8
8-Ball
Guest
In the EC, a guy’s squad is his family. In that sense, I had a pretty nice family. After I arrived at Paris, we discovered that the Enclave had managed to penetrate naval defense nets and drop a nuke into the heart of the Eiffel Tower. Landing at London, I was united with my 8-man squad, the Emoticons.
Michovsky was the squad leader. He was a battle-scarred Russian guy who had lost his entire family at the battle of New Stalingrad against enemy forces from the Enclave-captured Finorden (the Enclave’s pet name for Finland, Norway and Sweden). He didn’t have a callsign, we simply referred to him as Michovsky.
Winston, “Scar,” was a young British guy with a knack for picking off targets from a distance. The Enclave blitzkreigs on London had killed his brother when he was 13 years old and left a scar across his left eye. He was also the squad’s resident hothead, and commanders’ tendency to refer to such hotheaded pupils by their last name led to him being called Winston on a normal basis.
Hsieh, “Seraphim,” was a Taiwanese man about 27 years old. He had barely escaped sea-mounted raids on the West-Asian front by U.S. Naval Forces and managed to pilot his dead father’s cropduster halfway to the Ural mountains where a chance encounter with a Eurasian Vertibird hooked him up with EC.
Pierre was a Frenchman whose inspiration to fight against the Enclave was only recently, with the bombing of Paris. This being his first battle, he didn’t really have any important skills. He was lucky to even have any powered armor.
Vogt, “Villa,” was another young guy, this time from Germany. He had joined three months ago and only just now gotten his suit of powered armor.Vogt’s dad had been Michovsky’s squadmate once and he joined to avenge the death of his father at the hands of the Enclave.
Raj, was an Indian guy, and the medic of the squad. He was also, coincidentally, one of our best marksmen. India wasn’t officially part of the EC, instead the South-Asian Concordance (SAC) but we trafficked supplies back and forth and both nations eagerly helped each other in times of war.
Finally, Bozic was the mechanic of the group, from Montenegro. Mechanics were almost as important as medics due to a squad’s reliance upon powered armor. His love for mechanics gained him the nickname “Bozar.” He joined to fight the Enclave because of the loss of his girlfriend three years ago to Enclave air forces whilst she was taking up a part-time job teaching in an elementary school.
The London Airbase housed approximately three thousand vertibirds, all tucked up in hundreds of hangars. The airbase stretched on for miles and was considered to be the Coalition’s largest ‘bird depository. Our pilot was a young Swiss woman nearing the end of her two-year tour of duty. The vertibird we were assigned to with her was a relatively new model and plane—the padding on the chairs was still there.
Our first mission was to be carried out Friday, 0400. Pierre was rather afraid and spent more time chewing his fingernails than actually practicing in the firing range. The rest of the squad seemed okay with it. Our mission was to attack a small GPS base outside of Trondheim, Frmr. Norway.
* * * * * *
The vertibird was a mile away from drop zone and we were closing in fast when the flak started coming at us. The first few shots hardly shook the fuselage of the plane until we heard a great “CRASH” from the canopy. Michovsky unlatched his straps and opened the door to the canopy.
Immediately, Michovsky got sucked out and grabbed onto the side of the empty door. We had no radio or way to pilot the ‘bird. Least we could do was help him out. Raj and Hsieh magnetized their boots before disengaging straps and helping Michovsky out.
Pierre started nervously sweating and the squad thermal readout indicated his suit as having an 02-CO2 imbalance. “Quit breathing so much, Pierre!” I yelled into his console. “You’ll get yourself killed---the suit’s Respisystem can’t compensate unless you take in normal air, and who knows what sick chemicals they have stuffed into those flak shells.” Pierre proceeded to breath more slowly.
“Some more help, here? Pierre, get up and help us pull Michovsky out of the door.” Raj told us. Pierre, being closest, got up but forgot to magnetize his boots. None of us realized until Michovsky was out the door and Pierre went flying with him. He grabbed onto the side of the doorway, almost completely gone. Bozar and Raj were having a hard time keeping Michovsky from flying out as well, and our straps were starting to unbuckle. One of Villa’s flew right off and out the gaping doorway.
“Shut the damn door! I might not get to take any of the bastards down, but at least you can with my sacrifice! SHUT IT!” Pierre shouted.
Vogt jumped up with magnetized boots and heaved Michovsky in while Bozar and I attempted to pull Pierre. The other three couldn’t help out, as they were busy repairing damage to Michovsky’s powered armor that would lose us the suit if he kept on going.
