Old Habits Die Hard Pt. 3
09 Aug 2016Desert Fox CXVII
An alien sky stretches out above me, it's unfamiliar constellations shining through an atmosphere choked by a thick yellow haze. The taste of iron is heavy upon my tongue as I gaze up at the stars from below the brim of my helmet. In this moment, I have forgotten about the massive earthen defense works; the bunkers and machine gun nests, the coils of electrified barbed wire and the landmines, the air defence cannons and field guns. I’ve even forgotten about how cold and wet I am, how my stomach is tied in knots from malnutrition, or how my throat is parched and my lips are cracked and bleeding from dehydration.
All of it gloriously, if temporarily, forgotten in the face of nothing more precious than a sky full of stars. There are billions of views like this, each one slightly different from the last, but right now, as I lay at the bottom of this foxhole, a rifle clutched in white knuckled hands, this view is mine. It is my only connection to the world outside of my own personal hell; somewhere out there, circling one of those little spots of light, is my family, blissfully unaware of the things their son is capable of committing and enduring.
At that thought, a thousand pictures flash through my mind and the reality of my situation comes careening back to me like a runaway freight train. The stench of open sewage and week old corpses assault my senses with the same ferocity as our enemies.
Off in the distance, a firefight rages on; the overlapping chatter of machine gun fire and the steadier popping of rifle fire mix with the deep thumps of grenades and artillery, to create a cacophony of war that arrives a few heartbeats behind the various flashes of light from over the hill.
I close my eyes in a vain attempt to fall asleep despite the noise and the stink and the pool of frigid mud that had accumulated at the bottom of my foxhole.
My eyes aren’t closed for more than five minutes before someone shouts, in a voice choked by panic, the word we had all been living in terror of for the last six months. A word that, whenever uttered, brings terror and destruction with it.
“Incoming!”
I’m already curled in a ball, my hands covering my neck and head, face pressed against the dirt wall of my foxhole, when the shells start to come down. They rumble deep and low as they pass over, roaring loud enough that they drown out all other sounds, even that of their own detonations.
The ground shakes with the ferocity of the barrage, no one shell burst distinguishable from the other in the thunder all around me.
I cry out in terror, switching from frantic prayers to incoherent babbling and back again with panicked rapidity. In this moment, I’m not a well trained marine anymore; I’m just a terrified kid who wants nothing more than to be safe at home.
The intensity of the bombardment increases, and I curl up tighter still, my mouth overflowing with the taste of iron. This is where I’m going to die.
This is where it all ends.
This is whe-
The rumble stays with me into consciousness, jostling me awake and inducing waves of near crippling pain to throb around inside my head. I groan and shift in my chair, the taste of iron still in my mouth, accompanied by a thick sticky sensation on my lips and chin.
Groaning again, I crack open one eye, the other being fused shut by some sort of thick crusty substance. My cabin is lit intermittently by flashes of yellow warning lights and by a curtain of orange fire roaring outside of my canopy.
As I look around, still held within the haze of recent unconsciousness, two sounds, completely different from the deafening roar all around, bleed through to my pained ears. The first is the wailing warble of alarm claxons, and the second is my ship’s computer looping the same phrase over and over:
Impact. Impact. Impact: unsafe suborbital velocity. Reduce speed at once. Impact. Impact-
It takes a while for the words to work their way through my sluggish thought processes, and just as long for me to fully understand them, but once I do…
The world around me snaps into sharp focus; thick acrid smoke fills the cockpit, stinging my eyes and burning my nostrils. I spit, and my saliva comes out red and viscous with fresh blood. The throbbing in my head intensifies and I grit my teeth in sudden agony.
Glancing out of the canopy, the source of the deafening roar all around me becomes immediately apparent; Bright yellow flames cover my entire cockpit, and I know the rest of my ship looks the same.
I’ve hit atmo, and I’m burning up like a goddamn asteroid.
At once, my own internal alarm bells start ringing, jolting me into action. First, I reverse all thrust and pull hard on the stick, doing everything I can to get out of this nosedive.
My controls are barely responding; I’m at fifty percent power and my maneuvering thrusters are malfunctioning. I divert all the power I can spare to thrusters, even going so far as to cut life support. My remlok seals shut around my face and I feel the cold, slightly metallic tasting oxygen start to flow.
Even at full burn, with all power diverted to my engines, I’m still falling too fast to survive. To make matters even worse, my inertial dampeners cut off. Thankfully I’m not accelerating fast enough to feel too many extra G’s, but the violent turbulence from re-entry is doing a number on my headache.
The failure of my dampeners must have set off some kind of cascade event, because I start getting a stream of malfunction alerts flashing across my HUD; first it’s my FSD, then my power distributor, followed closely by my weapons and utility modules, and finally a stream of modules I couldn’t dream of pronouncing, let alone grasp their functions.
The situation is getting more and more hopeless with every passing second and every failed module. The more I fight with the controls, the more I realize that I won’t be able to save the ship, and the prospect of hitting the eject button is getting real attractive. The thrusters are still in somewhat alright shape though, if I can just jury rig something, maybe I can-
Catastrophic reactor containment failure: meltdown imminent. All hands, abandon ship.
That made my mind up real quick. Before she’d even finished saying “abandon,” my hand had already flipped the cover off the eject button and was slamming down on it when she finished “ship.” With the hissing of hydraulics and the rasp of steel on steel, an escape pod rises out of the floor and clamps shut around me.
