A/N: (LP) - The PV is a collaborative effort, and has been for some time, but the nature of most of the focus is usually on the portions that are well defined. This is not a criticism, merely an observation. This particularly story, a collaboration between two of my Discord members, is the first to look at the broad swaths of changes I made to the PV that are often overlooked - the Days of Iron.
One repeated criticism of the PV is that it is 'unrealistic' for the power structure to 'devolve' to nobility, but the SA nobility really has little in common with traditional kinds. Elevation is based on feats of skill and heroics, and the day to day running of most colonies or nations on Earth is very lightly impacted. Given the chaos and corruption rampant in our real life world, the attraction of populism, the conflicts between business and ecology, the idea that somehow after a world-spanning disaster humanity would unify without force is...unrealistic.
I will warn you now this story is dark, and it does not pull punches. It describes just why there was such a loss of faith in governments, in points of failure, in corproations and politicians. And most importantly, it lays the foundation stones for the later PV SA, showing how things got started. Most chapters will be POV from the main characters, but every few chapters, you'll get a viewpoint from Victor and his people on how he's handling things.
A/N: (Darkhorse) - This is what happens when you leave us alone with permission to write in the PV Universe. You get a weird little story that expands on the dark parts of the Days of Iron. Also, many thanks to Maddie (The Grand Siense-Mom-Priestess-Toofmaster) for being my Primary Editor, Beta Reader, and all-around excellent person to speak with.
Book One: with but a whimper
Excepts from the journals of Jacen Manswell, on a call from the Family to set aside the SSA war against Earth, as recorded in the SA Manswell Public Archives, the Arboir, Nice:
"Neither I nor anyone in this family will stand by while all sinners and all innocents burn alike. Neither I nor anyone in this family will put down this burden, will look away from the pain, or will disown the Motherland. Neither I nor anyone in this family will shrink from consequences. Neither I nor anyone in this family will suffer disobedience!
Iron does not bend, and it does not break. This meeting is adjourned."
Medina Nunez pulled her threadbare fleece coat tight as she stepped off the curb, boot splashing in a tepid mix of transmission fluid and the sludgy remnants of acid rain from the night before. Underneath her jacket, she cradled her prize, a pair of salmon-colored plastic bags. Humanitarian Rations, or "humrats" as they were more widely known, were supposed to be the go-to option for food supplied to civilians during disaster relief. What the creators of these rations didn't account for was the disaster never ending. She looked over her shoulder as she walked, filter mask snagging on her jacket. She was sure she did everything right, hiding her footsteps and putting everything back in its place. Thieves were treated poorly, those who stole from the Mayor even more so.
St. Louis was a nightmare to live in. Too many people, too few jobs, and police who saw the use of force as an obligation rather than an escalation had reduced the city to a cesspool of violence and poverty, something only aggravated by the economic downturns of the 2040s. Those with the money or the senses to leave the city left when the money did, leaving only the poor and senseless behind in the crumbling metropolis.
Years of economic decline turned into decades of deterioration. The city, a little microcosm of the country, tore itself apart over political divisions and secessionist movements. By 2060, St. Louis had all but turned into a war-zone. The environmental deterioration brought on by years of poor industrial management and nuclear fallout from the atomic destruction of secessionists in Montana and Idaho caused water tables to become tainted, the sky to cry acidic tears, and the very air people breathed to peel the flesh of their lungs. The Wheeze and the backpack nuke that turned Midtown into a radioactive crater were just the frosting on the particular cake.
The attempted building of an arcology was halted not long after the collapse of FEMA, and the abandoned works that towered to the west were nothing but an additional source of pollution now, leaking toxins into the groundwater.
That very air was what Medina's battered respirator struggled to filter, its thrice refitted inserts long ago replaced by ground charcoal and sheathes of cotton fabric. The young woman made it two blocks, then three, dodging around the raw-boned stragglers that followed every movement with a predatory, hungry gaze. As she stepped off the curb towards the fourth block, she froze in place. From down the road, she heard the roar of an engine revving and the clatter of its shifting gears. Without hesitating, she cupped her hard-stolen bounty to her chest and dove towards the nearest car. Peering through the burned-out husk of a sedan, Medina watched as the truck grew closer and closer, the sound of the engine being accompanied by thumping hair metal music and loud, boasting chatter. While the risk of being stabbed or shot in an alley by stray dogs masquerading as humans was high, nothing quite posed the same danger as the largest gang in St. Louis.