Winston’s straps were completely gone and he instead had to stand there with magnetized boots, which was hard considering he had a systems malfunction in one of them.
“Not going to let the newbie die!” Michovsky said with an exasperated breath. “Spleen damage…. I won’t live anyway.” He clasped his hands around Pierre’s arm and tried to pull him up, but there wasn’t enough hydraulic juice to do the job. “HOLD ON TO ME, MEDICS!” were his last words.
Raj and Bozar grabbed on to Michovsky’s back as he placed all remaining hydraulics and energy, even that from his magnetized boots, into his arm plates. He pulled Pierre right out and sent him halfway across the room. Engaging his boots, Pierre stuck to the floor.
Raj was the first to let go, his robotic arm plates not being able to hold any longer. Bozar couldn’t hold all of Michovsky’s weight alone and thus had to let go as well. He flew out the door as Bozar slammed down on the “CLOSE” button.
The vertibird was still crashing, and we had no pilot or squad leader.
Parachutes wouldn’t cushion the fall as much as we’d like due to the fact that the added velocity of the ‘bird’s speed would make it hard to land cushioned perfectly, but that didn’t deter the squad. Bozar, second in command, proceeded to take control of the
The backs of our suits opened up to reveal parachutes that subsequently popped out. Bozar began his mid-mission briefing. “Okay, we don’t have a radio so there is NO going back here. The only way we’ll possibly make it past borders is if we jerry-rig the GPS base. That means no hitting the consoles to electrocute the friendly operator, Winston.” We knew Bozar was mad when he called Winston by their last names—it annoyed him even more than when a commander called Winston by his callsign. “We’re also short one squad lea-“
“No thanks to Pierre!” Winston blurted out. I must admit I followed suit rather eagerly. I never had liked Pierre—but if only I could talk to him one last time…
* * * * * * *
The Emoticons were airborne quickly enough. First Bozar, then the rest. We landed with quite a thud before looking up at the sky, then having to look farther down where we saw the vertiberd smash into the ground. Had they noticed us? We could only hope not.
Almost immediately the squad located the nearest place for cover, and with Bozar’s permission we all took up strategic locations around it. Winston and I scouted the area ahead with our snipe-modified M3P1-L’s to see a jeep approaching.
“Jeep, 9 o’clock. Fire in 10, 9, 8, 7----” Winston droned on until we hit one and the entire squad popped out from behind the rock, first people with sniping modifications, then the heavy weapons guys.
The jeep made a power slide about half a klick away and tried to retreat. I switched my M3P1-L to “incindiary fire” and blasted a hole in the back of the jeep, lighting it aflame and sending the lightly-armored techies flying. Bozar congratulated me on finesse but berated me, explaining that the jeep would have been useful in getting to the base, which was three kilometers away.
The Emoticons continued marching to the base, Pierre getting a gratuitous amount of shoves, mainly from Vogt out of his late father’s friendship with the commander. I, too, gave Pierre a fair amount of shoves and dirty looks through my headpiece.
He apologized, too, the poor bastard. His headpiece was either looking up at the sky or down at the ground. He didn’t have his radio on, but I suspected he was crying. Not like I was going to comfort him—a move I will always regret.
About half a klick away from the base, we came to a canyon rift through a valley of mountains. The GPS site was atop one of the mountains, and our lucky squad had to climb it. Apart from the sniper fire about to befall us, the squad would be fine for the hike.
Bozar first saw the snipers. Taking a zoomview of the GPS site, he noticed about 16 lightly-armored Enclave troopers readying mounted sniper weapons. “RUN FOR COVER!” came his shout. The squad found whatever cover they had available and hid behind it. A mortar shell grazed Vogt’s back. Analyzing my surroundings, I noticed that if we could distract them for a moment, we might be able to get to an unprotected region of the mountain with which to scale it.
Telling this to Bozar, he nodded in approval. In an attempt to test their sniping mettle, I grabbed a rock about the size of the powered armor glove hand and tossed it into their firing range. The rock was pelted to a pile of an ant’s equivalent of one of our pebbles, not a single shot missing. I could hear confused voices over the squad-comms, but one thing stood out, a message from Pierre:
“I don’t think that you’ll ever really forgive me for my stupid mistake costing the life of a great man who died honorably to save my worthless hide, but at least I can redeem myself and complete the mission he set out to accomplish. Goodbye.”
