Sunglasses, Age of Empires Original 2, Spartan is 16 Chapter for AOE

Jacket is pay

Ch. 4

The M-16 felt cold to touch, arcing upward out of the back of his cloth garment, a white overcoat concealing him from eyes and from the rain. His fingers, touching the gun, hoped for a moment of calm, shaking as they were.

M wasn’t sure: did he kill the machine? Why did it try to kill him? And how the hell did it get a job as a bartender in Wake Alpha?

He looked up at the rays of light, letting the sun cool him and heat him up in its odd celestial way. He wondered about the darkness not so far away, the other side of the planet, and he wanted to remember---for that one moment—what had really happened on Wake Dark, what had set the evil in motion. A piece of him, he felt, was over there, and he simply could not figure out why; the only thought was of father: a man of history, a drinker, a forgotten soul who wanted to be forgotten after mom died. He felt the pain gash at him, reeling him in like a net, telling him not to think anymore and just do.

But that was what his father had done: stopped thinking. It’s all that made sense anymore. He had to think; it was the choice; it made him different.

Pulling on the gun, he lost himself in the wave of walking straight out of the city. “Trapped,” he whispered to no one, making sense of nothing with it. He knew no other place, knew few other ways to live, than living and fighting here.

“Best to make the best of it,” he recalled his father telling him.

So instead of leaving the city and running away, he turned in, pushed past the suburbs, walked into a gang area, still harnessing his weapon; walked past a military outpost covered in the yellow of the elite warriors of Wake, the Spartans with direct bloodlines to the old world; walked deeper into the city, his eyes catching other’s eyes, his steps a tide pushing him onward. He went to the old world, here, the first settlement Persepolis, built much like the one of Athens, or at least the pictures of Athens. He walked right into the eye of a storm, not realizing it. He walked into the Wake Spartan dining area, looking for nothing, finding too much, he later realized, finding far too much.

“Wake Spartans,” said the recruiter, “aren’t about making choices, or thinking, or reacting, they act, they make the opponent react, they don’t think. And you want to know why, brother? You want to know why Wake Spartans kill more of the Red Monsters than anyone else? Because we have souls.”

“Souls?”

“A piece of us—“

“Why would we have souls?”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. What are you, a Christian?”

“Where have you been?”

“In school,” M looked down.

“Right, they teach you how to use this,” this warrior said, pointing to his head, “but I will teach you how to use this,” he said, pointing at his hand, “and then this.” The fingers rested on M’s heart.

# ##

M took the gun and set it on the table; the metal of the M-16 calmed him for some reason, reminding him of his calm father sitting at the table all those moments ago and telling stories, saying the right things, not speaking of the madness and how it was in his day, for in those moments it was his day.

“It’s my only weapon,” he said smiling through the lie.

“So I see.” His name was Artimus, a descendant of a great Greek philosopher who turned into a warrior poet when his family was murdered by Persian mercenaries; the best kinds of men were made out of extreme pain, as were the worst. “But do you truly know how to use it? Can you spot a man six hundred yards away with the sight, can you see a Free Machine stopping because of one single bullet?”

“In my experience, you shoot for the head, human or machine, and it works out.”

“Cute, good,” and the aging Combat Spartan pulled out a cigar, two actually, and handed one to M. “It’s a nasty habit but it’s doubtful you’ll die from it.”

“What is it? Drugs?”

“In a sense, but it doesn’t have the effects of opium or angel dust.”

“Oriental?”

“A bit west of the old Sparta, a bit west,” lighting it, holding it in his mouth as he inspected the M-16. “This is a good weapon,” and he tried to break it in half. What the hell! M screamed. “A good weapon,” Artimus answered, “is the kind that keeps working when it’s broken.”

“A blade?”

“That breaks isn’t worthy of a Combat Spartan. Tell me, where did you get this weapon?”

“Long story.”

“I have all the time in the world, M.”

“My father gave it to me, said it was special.”

“Ah, a Talisman, but there is more.”

“My mother altered it, the scope, because it was meant for the old world with old gravity. They say weight is less there, that you can’t move quite as fast. So she altered the sights to make it work better, even made bullets out of …” he slowed, a guttural laugh building in his system, “Silver so my father could kill any wolf that came into my bed when I was a baby. They spent years putting it together. In one of my father’s drunken memories, he said he did break it.”

