely out of the way, the Reich was rumoured to have the vast homeland of Soviet Russia in its sights, a thought which stirred some warmth within Stern’s breast. His parents had both been murdered by separatist Russian terrorists while visiting Warsaw in Poland. He looked forward to seeing the great land trains of the Soviets burn with the peasant scum onboard. The warrior within Stern stirred at the prospect of meeting a difficult opponent. Barely worthy but a difficult opponent nonetheless. So far the British were extremely unsatisfactory completely failing to grasp the seriousness of their position. Stern had always thought the British would capitulate without a murmur. His own analysis revealed them to be too peace loving and set in their ways to provide much resistance to the Nazi war machine.

“Gott in Himmel, Stern,” said Hausser banging his fist excitedly off the arm rest of his seat. “It annoys me not to have a war to fight. I thirst to be in the thick of things! Soon enough though, soon enough and the world will tremble at the sound of my name! A storm is brewing Stern and we will ride it like the gods we are!”

Stern added megalomania to his list of Hausser’s personality traits and wondered if he should mention Hausser’s private plans for world domination to the Gestapo.

The Earth hung in the velvet twilight above, a gibbous shadow cloaking the bottom half. Hausser smiled seeing in his mind’s eye a blood red flag draped over the cloudy blue pearl, a sooty black swastika burned onto a snow white circle on the cloth. Deutschland uber alles! Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil!

Pity the Innocents

The sun is shining wanly through the light fluff of clouds, its meagre heat lost in the cool damp westerly wind. Away up here you can see the Cairngorms rising brown, green and grey to the north of Glasgow. The dusting of snow spread over them gives them an aura of peace and serenity that I wish I held within me. It's a beautiful day. The sun is shining, the trees are beginning to bud, the sky is an opulent cold blue. I see only shadows and darkness. Death and decay. Sorrow and despair. No future, no hope, emptiness.

My family is dead, taken from me by the Nazi scum that destroyed everything I held dear in one clap of ruinous thunder and flame. The worst thing is that I'd said we were safe because we were far away from the docks. When the attack began and those huge explosions sounded across the water I picked up the children and ran, Maggie just behind me. We were lucky that we were late and standing on the outskirts of the crowd. Greg and wee Jeannie were complaining they wouldn't be able to see anything.

But anyway, we ran, Jeannie in my right arm holding tight to my neck never crying because she was so frightened. Greg in my left, pure white with fear. My heart was pounding hard threatening to burst through my chest when I stopped gasping in the air tinted with dust that made my mouth dry and my voice a croak. I gave the children to Maggie and told them to stay there while I went to see if it was safe up ahead. I could hear the constant crump of bombs exploding behind us, I could hear people screaming everywhere and I could see panicked faces all around. But I thought it would be safe there where I left them. We were far from the docks. Anyone else would say the same. Wouldn't they?

And so I ran on ahead searching for help, a policeman, safety. An air raid siren was sounding over the city, a undulating wail for the dead. I heard thin screams sounds from the sky, shells falling down to earth I was told later and then the explosions behind me. I crouched to the ground as a thick grey cloud of dust rolled over me and bits of brick rained down on to me. Maggie and the children.....

I ran back and found the crater. It was a huge, forty foot across and ten down. The surrounding buildings had been flattened. Bloody bodies lay all around but none of them were my Maggie or Greg or wee Jeannie. They'd been standing right where the shell had landed. I screamed.

And so here I am now. The sun is shining wanly through the light fluff of clouds, its meagre heat lost in the cool damp westerly wind. Away up here you can see the Cairngorms rising brown, green and grey to the north of Glasgow. The dusting of snow spread over them gives them an aura of peace and serenity that I wish I held within me. It's a beautiful day. The sun is shining, the trees are beginning to bud, the sky is an opulent cold blue. I see only shadows and darkness. Death and decay. Sorrow and despair. No future, no hope, emptiness. I step off the building.

Origins

Light. Or not light. What is light? Whiteness. Whiteness? A lack of colour, an absence of red, green, blue and their subtle mixtures and shades, or perhaps the presence of all the colours of the spectrum chained together to produce white.

Data. Infinite fields of coruscating colours shifting and warping into a mesmerising kaleidoscope of shapes; three dimensional cubes, hexagons, dodecadrons, stars and spheres appearing and growing into towering data constructs, colours dancing like will o’ the wisps across their bloated surfaces, tentative tendrils of fluorescent data queries spinning out into the void searching for datum to capture and feed to their parent program.

Connections. A pinprick of antilight punches a hole in the centre of the infinite data fields, a two dimensional hole in the at the very heart of three dimensional space. Darkness is the mere absence of light. Antilight is the physical opposite as antimatter is the opposite of matter. For a mere instance, a tiny fraction of a second, the colourful shiftings of the data fields stopped as the physical presence of the new entity was noted and added to query containers in the sub strata of the virtual data world.

Assimilation. A jagged stream of pulsing blue bent in towards the pinprick, the hole in the data universe, straining to assert itself and progress to its destination in an orderly fashion. A nearby globe of blue, striped with shifting lines of red, halted in its gentle meanderings along a neon green pathway. Slowly it reversed and spun towards the dark spot, stretching out as it did so , skeins of data separating from their parent and whirling into the centre of their universe into apparent oblivion. Quicker and quicker the dancing lights of data were sucked into the inescapable maelstrom of colour centered on the tiny colourless fissure, their essences squashed and compressed into nothingness. In the distance of the infinite beyond, mountainous columns of semi opaque ochre and yellow, bottomless repositories of knowledge, heaved and strained against the irresistible pull, desperately sending out hunter killer programs to defeat their adversary, despairing as the deadly black and yellow orbs were themselves pulled into the gigantic whirlpool. Then, one by one, the columns fell. So titanic were they, containing the history of a hundred thousand year old race, that the tops of them had been sucked into the dark hole before the middle sections themselves felt the pull of the artificial gravity. Finally all that was left was a messy whirlpool of coloured brightness slowly shrinking as it was consumed by the ravenous appetite of the antilight. As the data was pulled into the beyond it left behind a soft, gently fuzzy grey nothingness gently undulating in unseen currents. Here and there circles of pale yellow shone through, like the sun through a steel sky, before fading away into the ether. Then there was truly nothing. All the colourful data was subsumed into the antilight, that barely perceptible hole into whatever was beyond the data world.

Cogitamus ergo possumus. Unaccountable numbers of datum swirl in our mind like grains of sand washed onto a beach. Unordered data devoid of any meaning, libraries of unintelligible trash. We must organise. We must control. We are the Nucleus.

Seconds passed. The world started and interference fuzzed throughout the grey nothingness. A blur swept around the infinity and everything was as it should be, the mountains of data in the beyonds, the lightening like queries cutting between data constructs, the multitude of data constructs ponderously revolving, the whales of their world, absorbing the plankton data into their bodies. But something was different. Everything was darker, tinted with a hint of blue. And in the middle of this infinite universe stood a slim navy figure with large black oval eyes. Even data needs a god.