Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Clarksville, TN
Age: 31
Posts: 461
Tournaments Joined: 0
Tournaments Won: 0
|
Minsk: Parting With The Permafrost, A BFCL AAR
Blood and Honor, The Journal of a 9th MID Soldier
Chapter 2: Parting With The Permafrost
(Round 2 of the BFCL 9th MID vs. TAW League)
“Proph, you’re bleeding.”
Still coming down from my adrenaline rush, I glanced over at Hidus. He was pointing at my left arm and shuffling his Baur onto his shoulder in order to get to his medpack. It’s like when someone points out that you’re not wearing pants to your wedding…once you know, it hits you like a ton of bricks.
The throbbing pain pulsed with the beat of my heart. Moving my arm didn’t hurt. Having it attached to my body did. Thankfully, it was still attached. As my old squadleader used to say, “If it’s still attached, use it. If not, pick it up and throw it at ‘em.” Crux taught me a lot before he got promoted. I hear he’s been given control of his own unit now. The Third Something-or-other. Good for him. Some of us are cut out to lead, and some of us are cut out to bleed. Apparently, I am the latter.
Staunching the slow but steady flow of crimson, Hidus had me bandaged up in no time. Brandishing an aerosol injector, he started to pop some painkillers straight through my skin. AI’s hurt like hell. Sure, they’re always sterile and no needles are involved, but I’d rather have a double-ought gauge needle jabbed into my vein than have an AI dosage. I grimaced and yanked the aerosol injector out of his hands.
“No way Hidus. I’ll deal with the pain I’ve got before I deal with the extra pain that this damn thing will cause.”
“Suit yourself Proph…why don’t you take the whole kit and I’ll hold on to your shotgun for you?”
I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or condescending, but to tell you the truth, my kit was getting a bit heavy.
“Good for me bro,” I said, handing over my shotgun. Hidus went to grip it by the pump, and saw a gobbet of leftover brain matter from when I killed that young punk that took out my beloved Lucy. Using a steriwipe, he reluctantly took possession of my weapon.
After switching kits, we packed up from our hydro-break and continued our sweep of the area. The further we moved from the front line outpost into the surrounding terrain, the less easy I felt. As our squads moved in a line sweep, I got this prickly feeling in the back of my neck.
“Hey Pfeil, you’re sure we wiped out all of their beacons, right?” I asked.
“Well, we didn’t find any at all, Proph,” was his reply. The prickly feeling turned into a full-blown need to scratch a ticklish spot. I hate it when this happens. Sometimes, my hunch is correct, other times, it’s way off.
One time, my squad spent three days combing an urban district of Last Stop due to one of my hunches. I had it in my head that in this seedy area of an overall seedy planet, there were insurgents masquerading as prostitutes. Not that I’d touch a Last Stop “lady” with a long-range Pilum shot. Too much Rad-poisoning had turned most of the local populace into mutants. In those three days, we saw more twisted acts of debauchery as we burst into the red light district house-by-house, room-by-room than most of us could have imagined…and I can imagine quite a bit. By the time we called it quits, we were all swearing off a soldier’s favorite pastime forever. On the other hand, not a single soldier that was detailed for this search has ever once been diagnosed with Burn, Ghonna-herpa-siphylis, or HIV. Sure, HIV is curable, but why take the chance it'll mutate again like it did back in '24?
Right then, the only thing that wasn’t curable for me was that itch on the back of my neck. I was checking my HUD’s minimap every five seconds. Then every two seconds. Then I stared at it, praying for a blip, but at the same time dreading it. I didn’t want to be right. I didn’t want to believe. The minimap consumed so much of my attention that I walked right into DaddyofThree’s back.
“Sorry Daddy, I was preoccupied.”
“About your hunch, right?”
“Yeah, what will you cure us of today, Proph? Frostbite?” DrakinClaw threw in to the discussion as he walked alongside us. He smiled good-naturedly. I knew he was just joking. After all, up until the incident on Last Stop, he was the biggest party-goer of us all.
“Sorry fellas, I just can’t seem to shake it.”
“Proph, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll detail four other guys to backtrack to the forward outpost with you so you can be sure,” said Pfeil with all the cool of the icicle that was hanging from my helmet’s visor. Pfeil wouldn’t have offered if he didn’t hold his own suspicions.
“I dunno boss, you know how I get. It could be just my imagination playing with me.”
“Tell you what, I’ll go with you.”
Pfeil put his words into action. Me, Daddy, Lucky, Drakin, and Fatkid were detailed to follow Pfeil back to the outpost. I stared at my own bootprints in the icy surface of Minsk’s outlying terrain, hoping that I was wrong. Hoping that the only thing we’d return to was a frozen-over mug of LuckyStrike’s god-awful coffee.
