Cut The Camera
10 Aug 2024Meowers
...The screen flickered for a few moments while the terminal fought an uphill battle of connecting, decoding and denoising, and then a picture appeared: a live news broadcast, on one of the innumerous local channels. The action took place on an Earth-like agricultural planet, in a temporary encampment set up by anti-xeno forces. There, a mere twenty light years from the frontlines, a large group of people held a demonstration, standing against a line of soldiers, next to a makeshift landing area on a grass field.
"They turned or' homes into a warzone," the reporter interviewed one of the protesters, an old man with a tired look on his face. "We ne'er ask'd for it. One day, I w's repa'ring that ol' farm bot, next mornin' I 'ave a damm milit'ry base a mile away. Damm ship nois's scare the anim'ls sick an' they 'ave doz'ns of 'em. Those damm Tha'goids 'ave ne'er been to this syst'm, why should they? Young'r folks told me they shouldn't. We've got no 'mmony planets ov'r 'ere."
The soldiers, not a specialised riot police but regular troops armed with combat weapons, stood shoulder to shoulder, forming a line from a riverbank on the left to a high concrete wall of a grain processing building on the right. Yet the protest participants mostly kept their distance, about a few steps, not looking like they came here to fight. A large, loud, diverse group of unarmed people, men and women, of every age, even the elderly and the kids, shouted slogans and held various signs and banners, shaming the military. 'Death Brings More Death', 'You Are Killing Us', 'We Aren't A Meat Shield', 'Everyone Deserves To Live', 'Stop Xenophobia', 'Live And Let Live' and more generic wordings like 'Stop The War' and 'Get Out'. Pilots and ground personnel apparently tried to carry on with their daily duties, ignoring the noise.
"They should stop! They only bring more suffering! INRA tried, Aegis tried, and where we are now, I ask you? Another bloody war! They'd better off staying in the Pleiades playing fu[...]ng heroes, no, they blew up that damn Proteus Wave and now we have this!" another face suddenly appeared on the screen, a younger man with a 'Stop Genocide' sign in his hand. "This war..."
"My kids! My kids and I want to live in peace," a short, stocky woman with dishevelled bleached hair interjected, speaking loudly right into the camera and pointing a finger at it. "We never had any aliens here! Other planets? They may live there, I don't care! Why should we care? I don't need to go to space! We can live here, on our lands, for ages! And aliens don't need our farms!"
"Don't they have carriers? I'd say, they better leave our planet!", "We never asked for any protection! Now they just had painted a target on our a[...]es!", "Our kids used to play on that field, and what now?", "It's not the Thargoids dragging us into the war, it's those a[...]holes!", and more, more and more random loud phrases from the crowd kept spilling into the broadcast as the camera drone performed a slow fly-by, reaching the far side of the area and then returning back to the news team.
"Excuse me, excuse me, could I..." a shy young male voice sounded nearby, and, for a moment, the camera focused on the person. "According to the Guardian-Thargoid war studies..."
"Hey, hey, look," someone from the news team didn't give him a chance to finish the speech, which, presumably, might've been quite long.
The camera panned and zoomed in, focusing on a woman inserting an indigenous flower into the barrel of the soldier's rifle. Time stood still as she, holding her breath and looking the soldier into the eyes, fighting her own worst fears, carefully guided the green flower stem down the cold steel tube. Coincidence or not, but very symbolically, the flower had eight petals on it.
Then, a shout, a groaning sound of people struggling, just a few metres away, and the camera abruptly switched to another scene: a young man in a face mask, with a handwritten 'Space For All Species' slogan on the back of his shirt, with a rock in his hand. A small nearby group tried to stop him, to disarm him, someone grabbed him by the collar and pulled back, but it was too late, the rock was thrown. A muffled thud drowned in the noise of the crowd, and one of the soldiers immediately shouldered the rifle, aiming the weapon at the protesters, unable to find and recognise the attacker in the diverse, colourful, loud chaos.
First screams. The beginning of panic.