Pierre stepped back. And back. And... back. Right into the enemy line of fire. We couldn’t help him at that point. The squad exchanged nods, and we all took a giant run across the space to the unprotected zone and waited as Pierre’s body was pelted with sniper fire. He lay bleeding on the ground. A shot hit one of the pipes in his headpiece. Taking it off manually, he took a breath of fresh air and smiled, shortly before a mortar shell blasted his corpse into oblivion.
We never forgave him.
Never a fan of dawdling, Bozar ordered us to climb the mountain. It was a slow hike, and the entire squad was sick to their stomachs about what we’d done to Pierre and the fact that we never would forgive him, or even get the chance to.
Are those the spoils of war? Tears? Maybe not to the rich, but the horrors of war are certainly horrible to a grunt.
Some of the squad had no need for regret. Some had been indifferent to Pierre, but none were ever really nice to him. Maybe that’s why he joined the army. To make a friend.
I was the first to get to the top of the mountain. The plateau at its top was large enough for another five or so GPS bases, but the actual base was across a rope bridge. Where we were standing was the radio. A tech working on it looked up at the squad. Raising his hands in fear and horror, he slowly stepped back.
“We don’t want to hurt-“ I was interrupted by his ghastly scream as he stepped off the plateau. Jumping down, I threw my hand at his. Catching on to it, his face was filled with terror. He thought that I was going to drag him up and dismember him—well, something to that effect because he let go of my glove and let himself fall to his death at the summit of the mountain. The rest of the squad looked down in horror.
I wondered, at that moment, if all the Enclave Troopers were really evil—maybe they didn’t want to piss off Big Brother, maybe they actually thought that they were the good guys. That seems reasonable, I mean, why else would they be fighting for the Enclave? Either that, or they think of us as evil pigs.
Standing up, I was second to follow Bozar across the bridge. The wood, as we first thought, was actually a steel polymer with some sort of brown shading. The entire squad was halfway across to the larger plateau which housed the GPS base, ¼ of a klick away from the bridge’s end.
The blast shocked me. The end of the bridge nearest the radio had been blasted by some C-4, probably set by the jumping tech. Everyone grabbed onto a panel except Raj, at the end of the line. He plummeted down into the ground, much to the horror of the rest of the squad.
Why must the innocent always die?
Grasping his weapon in one hand, Bozar flung himself over the edge above, rolled, landed on one knee, and blasted the right leg off of a fully-armed Enclave Trooper. I followed behind him with the others, taking cover as we rose.Popping out from behind an exterior supply cabinet, I quickly examined the battlefield.
There was an entire squadron of fully-armed troopers assigned here, with backup from GPS Base Security-the seven remaining in the enemy squad and the five GPS guards added up to a total of 12 dead men in front of me.
Backing behind cover, I suggested we all arise at the same time to Bozar. He shook his head in disagreement and tossed above the boulder he hid behind a grenade. Using infrared, I looked through the cabinet to observe three GPS securitymen flying away from the grenade.
The squaddies popped up from behind their respective cover, mounting weapons atop boulders and cabinets. An orgy of gore was to be seen before me—the last two GPS securitymen were literally pelted with rifle fire and went down within a second. The Troopers, however, were nowhere to be seen.
Switching to infrared, I noticed a trooper or two behind assorted boulders. Pointing them out to Bozar with hand signals, he nodded and commanded the rest of the group to switch to grenade-launch on the secondary fire mode of their weapons.
Responding to his command, the squad launched a massive barrage of mini-rockets at assorted cover, killing the remaining members of the Enclave squad and reducing their cover to rubble.
The Emoticons quickly rose and rushed forward to the base, guns blazing at the remaining GPS Securitymen. Their submachineguns left gaping dents and scars in our armor as our assorted weapons sent the securitymen and their feeble armor flying into rocks lying atop the large plateau.
Stepping into the base, Vogt sent the Comm. Officer flying into the wall with a shot to the chest. We followed behind him and intercepted the transmission.
“Zzzzt. Repeat, orbital ICBM station back online, request you fire at London Air Base, over. Please respond, GPS base, over.” The radio continued to drone on for sometime until we heard a snicker from the second floor. Rushing up to check on what was happening, I was shocked to see a teck slam his hand down on a button marked “Send Transmission.”
He turned around and looked at me with a smirk on his face. Pulling a sidearm and rolling to the side, he sent a bullet right across my left leg, leaving an easily-noticeable scar. Raising my weapon, I fired a shot at him, sending the lower part of his body whacking into the wall.
“I see two ‘birds outside. According to the logs of the transmission out here, we have to use it to get back home and weed out these spies on the SDI defense net team. With them in their positions, LAB won’t be able to defend against the attack and we’ll lose our entire supply of vertibirds.” Came Bozar’s briefing of the situation.