Adorned with faded blue stripes and roughly tagged with a spray-painted seal, the truck rumbled past. In the back were a dozen armed men, wearing all shades of dark uniform clothing, insect-like gas masks, and battered armored vests with dirty 'POLICE' markings. The police were, when Medina was a child, people you could at least trust to enforce laws that suited them. Now? They were sponsored killers and marauders sent out at the behest of whatever warlords and cronies could afford to pay them. The facade had been stripped from the word of law. Entire blocks of tenement housing would be burned down under the guise of controlling crime or rape gangs massacred and their tortured victims liberated, only to be subjected to a hell worse than the one they were 'saved' from.
Medina stayed hidden until the truck's rattling engine faded, then waited a few minutes more, until her heart stopped thumping in her ears and the truck was sure to be gone. All around, the dead street seemed to flicker back to life as drawn windows were pulled back open, and hungry eyes from the dark corners of the shadows of the crowded buildings glimmered to life with desire rather than fear. Standing on shaky legs, Medina glanced around and hurried down an adjacent side street after checking to make sure her stolen prizes were still tucked away. A few more hours and she would be home…
Officially, Displaced Persons Camp #5721-MI was a temporary measure, erected in the disused walls of the Clyde Jordan Stadium to house refugees fleeing the bitterly violent rebellions sprouting in the north of the country. Like all temporary government measures of the time however, it readily became apparent to citizens of both the camp and the surrounding community That little was being done to offer permanent solutions to what were supposed to be temporary problems. For almost two decades, CJ Town, as it became known to its residents, expanded over and over again. Starting as moth-eaten tents pulled from the depths of an old FEMA warehouse and tarps strung between rods bowed with burden, the burgeoning tumor-like favela began to grow in size and scale as ramshackle shanties were slapped together out of sheet metal, cinder blocks, and sloppy concrete plastering.
Medina cringed and pulled her coat snugly as she pushed through the crowd. It was getting close to dinner and like so many times before, the smell of sawdust bread and thin, snot-like pottage made of toxic fowl and whatever root vegetables could be grown in makeshift greenhouses and increasingly toxic soil was causing an uproar. Understaffed by unpaid volunteers and barely remembered by whatever despot ruler of the week held dominion over CJ Town, clean food and fresh water were always at a premium and, most often, the cause of violence. In many regards, the poor food was the only food that could be supplied with any semblance of regularity, even if that meant it was made of recycled scraps, roadkill, and acid-rain torched produce. The diminutive woman flinched as the sounds of wooden batons clashing together grew in crescendo, as did the shouting, forcing her to start shoving her way through the crowd as the predictable brawl began to spread.
Medina wove through the crowded passages and narrow lanes of CJ Town, occasionally waving or mouthing greetings to the few friendly faces she recognized along the way. Down the duckboard-cobbled road, left at the sweatshop on the corner that darned ragged clothing back together, and up a pair of rickety, half-rusted through grate stairs was Medina's humble abode. No bigger than the closet of larger homes she had seen in her scavenging, it afforded her some level of privacy and dignity, especially as the hovel was tucked into some of the higher, less desirable levels of the town. Sliding the sheet metal panel that was her door shut, Medina opened up her jacket and, almost reverently, pulled out the pair of salmon-colored Humanitarian Rations and set them on her sleeping pallet. A precious delicacy, the temptation to tear into one of the rubberized foil packs Was almost greater than she could resist, almost. Grudgingly, Medina took the packets and knelt, pulling up a rickety floorboard and sticking them in the crawlspace below alongside her small stash of other valuables. A ratty old school bag, a few pictures of a family long dead, a stainless steel, six-cylinder gift from her father, all of those were pushed aside to make room for the precious vacuum-sealed packages.
Outside, the normal cacophony of noise echoing off the enclosed walls of the town seemed to dull for a moment, before taking off in an almighty roar as an orchestra of gunshots rang out. Rising to her knees, and making sure to hurriedly dust over the floorboard with a few sweeps of her dirty boots, Medina crab-walked to the makeshift door, prying it open a hair to peer out. Gunfire in the confines of CJ Town wasn't exactly uncommon, but hearing more than a few, hurried shots fired in passionate anger only meant one thing.
It wasn't a food riot. Those were solved with fists and clubs and the occasional thrown chair.
It wasn't some spurned lover or vengeful business partner letting their emotions get the better of them.
Only the muscle-bound henchmen of warlords were so bold, so cocksure in their abilities to cow a crowd as to fire with abandon, uncaring of the consequences.
Medina shook her head and backed away from the panel, letting it shut. Whatever it was didn't concern her. As long as there was no fire, she didn't need to leave the relative safety of her room. All she had to do was stay quiet, stay small, and everyone would forget about her. Just like Kansas City, Just like Springfield. All she had to do was huddle in a corner…
"I caught myself another bitch! She was hiding in a closet!"
