8
8-Ball
Guest
The newest installment in the series penned by the NMA Board's favorite Left-Wing extremist and democrat basher, REQUIEM: CHAPTER THREE!
I gripped onto the blast panel nearest me as the ICBM smashed into the ground and slid across what seemed to be a fifth of the length of Nevada. The thing was a great ride until it jumped off a cliff and smacked down into the ground past it. If the missile rolled over once, it’d kill the whole squad. Luck got us there and luck was about to get us off the damn thing.
Nodding to Winston and Vogt, I jumped off while the thing was decelerating in the general direction of a cliff, the others following. Stepping back, we watched it zoom right over and plunge into the summit of the cliff.
Checking my GPS readout, I detected Redding about three klicks from our position. The desert around the place was rather flat and made passage easy. It was the arrival at the town that really screwed everything up.
As we stepped out of a canyon about ¼ of a klick from Redding, we noticed a rising tower of smoke from the center of the dead forest surrounding it. Zooming in, my eyes were host to a disgusting visage—Redding’s buildings torn to shreds, bodies impaled upon wooden poles and lying shot in the middle of the streets.
“Well, this doesn’t explain just where the Enclave went after doing this,” I pointed out to our trio.
Vogt begged to differ, “Who says they did it?”
We were interrupted by a voice from behind us. “We do, ya commie bastards. Suck on this, fu—“ he was interrupted by the flare of Winston’s MP31-L ripping his breastplate to shreds.
“I just hate long goodbyes.” Winston shouted at the trooper’s body.
Angry at Winston, I informed him of the stupidity of not rendering the guy simply immobile. “He said we and we don’t know who we is!”
I was just about ready to empty a clip of rage on Winston when I heard a distinct “SPLAT” on the group comms prior to Vogt’s falling over, dead.
Hiding behind a boulder, we heard the Enclave’s threats. “Come out. Your coalition is no more. It and the SAC have been blanketed by Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles. Surrender and the United States of America will not harm you.”
“What do we do?” Shouted Winston.
“There’s a vertibird at the dead forest, the Enclave left it there. They probably won’t have found it yet, the thing was well hidden. But we need a distraction…” I was stumped.
Switching to grenade fire, Winston blasted a smoke-shot in the air. Getting his point, I blasted the thing with a minispread of bullets and gave us a smokescreen to escape with.
Running through the forest, Winston got ahead of me. That’s what got him killed. A spray of bullets landed in his back and brought him down, and his last words were too muffled for me to hear what the hell he said. I heard him shout out for his mother a couple times, too—the poor guy.
* * * * * *
Seeing the ground before me, I thought desperately of a way to stop from falling straight to my doom. Pulling out my MP31-L, I fired a short-range smoke bomb right in front of me. The blast knocked me back into the cliff wall where I caught on to a rock and held on it for some time.
Looking at the smokescreen I had created, I was horrified to see the U.S. flag pop right through it, making way for a vertibird which would follow right behind. The main machineguns on the ‘bird aimed straight at me.
Jumping off, I gripped on to the bird’s nose. Smashing the windows with the back of my weapon, I hopped in and pelted the chairs of the two pilots. Grabbing the controls, I raised the altitude and got the thing floating above the top of the cliff in front of an Enclave Squadron.
“Let freedom ring!” I shouted out as the two main machineguns ripped the gorilla-faced Enclave Troopers to shreds, powered armor and all. The last remaining troopers managed to pelt the thing’s hydraulics control, so I spent the last remaining fuel smashing it into the dead forest and landing near the old vertibird.
I was halfway there when I heard it. “You move and your Juanito friend gets the bullet.”
“Don’t listen to the bastard! He—“ Juan’s voice was cut off by the roar of a bozar ahead.
Aiming ahead with my optical scanners, I popped the gorrila face right off the trooper and sent his carcass flying into the side of the vertibird. Running inside, I engaged the fuel systems and took the thing off.