“And?”

“And she fixed it. He says it’s never been the same. He said it’s never been the same. That the gun lost hope in him.”

“Ah, so you do know of spirits,” said Artimus, looking down the scope.

“I suppose so. But what does it matter? A Free Machine has no spirit. I only want to know how to kill them: where they are, how to end them, where the rest are, how to blow them all up.”

“Violence.”

“Violence.”

Artimus set the gun down, pulled up his boot, and laid an old Roman model blade, called a Gladius, on the table. Yet M saw differences in the design. Originally, from his history, he knew the Gladius blades come from the Iberian Peninsula in the, from Spaniard lands. This blade was different: a red handle, a star on the tip that looked quite like a diamond, and a heavier edge than a normal Gladius which made it seem much like an axe hacking downward. He held it in his hands, eyeing the tip, touching the tip and drawing blood. “Real?”

“Real.”

“Yours?”

“Yours.”

“He found hell yesterday,” Artimus continued with his own stories of who he was, what he be, where the stars set for him and his dreams.
M wanted to ask a question, like exactly what the meaning was, yesterday, but he let Artimus continue.

“Old ways stopped working. He broke our phalanx, our supreme weapon against the darkness of the night, against death herself, and all my brothers died, and both my sons died, and all that came out of the darkness was me, a blade in one hand, a handful of pain in the other. I just couldn’t stop: killing. It changes you, seeing death, and I saw her.”

“Madness!” M wanted to say, wanted to scream out. Death? There was no death: the old visceral idea that hell didn’t serve it, humanity served the goddess of the underworld. It was all wrapped up in philosophy and religion. Madness! he wanted to yell, but he bit his tongue and continued listening.

“There is more—and I see it in your eyes—to this world than the small battles we face every day. The archons have fallen from the graces of the light. A war of attrition, see, between humanity, and it will take one soul to bring us back together against the Free Machines.”

There was a moment of silence, M holding his breath the entire time, until he let some air out, finding the right words, the only word. “Who?”

“Not you.”

“Why not?”

“A girl. A hero born out of the night of Wake.”

##

Both taking puffs on their cigars—which M found made his mouth taste like gruel—they left the small Combat Spartan operation center. M had many questions. Who … what … where … and why were simply the basics. Who ruled Wake Dark? Red? That stung him: the evil darkness ruled by a man who sold out his own people to machines, ending the Wake golden age, killing so very many. He wanted Red dead. More, he wanted Red’s death to be painful. He would take him apart piece by piece until there was nothing left save some DNA evidence; he would burn the that; he would end his first life.

“I’ve never killed.”

“And you’ve never—“

“A human.”

“Right. If you want to be a Combat Spartan, you’ll need more than weapons to kill.”

He looked up at space. “Why can’t we go up instead of around?”

“What do you mean?” Artimus’s eyes lit up. “You want to hit the Free Machines in space?”

“Right.”

“No aircraft left not on full time defense duty.”

“Could we borrow one?”

“Could ‘borrow’ one if you got past a few battalions and hacked into the net.”

“The net?”

“Don’t ask me, I live outside of technology. Scares the damn out of me.”

“I have a secret,” M said, pulling out his own blade, “And it’s one I’ve never told anyone. I’ve known you one day,” he slowed. He made eye contact with Artimus, the engineer of the Combat Spartans, the last of a generation; the rest died by the bottle or smoked themselves senseless; the rest died in battle, to be remembered or forgotten. “I have my own blade, a magical blade, a powerful—“

“Spare me the poetry; don’t show it to me.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not in the way things go. I must tell you a secret then, and you wouldn’t want to hear that. No one should hear my secrets.”

The blade in his hand, the free blade in his palm, he eyed the outskirts of Wake Alpha. It was the capital, and there was a sort of peace occurring here, a time of relief. Death was here too, death and the end, not so far from each other, not so far from Wake. They said—

And he stopped, realizing Artimus had stepped away, to a small marker on the ground.