"Stop it! Stand down! Stand the fu[...]ng down you..." a commanding, yet seemingly annoyed female voice blared out of the emergency loudspeakers on the landing area. Multiplied and amplified, it came from several directions at once, causing the forward lines of protesters to make an instinctive step back, and then the owner of the voice appeared behind the line of troops, a very tall woman in a military jacket hastily thrown over a t-shirt, with a cordless microphone in her hand. Reaching the aiming soldier, she forcefully pushed the rifle barrel down, pointing it at the ground, and threw a sharp glance right into the camera.
"Cut the camera. Cut the camera now."
She said something to the troops and then covered the distance separating them and the news team in a few wide steps, paying little to no attention to the protesters, some of which helplessly tried to stop her as she barged through the crowds, and the picture became blurry and unstable as the drone operator timely attempted to get the expensive device out of harm's way.
"Stop. Stop it. I'm not here to hurt you," the same voice, but much calmer now, and without the loudspeakers behind her. "Okay. Just, don't point it at our stuff. Even if it's a bunch of tents, it's still a military... place. Right. No, no worries, you can show my face. Maybe I should sit down..? No..? Sure, thank you. No, I'm not in charge here, but I'm responsible for everything that does flying. And, kind of, was the first to react."
Noises in the background quieted down to disgruntled rambling, and the woman finally appeared on the screen. Uncommonly tall and somewhat heavy, with violet eyes and pitch black, casually tied hair. Military jacket with the 'Anti-Xeno Defence Force' patches on the shoulders, over a khaki t-shirt with a picture of a cartoony Hydra: a pair of comically stupid eyes and a pink hanging tongue drawn over a familiar eight-limb silhouette. Perhaps, there was no time to pick anything more official. The metallic nameplate on the jacket read: "Ina Muir".
"Ina Muir, AXDF," she nodded. "There's not so much to say. As if the bugs weren't funny enough, now I have to report... That."
The woman, who seemed to be a mid-ranking officer of the forces she represented, gave the whole protesters situation another look, slowly gesturing towards the crowds in a disappointed, even slightly disgusted manner. As if not the demonstration itself caused such a reaction, but the fundamental fact that a part of humankind couldn't find a better way, resorting to that; and then turned to the camera again.
"Now, you have that on camera, we have that on our CCTVs too, and that wasn't just another random nuisance. These folks are getting out of here. No shooting and no violence, but I'm telling you they aren't going to like it. Pffff..."
A certain note of underlying relief was quite noticeable in her long-drawn exhale.
"Finally, I'd say. Those f... buggers have been dancing here for four days straight, testing our nerves. The other day, I personally had to break the handcuffs one idiot used to attach himself to a landing gear. He ate the key. They throw rats into our food supplies. At least they don't sh[...]t into there yet, thank you. They shoot paint guns, aiming at ship canopies. They talk sh[...]t about us on their own private broadcasts. And all that on top of... What you've seen already, crowding and yelling all over the place. And some good ol' littering. You better don't go into those bushes over there. Although, no open violence so far... At least, nothing that could've been, you know, legally interpreted as such. Until now."
"You know, it totally looks like they work in shifts, around the clock. So that we can't really sleep. The whole thing might be arranged by someone, but as for that, I can't know for sure at the moment. Sh[...]t, half of my pilots haven't been able to sleep properly after their flights. Not to mention the marines who have to stand there still for hours. That friggin spectacle doesn't have seats in the front row. We tried to ignore them, then you appeared with cameras and some of those schmucks figured out it's their shot at glory."
"We're people too. We found that field next to the settlement, because, yup, landing on a farm patch is bad for crops. Thought that we could have some fresh air and water. Not the thousand-times-processed stuff on the carrier. That still reeks of bug guts. Nah. That's all we've got. This region is still far from being clear and safe, yet I hope we can move on further in a few days. Doing our best, as always, you know."
"So, yeah... That's it. Stop the recording. Please. And I... I have to go and calm my troops down. I don't want bloodshed to happen, and my folks are really on the edge. We've been mopping the systems for a few months already, and now this crap, four days non-stop. Anyone could go nuts. Maybe those idiots think we're cyborgs or whatever."