* * * * * *
Flying over the District of Columbia, I looked down at the place, expecting to see a boneyard of knocked-over buildings and bombed out areas, but to my amazement I saw a vast city of somewhat rebuilt buildings stuck together and stretching across some distance.
Cannons began popping out of the main buildings and aiming at the vertibird as the radar informed me that I had a squadron of light fighter-birds on my tail, closing in fast.
I swooped the vertibird down into the cityscape and began darting between buildings as the vertibirds followed close behind. It was about 30 seconds into the chase when one smashed into a building behind me, right into the face of an “Uncle Sam Wants YOU!” poster.
Darting to the side, I flew right by a barely-reconstructed Washington Monument with the word “AMCAP” carved into it. Crap, I thought. Thinking smart, I almost stalled swooping upward above the monument and then diving towards the White House before swooping over that, too. One of the last three fighters smashed into the monument and knocked it down while the other two scraped the White House’s top.
The fighters started firing their machine guns at the rear of my vertibird and scraped its winds as I twisted around my own guns to aim at them and fired, ripping one bird to shreds and missing the other one, which swerved upward away from the guns’ fire.
The machineguns tracked it and began emtyping my ammunition supply at a rapid rate. The fighter got one of its wings damaged as I intercepted a command from their base.
“Bird 287, you are ordered to immediately take out that vertibird via any means necessary. For America!” Came the Colonel’s order.
The fighter pulled down its nose and went on a kamikaze move right into me. Firing the machineguns at its engine, I swerved the thing off course only to have its eject pod shoot out and latch onto the back of my vertibird.
Magnetizing my boots and pulling out my weapon, I hopped out onto the top of the vertibird and got ready to fight the pilot. He was already out of the ‘pod and standing atop the vertibird.
My communications light flared. “I’m unarmed. You want to show how nice and caring your Communist buddies are and shoot an unarmed man, or do you want to get it on mano é mano?”
Tossing my gun into the cockpit, I tightened my fists. “You know, your leaders aren’t even capitalists—they don’t give a shit about you and wouldn’t if they were. Give it up. They only call themselves that because they’d have to make all of the idiots living with them forget what ‘Communist’ meant to call themselves it and not piss off the whole nation”
He responded, “So you think that after just being willing to give my life for the USA, I’m going to give up all of my ideals just to help out some Commie moron?”
I gave up the whole rebellious aspect of my speech. “Guess not.”
Charging towards me, the pilot landed a hit on my breastplate as I grabbed the tubes on his headpiece and ripped them apart. He stepped back, grabbing his helmet and threw it off, charging at me yet again, this time kicking me in the stomach and sending me flying back, almost off the top of the vertibird. I grabbed his face with my glove and threw him down into the plating of the ‘bird.
Pulling out a .223 pistol from his bootstrap, he aimed up at my breastplate and made a scar straight across it. I kicked the gun from his hand and straight off the vertibird.
With a look of terror in his face, the pilot inched back and accidentally flew off the side of the ‘bird. I jumped down and grabbed his hand. Don’t let him die like the techie, I thought and grabbed his hand with both of mine.
“And I give up my beliefs just because of your goodie-goodie cliché attitude? No way.” He tried to let go of my hands but couldn’t garner the strength.
“No way?” I asked him.
“No way. Thanks for trying, though.” He replied.
And I let go. I don’t know what came over me, but I did. I felt bad about it, too. About letting the guy go. He wasn’t stupid, I could tell that—it was why a perfectly smart person could so eagerly pick the wrong side that disturbed me.
But what is the wrong side?
* * * * * *
As I got a glimpse of the Iberian Peninsula, I saw that Eurasia had not been planketed by nukes, but something much worse was about to befall it. Heading down the border between the Coalition and the South-Asian Concordance, I intercepted broadband radio signals from both sides.
From the EC, “The newly self-appointed dictator of the South-Asian Concordance has allied the SAC with the Enclave and declared war upon the Coalition. Let us take up arms and fight!”