“There was a time,” said the Combat Spartan, “When this line was the one line we had to hold. I wanted to forget it, but memories that shouldn’t be forgotten rarely are.”

“A line?”

“Sometimes you have to make a stand for something; ours was for survival.”

“Tell me everything.”

“I’ve told you much,” replied Artimus.

“And I want more.”

The story went slowly at first, the gate bringing Spartans and even a few Athenians and Egyptians across the galaxy. There had been stories of gates crossing the gaps in space before; early Greek science evolved quickly, explaining that traveling through this space the Earth rescided in, was quite impossible. But someone, from some other time, perhaps a dozen millennia before the first Dorians “civilized” Greece, knew this first. And they built a gate, with a key. And this key took a mass of Spartans and a few dozen Athenian and Egyptian carpenters and scientists and philosophers across the gap. To men with faith, it was a last chance to escape the solar system, Noah’s voyage in action. Stories of gates were as common as stories of Babel and God, yet this gate existed, this gate worked, and this gate brought Dorians to Wake.

“So it went,” said Artimus, “And they don’t tell you that in school.”

“Some of it.”

“Sure,” Artimus replied, “there was a ‘magical” gate that took us here, a place rich in goods. But we changed here on Wake, very early: we became power mongers and tech lords and opium and rum addicts; we destroyed more than we created in the first millennia.”

“Millenia! They said we’ve been here four—“

“Not four generations, not even close. It’s the believers, who are close on many things, but want us to believe we’re still connected to the lands of Earth, that the gods still exist, that God is still here with us. We can’t believe this is us, we are here, and there is nothing but darkness and light. It’s too tragic, even for a poet.”

“I don’t believe you,” said M.

“You don’t have to, my soldier, because I might be wrong. There are stories of men being here before even us, the original builders of the gate and some Chaos God, who were sick with technology when man had yet to build a city. But it’s what I believe; it’s in the Book of Lights.”

M stopped, pulling a small, tattered and leather bound copy of Book of Lights out. “The machine gave me this.”

“Yes?”

“And then tried to kill me.”

Artimus stopped. They weren’t going anywhere in particular, in a philosophical sense, but on the physical level they had left Wake Alpha a dozen miles ago, going through small hamlets and crossing bridges over dark and sick looking rivers. They called them the blood rivers; no one drank from them; no one went there unless they intended to die.

“He gave you the Book of Lights and then tried to kill you. Ha! You see the symbolism, correct?”

“No.”

“You will.”

They stopped at a bridge, where a Combat Spartan in ancient ceremonial gear, with even his spear and short sword, stood. He walked toward them, his head down and his walking slow; old, was M’s original thought, for he walked angled, like a drunk, but held his spear steady and kept his eyes downward, looking at the stones on the ground.

“Keepers of the Light,” said the Spartan.

“Bringers of the Machines,” said Artimus.

“Are the end and the beginning.”

The Combat Spartan went to the ground, laying his head on the sand. “I grow old, Artimus.”

“I have—“ but M was stopped.

“He’s just a Spartan Poet, my friend, just a Spartan who fought at the Gate so long ago.” “You fought at the gate?”

“Fraid so.”

“And?”

“And nothing.”

“How old are you? That was two centuries ago.”

“I am very old.” And he was. This veteran missed one eye, had a slight stutter to his voice, one lip pushing against the other when words came out; his motion was chaotic, for he danced with death; his body itself was huge, but slim in the gut, his arms muscled even for an old man. “Have you not known the ways of the Art?”

“Nope,” said M, sick of everything and too confused to care.

“it’s the path to immortality..”

“No one lives forever.”

“True, but some of us live longer. The keepers of the light, they live on, young man, and I am one of them.”

“I am a Combat Spartan.”

“Good,” the veteran said, uncaring.

“I killed a Free Machine.”

“And what? You want respect and power.”

M wanted to kill him, to let his rage out. He wanted to tell him how he’d lived alone for 8 years, living on the streets sometimes, taken in by friends and strangers, bums and the lowest of society. Because society didn’t help the fallen, because ..

The Spartans had forgotten him; he didn’t want their respect; he wanted answers.

“I want more than that.”

