skonen_blades: (dark)
[personal profile] skonen_blades
It’s December and I think it might be a friend of mine’s birthday today. I can’t remember who, though.

I empty clip after clip into the face of the blue skinned alien trying to force its way through the elevator door. I slam the big red button to close the doors and get us going up. I am soaked in the alien’s slightly radioactive blood. I have two wounded and three KIA with me in the elevator. I have memorized the names of the men whose DNA dogtags I could not retrieve during the battle. We’re all that’s left of the fifteen units that were sent in.

I think I left the oven on at my apartment. I’m anxious to get home and find out.

The elevator lurches as a thermal gust follows an EMP through the shaft. My helmet sensors shut down and my armour goes suddenly real-weight. There’s a screech like a metal throat being torn to pieces and thunder shakes us around for a while. Then there’s silence and darkness. The elevator has stopped. The back-up red LED is blinking on my armour and the armour of the other two wounded. I look up through the grate on the ceiling of the elevator. I can see a tiny square of light.

One of my fillings is loose. I keep forgetting to make a dentist appointment to get it looked at.

I help the two wounded to their feet and arc-weld their shoulder plates to my own. I line the monomers up so we become basically one object. I grab the DNA dogtags of the two KIA. I heft the heavy handle of my gun and dial the muzzle all the way open for maximum spread. Jason on my left is passed out. I tell Pyotr on my right to close his eyes. I aim at the ceiling of the elevator and pull the trigger. The small roof blows open in a wild noisy shower but the lines hold.

Jenny’s birthday is coming up and I still have no idea what to buy for her.

I spool my fist cannon’s grappler up and over the main cable and flick the switch to make it attach. Luckily it’s ferrous and not ceramic. The attachment holds. Pyotr is crying. Jason’s gone flatline. There are seconds left to get him to the extraction point so that he’ll live. I point the muzzle of the gun down between my legs and pull the trigger. There is a blinding explosion and richocet shards punch little jigsaw patches of melted steel into my armour.

I can’t remember if I paid the hydro bill before I left.

The floor of the elevator turns to cheesecloth. The KIA fall listlessly down the elevator shaft below our feet. The three of us are hanging from my wrist cannon now in armour that is no longer assisted. I can feel my shoulder give way sickeningly easy. The three of us are now kept from the inky darkness by the sinews and muscle and tensile strength of my flesh. There’s a shrill screaming coming from one of us between bared teeth and when I realize who it is, I shut up. I take a careful aim on the cable supporting the elevator, the cable I am not attached to. If I miss, we all go down. If I hit it correctly, we go up. Sweat crawls into my eyes.

I wonder how Jake is doing. I haven’t seen that guy in ages. What’s it been, like, five years already? Jeez. I think he still owes me twenty bucks.

I squeeze the trigger. The leads connect and because of the awkward way I’m holding the gun, the recoil grinds a shower of sparks off my shoulder plates. There’s a pull on my shoulder that brings more pain that the meds can cut and I vomit up against my faceplate. The nanos scrub it down. My visor clears just in time for me to see the white square racing down to meet us and swallow us whole. We bust up through the roof of the installation and land in a tangle of metal and flesh out in the open on warm gravel.

The cloud I’m looking up at looks kind of like a horse.

Our emergency beacons go off like screaming babies and the answering cry says we’ll be picked up in thirty six seconds. I don’t think Jason is going to make it. Pyotr will probably be okay but the psychs might wait for a while before putting him in the field again. I’m sixty eight years old. This was my two-hundred-and-fifty-sixth mission. They know I’ll be good to go again after I've been debriefed and patched up.

I have to remember to pick up milk on the way home.



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