And from the SAC, “The new self-appointed dictator of the Eurasian Coalition has allied them with the Enclave and declared war upon Southasia! The traitors will die at our hands!”
And a third US signal from a makeshift stealth Enclave military base, “Yes, Mr. President. They will kill each other soon enough. We’ll update you on the coordinates of the winning side’s last bastions of power for the nuclear bombardment when the tide of war subsides. May I say that Uncle Sam’s idea of setting the two sides against each other like two wild dogs was a truly excellent plan!”
That was all I needed to hear. Looking at the ground below me, I saw what were apparently thousands of troopers from both sides taking up the trenches and at the same time dropping like apples. Taking a risk, I landed the vertibird at the center of the battle and stepped out atop it.
Both sides recognized me as the one who’d stopped the bombardment of London. Stepping atop the vertibird, I yelled out to the masses.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to big, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which!” I shouted out to the masses.
“An Enclave military base lies three kilometers from my position.” I told them.
Immediately, my Enclave Comms Light flashed. “What the fuck? How’d he find out? Crap! The president’ll have our heads… unless… tell him to fire a nuke at the battle’s crux! NOW!”
In response to that, I yelled out, “They’re firing a nuke here almost immediately and if like-minded idealists continue to fight one another, we can kiss our asses goodbye. The Enclave has been playing the lot of you! Neither sides have self-appointed dictators or alliances with the Enclave! ASSAULT THE BASE!”
A massive uproar of voices could be heard as a huge horde of troopers ran up the hill to the base and flew via vertibird, where the Enclave troopers standing guard were brutally slaughtered along by about two hundred bullets apiece and the interior of the base detonated with C-4 as the troopers inside were taken out and tortured to the soldiers’ hearts’ content.
I didn’t have any part in the torturing of the soldiers inside—I actually tried to stop it. I was horrified to see my “comrades” mutilate the bodies of most of the troopers and rape almost every female soldier in the base.
After everyone watched the nuke land at the empty area three kilometers away from the hill the base was mounted on, an order came to execute soldiers who would not give up information.
Stepping inside the base and shaking my head, I saw Bozar and Seraphim sitting down and staring at the ground.
Taking off my headpiece and putting on a smile, I greeted them. “Hey, guys! Long time no see!”
Both replied in unison, “Hey. Where are Winston and Vogt?”
My smile faded. “They both died—with honor. Let us not forget them.”
Their bad moods only slightly degraded, being horrible as they were. “Damn. They were great friends.” Bozar told me.
I asked them, “What is it that had you down when I came here?”
Bozar looked up and told me. “We were ordered my a drunk colonel to sit by and do nothing while he dragged a guy in there and tore up his body, then dragged in a girl and raped her. Nothing. We couldn’t do anything. Just sit here.”
I heard Seraphim chuckle. “We took an oath to uphold justice and defend the truth, but here we have 200 soldiers in this base dying in the most dishonorable of ways. Our own commanding officer ordering us to sit outside while he has his way with whoever and whatever he wants.”
I heard a scream from inside the room. I’d had enough. Kicking it down, I grabbed the naked Colonel and smashed him into the wall.
“Huhhh? What’re you doing here? Uhhh… go away please.. .heh…heh” Came his drunk babble.
“You sick bastard.” I picked him up by his collar and threw him out of the room, letting him smash onto the wall.
Bozar and Seraphim ran in, Seraphim warning me that my ass was the Colonel’s and Bozar threatening to remove said Colonel’s larynx if he ever said anything about what I had just done to him.
I chuckled until I realized that the room I was in belonged to the base commander when the radio started quacking.
“Come in, base commander. Repeat, come in. You are hereby ordered to respond in five minutes or we will launch a tactical nuclear warhead at your position and blanket SAC\EC area with nuclear blast, over.” It said.
