The explosion had put an end to that. His whole body shock as once again the moment replayed itself in his mind, as it had done so often since then. The flash of light came first followed closely by the flame, the river of time for him seemed to slow to little more than a trickle as he watched the heat ripple and distort the air. Then the searing pain arose, as the white hot shrapnel slashed into his face and body, even now he could still smell his own flesh burning.
The only thing that had saved his life was his body armour, which had done its job and protected his torso from most of the force of the explosion. He must have blacked out for a moment because when he opened his eyes again, he was laid upon the ground looking up, at a beautiful, almost serene, clear blue sky and upon it soft, wisps of white clouds floated by aimlessly. At first he hadn’t been able to place himself and he thought perhaps it was some kind of magical dream. Then he could taste the metallic tang of iron in his mouth and his vision grew hazy. He had realized this was not a dream at all and was merely the nightmare of war. He felt the grim reaper coming for him, its frigid, spectral grip on his shoulder and for the first time in his life other than at the birth of his children he felt fear crawl its way into his gut, and make its home.
It was then, that Daniel appeared, firing as he raced. Like some kind of hero loosed from the pages of the comics he had been read as a teenager.
“Can you hear me first sergeant?” Daniel had screamed as he ejected an empty magazine from his weapon and slammed another one in. “First sergeant!” he shouted grabbing Bills shoulder.
“Bill,” he spluttered through a mouthful of claret and bile.
“Ok Bill we have to get you out of here.” Daniel’s tone was calm, almost serene, yet urgency pulsed just below the surface. The assault rifle roared in his hands, as he continued to fire at some unseen and unknown enemy.
It was then Daniel glanced down at him, sanguine fluid and dirt caked his own boyish features, “Your hurt bad, but you’re alive. Now this is going to hurt, but all that means is your still kicking. Ok?” Daniel had grinned like a child, so full of warmth and kindness, even amid all this chaos and carnage.
Bill couldn’t speak instead he simply nodded, as waves of agony lashed over his frame and his lungs began to fill with liquid. Even now almost four years later, he could still feel himself drowning. Sometimes at night he would awaken drench in sweat, gasping for air, in his dream he was always caught in murky, frozen water and sinking towards the unfathomable depths. The frigid fluid slowly filling his lungs and stealing the life from his body.
Daniel had continued to fire, his eyes constantly scanning, as if he was spotting more and more target. Then he had taken a smoke grenade from his webbing and hurled it towards the adversaries. Before he turned to Bill and grabbed his armour and heaved his immense figure over his shoulder. They had got no more than a few feet, before the first round struck Daniel in the thigh, the force of the blow had spun him round, which allowed the second shot to hit him in the left shoulder, the armour piercing bullet, sliding through the Kevlar sheets like a sharpened knife through a perfectly cooked steak. Daniel had collapsed to the ground, dropping Bill next to him. The next thing Bill could remember was the captain over him, thick crimson fluid pouring from his shoulder, firing with the other arm.
“Sorry about the fall Bill, hope you won’t hold it against me?” Daniel exclaimed, finding humour even now, wounded and facing his own passing square in the face.
Bill glanced to his right and saw the terrorist striding forward, he counted at least twenty of them, in heavy body armour, balaclavas and carrying assault rifles. He spat a mouthful of coagulating blood out onto the dirt and tried to speak as rounds snapped past them, “You…hav….to…go.”
Daniel peered down at him and smirked, this time more natural and instinctive. “I can’t do that first sergeant,” he paused, “I mean Bill, not now I know your name.” He continued to shoot and then the smouldering rounds hammered into his chest and sent him flying backwards in the air.
Bill alighted back towards the enemy and saw them march towards him. Firearm’s primed and ready. He could see the primal ire in their eyes and heard the religious hatred they spewed forth. He sealed his own eyes, death had finally found him and he expected that to be the end. Yet instead of a gunshot he heard a large explosion and felt a wave of super-heated air buffet his broken body. When he looked again all he saw was a wall of living fire in front of him.
