Thanks!

Thanks for reading my blog, people!  That was just a preview of what's to come.  Soon I'll release another blog with another story.  Look for "Downfall" by me.  Thanks!

Bomb!

    Spotting a suitable location for the bomb, Leto latched the payload onto the main support beam of the barn. 
“The egg is in position, ready to hatch,” he whispered into the comm.  He waited until three winks of light on his HUD went off, the signal for ‘Affirmative’.  Silently jogging to the rafter gate he had left open, Leto leapt onto the pile of hay below.  Sprinting toward the sandstorm tunnels, he ordered his troops to get inside immediately.  Slamming the horizontal doors shut, he latched each and every lock and deadbolt, finishing the job by sticking a metal pipe through the door handles. 
one…two…three…four…
Leto counted down the bomb’s fuse time, and warned his soldiers.
“Impact!”  The doors shuttered, the locks bent, and the pipe was jolted out of the handles.  Fire flew through the cracks of the doors, and smoke billowed from under them. 
“Retreat!”  he yelled, and the other three soldiers in the tunnel dashed away, apparently not needing any more reason than that to leave hastily. 

    There was something Leto had remembered about these types of structures: they were not usually fireproof, nor were they stable.  The good thing was that he also remembered they always led somewhere far away from the entrance.  He thought it was strange, however, that the doors were already opened. 




Comments, Please!
--Bo

Huge Action Scene

    1^st Recruit Patters stared down his scope with a sense of dread.  He knew he was to be the ‘bait’ of the operation, and the thought of dying was carved into his mind.  Although some called him a coward, Patters could always be trusted to defend his country.  Lining up the iron sights, he advanced steadily, cocked his gun, waited.  Waited.  What was only a matter of seconds seemed like a century to him.  A flash of yellow sparked out of the seemingly endless barrel, and a booming sound occurred.  The first guard fell, and Patters knew there was no turning back know.
“Suck on this, bitches,” he screamed, while firing wildly.  Three guards were felled in the rampage, and more ensued.  He stormed into the outpost, and all he could see was red.  The next thing he knew, he was actually seeing red.  Patters looked down, spotting a gaping hole in his stomach. 
“Die, you pieces of shit!”  He unsheathed his combat knife, a non-commissioned sterling silver blade with a mahogany grip, a gift for the recruit’s departure into the Marines, given by his beloved grandfather.  Rushing over to one Seraph, he gored its neck.  He jumped onto another hostile, plunging his blade into the heart of the beast.  After maiming and killing nearly ten of the creatures, Patters finally succumbed to his wounds.  Falling to the sandy desert ground, he reflected upon his life.  A wounded Seraph stumbled to him.  It glared deep into the recruit’s eyes.  Having a broken wrist and three toes missing didn’t stop him from despising the Seraphim; in one last act of desperation, the hero of war stabbed the knife into the monster’s shoulder, missing the throat by a few inches.  The Seraph’s growl grew ever louder; its ravenous jaws opened.  That didn’t matter, though; Patters was satisfied.

    On the other end of the base, the mission was running smoothly.  The few contacts engaged were half-asleep Seraphim with no fighting gear.  The barracks had been entered through the rafters of an old Apollo barn, and no rats were in sight.  That was probably due to the fact that rats were in short supply on distant planets, as ship decontamination protocols kept most non-human life to a minimum.  The idea Leto had was to plant the bomb in the most populated area of the stables, so that maximum damage was caused.  On their way in, he had spotted a sandstorm bunker, which was to be the escape route.

Comments, Please!
--Bo

Action Scene!