Picking up the mike, I talked into it. “This is the base commander. The battle looks like it will go on for another three days, we’ll report back to you then.”
“Voice recignition—hey, wait, only ten people show up under VoiceRec for your voice; with seven on duty here, two KIA, and one MIA, presumed defected. General, prepare to launch nukes! Ah, crap I left the mike on… BZZT” It replied.
“Let’s go” I told Bozar and Seraphim. “We have to warn them—warn them that they better pack up and run because hell’s coming our way.”
“Right” They both responded.
“Hey, what about me?” came a voice from the room..
“Stay here. It’s safer.” I told her.
“Oh, yeah. When the nuke comes I’ll be just fine. I’ll make it. No worries. Yeah, right. Let me come with you!” She pleaded.
“Fine” I told her. “Get in the Colonel’s suit and come on!”
* * * * * *
“They’re getting ready to blanket Eurasia and Southasia! We can only assume that they have spies at our SDI grids!” I told the groups outside.
I got few replies from the drunken horde except for, “We’ll never fish them out in time. I’ll get on long-range and tell them to evacuate.”
Stepping into a Coalition vertibird with the three others, I took off and thought for a moment.
Why should I still help the Eurasian Coalition or the South-Asian Concordance? They aren’t that different from the Enclave these days. I suppose we should go rogue—but why? It seems like our only hope is to take out the Enclave ourselves. Maybe the people of the Coalition and the Concordance will band together and make the world a better place without the Enclave. Then again, how will four people take out a superpower like the Enclave? It seems impossible. But then again, when the blanket comes, there will be nothing left of the Eurasian Coalition or the South-Asian Concordance. What little is left will die of food shortage after they become cannibals and will be gone forever. We will be all that remains. Unless---
Enganging long-range communication, I talked my way into a conversation with the Chancellor of the Coalition.
“Sir,” I began, “I know that the war will end within this generation, but let’s not allow the Enclave to be the victors. I propose a full-scale assault against the Eastern Seaboard. While this happens, my squad—if you will assign us four new members—will sneak into the sewers of the cities and get into their main computers where we can get the ICBM’s to fly up in the air and come smashing down into what’s left of the United States.”
The president’s face didn’t smile and begin laughing like I had expected it to. “Well, I think that this will be the first time in history that a military superpower has followed the commands of a simple frontline grunt, but these are dire circumstances, and I do believe that the savior of the Coalition knows what he is talking about. I’ll send your ‘bird’s computer an e-mail with the mission briefing ASAP. Good luck.”
Landing at London Base, we picked up the four new members he assigned us.
Wolenczak, a hardened polish trooper who’d been in the coalition three years and had all the experience a guy could get.
Rico, another hardened soldier, this time from Spain and packing five years of experience and a skill with close-range weapons.
Cale, an two-year-service englishman with a knack for long-range weapons.
And, finally, our medic and Rico’s love interest, Valdez, a Spanish Woman in the service for two and a half years.
We also had to put up with Claire, the defector who was good with close-range weapons.
* * * * * *
The vertibird launched off with two thousand others, headed straight for the eastern seaboard. The entire military might of the combined Eurasian Coalition and South-Asian Concordance. Fighter-birds led the fleet, their machineguns and missiles at the ready.
The people of the Eurasian Coalition and South-Asian Concordance couldn’t possibly all be evacuated, and thus were left ignorant of their impending doom, to die. None of the soldiers in the vertibirds looked back to see their friends and families die painfully by a nuclear blanket.
We were flying away from what had just become as nothing towards what we were going to attempt to make a carbon copy of what we had left behind.
At the same time, we expected and hoped that the Chinese forces would hold a vertibird strike against the western seaboard. Their country, too, would surely be blanketed and host to a much larger amount of deaths. The Chancellor’s pact with the Chinese was finally going to pay off now.
War never changes. What had happened three thousand years ago and what had happened three hundred was happening right now. War. If people learned from their mistakes, there would only have been one war in the history of mankind. Unfortunately, people don’t learn from their mistakes.