“Airstrike!” a voice croaked.
He turned to see Daniel, his body quickly being enveloped in a pool of a dark tar-black blood.
“You still with me Bill?” Daniel asked dryly, his voice, trembled, the pain almost palpable.
“Yeah,” Bill managed to sigh, before the darkness had overtaken his vision.
He had woken up three weeks later, back in an Earth. Force hospital, his wife next to him, looking more beautiful than the day he had married her. She leaned over, kissed him and had stared so deeply into his eyes. At that moment her heart was bare to him and although he had known it before, now he saw how much she loved him. Saw the pure and physical evidence of it held up before him.
While in the next bed Daniel laid joking with his children. Most of his shattered body wrapped in almost translucent bandages, under which tiny, nano-robots, worked feverishly to seal and clean the wounds he had suffered. Both of them could have had stem cell treatments which would have lessened the scars, this though was not covered by the Earth. Force medical, as it was considered cosmetic, and the private remedy would probably cost more than they both made in a year. So his own disfigurements were permanent, as they were supposed to be, a reminder of that day and all he had nearly lost.
Daniel should have left him, but he hadn’t, he had saved his life that day. Since that moment they had been more than just brothers in arms, they had become family. Bill owed the Captain a debt that he would never be able to repay, a debt of blood and loyalty. They had spent Christmas’s together and Daniel was Godfather to his youngest. Yet in all that time they had never really talked, not about what had happened to him as a child, which Bill had heard from someone else, or about the drinking. He knew that his friend was hurting but he just didn’t know how he could help, it wasn’t wired into his DNA.
A familiar voice brought him back to reality, “Hey Monster, is Lone star ok?”
Bill shook his head and allowed a small thin smile to be his answer. He found himself studying the young woman, who stood before him. Her name was Millie “Doc” De Gruff, the unit’s medic and attached to Daniels fire team. She was a statuesque woman; even now in the bulky spacesuit she possessed an almost old fashion and timeless beauty. Her every word and movement, seemed sensual and yet still genuine. He had always thought she seemed like she should have been in one of those classic black and white movies that his wife liked so much.
When he did speak his reply was laconic and laced with the emotion he couldn’t express in any other way. “I don’t think so Doc.”
Millie edged forward nimbly and managed to sit down in one single fluid motion. “Have you talked to him yet?” Her tone was questioning and inquisitive, but also still compassionate.
Bill stared into Millie’s cornflower blue eyes, magnified by the curve of her helmet and saw genuine concern. “Not yet, I will do, when this goddamn mission is over.” His pitch and attitude angrier than he intended, “I’m sorry Doc it’s not you, I’m just angry with myself. I’ve known he’s been hurting for a long time and I just tried to ignore it and hope that it would get better.” His gaze shifted to Daniel, still standing alone, lost within his own contemplations. “I love him like family, he’s like the brother I never had and I just can’t help him.”
She nodded. “I know you do Bill, but part of loving someone means being honest with them and helping them when they are in pain.”
Bill liked the young doctor, he had heard the scuttlebutt of course, they all had and he didn’t care. She had been on the fast track to becoming a b
ig name surgeon back on one of the core colony planets, she was from money, you could see it in the way she talked, carried herself and even in the way she walked. As the story went she had started to use stimulants to keep herself awake to cope with the night shifts. Then she had begun to use them, during the day so she could stay awake longer and work harder. The transition somehow took place to harder drugs, like many the addiction had crept up on her, and soon she was lost within its warm embrace. The tale he had heard was that one day during a surgery her hand had slipped and she had cut the artery of a young girl. She had not asked for help until it was too late and the child had died. Millie had been charged with manslaughter but the judge, most probably conscious of her family and the wealth and influence they held had given her a choice, prison, or rehab and then service with the marines. Millie had chosen to get clean and then serve, which was how she had found herself here, at the arse end of the universe and surrounded by roughneck troopers.