Winston finally came up with something not impetuous to say and countered Bozar’s remark. “Sorry, Bozar, but no can do. Apparently they’re going to sabotage the power supply to the SDI grid in ten minutes, and even if we do weed out the spies, the SDI can only deflect the nuke, which’ll send it into Eurasia, and we don’t want that. We’re going to have to weaken the armor on the nuke enough to make it blow when the SDI grids start firing.”
“But the station’s in space!” Seraphim protested.
“Says here the Enclave sent an NeoShuttle up there with a crew to rig the thing up.” I told them, having recently sifted through the transmission logs.
“Thanks for the info, 8-Ball. NeoShuttles don’t need rockets to take off. Seraphim and I will fly back home and weed out the spies—we’ll transfer all unnecessary fuel to you guys. With it, hijack the NeoShuttle, fill ‘er up, get up to the station, take all of the armor plates off of the thing, and fly back. Detonation with electronic timers won’t work up there because the signals will be corrupted by radiation from long-leaking radioactive chemicals.” Bozar informed us, shortly before almost emptying one of the vertibirds and getting in it with Seraphim. The rest of us got into the second shuttle and took off.
* * * * * * *
Winston spotted the thing on Radar and piloted us towards it. Vogt and I loaded up our weapons and prepared to shuttlejack the thing. As we saw it on the viewscreen, Winston pulled us a tight turn which sacrificed some velocity and put us behind the shuttle.
Catching up, we latched onto the back of it and lasered a hole in. Jumping inside, we walked to the bridge where a group of astronauts had their hands raised high. Vogt threw them all into the lower recesses of the ship where they would stay before he joined us on the bridge.
The NeoShuttle was easy for the three of us to pilot. Sucking in all the fuel from the vertibird and letting it fly off, we exited the atmosphere and went into orbit with approximately three hours until we’d reach the ICBM satellite.
Passing time by playing cards, we were startled when the computer finally told us that the satellite’s range was closing. Latching the NeoShuttle on, we stepped onto the ICBM satellite’s exterior and magnetized our boots.
We slowly began removing plates and tossing them at the atmosphere of Earth. It was at this point that the corroded latch snapped. The NeoShuttle Computer stupidly tried to push itself into the satellite to regain contact, but this just bounced it off and sent it flying down in the general direction of the United States. We saw an escape pod pop out of it, probably the bridge crew—I still don’t know.
We concentrated on the task of removing the panels from the nuke before dealing with our way home. We’d have to somehow get away from the radiation and send a signal to the folks at London telling them to send a vertibird to shoot down one nuclear warhead help the riders of a second one get off.
Jerry-rigging another nuke for our voyage, we attatched a coil to the back of Winston’s suit and pushed him away from the station while holding onto the coil. He managed to get out of the radiation and send the signal, but we didn’t know if they got it or not, as his built-in long-range radio was the only one working and couldn’t receive even an “affirmative” signal.
We stepped back as the SDI-targeted nuke launched in the general direction of London. Engaging launch sequence for the nuke, we boarded it and launched the thing straight off the satellite and into the sea north of Ireland. The warhead was empty and wouldn’t explode, much less kill any fish in the already-overpolluted waters, petroleum dropped in them by the Enclave to kill off EC fishing communities.
The atmosphere’s penetration sure was a bitch. My armor was hotter than the devil’s breath as we penetrated it. Finally, exiting the outer atmosphere, the nuke was flying straight at the sea. Looking down, we saw an explosion but couldn’t tell if it was on the ground at London or above, in the air. After we were within vertibird range, we saw one in the distance, coming towards us.
“YEE-HAAAW!” Shouted Winston.
“We’re going to be heroes! Heroes!” Came Vogt’s overenthused reply.
And then my pessimistic awakening of their senses to reality. Zooming in on the Vertibird, I saw a big, fat, ugly “USA” engraved on the front of its fuselage. “That’s an Enclave Vertibird, they obviously intercepted the signal—but how?”
The glumness of Winston and Vogt faded to nihilistic muttering until Winston murmured, “Shit. I know what did it. They had radios up there, how else would they send signals to the ICBM satellite? Radios that must have been able to penetrate the radiation. Those radios picked up the transmission and blocked it out. How could we be so stupid?”
The enclave vertibird fired a missile, but it missed and instead sent the nuke spiraling towards Nevada. The vertibird behind us wouldn’t catch up, but down there we knew we’d meet trouble.