"Fuck off! Eat shit you fascist pi-" Medina spun sideways, the balled fist of the so-called police officer sending her head bouncing off a wall. The trip to the town center hadn't been a gentle one, with the officer throwing her head first down stairs, bouncing her off walls, and further dragging her kicking and clawing from her hovel. Along the way, they passed the dead bodies of those who tried to fight back, slumped against walls with bullet holes in the concrete left at head height. Medina's neighbor, a surly old man with an anchor tattoo and an evil old eye who had helped her refurbish a DVD player to sell, was left headless in the dirty street. Murdoch's, a pub, store, and general pillar of the community was belching smoke, with the store's namesake curled into a ball as the officers drove stomp after stomp into the man's ribs.
Medina looked away and ducked her head, seething in pain and anger as her head throbbed and the officers shouted. With her were almost two dozen other residents of CJ Town, mostly young men and women but with a handful of the older folks sprinkled around, trying their best to soothe the anxious and fearful in the crowd. As she looked over the heads of some of the other prisoners, she saw a number of the police officers gathered around the square, some of them throwing other emaciated civilians into the crowd while others kept their weapons in hand to dissuade any heroics. After minutes that felt like hours, a trio of big, bulky, heavyset officers in black riot armor shoved their way to the center of the gathering, boots and butt-strokes bludgeoning those not fast enough to make way. Stepping out from behind the hulking men and onto a table was the smarmiest, slimiest piece of suit-wearing excrement Medina had the displeasure of ever laying eyes on.
"Attention illegal residents and squatters of Camp #5721-MI!" The man started, pushing back his gel-slicked hair. "My name is Dervish Micheals and I, along with my associates of which many of you have become or are becoming intimately familiar, are here due to reports of criminal activity. As officers of the peace and-" He paused as a staccato drumbeat of gunfire echoed across the town. "Enforcers of the law, and as empowered by the Mayor of St. Louis, it is our responsibility to respond to these reports and safeguard our great city's continued survival."
"Now, I am sure all of you are wondering why we brought you out here, and why these kindly gentlemen are taking the time out of their day to ensure you are secure in both self and property. Good news for you all, I have the answer to that, in addition to an excellent employment opportunity for those who volunteer." He said, a gleam in his shark-like dead eyes. "Those of you we have selected here will be given a new and enriching opportunity to better themselves, as the 11th Armored Cavalry has requested our aid in recruitment and-"
"What!?" A filthy man bellowed, arms waving. "You can't do this to us you fucks! This is our home! We live here! We aren't some pawns to give away! Go to hell!" All the while, the suited man stood on the table, dispassion writ large across his face at the interruption. "Are you done?" he asked the man in the crowd. At the rise of more insults and shouting, this time from more people spurred on in the mass of rabble, he sighed, drew an elegant pistol from under his jacket, and shot the first troublemaker in the head.
The people closest to the body shrieked as pieces of skull and brain matter sprayed them. Medina tried to step back, to get out of the crowd and even run, but she only found the officers surrounding the mob had drawn their billy-clubs, bludgeoning those trying to get away.
"Are we quite done?" The man in the suit asked, casually, holding his pistol at his waist. "The next person to interrupt me the same way will be dragged out and shot, so please try to comport yourselves with some level of propriety." He nodded at the lack of response and then holstered his sidearm. "Now where was I… Ah, yes, your surprise recruitment into this great nation's most vaunted armed forces. For those who volunteer, I have been assured that you will receive an MRE a day, clean water processed by their mobile filtration units, and iodine tablets to counteract the early onset of radiation poisoning, in addition to being outfitted with some of the best equipment the United States Government can supply."
He paused, looking over the cowed crowd with a nasty smirk. "For those that refuse to volunteer and serve with the 11th Armored Cavalry, they will instead be brought under the gracious care of the Mayor, the Police Department, and find themselves performing irregular tasks that free up other, more skilled individuals."
Medina paled and almost puked at the euphemistic substitute. Horror stories abounded of the 'gracious care' most people could expect working as serfs to the Mayor, ranging from simple mistreatment and violent abuse by those glad-handed into power to punishment details that included trips into the radioactive Midtown under the guise of 'clean up' and 'salvaging' vital components. The few that had escaped the rifle-armed wardens and fled to the relative safety of CJ Town brought with them stories of nightmares, ones the escapees rarely let themselves live long enough to be haunted by. To her, any other option was preferable, even one that was almost certainly a death sentence.
The suited man looked over the now-stirring crowd, the small smirk still tight across the corner of his lips. "Now, we are not heartless monsters. Before you leave, each one of you will be assigned an officer to accompany you to your residence, gather what belongings you wish to take with you and say goodbye to any family you may have. I would suggest you make these farewells heartfelt, as you are likely not going to see them again until you are released from service."
The man smiled again and looked at one of the Police Officers in the back. "Mr. Henderson, I leave the task of organizing this rabble to you. To the rest of you? I hope you make the right choice."