“Ah, ambition is a sin to certain of us. Not me. Certainly not me.” The Spartan pulled off his helmet, a long wave of graying hair falling down around his shoulders, then set his blade on the ground, giving M his good eye for a moment when he did so.

“I have better blades.”

“You don’t. This one speaks. Took it off a Free Machine at the gate.”

“This was made by a Free Machine,” replied M.

“What!”

Artimus let out a laugh. “The old sage is surprised.”

“Let me see this blade,” said the veteran.

“For what?”

“You want something?”

“Yes.”

“As always. I will tell you a story.”

“I want access to this gate. No stories.”

The gate stood, casting a shadow over the expanse. It held the old Dorians, it was said, or it held the keepers of hell, others said. If you saw this gate on an ordinary day—and which are those?—you might get a quick glimpse and keep walking. The doorway was made of wood, a gentle blacksmith had placed gems on the handles; an old door, this gate, and it didn’t seem to mind them staring at it. For some reason, M wanted to speak with it, like it had much to say.

“You’re saying this old beaten doorway took man to the stars?”

“Quit reading your textbooks and open your eyes.”

“To what?”

“The wood, feel the wood, an old tree, from a time of angels on this earth. An old soul, not from a man or a women, not from a dog or a cat; this beast is alive with the very beginning of the universe, created by a race before even the angels, long before the Dorians.”

“It’s a wooden doorway.”

“Is he always this questioning?” The old man asked.

They weren’t in a physical place, quite, but at a place in between times, in an arc of Wake world, the so called no mans land where light and darkness mixed and brought many beastial creatures to life, and housed most of the Keepers of the Light. There were no cities; there were no hamlets, villages with walls; all that there was wasn’t tangible. It was an odd place for a warrior to be, it was the time of the philosopher, the space of the poet.
“It’s not even straight,” he almost said, but didn’t. He believed, for in ancient Greece, so the story went, strong wood was more valuable than twice its weight in gold. It built ships, ships that colonized the world; and it built homes, homes which stopped the storms; and walls, walls that kept the darkness at bay.

He almost fell over, his blade falling out at a very odd time. It came out like it had a life of it’s own. “Come back, friend,” he whispered to it, waiting for a response. But the machine, or the AI, or the spirit, had nothing to say—it just lit up the entire area, pushing the darkness away. M smelled beasts approaching; a few called out, screaming at the light spreading.

“An old tree which could keep even the most evil techlords at bay.”

“But they didn’t have tech then,right?”

“There were aliens, there were wars, there were rifts in heaven and in time. It gets complicated.”

“So angels came through here?”

“Angels did, in fact, come through this gate. And one other, on Wake Dark. Here the Keepers kept them at bay; it wasn’t as good on the other side of the planet, where their wings took them straight into the capital city. Angry angels. Killer angels.”

“Angry. Why?”

“No one knows,” said the old keeper, his teeth showing, his lie showing.

M looked around, lost in a sense. His physical body, he learned, would transcend this shell, but that was much later in his journey. He just didn’t know where he was, but where he went, it seemed hell would follow. It always had.

He turned in time to see the flock of angels approaching, and for some reason, perhaps the right one, the blade went straight into his open right hand, it’s coolness creating goosebumps on his wrist and arms, and it was angry—he felt that too.

“I won’t even ask,” he said, turning around to see the old keeper narrowing an old fashioned crossbow, the kind created a century or two ago by an aging inventor; and he saw Artimus pulling out his Gladious blade, ready for combat and always willing to kill. The angels stopped, eyeing the gate, screaming out in an old angel language lost around the time of the gate..

“Where exactly are we?”

“In angel territory.”

“The gate is—“

“Yes.” The old keeper shot an arrow toward the angels, who quickly darted around them and cascaded into the hills, as though the three showed no threat to the gate. Or maybe it was something else.

Or maybe, M thought, they retreated.

“I am leaving.”

“Right.” There was no argument. The three approached the wilderness with a gate to another place at their back, a crossover through space and time holding them tightly. All three, one an aging Combat Spartan with an eye for blades, another an old keeper with a few centuries under his belt, and of course our renegade hero M—all three looked back to the gate with hopeful eyes. They would see it’s true purpose, the stars said, soon enough.

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