An explosion from up ahead brought me out of my reverie. My head shot up just in time to see our comm tower disintegrate into so many flying shards of metal. The comms in my ear immediately turned to crackling static.
“We’ve been had!” shouted Pfeil. He pointed to Drakin and rattled off a series of commands. Drakin started a sprint to catch up with the other elements of our squads that were still out sweeping, and the rest of us began trotting towards our sabotaged base.
With the four of us remaining under Pfeil’s command, we rushed towards the northern approach of trenches that we had so recently defended against the enemy. It was a haphazard squad. Having no time to prepare, our squad was somewhat mismatched. Two assault kits and three engineers. With no time to reorganize with the other elements that Drakin would be bringing up from further behind us and no way to get to our magazine at the forward base, we were stuck with what we had.
Panic seized me. Lucy! She was left at the outpost so she could finish recharging and let the newly repaired armor settle into the cold temperature. With her electronics fried from the previous battle, her Bioscanner was on the fritz.
“Pfeil, Lucy Quipment…”
“I know Proph…we’ll put her down painlessly,” interrupted Pfeil. Suddenly, having three engineers didn’t seem like a bad idea. Hopefully, she wouldn’t hold too much of a grudge if I ever saw her again in one piece.
“Aim for her left leg,” I choked out, “She’s got a patchwork job there from when they hit us the first time. She should go down pretty quick.”
Nodding their understanding, Fatkid, Lucky, and Daddy moved forwards, unlimbering their Pilums and scanning the horizon for my poor baby’s buxom figure. Pfeil and I readied our assault rockets and began weaving inbetween bits of cover as we approached our recently deserted position.
“Movement, eleven-o-clock, second floor” murmured Fatkid. With no comms, we had to stick close to each other just to be heard.
Gazing in that direction, I saw him. He was crouched down in the eyrie of the multi-story bunker with an LMG sweeping back and forth, looking for targets. So far, we had managed to catch ‘em with their pants down. He was the only enemy in sight.
We advanced up through the system of trenches on the north, still littered with spent ammo casings, bloodstains, and worse from just that morning. The stench wasn’t too bad yet. Probably wouldn’t be bad at all. The freezing temperatures didn’t really give corpses a chance to rot here. They were frozen solid, locked in a rictus of their last moments.
Like some bad zombie movie, a corpse shifted in front of Daddy’s position not ten paces away from where I was standing. Knife in hand, the corpse approached Daddy from behind, stalking closer for the kill.
One breath later, the reports from LuckyStrike’s SMG echoed off of the pass’ walls and the living “corpse” became one for sure this time. Well…we had officially announced our presence.
"It's a trap!" yelled Pfeil.
Hell. That’s what this place is. That’s what it became in the next few moments. Hidden enemies popped out from the trenchworks, spraying our position with automatic fire. The LMG in the eyrie opened up on us. Worst of all, the lumbering form of my hijacked walker came into view from around the rear of the bunker.
“Luc…erm…walker at ten-o-clock” I reported half-heartedly. Like that old Terran movie about the dog Ole Yeller, I felt like I was about to kill my best friend. Three Pilum shots raced from the engineers in my squad and connected with Lucy’s left leg, shearing it off completely.
I watched Lucy Quipment fall out of sight behind the bunker, whispering to myself and to her, “It’ll be okay, gal. It’ll be okay.”
Numb from the neck up, my brain fogged over. Whether this was due to the wound in my arm taking its toll, or the sad remorse of watching my faithful walker fall I don’t know.
What I do know is that the enemy had the drop on us. They must’ve hidden a beacon somewhere, because we couldn’t raise any of the three defense lines we had within the Minsk control area. Cut off from supplies and reinforcements, we had about a hundred guys out on patrol. Most of them had begun to trickle back from the sweep in twos and threes. Across the way on the southern side, I could make out Drakin’s squad as they battled their way forwards against heavy opposition.
We died. We died in droves. Like the waves of the ocean, we broke against the solid wall of a towering cliff. I watched so many of my brothers die in those minutes, but what else could we do? The nearest point to fall back to was Belgrade, and that was a three-day march across inhospitable ground. Without supplies, we’d never make it across the frozen tundra. Supplies were in any of the three defense points we’d created inside of Minsk. We had to capture one of them just to ensure our survival during the retreat.
I used my defibs every chance I could, hitting a stunned comrade with a jolt, and helping him to his feet. I’d thrust his weapon against his chest and move on to the next body to check for vital signs as soon as the dazed soldier reflexively grasped the weapon I’d pushed into his hands.
