Should auld acquaintance be forgot, By Alex Wakeford (Forgotten Heroines of 10kd)

by Alex Wakeford, who after he inevitably gets famous will allow us to be a footnote on his wikipedia page, but only on Thursdays.
art by Bri Crozier, who will not be able to escape having us credited on their wikipedia page. Sorry about that. Our bad.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

The enemy ship was large, monolithic, and boasted no interesting features to speak of, which struck the Tourist as an equally unremarkable opening she would be sure to change when she came to retell this story.

Crewed by a menace that brought dread wherever they went, they’d plunged through dimension barriers and shattered probability mirrors to lose them. But, true to their reputation, they just kept coming.

The Canon would never stop coming.

(Much better, the Tourist noted.)

She danced around the central console of her own vessel with Ashlyn, dressed in her white lace shirt and grey hybrid jumper. And oh, what a double-act they made! They were to piloting a hyper-advanced narrative waverider as Abbott and Costello were to physical comedy – they were Laurel and Hardy, Ant ‘n’ Dec, Cheese and Crackers!

Speaking of the latter…

The Tourist furrowed her brow and took a long drag from her cigarette as she spotted, in the corner of her eye, crumbs fall to the floor from the crackers that Shona was loudly munching on while studiously monitoring the tactical readout on the viewscreen. Even the Tourist’s shadow seemed independently disapproving, she noted its stern posture with its hands on its hips, before she realised that she was emulating the same stance…

She turned to see Miranda zipping across controls on the upper-levels that now existed, and Pathway was charging up a comically large directed energy weapon – preparing to deliver a swift and explosive refutation to the Canon.

At that moment, an entitlement-class torsion missile detonated off the bow (if a pyramid vessel can be said to have such a thing) and – to the Tourist’s irritation – scrambled all the controls’ functions.

“Miranda,” she called to her rollerblading companion, who was continuing to ascend up to the sixth level that seemed to have suddenly sprung into existence. “Get these systems under control, they’ve got me flying on inverted!”

“What’s wrong with inverted?” Shona grumbled through a mouthful of crackers.

“Everything’s wrong with inverted!” the Tourist and Ashlyn snapped back.

Pathway slammed the release on their ship’s entrance portal and heaved her energy weapon into an aiming position at the first of the Canon’s streaming pods.

“They’re broadcasting this?” Ashlyn exclaimed. “They must be upset!”

“Five women existing in an independent narrative? Of course they’re upset!” Miranda called down from the seventeenth level. “Just be glad that the first thing I did was mute their repeating comms at us about how we’re unrea—"

Another torsion missile detonated, this time triggering the activation of random systems. Whatever was said next went entirely unheard by Ashlyn Oswin, as she was enveloped in an emergency teleportation field.

Her form shattered into its component molecules, tumbling through unconventional space. The Pyroclastic Kingdoms of Shuntspace, the Stellar Engines of the Dead Star Nine, the Interpluvial Helix – all these places and more, until she arrived (thankfully with a successful reconstruction) on the most exciting, most luminous world she could hope to be.

Earth.

*

D’you remember the first time you went to the beach?

There’s that moment where you come over that first hill and catch a glimpse of how the sea spans the horizon. Your young mind can’t quite comprehend its expanse, all you can do is become lost in how the light dances on the waves and watch the rolling tides.

Battlefields are like that too. But instead of the sea, it seems like an equally vast plain of cold and muddy morass. It is the frigid air that is the rolling tide, the vast interconnected network of barbed wire that is the light upon the waves, as the mind attempts to untangle what it is bearing witness to.

And it’s not true, of course – the expanse of it. No, not on this particular battlefield. The average amount of space between opposing trenches was no more than a few hundred yards at most…

Ashlyn had materialised in the heart of No Man’s Land.

Scanning the horizon, she saw two strange rectangular boxes sitting on a distant hill as the only notable landmark that wasn’t wreathed in wire. She thought of the others, where they must be now, whether they would escape, if they could possibly find her, and if she was herself stepping into far greater danger here.

But as she warily stepped forward, it was not the staccato beat of single-shot gunfire that greeted her, nor the bellowing of orders from a captain.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?

It was singing.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?

Ashlyn reached the top of a muddy ridge and saw something she wouldn’t soon forget.

A great crowd of brown and green and grey uniforms stood together, more than she could count. Some shook hands, some held onto each others’ shoulders, medics tended to the wounded on both sides.