“I haven’t asked you about this because you haven’t brought it up, but you know something about addiction don’t you?” he desperately tried to choose his words carefully as the last thing he would want to do was offend her.
Millie glanced past him for a moment, her face a deadpan mask. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft and yet filled with a yawning sadness. As if to her the past was not simply a memory that would eventually vanish, but a visceral, living and breathing thing. Something that she could never escape. “It’s not something I like to think about, it was the greatest mistake I have ever made.”
“I’m sorry Doc, forget I said anything.”
“It’s not your fault Bill,” She sighed. “It’s my problem and my responsibility to carry.”
Bill tussled to find the right words. “I only brought it up, because Lone Star likes you and maybe it might be easier coming from you that’s all.”
Her immediate answer was a slender curl of her lips, even through the thick glass he could feel its affection. “Whether he likes me or not, I’ve only known him for a few months, you have known him for like four years,” Her tone lighter now. “You’re as much a brother to him, as he is to you and he needs you now.”
“I know,” Bill retorted, defensively. “Am just trying to get myself out of it. He saved my life did you know that?”
“Yeah I have heard the stories, everyone has.”
“He got hurt pretty bad, not like these.” Bill said, indicating his own scars. “But still bad, he should have left me, there were terrorists all around, bombs going off like firecrackers. But he didn’t, he came back for me and dragged me out of that hell.”
Millie’s gloved hand found his shoulder. “I think if what I have heard is true, some bad things happened to him long before that extremist attack. Now that might not have made it better, but I think that he was hurting deeply long before he got injured.”
“You heard about his sister?”
“Just the scuttlebutt on ship, that she went missing, when his parent were killed.”
“Yeah that’s all I know either, we’ve never talked about it, about what happened to him I mean, just never seemed like the right time to bring it up and he never mentioned anything about it.”
For a time, neither of them spoke, eventually it was Millie who broke the silence, “Well maybe once this mission is over then.”
“Yeah, once were done with this bullshit.” Bill exclaimed.
“I think this mission is giving everyone the creeps, there are some weird rumours going around about that ship.”
“You shouldn’t listen to rumours Doc, you know that, finding the truth in most of them is like looking for a grain of sand on a fucking beach.”
“No I agree with you, but I have been hearing this a lot,” she paused for a minute and peered around as if checking that no one else was listening in. “People are saying that this Eclipse one wasn’t in fact an Ark ship at all, that unlike the other four it was in fact an advanced research vessel that was being run by the Sci-corp.”
Bill chuckled. “You’ve got to be shitting me, a clever women like you, can’t really be buying into that rubbish. You’ve been watching too many of those conspiracy casts.”
“Well most of that stuff might be rubbish, but if you look into it this does actually make some sense. Why was it sent so far out into unknown space, while the others were sent to specific planets?”
Bill shook his head, “Come on Doc, now I’m the last one to defend Sci-corp, bunch of crazy, religious nuts and lab rats, but that sounds messed up even for them. We’re talking over two hundred years ago, way before they had the money and power they have now. I don’t think there’s any way that they could have pulled that off.”
Millie didn’t allow him to finish and hijacked the conversation. “Exactly that’s the point, you see back then, they didn’t have the pull which they enjoy now, and they couldn’t just get away with whatever they wanted. So if they had wanted to start running some crazy experiments, they would have had to find somewhere secret and out of the way. A place which the free press or government back then, wouldn’t have been able to find and what better place than out in the darkness of unknown space, where no one is going to come looking for them.”
Bill frowned, he couldn’t be buying into all this, could he. He had read and seen enough of the underground casts that the Sci-corp were apparently into some really pretty dark shit. Allegations of rigging elections, testing new diseases on unsuspecting colonists, murder, torture basically the whole nine yards. Yet this sounded just one step too far, even for them. Still he felt a nagging feeling in his gut, a sensation that a career soldier came to trust. It was the same sensation he had, four years ago.
