Sci/Fi story

[Thomas J. R.]

This is my first story, so feel free to point out mistakes. (Note: the concept behind this story, namely that scientists are outlawed in the future, is actually from the novel "The Stars are Ours". So I don't take credit for the back story, although what I'm writting has nothing to do with the novel).
I'm used to writting papers for class or movie scripts, so this won't be the best you've ever seen. ('scuse the grammer also)

A.D. 2057

A shot rings out in the cold night air, the report echoing in the nearby mountains. A man, bent over and running, spins in pain as blood sprays out of his left shoulder. He stand, steadying himself for a moment, and turns to face his assultant. The man with the rifle, dressed in the usual "Peace Keeper's" uniform of black and white, runs and tries to reload his rusty bolt action rifle at the same time. He looks up and sees the wounded man reaching under his coat for something. Hurridly he tries to jam the shell into the chamber, only to drop it to the ground. The air is split with a loud crackling noise as a green ray emitted from the gun the wounded man was holding. The ray hits the officer, throwing him to the ground and rendering him unconscious. The wounded man staggers foward, but the pain of the bullet is too much for him to bear. As he falls to the ground, he hits a red button on an infrared beacon attached to his coat, enabling his comrades to find him with night vision.

-More to come soon.

[Thomas J. R.]

The man's vision slowly faded in. He was straped to a large steel bed with large leather straps. He looked around in the dim light provided by a flickering florescent bulb, probably long past it's prime. He looked down. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, stained with blood. His ray gun was gone, and his transmitter was on the table beside him. He looked over his shoulder, and found a cart covered with sharp blades and other cutting devices upon it. He had heard the horror stories about this. He was at the captital of the Peace Keeper's realm. Then the doors directly in front of him opened, and seven cloaked and masked figures walked inside. As they moved to the table, one of them picked up a very long and extremly sharp knife. He looked on in horror as the blade turned first a glowing red, and then white hot. Steam shot off the blade as the cloaked person moved the blade rapidly towards his head.
Suddenly he woke up, drenched in cold sweat. He sat up in the snow, realizing that he was not at Peace Keeper's base, but in the middle of the field where he was just a few minutes ago. Then he heard a distant sound, yet it struck horror into him. A truck was coming. He recognized the agonizing sound of ill-fitting gears grinding themselves into oblivion. He ducked and rolled to face the machine. It was running almost strait towards him, and he knew that once he got into the spotlight of the machine he would be dead. Only there was something funny about the way it was going. On it's current course it would barely miss him.
As the light swung around, it spotted the dead body of the soldier. He was only about fifteen feet away, and for Brian this was much to close. He looked at the body and then at the truck, which now came to a lumbering halt. A guard got out and started towards the body. Brian knew that he had to complete his mission and return the papers to his officers, and so in an act of desperiation, he pulled out a hand grenade. A handgrenade was very rare, and very few soldiers had actually used one. Brian held the lever down and slowely pulled the pin from it's socket while the guard approched. He readied the pistol in his other hand. The guard cautiously approched the body, and never saw what happened. In one move Brian jumped to his feet, shot the guard and tossed the grenade into the truck. The truck instantly turned into a heap of flaming metal as the phosphorous in the grenade set off the gasoline and ammunition.

[SageRock]

Sweetness. This will be very interesting to see how it unfolds...

Narf

[Haibane Shadsie]

Your main character is named Brian, right?

You should name him in the first paragraph. I had a lot of trouble distinguishing him from the Peace Keeper... trying to figure out who was who.

I hope your... green lazer guns... I hope you aren't planning on using lazers as weapons without some explaination: Current lazer technology can barely burn through the skin on a raw chicken, let alone be an effective weapon - and that is not likely to change much in the next 50 years or so. It is best to stick with kinestetic weapons... bullets and the like. Just a scientific nitpick.

Paragraphing... when you change a scene or a general thought... you should start a new paragraph. Having huge blocks of text that run together makes stories difficult to read.

My main issue is figuring out who is who in your story, distinguising the main character from the man after him. That needs clarification badly.

Otherwise... this is a good concept. The "dark future" sceneario has been done time and time again, but it's always neat to see what new writers do with it.

[Thomas J. R.]

Ok, I should have clairified the character first, but I hadn't figured his character out yet. I was still toying with several possibilities.
As for the green-ray guns, I was writting this based on what somebody wrote about 40 years ago. So here's my explaination for the scientifically minded:
The green ray gun uses a particle-beam, a type of high-energy weapon that was tested by the Russians without good results. The reason the pistol is so close-ranged is that when a particle weapon is fired, the particles must force the air out of it's way to reach the target, which means that the energy of the ray at fifteen feet isn't much compared to a point blank shot. As the particle-energy decreases, the ray becomes less effective. This explains why Brian only bothered to shoot the gaurd at very close range.
So maybe we can burn raw chicken at point blank within the next fifty years.
Yes, I apologize for cramming the writting into one chunk. I wrote it at about midnight, so it's kinda weird.
More to come soon!

[Thomas J. R.]

Ok, here goes:
Brian looked at the burning heap and knew that there had to be something useful inside the vehicle. The smell of the burning things inside was awful; however, he moved towards the burning vehicle. He knew that within a few minutes the Peace Keepers would notice the burning wreck and send some troops to find out what happened, so Brian quickly hit the release-latch on the side door of the vehicle. As the door of the vehicle opened, he steped back because of the heat. The inside of the vehicle was red-hot and still on fire. Then Brian realized why: The fuel was burning! He had to get what he wanted quickly or he would be blown to peices.
He shut the door and looked at the top of the vehical. Mounted on top was an old gun of some type. He pulled out the two pins that held the gun on it's mount, and jumped off the vehicle, toting the heavy weapon. He estimated that the gun weighed about eighty pounds or so. He looked at the gun. It was long, black, and had a string of bullets hanging from the side. On the opposite side of the gun, there was a small switch near the trigger. It had two positions: Auto or Semi. He switched it to semi-automatic, wanting to conserve the ammunition.
He began to walk off into the woods, when he noticed an odd red light projecting from deep within the forest. He started into it, then stopped. He thought to himself, "Could the light be coming from a vehical? No, it's too big for any kind of vehical-mounted light." Then it hit him: The light was from a massive fire! Something very large, possibly a base, was on fire.
Brian began to run. His usually tall frame was now hunched in pain from the wound in his shoulder. He looked towards the light, and then around him. The forest was now catching on fire.
He pulled out his binoculars, and pointed them at what he guessed to be the central location of the fire. He looked at it, and then realized that he was looking at a burning Peace Keeper power-plant.
For a second he was confused. There should not have been anything there but trees and bushes. Then he realized what had happened: When he ran from the burning vehicle, he just ran for the nearest woods, not paying any attention to the way he was going! He was in the middle of enemy territory, and already wounded to boot!