Hateful old men would do their best to ensure that nothing like this would happen again. And their evil will endure, taking ever new forms, combat against which may well be eternal – their enmity forever unslaked.

But for this single moment in history, it was two voices that joined as one, people who realised that they had no reason to hate one-another, and – however fleeting it may have seemed – the human spirit won out.

And Ashlyn, who had seen much of this evil and would fight against it with every ounce of her being regardless of whether it was a winning battle or not, was resolute that the same spirit could prevail again.

She smiled as a bear of a German soldier joined the crowd and bellowed in

Es ist in jedem Anbeginn,
das Ende nicht mehr weit
wir kommen her und gehen hin,
und mit uns geht die Zeit

The song faded from Ashlyn’s ears, as if some kind of barrier had been surreptitiously placed between them, and she found herself moving – only half-aware of where she was going – towards an old man who looked every bit a stranger to this place as she did.

She noticed that there was only one box on the horizon now. Odd…

He stood away from the crowd. His clothes were ripped and torn; Ashlyn momentarily mistook the visible tufts of red velvet sticking through his coat for blood as she got closer. The thick, furrowed eyebrows betrayed a kindly-looking face, and his untidy mop of curled grey hair was anything but regulation-length for a soldier.

She couldn’t understand what it was that stirred in her, compelled her to keep walking towards him. It was like something written into her organic circuitry and she’d just learned how to read.

She didn’t know why she smiled at this stranger who – upon facing her – looked as if he were seeing the face of an old friend.

He said a name, but it was not her own.

I think you know who it was, and she went along with it regardless.

*

“Curator!” a young lieutenant approached in some distress. “The Canon is going down, what are your orders?”

They had sustained a hit to their ventral cannon which caused a wildcat destabilisation of the Lore Drive, not to mention their streaming pods had been picked off one-by-one, bringing a premature end to their four-hour broadcast.

“Curator!”

The Curator stood there, dazed, watching the cascading explosion cause a major breach in their now disordered hull. His wispy blond hair looked like an independent sentient being from how it stood on his head as power transferred to the inertia dampers.

“Your uniform, lieutenant,” the Curator spoke at last, his voice sounding as if it were light-years away.

“My uniform?”

“I see you have deigned to impress your peers and superiors by modelling it on the Imperial battle-dress uniform.”

“Yes, sir…” An alarm began to blare, signalling the bridge crew to abandon ship.

The Curator then rounded on him, bellowing in his face as the alarm blared louder. “AND YET, you have misplaced no fewer than THREE essential canonical details, aligning yourself not with your duties as a canonical curator, but a lowly creator! The punishment for this fakery carries a ship-wide reprimand, followed by immediate excision by airlock.”

He needn’t have bothered, for the bridge was consumed with flame and the Canon was no more.

*

It only took a few minutes for the familiar pyramid vessel to materialise and for the other four women to come rushing out to find Ashlyn, who stood waiting with an expectant look on her face, before plunging herself into the arms of a welcoming group hug.

“We were terribly worried!” said the Tourist. “Luckily, Miranda was able to track the emergency teleport’s coordinates.”

“Turns out that was on the seven-hundred-and-fifth level,” Miranda grinned. “But we’ve managed to size things down to normal again. Hopefully…”

Shona nibbled on a chocolate bourbon, offering the pack around. “Well, now that we’re all back together, let’s go and find a happy story.”

“About that…” Ashlyn grabbed Pathway by the hand and pulled her and the group over to the top of the ridge, revealing the sight of the Christmas Armistice.

“It would appear that we’re in one…”

Ashlyn thought back on the strange old man. They hadn’t spoken for very long at all. Indeed, she hadn’t really been sure what to say, but she felt in a way she couldn’t quite describe that what had passed between them carried the weight of many years.

She was certain that, in some fashion, she may well have just saved the old man’s life, and that some invisible purpose within her had been fulfilled – for the last time.

But now, the time had come to revel in merriment, as the soldiers started up their song again in a gleeful encore, and the five heroines were moved to join.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?


​

Copyright 2020 Arcbeatle Press and James Wylder
Any resemblance to persons living or dead, fictional or real, or events past or present is either purely coincidental or done firmly within the grounds of loving parody.
Any attempt to use this story to make weird claims on a wiki argument thread should probably be grounds to ignore any other arguments from the user making those claims forever. Just saying. It's an April fools story, I mean really.