I gripped onto the blast panel nearest me as the ICBM smashed into the ground and slid across what seemed to be a fifth of the length of Nevada. The thing was a great ride until it jumped off a cliff and smacked down into the ground past it. If the missile rolled over once, it’d kill the whole squad. Luck got us there and luck was about to get us off the damn thing.
Nodding to Winston and Vogt, I jumped off while the thing was decelerating in the general direction of a cliff, the others following. Stepping back, we watched it zoom right over and plunge into the summit of the cliff.
Checking my GPS readout, I detected Redding about three klicks from our position. The desert around the place was rather flat and made passage easy. It was the arrival at the town that really screwed everything up.
As we stepped out of a canyon about ¼ of a klick from Redding, we noticed a rising tower of smoke from the center of the dead forest surrounding it. Zooming in, my eyes were host to a disgusting visage—Redding’s buildings torn to shreds, bodies impaled upon wooden poles and lying shot in the middle of the streets.
“Well, this doesn’t explain just where the Enclave went after doing this,” I pointed out to our trio.
Vogt begged to differ, “Who says they did it?”
We were interrupted by a voice from behind us. “We do, ya commie bastards. Suck on this, fu—“ he was interrupted by the flare of Winston’s MP31-L ripping his breastplate to shreds.
“I just hate long goodbyes.” Winston shouted at the trooper’s body.
Angry at Winston, I informed him of the stupidity of not rendering the guy simply immobile. “He said we and we don’t know who we is!”
I was just about ready to empty a clip of rage on Winston when I heard a distinct “SPLAT” on the group comms prior to Vogt’s falling over, dead.
Hiding behind a boulder, we heard the Enclave’s threats. “Come out. Your coalition is no more. It and the SAC have been blanketed by Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles. Surrender and the United States of America will not harm you.”
“What do we do?” Shouted Winston.
“There’s a vertibird at the dead forest, the Enclave left it there. They probably won’t have found it yet, the thing was well hidden. But we need a distraction…” I was stumped.
Switching to grenade fire, Winston blasted a smoke-shot in the air. Getting his point, I blasted the thing with a minispread of bullets and gave us a smokescreen to escape with.
Running through the forest, Winston got ahead of me. That’s what got him killed. A spray of bullets landed in his back and brought him down, and his last words were too muffled for me to hear what the hell he said. I heard him shout out for his mother a couple times, too—the poor guy.
* * * * * *
Seeing the ground before me, I thought desperately of a way to stop from falling straight to my doom. Pulling out my MP31-L, I fired a short-range smoke bomb right in front of me. The blast knocked me back into the cliff wall where I caught on to a rock and held on it for some time.
Looking at the smokescreen I had created, I was horrified to see the U.S. flag pop right through it, making way for a vertibird which would follow right behind. The main machineguns on the ‘bird aimed straight at me.
Jumping off, I gripped on to the bird’s nose. Smashing the windows with the back of my weapon, I hopped in and pelted the chairs of the two pilots. Grabbing the controls, I raised the altitude and got the thing floating above the top of the cliff in front of an Enclave Squadron.
“Let freedom ring!” I shouted out as the two main machineguns ripped the gorilla-faced Enclave Troopers to shreds, powered armor and all. The last remaining troopers managed to pelt the thing’s hydraulics control, so I spent the last remaining fuel smashing it into the dead forest and landing near the old vertibird.
I was halfway there when I heard it. “You move and your Juanito friend gets the bullet.”
“Don’t listen to the bastard! He—“ Juan’s voice was cut off by the roar of a bozar ahead.
Aiming ahead with my optical scanners, I popped the gorrila face right off the trooper and sent his carcass flying into the side of the vertibird. Running inside, I engaged the fuel systems and took the thing off.