“So, Winston,” I asked in an attempt to make small talk, “What’s your first name?”
Came his cynical reply, “Tim.”
Michovsky was the squad leader. He was a battle-scarred Russian guy who had lost his entire family at the battle of New Stalingrad against enemy forces from the Enclave-captured Finorden (the Enclave’s pet name for Finland, Norway and Sweden). He didn’t have a callsign, we simply referred to him as Michovsky.
Winston, “Scar,” was a young British guy with a knack for picking off targets from a distance. The Enclave blitzkreigs on London had killed his brother when he was 13 years old and left a scar across his left eye. He was also the squad’s resident hothead, and commanders’ tendency to refer to such hotheaded pupils by their last name led to him being called Winston on a normal basis.
Hsieh, “Seraphim,” was a Taiwanese man about 27 years old. He had barely escaped sea-mounted raids on the West-Asian front by U.S. Naval Forces and managed to pilot his dead father’s cropduster halfway to the Ural mountains where a chance encounter with a Eurasian Vertibird hooked him up with EC.
Pierre was a Frenchman whose inspiration to fight against the Enclave was only recently, with the bombing of Paris. This being his first battle, he didn’t really have any important skills. He was lucky to even have any powered armor.
Vogt, “Villa,” was another young guy, this time from Germany. He had joined three months ago and only just now gotten his suit of powered armor.Vogt’s dad had been Michovsky’s squadmate once and he joined to avenge the death of his father at the hands of the Enclave.
Raj, was an Indian guy, and the medic of the squad. He was also, coincidentally, one of our best marksmen. India wasn’t officially part of the EC, instead the South-Asian Concordance (SAC) but we trafficked supplies back and forth and both nations eagerly helped each other in times of war.
Finally, Bozic was the mechanic of the group, from Montenegro. Mechanics were almost as important as medics due to a squad’s reliance upon powered armor. His love for mechanics gained him the nickname “Bozar.” He joined to fight the Enclave because of the loss of his girlfriend three years ago to Enclave air forces whilst she was taking up a part-time job teaching in an elementary school.
The London Airbase housed approximately three thousand vertibirds, all tucked up in hundreds of hangars. The airbase stretched on for miles and was considered to be the Coalition’s largest ‘bird depository. Our pilot was a young Swiss woman nearing the end of her two-year tour of duty. The vertibird we were assigned to with her was a relatively new model and plane—the padding on the chairs was still there.
Our first mission was to be carried out Friday, 0400. Pierre was rather afraid and spent more time chewing his fingernails than actually practicing in the firing range. The rest of the squad seemed okay with it. Our mission was to attack a small GPS base outside of Trondheim, Frmr. Norway.
* * * * * *
The vertibird was a mile away from drop zone and we were closing in fast when the flak started coming at us. The first few shots hardly shook the fuselage of the plane until we heard a great “CRASH” from the canopy. Michovsky unlatched his straps and opened the door to the canopy.
Immediately, Michovsky got sucked out and grabbed onto the side of the empty door. We had no radio or way to pilot the ‘bird. Least we could do was help him out. Raj and Hsieh magnetized their boots before disengaging straps and helping Michovsky out.
Pierre started nervously sweating and the squad thermal readout indicated his suit as having an 02-CO2 imbalance. “Quit breathing so much, Pierre!” I yelled into his console. “You’ll get yourself killed---the suit’s Respisystem can’t compensate unless you take in normal air, and who knows what sick chemicals they have stuffed into those flak shells.” Pierre proceeded to breath more slowly.
“Some more help, here? Pierre, get up and help us pull Michovsky out of the door.” Raj told us. Pierre, being closest, got up but forgot to magnetize his boots. None of us realized until Michovsky was out the door and Pierre went flying with him. He grabbed onto the side of the doorway, almost completely gone. Bozar and Raj were having a hard time keeping Michovsky from flying out as well, and our straps were starting to unbuckle. One of Villa’s flew right off and out the gaping doorway.
“Shut the damn door! I might not get to take any of the bastards down, but at least you can with my sacrifice! SHUT IT!” Pierre shouted.
Vogt jumped up with magnetized boots and heaved Michovsky in while Bozar and I attempted to pull Pierre. The other three couldn’t help out, as they were busy repairing damage to Michovsky’s powered armor that would lose us the suit if he kept on going.
Winston’s straps were completely gone and he instead had to stand there with magnetized boots, which was hard considering he had a systems malfunction in one of them.
