Skyward - (NaNoWriMo 2013 Novel)

Rats. Catcher. - (Nov 15, Friday)

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It was the bit of being a Peacemaker that he hated most: the rapelling.

Or was it repelling? It did, after all, require a little of both.

Every few weeks, Peacemakers were required to escort a member of the MegaDo's architectural advisory committee down the surface of each 'Do. The inspections had begun as a way to spot any structural flaws and head them off at the pass, before they passed into the realm of actually threatening the integrity of the Do. These days the inspections were more defense-based and less structural: The peacemakers were looking for evidence of skypirates attempting to tunnel though the thick, outer flexcreet layer that protected the 'Dos. When they did detect evidence of attempts to break into the 'Do (both sides of the equation had independently decided to refer to the practice as "cracking"), the Architectural Advisor was there to evaluate the severity of the structural threat posed by the cracking attempts.

Technically, these inspections never happened. To admit that they did would unseat two very convenient white lies that the governing Corps had planted in the minds of civilians: namely, that the 'Dos were invulnerable to attack or erosion, and that to leave the confines of the 'Do would mean death; either by lingering Virus particles or by the Wild.

That last was not a very good lie. Over the years numerous inspection teams had been lost to predation from the Wild; whether it was from airborne predators while still suspended on high, or from land-based predators when the teams were require to inspect each building's lowest floors.

Admitting to the inspections, and too how many personnel were engaged to carry them out would also have tipped the governing corp's concerns about how serious a threat they thought the pirates to be. If they ever referenced the pirates at all, they generally tried to pass them off as a nuisance, and not a credible threat to 'Do security.

Theoretically, the outer surfaces of the 'Dos were inpregnable by anything but the most potent of weapons.

Theoretically, Nothing in the pirates' arsenals should have been able to scratch all of that reinforced flexcreet.

Theoretically.

However, the practical reality of the matter was that whatever the sky pirates lacked in terms of firepower, they more than made up for in cunning--in dogged determination. This particular band of reprobates (they called themselves the browns or the greys or something) had proved themselves particularly dogged when it came to cracking 'Dos

They were learning, the sky barnacles. They were always fucking learning. He didn't know if life Outside made you smart, but it certainly seemed to make you quick. One 'boarding party' of pirates was easily contained and dispatched. They had drop bulkheads and noxious backflow vents for that. However, when you had multiple boardings, all happening in sync, things got a little trickier. Add to this the fact that the boardings seemed to get less random all the time, and it got to a point where the Peacemakers actually had to work for their enhanced rations and accommodations.

A few months back, the pirates had cracked right into a housing block in the industrial layers, and it was determined that the standard drop-and-gas protocol would mean an unacceptable loss of valuable labour, so the Peacemakers had actually had to get off their asses, head into the dark, dank block and go bunk to bunk, pacifying and dragging out pirates. When you consider that Industry Civies didn't have much in the way of flash uniforms, and most of them just wore the rags that they'd dragged up from the immigration layers, it got to be pretty hard to tell what was a pirate and what was a lawful civie. He figured there was probably a good couple of pirates who had successfully immigrated into the industrial layer that day, but such concerns were above his ration grade.

Fortunately, though the powers that be designated labourers to be above gassing, they had no qualms about the unceremonious expulsion of sky vermin. After the peacemakers had stunned most everyone in the industrial housing block, and sorted through the limp bodies to make their best guesses at which ones were pirates, they dragged each of them to the rough, meter-deep hole they'd cracked in the flexcrete and tossed each one of them out into the the hundreds of meters of grey nothing between that layer and the Wild below.

The prowlers ate well that night.

After that attack, the pirates started hitting mass-pop layers more often, sometimes synching up raids on multiple high-pop layers at the same time. He tried not to give it too much thought because when he did, it really wigged him out. He'd only been working as a peacemaker for about four years, but he felt like, even in his short time in the corps, he'd seen the the sky rats get smarter. They'd gone from a chaotic mess that occassionally scored a real hit on the 'Dos to an actual concern that seemed to now be putting some real calculation into their raids. It was like the someone had handed them a map of the 'Do.

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Here we see two sides of the same coin: the evolving skypirate menace, and the peacemakers who are mostly tasked with combatting them.

Nothing all that deep and epic to comment on tonight, though i feel like the peacemaker's tone is the most divergent i've come across yet...apart from the mad ol Ticktock Man!

The scene with the peacemaker rapelling is only just begun!