* * * * * *
Flying over the District of Columbia, I looked down at the place, expecting to see a boneyard of knocked-over buildings and bombed out areas, but to my amazement I saw a vast city of somewhat rebuilt buildings stuck together and stretching across some distance.
Cannons began popping out of the main buildings and aiming at the vertibird as the radar informed me that I had a squadron of light fighter-birds on my tail, closing in fast.
I swooped the vertibird down into the cityscape and began darting between buildings as the vertibirds followed close behind. It was about 30 seconds into the chase when one smashed into a building behind me, right into the face of an “Uncle Sam Wants YOU!” poster.
Darting to the side, I flew right by a barely-reconstructed Washington Monument with the word “AMCAP” carved into it. Crap, I thought. Thinking smart, I almost stalled swooping upward above the monument and then diving towards the White House before swooping over that, too. One of the last three fighters smashed into the monument and knocked it down while the other two scraped the White House’s top.
The fighters started firing their machine guns at the rear of my vertibird and scraped its winds as I twisted around my own guns to aim at them and fired, ripping one bird to shreds and missing the other one, which swerved upward away from the guns’ fire.
The machineguns tracked it and began emtyping my ammunition supply at a rapid rate. The fighter got one of its wings damaged as I intercepted a command from their base.
“Bird 287, you are ordered to immediately take out that vertibird via any means necessary. For America!” Came the Colonel’s order.
The fighter pulled down its nose and went on a kamikaze move right into me. Firing the machineguns at its engine, I swerved the thing off course only to have its eject pod shoot out and latch onto the back of my vertibird.
Magnetizing my boots and pulling out my weapon, I hopped out onto the top of the vertibird and got ready to fight the pilot. He was already out of the ‘pod and standing atop the vertibird.
My communications light flared. “I’m unarmed. You want to show how nice and caring your Communist buddies are and shoot an unarmed man, or do you want to get it on mano é mano?”
Tossing my gun into the cockpit, I tightened my fists. “You know, your leaders aren’t even capitalists—they don’t give a shit about you and wouldn’t if they were. Give it up. They only call themselves that because they’d have to make all of the idiots living with them forget what ‘Communist’ meant to call themselves it and not piss off the whole nation”
He responded, “So you think that after just being willing to give my life for the USA, I’m going to give up all of my ideals just to help out some Commie moron?”
I gave up the whole rebellious aspect of my speech. “Guess not.”
Charging towards me, the pilot landed a hit on my breastplate as I grabbed the tubes on his headpiece and ripped them apart. He stepped back, grabbing his helmet and threw it off, charging at me yet again, this time kicking me in the stomach and sending me flying back, almost off the top of the vertibird. I grabbed his face with my glove and threw him down into the plating of the ‘bird.
Pulling out a .223 pistol from his bootstrap, he aimed up at my breastplate and made a scar straight across it. I kicked the gun from his hand and straight off the vertibird.
With a look of terror in his face, the pilot inched back and accidentally flew off the side of the ‘bird. I jumped down and grabbed his hand. Don’t let him die like the techie, I thought and grabbed his hand with both of mine.
“And I give up my beliefs just because of your goodie-goodie cliché attitude? No way.” He tried to let go of my hands but couldn’t garner the strength.
“No way?” I asked him.
“No way. Thanks for trying, though.” He replied.
And I let go. I don’t know what came over me, but I did. I felt bad about it, too. About letting the guy go. He wasn’t stupid, I could tell that—it was why a perfectly smart person could so eagerly pick the wrong side that disturbed me.
But what is the wrong side?
* * * * * *
As I got a glimpse of the Iberian Peninsula, I saw that Eurasia had not been planketed by nukes, but something much worse was about to befall it. Heading down the border between the Coalition and the South-Asian Concordance, I intercepted broadband radio signals from both sides.
From the EC, “The newly self-appointed dictator of the South-Asian Concordance has allied the SAC with the Enclave and declared war upon the Coalition. Let us take up arms and fight!”