“Not going to let the newbie die!” Michovsky said with an exasperated breath. “Spleen damage…. I won’t live anyway.” He clasped his hands around Pierre’s arm and tried to pull him up, but there wasn’t enough hydraulic juice to do the job. “HOLD ON TO ME, MEDICS!” were his last words.
Raj and Bozar grabbed on to Michovsky’s back as he placed all remaining hydraulics and energy, even that from his magnetized boots, into his arm plates. He pulled Pierre right out and sent him halfway across the room. Engaging his boots, Pierre stuck to the floor.
Raj was the first to let go, his robotic arm plates not being able to hold any longer. Bozar couldn’t hold all of Michovsky’s weight alone and thus had to let go as well. He flew out the door as Bozar slammed down on the “CLOSE” button.
The vertibird was still crashing, and we had no pilot or squad leader.
Parachutes wouldn’t cushion the fall as much as we’d like due to the fact that the added velocity of the ‘bird’s speed would make it hard to land cushioned perfectly, but that didn’t deter the squad. Bozar, second in command, proceeded to take control of the
The backs of our suits opened up to reveal parachutes that subsequently popped out. Bozar began his mid-mission briefing. “Okay, we don’t have a radio so there is NO going back here. The only way we’ll possibly make it past borders is if we jerry-rig the GPS base. That means no hitting the consoles to electrocute the friendly operator, Winston.” We knew Bozar was mad when he called Winston by their last names—it annoyed him even more than when a commander called Winston by his callsign. “We’re also short one squad lea-“
“No thanks to Pierre!” Winston blurted out. I must admit I followed suit rather eagerly. I never had liked Pierre—but if only I could talk to him one last time…
* * * * * * *
The Emoticons were airborne quickly enough. First Bozar, then the rest. We landed with quite a thud before looking up at the sky, then having to look farther down where we saw the vertiberd smash into the ground. Had they noticed us? We could only hope not.
Almost immediately the squad located the nearest place for cover, and with Bozar’s permission we all took up strategic locations around it. Winston and I scouted the area ahead with our snipe-modified M3P1-L’s to see a jeep approaching.
“Jeep, 9 o’clock. Fire in 10, 9, 8, 7----” Winston droned on until we hit one and the entire squad popped out from behind the rock, first people with sniping modifications, then the heavy weapons guys.
The jeep made a power slide about half a klick away and tried to retreat. I switched my M3P1-L to “incindiary fire” and blasted a hole in the back of the jeep, lighting it aflame and sending the lightly-armored techies flying. Bozar congratulated me on finesse but berated me, explaining that the jeep would have been useful in getting to the base, which was three kilometers away.
The Emoticons continued marching to the base, Pierre getting a gratuitous amount of shoves, mainly from Vogt out of his late father’s friendship with the commander. I, too, gave Pierre a fair amount of shoves and dirty looks through my headpiece.
He apologized, too, the poor bastard. His headpiece was either looking up at the sky or down at the ground. He didn’t have his radio on, but I suspected he was crying. Not like I was going to comfort him—a move I will always regret.
About half a klick away from the base, we came to a canyon rift through a valley of mountains. The GPS site was atop one of the mountains, and our lucky squad had to climb it. Apart from the sniper fire about to befall us, the squad would be fine for the hike.
Bozar first saw the snipers. Taking a zoomview of the GPS site, he noticed about 16 lightly-armored Enclave troopers readying mounted sniper weapons. “RUN FOR COVER!” came his shout. The squad found whatever cover they had available and hid behind it. A mortar shell grazed Vogt’s back. Analyzing my surroundings, I noticed that if we could distract them for a moment, we might be able to get to an unprotected region of the mountain with which to scale it.
Telling this to Bozar, he nodded in approval. In an attempt to test their sniping mettle, I grabbed a rock about the size of the powered armor glove hand and tossed it into their firing range. The rock was pelted to a pile of an ant’s equivalent of one of our pebbles, not a single shot missing. I could hear confused voices over the squad-comms, but one thing stood out, a message from Pierre:
“I don’t think that you’ll ever really forgive me for my stupid mistake costing the life of a great man who died honorably to save my worthless hide, but at least I can redeem myself and complete the mission he set out to accomplish. Goodbye.”
Pierre stepped back. And back. And... back. Right into the enemy line of fire. We couldn’t help him at that point. The squad exchanged nods, and we all took a giant run across the space to the unprotected zone and waited as Pierre’s body was pelted with sniper fire. He lay bleeding on the ground. A shot hit one of the pipes in his headpiece. Taking it off manually, he took a breath of fresh air and smiled, shortly before a mortar shell blasted his corpse into oblivion.
