The Shortest Straw

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Phineas
Phineas
742 Followers

"What the fu… damnit, after all we've been through we can't just abandon this place and these people!" I spat out at him.

"Something is happening up there, Ell-Tee, we've got our orders."

I looked up towards the sky where he had motioned and wondered just what indeed was going on up there. We had beaten the acathian's space forces a few standard months back, or at least as much as they had thrown at us or shown us they had. If they had another fleet hidden somewhere, we could be in big trouble.

I nodded, "Alright corporal, tell Captain Hartley I'll evac my wounded to the shuttles." The corporal saluted me and was off before I could even notice his name on his uniform. I glanced down and realized that at least he had a full uniform.

"Gunny, get your ass up!" I snapped at the barely conscious man. "No time for napping on the job."

He hacked a few more lungfuls of smoke out and staggered up with a fierce grin on his face. "Yes Lieutenant."

I noticed the multiple burns on him and promised myself that I would gladly give him some decent R&R once we were out of here. "All the ones that can't move, get 'em on a transport. Make sure you go up with them."

"Yes Ma'am," He responded, already turning to order the more able bodied survivors to help the less able bodied.

An enemy fighter screamed by overhead, leaking smoke from several holes in its hull. It crashed into the remains of our barracks tent, permanently removing any chance of salvage from it. It dug a deep trench into the hard packed ground before it slammed into a rocky wall and lay forever still.

"Lieutenant," King called out to me after we had all started to regain our feet from the near miss. "You're wounded bad too, you'd better come with us."

The heat of the moment was on me. Genetically enhanced adrenal gland working overtime. I felt no pain. "We're marines, soldier, we have jobs to do. You do yours and let me do mine!"

His jaw clenched for a moment but he nodded and snapped off a salute to me before he turned and helped pick up a man who had to have part of the skin on his cheek cut off to separate the burning piece of tent fabric that had clung to him. I saw that the man was missing part of his foot too. He was so badly maimed I could not recognize him.

Tabling the image for later, I turned and ran off towards where I deemed the heaviest fighting to be. I cast about, looking for Jethallin, but found her nowhere to be seen. I did find a spare soundblaster on my way to the wall, thanks to a marine who had been unlucky enough to be separated from her lower torso. There ain't no good way to die, but I hoped that for her at had at least been quick.

The situation at the wall was bleak, to say the least. There I was, using a short range weapon in a long range fight and wearing a half melted vest. I guess it really did not matter, but it was just the principle of the matter. It might have even been the X chromosome in me. Granted a battle of this size was not exactly a social event, but I still preferred to be dressed for it.

Then something happened that made me really miss my uniform. A particle beam passed extremely close to my leg. My pants, certified ES Marine combatwear, actually kept my shin from acquiring much more then a tingly sensation. The ionized air and radiation around the beam should have burned my leg fairly badly. Of course that leg on my pants now had a gaping hole on the outside of it just below my knee, but it had served its purpose.

I missed my helmet too. Without it, I had no visor to block the light and the flashes of explosions. I had no tactical heads up display. And most importantly, I had no comm-link. I was just another grunt on the line. Worse, a blind and deaf grunt on the line.

I had to get some spare power packs from the marines near me since the former owner of the soundblaster I had acquired had none on her. Usually spare battery packs are worn around the waist and she had misplaced that portion of her anatomy.

The acathians pushed in on us slowly, our numbers dwindling as individual marines were called back to board the shuttles. Called back or killed. I glanced back into the base during my last switch to a fresh pack and saw that there was only 2 transports left. Two transports and about 36 marines. Plenty of room, but without the few of us to hold off the acathians charge, we would not last a minute.

My momentary distraction cost me. When I turned back around I saw seven acathians charging our position. One went down under the fire of the marine on my left. Before he could cut anymore of them down he lost his GAR and his hand as a particle beam sheared right through them. Handy thing about particle beams, at least they cauterize the wound.

I was yanking the trigger on my soundblaster as quick as I could then, but my aim was pretty lousy since they were way out of range and I had four particle rifles alternating their fire at me. My riot gun charged and fired roughly once every second, and theirs about once every 6 to 8 seconds. But with them alternating, that cut my time back to two seconds on a good day. Maybe. I did not push my luck, considering what all I had survived so far that day.

"Get the fuck out of here, marines! That's an order!" I screamed out to the guys who were left crouched in the hastily dug trench with me. Only 3 of us, including the recovering Private Stumpy. He cradled his soundblaster in his left hand, preparing to use it.

I grabbed it from him and did a little trick that is not in the field manual to it. It involved setting it to a maximum charge and then disabling the power converter on the power pack. Only took a couple of seconds, which I used between shots with my own gun. When I looked up again there were more acathians charging our position, black skin gleaming in the incredibly bright Acathian sun. They had started out at roughly 300 meters, and were now within 50. Sadly they were just about in prime soundblaster range. All 14 of them.

I fired one last time, catching one of the acathians in the leg with the narrow cone of ultrasonic waves. It whipped him around and shattered his leg, making him crumple to the ground. Chalk one up for me. My satisfaction was short lived though, for that time multiple particle beams came my way. I could faintly smell the burning hair of one that narrowly missed my buzz cut head, but that was secondary to the ones that slammed into the rock in front of me and beside me. Splinters and, in my opinion small boulders, broke free and slammed into me. I was knocked senseless briefly as a rock the size of a baseball careened off my cheek.