And from the SAC, “The new self-appointed dictator of the Eurasian Coalition has allied them with the Enclave and declared war upon Southasia! The traitors will die at our hands!”
And a third US signal from a makeshift stealth Enclave military base, “Yes, Mr. President. They will kill each other soon enough. We’ll update you on the coordinates of the winning side’s last bastions of power for the nuclear bombardment when the tide of war subsides. May I say that Uncle Sam’s idea of setting the two sides against each other like two wild dogs was a truly excellent plan!”
That was all I needed to hear. Looking at the ground below me, I saw what were apparently thousands of troopers from both sides taking up the trenches and at the same time dropping like apples. Taking a risk, I landed the vertibird at the center of the battle and stepped out atop it.
Both sides recognized me as the one who’d stopped the bombardment of London. Stepping atop the vertibird, I yelled out to the masses.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to big, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which!” I shouted out to the masses.
“An Enclave military base lies three kilometers from my position.” I told them.
Immediately, my Enclave Comms Light flashed. “What the fuck? How’d he find out? Crap! The president’ll have our heads… unless… tell him to fire a nuke at the battle’s crux! NOW!”
In response to that, I yelled out, “They’re firing a nuke here almost immediately and if like-minded idealists continue to fight one another, we can kiss our asses goodbye. The Enclave has been playing the lot of you! Neither sides have self-appointed dictators or alliances with the Enclave! ASSAULT THE BASE!”
A massive uproar of voices could be heard as a huge horde of troopers ran up the hill to the base and flew via vertibird, where the Enclave troopers standing guard were brutally slaughtered along by about two hundred bullets apiece and the interior of the base detonated with C-4 as the troopers inside were taken out and tortured to the soldiers’ hearts’ content.
I didn’t have any part in the torturing of the soldiers inside—I actually tried to stop it. I was horrified to see my “comrades” mutilate the bodies of most of the troopers and rape almost every female soldier in the base.
After everyone watched the nuke land at the empty area three kilometers away from the hill the base was mounted on, an order came to execute soldiers who would not give up information.
Stepping inside the base and shaking my head, I saw Bozar and Seraphim sitting down and staring at the ground.
Taking off my headpiece and putting on a smile, I greeted them. “Hey, guys! Long time no see!”
Both replied in unison, “Hey. Where are Winston and Vogt?”
My smile faded. “They both died—with honor. Let us not forget them.”
Their bad moods only slightly degraded, being horrible as they were. “Damn. They were great friends.” Bozar told me.
I asked them, “What is it that had you down when I came here?”
Bozar looked up and told me. “We were ordered my a drunk colonel to sit by and do nothing while he dragged a guy in there and tore up his body, then dragged in a girl and raped her. Nothing. We couldn’t do anything. Just sit here.”
I heard Seraphim chuckle. “We took an oath to uphold justice and defend the truth, but here we have 200 soldiers in this base dying in the most dishonorable of ways. Our own commanding officer ordering us to sit outside while he has his way with whoever and whatever he wants.”
I heard a scream from inside the room. I’d had enough. Kicking it down, I grabbed the naked Colonel and smashed him into the wall.
“Huhhh? What’re you doing here? Uhhh… go away please.. .heh…heh” Came his drunk babble.
“You sick bastard.” I picked him up by his collar and threw him out of the room, letting him smash onto the wall.
Bozar and Seraphim ran in, Seraphim warning me that my ass was the Colonel’s and Bozar threatening to remove said Colonel’s larynx if he ever said anything about what I had just done to him.
I chuckled until I realized that the room I was in belonged to the base commander when the radio started quacking.
“Come in, base commander. Repeat, come in. You are hereby ordered to respond in five minutes or we will launch a tactical nuclear warhead at your position and blanket SAC\EC area with nuclear blast, over.” It said.
Picking up the mike, I talked into it. “This is the base commander. The battle looks like it will go on for another three days, we’ll report back to you then.”