We never forgave him.
Never a fan of dawdling, Bozar ordered us to climb the mountain. It was a slow hike, and the entire squad was sick to their stomachs about what we’d done to Pierre and the fact that we never would forgive him, or even get the chance to.
Are those the spoils of war? Tears? Maybe not to the rich, but the horrors of war are certainly horrible to a grunt.
Some of the squad had no need for regret. Some had been indifferent to Pierre, but none were ever really nice to him. Maybe that’s why he joined the army. To make a friend.
I was the first to get to the top of the mountain. The plateau at its top was large enough for another five or so GPS bases, but the actual base was across a rope bridge. Where we were standing was the radio. A tech working on it looked up at the squad. Raising his hands in fear and horror, he slowly stepped back.
“We don’t want to hurt-“ I was interrupted by his ghastly scream as he stepped off the plateau. Jumping down, I threw my hand at his. Catching on to it, his face was filled with terror. He thought that I was going to drag him up and dismember him—well, something to that effect because he let go of my glove and let himself fall to his death at the summit of the mountain. The rest of the squad looked down in horror.
I wondered, at that moment, if all the Enclave Troopers were really evil—maybe they didn’t want to piss off Big Brother, maybe they actually thought that they were the good guys. That seems reasonable, I mean, why else would they be fighting for the Enclave? Either that, or they think of us as evil pigs.
Standing up, I was second to follow Bozar across the bridge. The wood, as we first thought, was actually a steel polymer with some sort of brown shading. The entire squad was halfway across to the larger plateau which housed the GPS base, ¼ of a klick away from the bridge’s end.
The blast shocked me. The end of the bridge nearest the radio had been blasted by some C-4, probably set by the jumping tech. Everyone grabbed onto a panel except Raj, at the end of the line. He plummeted down into the ground, much to the horror of the rest of the squad.
Why must the innocent always die?
Grasping his weapon in one hand, Bozar flung himself over the edge above, rolled, landed on one knee, and blasted the right leg off of a fully-armed Enclave Trooper. I followed behind him with the others, taking cover as we rose.Popping out from behind an exterior supply cabinet, I quickly examined the battlefield.
There was an entire squadron of fully-armed troopers assigned here, with backup from GPS Base Security-the seven remaining in the enemy squad and the five GPS guards added up to a total of 12 dead men in front of me.
Backing behind cover, I suggested we all arise at the same time to Bozar. He shook his head in disagreement and tossed above the boulder he hid behind a grenade. Using infrared, I looked through the cabinet to observe three GPS securitymen flying away from the grenade.
The squaddies popped up from behind their respective cover, mounting weapons atop boulders and cabinets. An orgy of gore was to be seen before me—the last two GPS securitymen were literally pelted with rifle fire and went down within a second. The Troopers, however, were nowhere to be seen.
Switching to infrared, I noticed a trooper or two behind assorted boulders. Pointing them out to Bozar with hand signals, he nodded and commanded the rest of the group to switch to grenade-launch on the secondary fire mode of their weapons.
Responding to his command, the squad launched a massive barrage of mini-rockets at assorted cover, killing the remaining members of the Enclave squad and reducing their cover to rubble.
The Emoticons quickly rose and rushed forward to the base, guns blazing at the remaining GPS Securitymen. Their submachineguns left gaping dents and scars in our armor as our assorted weapons sent the securitymen and their feeble armor flying into rocks lying atop the large plateau.
Stepping into the base, Vogt sent the Comm. Officer flying into the wall with a shot to the chest. We followed behind him and intercepted the transmission.
“Zzzzt. Repeat, orbital ICBM station back online, request you fire at London Air Base, over. Please respond, GPS base, over.” The radio continued to drone on for sometime until we heard a snicker from the second floor. Rushing up to check on what was happening, I was shocked to see a teck slam his hand down on a button marked “Send Transmission.”
He turned around and looked at me with a smirk on his face. Pulling a sidearm and rolling to the side, he sent a bullet right across my left leg, leaving an easily-noticeable scar. Raising my weapon, I fired a shot at him, sending the lower part of his body whacking into the wall.
“I see two ‘birds outside. According to the logs of the transmission out here, we have to use it to get back home and weed out these spies on the SDI defense net team. With them in their positions, LAB won’t be able to defend against the attack and we’ll lose our entire supply of vertibirds.” Came Bozar’s briefing of the situation.
