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Story By JA Baker[]
| Atomic Anne | |
| Facts | |
| Author | JA Baker |
| Series Name | Tall Tales |
| Alternate Universe Name | |
| Year Written | July 14th, 2020 |
| Story Era | Dark Age Era |
The Department of Special Projects and Resources.
But you your last kroner you haven't heard of us. Few people have, and that's kind of by design.
We're buried deep, deep into the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the LCAF, to the point that I doubt many people would know where to look. And I'm not saying that we're in the "what the Archon doesn't know won't hurt them" camp, but rather well, despite the rather cloak and dagger sounding name, we deal with... things that don't really fit anywhere else. We're a junk-draw for the military, collecting all the stray projects and personnel that don't really fit anywhere else, but are too potentially useful to throw away.
If you really want to find one of our offices, look towards the back of a major military bases. Really far back, past the shooting range, the motor-pool, the sewage reclamation plant and the wooded area where young officers with a little too much blue blood in their balls go to screw agreeable young women, and you'll find a collection of small, nondescript buildings.
That's us.
In many ways, we're a clearing house, a place to try and see if something or someone has any possible use before they're officially decided surpluses to requirements. But we also play home to a few people who, well, they're useful, but you need to know how to handle them.
We had this one guy, Eddie. Complete ****** to everyone, just seemed to rub every one the wrong way, and didn't seem to care. Kind of guy who'd kill the morale of a unit buy walking in the door, the kind voted "most likely to be killed by 'friendly fire'" in basic. Nobody liked Eddie, and under most circumstances, he would have been booted out of the army so fast his head would spin. But he had a gift: show him a page of numbers, devoid of any context, and he'd see any discrepancies, same as you or I would read a kids book. Savant, I believe the word is. No sign of any developmental disorders, just a natural gift to see order in apparent chaos. So, Eddie found a home at the DSPR, and was occasionally loaned out to the Quartermaster Corps or the JAG when they needed someone to make sense of something they couldn't decipher. He was definitely what we'd call a 'Resource', and a surprisingly useful one at that.
My specific job was 'Asset Management', which is a posh way of saying that I was tasked with keeping tabs on some of the more... unpredictable people assigned to the DSPR.
Case in point, Annie, last name official redacted to the point where even the Leutnant-Kaptain claimed not to know for sure. Office gossip was that she was the illegitimate daughter of some planetary Duke from some planet you've probably never heard of, who was sent away to try and avoid a scandal. And Annie was smart, as in, off-the-freaking-charts smart. Unfortunately, she knew it and took every opportunity to prove it. She was also a kleptomaniac and a pyromaniac, meaning that she'd often steal seemingly innocuous things, then use them to assemble bombs or incendiary devices for little more than shits and giggles.
Lohegrin and Loki had both made plays for Annie, but while her father was doing his best to pretend she didn't exist, he did apparently have someone keeping an eye on her, and they had enough clout to keep LIC away from her. But, after the last in a long string of run-in with the law, Annie had been given a choice between prison or the military, and chose to sign-up.
It didn't take all that long for her file to fall into our laps, with orders to find some way to put her once-in-a-generation intellect and natural gift for making things go Boom! to good, or at least productive, use.
And this is where I came in: all the psych reports said she desperately wanted some kind of family, so I was assigned to be her 'big brother', and to try and keep her more destructive tenancies, if not contained, at least focused. As such they sent us to The Farm, an old ranch in the back-ass of beyond on... yeah, I'm not telling you that. Place was massive, around 10,000 square kilometers, mostly grass and shrub, but there was a low mountain range that cus across one corner. Nearest 'town' was a five hour drive, each way, and that was little more than a few shops, a gas station and a pub. You wanted anything more cosmopolitan, you needed to hop a shuttle for a sub-orbital to the nearest city, far side of the mountains, near the coast.
In short, it was the perfect place for a juvenile delinquent to indulge her every mischievous impulse without drawing any unwanted attention.
Annie loved it! She had a dozen or so laboratories, set up in old barns and storehouses, where she could concoct all kinds of surprises. Everything she did was carefully monitored and recorded, the ingredients and processes she used to turn everyday items in to potentially deadly IED's being passed on to, well, it was best not to ask. Occasionally we'd receive a request for her input on a specific problem, something that needed to be removed from the universe with the minimum amount of fuss and in a manner that could in no way be traced back to the Commonwealth. Annie loved these little problems, almost as much as she loved the gifts from, well, places no Lyran citizen ever officially went, that she was sent in gratitude for her assistance.