“Voice recignition—hey, wait, only ten people show up under VoiceRec for your voice; with seven on duty here, two KIA, and one MIA, presumed defected. General, prepare to launch nukes! Ah, crap I left the mike on… BZZT” It replied.
“Let’s go” I told Bozar and Seraphim. “We have to warn them—warn them that they better pack up and run because hell’s coming our way.”
“Right” They both responded.
“Hey, what about me?” came a voice from the room..
“Stay here. It’s safer.” I told her.
“Oh, yeah. When the nuke comes I’ll be just fine. I’ll make it. No worries. Yeah, right. Let me come with you!” She pleaded.
“Fine” I told her. “Get in the Colonel’s suit and come on!”
* * * * * *
“They’re getting ready to blanket Eurasia and Southasia! We can only assume that they have spies at our SDI grids!” I told the groups outside.
I got few replies from the drunken horde except for, “We’ll never fish them out in time. I’ll get on long-range and tell them to evacuate.”
Stepping into a Coalition vertibird with the three others, I took off and thought for a moment.
Why should I still help the Eurasian Coalition or the South-Asian Concordance? They aren’t that different from the Enclave these days. I suppose we should go rogue—but why? It seems like our only hope is to take out the Enclave ourselves. Maybe the people of the Coalition and the Concordance will band together and make the world a better place without the Enclave. Then again, how will four people take out a superpower like the Enclave? It seems impossible. But then again, when the blanket comes, there will be nothing left of the Eurasian Coalition or the South-Asian Concordance. What little is left will die of food shortage after they become cannibals and will be gone forever. We will be all that remains. Unless---
Enganging long-range communication, I talked my way into a conversation with the Chancellor of the Coalition.
“Sir,” I began, “I know that the war will end within this generation, but let’s not allow the Enclave to be the victors. I propose a full-scale assault against the Eastern Seaboard. While this happens, my squad—if you will assign us four new members—will sneak into the sewers of the cities and get into their main computers where we can get the ICBM’s to fly up in the air and come smashing down into what’s left of the United States.”
The president’s face didn’t smile and begin laughing like I had expected it to. “Well, I think that this will be the first time in history that a military superpower has followed the commands of a simple frontline grunt, but these are dire circumstances, and I do believe that the savior of the Coalition knows what he is talking about. I’ll send your ‘bird’s computer an e-mail with the mission briefing ASAP. Good luck.”
Landing at London Base, we picked up the four new members he assigned us.
Wolenczak, a hardened polish trooper who’d been in the coalition three years and had all the experience a guy could get.
Rico, another hardened soldier, this time from Spain and packing five years of experience and a skill with close-range weapons.
Cale, an two-year-service englishman with a knack for long-range weapons.
And, finally, our medic and Rico’s love interest, Valdez, a Spanish Woman in the service for two and a half years.
We also had to put up with Claire, the defector who was good with close-range weapons.
* * * * * *
The vertibird launched off with two thousand others, headed straight for the eastern seaboard. The entire military might of the combined Eurasian Coalition and South-Asian Concordance. Fighter-birds led the fleet, their machineguns and missiles at the ready.
The people of the Eurasian Coalition and South-Asian Concordance couldn’t possibly all be evacuated, and thus were left ignorant of their impending doom, to die. None of the soldiers in the vertibirds looked back to see their friends and families die painfully by a nuclear blanket.
We were flying away from what had just become as nothing towards what we were going to attempt to make a carbon copy of what we had left behind.
At the same time, we expected and hoped that the Chinese forces would hold a vertibird strike against the western seaboard. Their country, too, would surely be blanketed and host to a much larger amount of deaths. The Chancellor’s pact with the Chinese was finally going to pay off now.
War never changes. What had happened three thousand years ago and what had happened three hundred was happening right now. War. If people learned from their mistakes, there would only have been one war in the history of mankind. Unfortunately, people don’t learn from their mistakes.