Winston finally came up with something not impetuous to say and countered Bozar’s remark. “Sorry, Bozar, but no can do. Apparently they’re going to sabotage the power supply to the SDI grid in ten minutes, and even if we do weed out the spies, the SDI can only deflect the nuke, which’ll send it into Eurasia, and we don’t want that. We’re going to have to weaken the armor on the nuke enough to make it blow when the SDI grids start firing.”
“But the station’s in space!” Seraphim protested.
“Says here the Enclave sent an NeoShuttle up there with a crew to rig the thing up.” I told them, having recently sifted through the transmission logs.
“Thanks for the info, 8-Ball. NeoShuttles don’t need rockets to take off. Seraphim and I will fly back home and weed out the spies—we’ll transfer all unnecessary fuel to you guys. With it, hijack the NeoShuttle, fill ‘er up, get up to the station, take all of the armor plates off of the thing, and fly back. Detonation with electronic timers won’t work up there because the signals will be corrupted by radiation from long-leaking radioactive chemicals.” Bozar informed us, shortly before almost emptying one of the vertibirds and getting in it with Seraphim. The rest of us got into the second shuttle and took off.
* * * * * * *
Winston spotted the thing on Radar and piloted us towards it. Vogt and I loaded up our weapons and prepared to shuttlejack the thing. As we saw it on the viewscreen, Winston pulled us a tight turn which sacrificed some velocity and put us behind the shuttle.
Catching up, we latched onto the back of it and lasered a hole in. Jumping inside, we walked to the bridge where a group of astronauts had their hands raised high. Vogt threw them all into the lower recesses of the ship where they would stay before he joined us on the bridge.
The NeoShuttle was easy for the three of us to pilot. Sucking in all the fuel from the vertibird and letting it fly off, we exited the atmosphere and went into orbit with approximately three hours until we’d reach the ICBM satellite.
Passing time by playing cards, we were startled when the computer finally told us that the satellite’s range was closing. Latching the NeoShuttle on, we stepped onto the ICBM satellite’s exterior and magnetized our boots.
We slowly began removing plates and tossing them at the atmosphere of Earth. It was at this point that the corroded latch snapped. The NeoShuttle Computer stupidly tried to push itself into the satellite to regain contact, but this just bounced it off and sent it flying down in the general direction of the United States. We saw an escape pod pop out of it, probably the bridge crew—I still don’t know.
We concentrated on the task of removing the panels from the nuke before dealing with our way home. We’d have to somehow get away from the radiation and send a signal to the folks at London telling them to send a vertibird to shoot down one nuclear warhead help the riders of a second one get off.
Jerry-rigging another nuke for our voyage, we attatched a coil to the back of Winston’s suit and pushed him away from the station while holding onto the coil. He managed to get out of the radiation and send the signal, but we didn’t know if they got it or not, as his built-in long-range radio was the only one working and couldn’t receive even an “affirmative” signal.
We stepped back as the SDI-targeted nuke launched in the general direction of London. Engaging launch sequence for the nuke, we boarded it and launched the thing straight off the satellite and into the sea north of Ireland. The warhead was empty and wouldn’t explode, much less kill any fish in the already-overpolluted waters, petroleum dropped in them by the Enclave to kill off EC fishing communities.
The atmosphere’s penetration sure was a bitch. My armor was hotter than the devil’s breath as we penetrated it. Finally, exiting the outer atmosphere, the nuke was flying straight at the sea. Looking down, we saw an explosion but couldn’t tell if it was on the ground at London or above, in the air. After we were within vertibird range, we saw one in the distance, coming towards us.
“YEE-HAAAW!” Shouted Winston.
“We’re going to be heroes! Heroes!” Came Vogt’s overenthused reply.
And then my pessimistic awakening of their senses to reality. Zooming in on the Vertibird, I saw a big, fat, ugly “USA” engraved on the front of its fuselage. “That’s an Enclave Vertibird, they obviously intercepted the signal—but how?”
The glumness of Winston and Vogt faded to nihilistic muttering until Winston murmured, “Shit. I know what did it. They had radios up there, how else would they send signals to the ICBM satellite? Radios that must have been able to penetrate the radiation. Those radios picked up the transmission and blocked it out. How could we be so stupid?”
The enclave vertibird fired a missile, but it missed and instead sent the nuke spiraling towards Nevada. The vertibird behind us wouldn’t catch up, but down there we knew we’d meet trouble.
“So, Winston,” I asked in an attempt to make small talk, “What’s your first name?”
Came his cynical reply, “Tim.”
(nt)
:: applauds::