I swear, her bedroom was a diplomatic incident waiting to happen, should the wrong person ever see it.
Most of my time was spent making sure she looked after herself: Annie had the habit of getting so fixated on a problem that the rest of the world just faded into the background. I'd have to remind her to eat, sleep and even bathe on occasion, but the truth is, I actually liked the job. For all her tendencies to look down at you when you asked her to explain something that was sooooo obvious to her, and try and set fire to my hair if I wasn't careful, she was actually a somewhat lonely, insecure little girl once you got past her defenses.
Once a month, we'd go into the city so she could spend at least a little time being a teenager; she was only fifteen when she was sent to us, so I dutifully followed her around shops as she looked at clothing, makeup and countless other little things that seemed to be important to her. And I made sure everything was paid for, LCAF and LIC having set aside a significant expense account to keep her entertained and out of trouble.
So we'd shop, eat junk food and maybe go see a movie, trying our best to act like we couldn't see the close protection detail assigned to keep an eye on her. I knew that they had orders to kill her if it looked like she was in danger of capture, and I'm sure she'd worked it out, but it wasn't something we'd ever discussed. A big part of my job was, after all, protecting Annie from the wider universe as much as it was protecting it from her, and it was something that I took seriously.
Annie was an attractive young lady, speaking subjectively, with her long blind hair and blue eyes a stark contrast to her otherwise obviously Asian heritage. Not Japanese, thankfully, that much was clear, but it was unmistakable that a significant number of her ancestors originated in the Southeast Asian sector of Old Terra. This made her stand-out amongst the predominantly European looking locals, and gained more than a little attention from the local teenage population. My mission brief was to keep her safe, stable and productive, so I made sure she got a contraceptive implant and had access to condoms, then provided a shoulder to cry on if a young man she'd been interested in never called the very carefully routed and monitored phone we gave her.
Not exactly what I joined the military for, but I still like to think of it as protecting and serving the people of the Commonwealth.
And yes, part of that included keeping Annie from indulging in her more... homicidal impulses. More than one young man will live out their lives never knowing that I saved them from being turned into a rapidly expanding cloud of pink mist with a well-timed mug of coco and a cinnamon bun. I did, however, ensure that, should any of them ever find themselves in uniform, they'd find themselves assigned more than the expected amount of unpleasant duties.
So, one day, just after she turned eighteen, Annie comes to me with a very worrying smile on her face. Tells me she's working on something... special, something she wants to keep off the books until she's sure it'll work. This was enough to sound alarm bells from there to Tharkad, but she'd been behaving herself, so I agreed to temporarily disable the monitoring equipment in one of the outlying labs. I did keep an eye on the equipment and supplies she requested, but it was nothing out of the ordinary: some household cleaning products, a few tools that could be found in almost any workshop across the Inner Sphere, and a catering size tin of instant coffee.
That had me worried: Annie and caffeine were a bad combination, but she promised me that it was an ingredient in her 'project', not for drinking.
Two months go by, and Headquarters were starting to ask questions, but Annie eventually announced that she was ready for a test.
Now, The Farm was chosen because it was big and isolated enough that the 'locals' probably wouldn't even notice the occasional explosion, planned or otherwise, but Annie still insisted that we find the most isolated corner we could. To have all non-essential staff take the weekend off. We were used to indulging her little idiosyncrasies by then. So we cleared out everyone but the security staff, then took a little VTOL out to an old, long abandoned gravel pit that Annie decided would suit her needs. I watched as she placed a package, no larger than a backpack, in the middle of the pit, connecting it by hard-wire to a receiver on the lip. Then we made our way to a hidden bunker about twenty kilometers away, landed the VTOL, and gave the standby order.
Grinning like a maniac, Annie pressed the detonator.
Even twenty kilometers away, and in a re-enforced bunker, I was thrown from my feet by the shock-wave as it rippled out from the gravel pit. Pulling myself to my feet, I looked out to see the unmistakable sight of a mushroom cloud rising up high into the air. Terrified, I looked at the small collection of sensors built into the Bunker, and while they showed both the seismic and atmospheric shock waves, as well as the thermal pulse, there was zero fallout and no detectable EMP.
"Just 15 kilotons? Far below my projections." Annie stood, looking over her notebook, "Next time, we use the Expresso grade beans."
The End
- Notes from the Author
- Something a little different than most of the others
- Notes from the Wiki Editor
- Anne is the unofficial half-sister of Elizabeth Ngo, Patrick Ngo, and Henry Ngo"