    “Only a quarter-klick to the objective, men,” Leto shouted to his group.  At his left, CWO2 Anders trudged through the sand, while behind him stood PO Garfield.  The other twenty recruits traversed the gritty path in exhaustion.  Garfield froze. 
“What the hell is that?” he yelled, just before a soaring blade sliced through his soft belly, spilling his intestines onto the ground.  The whole platoon spread out in panic, scanning the wasteland for any sign of life.  A second swirling object appeared, decapitating one of the recruits.  Everything went straight to hell after that.  Most of the recruits ducked down in fear, and Anders frantically dug a pit in the ground to hide in.  The remaining soldiers began searching for cover, when a large presence was spotted rising out of the earth.  Sand poured off its back, and a smooth dome slid back to reveal two crimson ‘eyes’.  The figure lifted its arm, showing a massive cannon.  Electrical bolts spewed out the sides of the gun, and a bright light formed in the barrel.  Leto snapped out of his shock and fired his assault rifle.  Armor-piercing bullets pinged off the shining metal carapace as the bright light increased in size. 
“Take Cover!” shouted Leto, as the blue-green plasma bolt struck the desert ground, instantly vaporizing ten of his men.  As the armor burned off his back, he sprinted toward the lurching machine, unpinned grenade in hand.  Leaping onto its front, he pierced the robot’s eye with his knife.  Now exposed, the central processor activated its red warning lights.  Leto threw his fragmentation grenade inside, and leapt off the hulking death machine.  Barreling away from the metallic creation, he had no time to watch as it burst into fragments in a glorious mushroom cloud.

    After the platoon recovered from the robot attack, only eleven soldiers were left standing.  Leto doubted they could finish the mission, but he didn’t say anything that could lower the troop’s morale.  Finally, the Zulu-3 outpost was sighted.  The Seraphim were a nasty bunch, and seeing them made Leto’s skin crawl. 
“Men, reload,” he commanded.  After the last mag fell and the final clicking sound was made, the platoon was ready to roll.  Clipping grenade-launchers onto their assault rifles, the first wave of soldiers, consisting of five men and the CWO2, approached the left flank of the rubble-filled camp.  Leto himself and four other men made up wave two. 
“Team one,” Leto explained, “will be the sabotage group.  Your main objective is to infiltrate the enemy base and plant this grenade in their barracks.”  He produced an incendiary bomb from his rucksack.  “Also, I want you to silently retrieve the enemy commander.  Take him alive at all costs.”
“Team two; you are under my orders, just as team one is under Chief Warrant Officer Two’s command.  Our objective is to draw attention.  However, we shouldn’t be too greedy for it: we do not, I repeat, do not, want to seem like large enough of a threat to have the hostile force awaken their sleeping soldiers.  Thread silencers onto your weapons.”  Everyone knew what to do.  All that was left was to commence with the plan.  Everyone knew what to do.  All that was left was to commence with the plan. 

 

Comments, Please!

--Daniel

My First Two Paragraphs

    So far, I have completed two paragraphs of my writing. These are the two paragraphs:

    The hot afternoon suns shone down on the landing craft’s roof.  Sweat welled from every single pore on Leto’s body, and water was in short supply.  How could it not be?  This was Apollo, after all, and the bloody planet had almost no water!  Admiral Vaughn said the mission would be easy, and several factors pointed to the contrary: First, the LZ was in a desolate location known to the Apollo colonists as the ‘hot seat’ of the planet.  Second, cyanobacteria deposits had left the objective site with too much oxygen, and firing a weapon would only lead to loud booms in the hazy gloom, and third, enemy contacts had been spotted only a klick away.  Mission orders were to eliminate hostiles in the area and to capture the ET commander alive, at all costs.  The strange thing about the mission was that only a platoon of soldiers had been ordered, yet over five dozen blips had shown up on heat scans.  Along with the overwhelming opposition, eighteen AA installations were present, meaning the drop-ship was forced to land far away. 

    Leto felt a thump in the hull of the Cavern class landing craft.  Immediately, the loading door opened, and the seat harnesses unlocked. 
“Let’s go, ladies!  We’ve got a half-company of Zulu-3s to neutralize!”  Leto wondered why his soldiers were only motivated by being called women; some of his people were women!  As the platoon’s armor-clad boots pounded on the grated floor of the drop-ship, he wondered if any of them would survive.  He certainly hoped they all would.

Comments, Please!
--Daniel

I. Am. Daniel.

    You may have heard of my mother, Anne Kimball.  I am one of her children.  In a family of eight, you have to take what you can get, and I recently took alot of bull. 
    At the Oxford Area High School that I now attend, my Academically Talented Program (ATP) teacher, Ms. Burnett, assigned a project to the class.  The goal was simple: state a goal that you would like to complete and, in thirty days, complete it. 
    You may think this is too simple.  That's what I thought, but I soon forgot about the project altogether.  Before I knew it, the time gap between now and then closed to a week from today.  I quickly reverted my original goal of writing a novel into writing a short story.  This blog will track my progress toward that goal.

--Daniel Kimball