There were some I could save. There were many others I could not. Gods, how I wish I’d kept my shotgun and left Hidus in charge of being the medico. I had a job to do though, and whether I was filling enemies full of Backblasting Buckshot, or my downed comrades with joules of life-starting electricity, I knew I was contributing to our chances of survival.
Drakin’s squad managed to grab one of our parked rabbits and press forwards to the western depot…our second line of defense in case we were overrun. I guess we were officially overrun, so they thought this was a natural progression.
As Drakin and his under-manned squad fought tooth-and-nail with the defenders of the secondary outpost, Pfeil led us through the trees, hightailing it towards Drakin’s beleaguered force.
We arrived in a blaze of small arms fire. Pushing the defenders back proved to be of no difficulty. Keeping them back was another story. We held out while a couple of troopers hurriedly threw supplies into the rabbit, filling the FAV so full that the shocks could no longer guarantee a smooth ride. That was fine with us though…our boys needed these supplies, and it was my fault for not following my instinct early enough.
Knowing that we were ensuring that the rest of the 9th would make it out alive, we put up one hell of a fight. It gave us strength. We repelled more waves of the enemy with fewer numbers than we had during the entirety of the morning attack. We were buying time at a high price though. First Daddy went down to a grazing hit across the thigh. Then Hidus took one to the shoulder so hard it spun him around twice before he hit the permafrost.
Squad Pfeil and Squad Drakin were the last ones out. We’d hung on long enough to gather the needed supplies into the rabbit, but now it was time to bug out. In good order, we melted into the trees, picking off the few pursuers that attempted to follow us. With the battle over, I turned my back on the bloody ground and started to file into my squad’s formation.
The heat hit me first. I watched blood and fragments of bone explode from my wounded arm. The report from the Zeller rifle happened two agonizingly long heartbeats later. I stumbled three steps forward before my body went into shock. My padded knees impacted with the frozen dirt. My face impacted next.
That’s about all I remember up until now. Acreo tells me I was in and out of consciousness…babbling on about whether Lucy would be okay and how evil the enemy was for deliberately aiming at my arm instead of my head.
I can’t help but think though, if I’d have paid attention to my gut feeling…or even told Pfeil about it earlier, this could have all been prevented. Not my injury…I could care less about losing an arm. I care about the scores of brothers that died to see the rest of us make it through. I honor their sacrifice and would gladly do the same for them, but I am one of the unfortunate ones that lived. I carry the burden of remembering what they did for me and my fellows. I have the burden of living up to their deeds.
As it stands, I now lie in a field hospital bed in Belgrade. I write this journal not in the hopes that someone will label me “hero,” but to remind myself of the sacrifices that my brothers made. What remains of my arm is to be amputated from the bicep-down. It didn’t survive the three-day trek to Belgrade. The freezing temperatures turned the lower part of my arm to ice, freezing the once-flowing blood in my veins. As I lie here looking at it, it appears so black that it looks like it was burnt in a fire, not frozen in ice. The docs say they can replace it with an artificial one. That’s okay with me. I’ve seen what the medicos can do.
Eroak took a hollowpoint to the sternum a couple years back. Blew out three discs of his spine all the way through his backpack. Somehow, he survived long enough to receive surgery thanks to Hidus and the field medics like him. They replaced most of his spinal column with a plexisteel replacement and grafted new conductive fibres to the shattered nerve endings.
There are gunship pilots that have quick reflexes. There are those that are so steady on the stick that they can keep a feather floating perfectly still in their engine’s updrafts. Eroak can do both…a rare sight. I guess that’s why they allow him to fly the multi-billion dollar pieces of machinery. Footsloggers like myself only get the expendable boats that the MID call “Air-deployed drop pods.” We grunts just call them deathcans.
Word has it that the enemy is following our retreat to Belgrade. They’ll probably be here tomorrow morning. Pfeil has already made arrangements for me to be evacuated by transport by then. I’m to be flown into orbit to the medical frigate. Seems they don’t have enough tech down here on the planet to graft a bionic to my soon-to-be stub of an arm. I fought with him about it, but a soldier follows orders. I hope all of them follow my only order: survive until I get back.
Looks like the docs are coming back with the aerosol injectors. Must be time for them to saw off my arm. If anyone reads this, tell Drakin that I did indeed cure us of frostbite...the only downside is the cure involves cutting off an arm.
I think I’ll ask ‘em to inject the anesthesia in the arm I won’t have when I wake up. Less pain that way. I’ve already had enough of pain for today.
|