I picked myself up as quickly as I could. It felt like forever to me, but I think it was a matter of only a few heartbeats time. I had dropped both of the soundblasters, one near where I had been hiding before I had been knocked away from it, and the other near me. Luck once again was on my side, the one near me was the good one. I pulled myself to it and noticed that my right foot felt kind of funny.

I read somewhere once that some crazy guy did not believe in luck. Instead he insisted that chance favors the prepared mind. No sane person prepares for this kind of stuff. I would have liked to have seen him in my position, because without a healthy dose of luck on my side, I would never have even made it to where I was then.

Nor would I have been able to survive the explosion that I caused as soon as three of the acathians jumped over the pile of rubble that had served as cover for me a few minutes ago. I fired the soundblaster as soon as I saw them, hitting the booby-trapped one squarely and causing the overloaded power pack to release its stored energy in a glorious fireball. I was picked up and sent skidding backwards along the ground, acquiring countless more scrapes, bruises, and cuts along the way. But without my lucky rabbits foot, there was no way I could have managed to stay breathing through that.

Breathing yes. Conscious yes. Lucid… well maybe not quite. It took me several seconds to realize that the world was upside down. Several more seconds for me to realize that I could fix that by just rolling over. A pity though, it had looked rather neat and I thought that maybe blood was finally falling upwards.

That funny feeling in my foot had disappeared, now it just felt numb. When I tried to use it a stabbing pain made me collapse back to my knees. I guessed I had broken my foot at some point. A quick glance changed my mind, there was actually a jagged rock splinter stuck all the way through my foot, from top to bottom. Well enough, it was time to crawl. Do or die, that is how the marines live. Or maybe do and die. I get confused, especially when suffering a major concussion.

Somebody tried to pick me up then, but I had no idea who and I was not taking any chances. I twisted as best I could and used my elbows and hands as weapons. It was clumsy and whoever had me avoided it easily enough by dropping me. I saw a uniformed leg directly in front of me and I lashed out at it, trying to bite. My teeth could not get through the armor in the fabric though, but the crushing of my jaw did draw a curse from whoever my assailant was.

Funny thing was, the curse was in English. The uniform was a marine uniform. Oops.

I had not realized my hearing was gone until then. Probably because it suddenly came back to me. Came back with a terrible ringing in my ears, sure sign of permanent hearing loss, but more then that, it was also a familiar voice calling out to me.

"Ell-Tee, knock it off and let me help you!"

Good old Sergeant King. He had never let me down. "Gunny!" I said. Or at least I think I said it. I could not hear myself talk, and it may very well have come out as something terribly garbled. Regardless he picked me up and threw me over his shoulder.

I was suddenly laughing, or doing whatever someone who has been beaten within an inch of her life does to approximate a hysterical laugh. I am not sure what was so funny to me at the time, maybe it was just being still alive.

He set me down a few minutes later and forced me to look into his eyes. That sobered me up, seeing the cuts and burns on his face. We were in the transport though, so things felt like just maybe they were going to be okay. I should have known better.

"How are the men?" I asked him quietly. Turned out I yelled it, but it sure did seem like a whisper to me at the time.

He just pointed up, letting me know that the ones that had made it were headed back to the Columbus. He tied a strap around me to keep me in my seat and then fell into the one next to me. The transport lifted before he had finished securing his own restraints. Across the narrow aisle from me in the transport was the marine I had been crouched down next to while defending the base. He clutched his stump of an arm in his good hand and stared off into space with streaks of tears running down his cheeks. His jaw was clenched and he made not a sound. I had no choice but to admire him.

"What's your name?" I asked him, still talking much to loudly.

He glanced and me and noticed that I had been next to him in the trenches. He looked down at his arm and then ran his eyes over my body. I wondered what he saw, I did not have the guts to look at myself and see what was left. "Private Demmer, Ma'am"

I nodded. "You did a great job out there private. They can fix that when we get back, you just hold on."

He nodded and offered me a weak smile. It was true, in a couple of weeks the doctors could have a new lower arm and hand grown and in place on Private Demmer's arm. There was not much they could not fix anymore, and since we were so short handed (sorry), nobody was worried about not getting proper medical care.

The transport rocked then, hit by fire from below. A wing of our fighters had strafed the ground before we took off, giving the last of us stupid groundpounders the chance to get aboard the last transport. One of those fighter pilots never made it back though, his ship was tattooed with particle beams.

With only one fighter to provide cover for our transport, it was a rocky ride. We were less then a thousand feet up when I felt our ship shudder again. Believe me when I tell you that there is no worse feeling for a marine then to be trapped inside a ship of whatever type, unable to fight back or even see what was going on. Total helplessness, and that is where all 15 of us where then.

Then we shuddered again and lost pressure. A sizeable hole had appeared to the aft end of the cabin, drops of red hot metal dripping around the edges. What was worse was that in addition to losing pressure, we were suddenly losing altitude. With no cabin pressure there was no way we could escape the atmosphere. My day just could not get any worse.

There really should be a law against thinking that thought or uttering those words. It seems as though it is an open invitation to misery. As fate would have it, a couple of the repellers that gave us lift in the atmosphere had been shot out, causing the ones that were left to be too overloaded to allow us to stay airborne. The pilots did what they could, there was no doubt about that, but when you toss a floating brick into the air and take away its means to float, there is only one alternative.

The last thought that went through my mind before we started bouncing off the rocky landscape below was that it just did not seem fair. All that I had gone through was for nothing. Sure, I saved the lives of several men and women in my platoon, but damnit, I was hoping to save myself too! My hand found Gunny's in a final act of humanity that neither of us genetically bred homo-superiors had ever expected to share.

Phineas
Phineas
742 Followers
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