“You know how crazy this sounds right?” he questioned hesitantly.
“Of course I do, however if you think about it, it starts to make sense.”
Bill sighed deeply, this was the last thing that he needed. “What can we do anyway Doc, we’re not politicians or journalists we’re Marines. Earth. Force tells us where to go and what to do when we get there.”
“Well I just think that we should keep out eyes open, I don’t like how all this feels.”
“Ok well, we can do that.”
“I mean we never know what we might find over there.” Millie lowered her voice, “messed up zombies, some kind of crazy diseases or maybe just some talking monkeys or something.” She began to giggle.
Bill glanced at her and beamed, “I see funny.”
“Just trying to lighten the mood Monster,” Millie’s smile lessened. “But I do think we need to be careful and I think you do too?”
“Yeah I have had a bad feeling about this from the start.” He sat back in his seat and allowed thoughts to explode within mind. He couldn’t really believe it, the political and military clout that would be needed to pull off something like this and to keep it secret for all these years was something that even Sci-corp couldn’t muster. No it just couldn’t be true, as he pivoted his head and once again looked towards Daniel, he realised that whatever was happening with that ghost ship, he had more pressing matters closer to home that needed to be sorted out. Once again he was back just before the explosion, that familiar feeling churning within his stomach and then the blast. All he felt was the pain as the shrapnel shredded his flesh and once again he tasted blood.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the cockpit, Brad caught his first glimpse of the gargantuan, ancient Ark ship and it took his breath away. In all his years of flying he had simply never seen anything like it before. It was at least ten times the size of the Troy and that was one of the largest Earth. Force destroyers in the Flee, its hull was covered in rippled armour plating that gave it an almost animalistic appearance. Like some kind of primeval leviathan, unleashed from the sea and into the bleakness of space.
“That is one ugly looking ship.” He spluttered as his neural link began to feed him information about the craft. He could see its original schematics overlaid on the actual vessel. It was a s
imple design by today’s standards, the main engines were mounted at the aft which was elongated and punctuated by sleek, gargantuan tail fins. Ahead of this was an engorged mid-section which to him looked like some kind of obese belly, as if something inside was straining to escape the metal skin. Forward of this it tapered off to the fore sections which housed the bridge and the main control areas. As he examined this colossus more closely, he became more troubled by its design, as if it hadn’t been created by engineers at all, but some kind of mad artisan, who had simply formed it with vicious brush strokes.
“You’re not wrong, they don’t make them like that anymore,” Maggie remarked, the comment offhanded, as she barely considered the Ark ship and instead concentrated on preparing the scanners. “Initial sweep is underway.”
Brad clicked the intercom so that he could talk to the recon marines in the hold, bunch of crazy bastards as they were, he was glad to have them along, he was sure of that. If the shit hit the fan, they were the kind of troopers you wanted watching your back.
“We’re beginning our final approach now ladies and gentleman, we’re conducting our first sweep, so hang onto your lunch.” He returned his attention back to the virtual display in front of him, as thousands of separate computerised scanners scrutinized the Eclipse One. His own implant purred, as information transferred to and from his neuron. He could see the results of countless distinct scans as they flashed one after another, rows and rows of data, was collated by his own synapses and was given shape and form.
Then all he saw was maroon blood, thick and pulsating. He struggled to dispel the image from his mind, and yet it was as if it was imprinted on his very soul. He felt acid burn and rise in his gorge; he stifled the urge to puke and struggled to control himself. He glanced out at the ghost ship, and saw Rebecca again. Sullen, sunken, and bloodshot eyes stared back at him. His abdomen was thick with dread, he felt the tension at the back of his neck and down his spin, like spectral fingers, frosty and haunting.
The First Dawn (The Sci-Corp War Saga Book 1) Page 9