In the moment before the internal HUD flickers on, I’m in complete darkness. The only sounds inside the pod are that of my own heavy breathing, the alarm claxons and the roar of re-entry blocked out by six inches of steel, titanium and carbon nanotube insulation.
With a high pitched whine, the pod’s internal reactor spools up, the ventilation system hums to life and the HUD flickers on, bathing me in cool blue light. The external cameras show me the bridge, still illuminated by the angry yellow glow of the flames. I’m only given a few seconds to brace myself before the start up sequence activates and-
Eject, eject, eject.
The canopy blows out and the pod’s chemical rockets blast me into the void. I black out momentarily, my head lolling off to one side, as the sudden acceleration pulls blood from my brain. My suit reacts a split second later, contracting and pushing the blood back where it belongs. I gasp and grit my teeth at the rapid and unpleasant fluctuations in consciousness as I spin away from the fireball I once called my ship.
If this were any other escape pod, I’d be feeling the cold sting of needles injecting stasis drugs into my system and the warm fuzzy feeling as I slip into suspended animation. Thankfully, however, this isn’t any other escape pod; I’d had the foresight to install an aftermarket pod. This is a modified paratrooper drop module, with integral guidance systems, maneuvering thrusters and re-entry capabilities. It could still put me in stasis, but only if I gave the command. In triplicate.
Right now though? Right now I can’t afford to spend six months in stasis and wait for rescue; somewhere out there is that fucking Corvette, plummeting down to the surface just like me. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let that big bitch get away. If I had to take her out and grab the target on the ground, I sure as hell would.
That all hinged upon me surviving long enough after touchdown, which was reliant on how close to the crash site I landed; too close and I’d get vaporized, too far and it’s a toss up between dehydration, starvation or hungry jungle critters. Hopefully my guidance system wouldn’t burn out and I’d land in the sweet spot. After that, it’s hump my ass to the crash site to find my “oh shit” safe, and worry about the rest later.
There are a lot of “if’s” in this plan.
Flames begin to flicker outside, the heat distorting the external cameras. Vaguely, through the curtain of fire and static, I can make out two twinkling points of white light falling toward the planet. I bare my teeth in a wolfish smile, content in the fact that I’m not the only poor dumb bastard on a collision course with this rock.
Well, no use worrying anymore. There’s really nothing I can do from here on out. All I can do is wait until I float gracefully to the ground as wieghtless as a leaf on the wind. Yeah, right. This was going to be almost as rough as a crash landing in Nerfertiti; the onboard inertial dampeners are enough to keep me alive, not comfortable. My head gives a particularly painful throb at the thought.
Ah well, it’s out of my hands now. Either I’m going to die sometime in the next fifteen minutes, or I’m going to have a particularly unpleasant touchdown. At least my chair is comfortable, at any rate.
I settle in, offering a silent prayer as I do so.
Once you get past the upper atmosphere and decelerate to ‘safe’ velocities, these pods aren’t so bad. It’s actually kind of peaceful up here, watching the ground come closer and closer and the horizon coalesce into a recognizable border. I almost forget that in a matter of minutes, I’ll be in a life or death survival situation.
Almost.
Touchdown in: thirty seconds. Brace.
I reach out and wrap my hands around the handles on either side of the vidscreen in anticipation. Somewhere off in the distance, there is a flash of light and a cloud of dust, followed closely by a nearly identical one that is much closer. A muffled boom reaches me a couple seconds later, the shockwave jostling the pod and sending a fresh lance of pain through my head.
Touchdown in: ten, nine…
The pod’s second stage boosters ignite and I momentarily sink into the chair as the rockets fight my inertia. The ground is rushing up to me now, and I can start to make out fine details; thick impenetrable jungle stretches in all directions, broken only by two columns of thick gray smoke and a few small rivers.
Five, four, three…
The treeline engulfs me in a canopy of heavy alien foliage, blocking out most of the ambient light and plunging me into an eerie gloom.
Two, one. Touchdown.
The boosters kick off and I slam into the ground with a deafening crunch of impact and the groaning of stressed metal. Half a beat later, the hatch of my pod is blasted off by several small charges in the seam and is flung out into the jungle before being swallowed in the gloom.
All is silent except for the little tick-tick-tick of rapidly cooling metal and the gurgle of a nearby stream. I wait for three beats, my ear cocked to one side, palm resting on the butt of my pistol. Nothing big and ugly jumps out of the underbrush, and I’m not torn to shreds by a hail of gunfire. Thats a good thing; I’m not dead. Not yet at least.
My helmet’s readout tells me the atmosphere is breathable, with oxygen levels well above normal human recquirements. That’s also a good thing. I just don’t want to be lighting any fires, and I’d be golden. Nevertheless, I opt to keep my remlok in place; no use tempting fate any more than I had already. Complacency breeds carelessness, and carelessness gets you dead fast. I’d prefer to stay alive, if at all possible.
Shocking, isn’t it?
After another few seconds of quiet observation, I hop out of the pod and go about gathering what few survival supplies I have, careful not to touch the scorching hull of the pod.
A day’s rations, some basic first aid supplies, a small knife, an emergency beacon and my pistol; that’s all I have to carry me over God knows how many clicks of dense jungle. And that’s not even taking into account whatever the fuck could be lurking in the underbrush. Could be anything from space chinchillas to jungle Cthulhu. Knowing my luck, it’s Cthulhu.
Fuck.