by Daniel Gibbs
“Beckett, there’s an artificial gravity control node right next to your leg. Open it up and reverse the polarity for the passageway directly in front of us.”
“But it’ll only last a couple of seconds before the safeties reset and lock us out, Corp.”
“We only need a few seconds. Now do it!”
Beckett reached down to the panel, opened it and fumbled around with something inside. “Got it, Corp!”
“Pulse, over!” David shouted, pulling the pin from the grenade before tossing it down the passageway. He waited for the imminent explosion with hands over ears, mouth open and eyes closed, hoping the other two did the same as they’d been trained. With the bang of the explosion, he threw himself back into the line of fire to see a most peculiar sight: a dozen enemy soldiers in a heap, collapsed on what was, to David and his team, the overhead.
While a few of the poorly trained League soldiers groped about in the heap of bodies, trying to stand up, most held their hands up to their faces, or fired blindly toward the bulkhead opening. David fired in bursts along with Munford and Beckett, targeting the few that still had their weapons first. Once those enemies were down, the three of them methodically felled the rest as they groped for fallen weapons and struggled to draw holstered sidearms. The bodies that lay beyond were too numerous to count.
In the lull of the combat, they exchanged glances. David’s hand shook, making it difficult for him to reload his weapon. He could hear the whine of the resetting artificial gravity generator that would flip the space beyond “right side up” again. Nice trick…while it lasted.
“I didn’t sign up for the Marines,” Munford said.
David couldn’t tell if she was being serious or trying to lighten the situation. “I don’t think any of us did,” he said, trying to focus on something, anything, except the bloody pile of bodies around the corner. “They’re going to hit us again any second now.” He peered toward the next bulkhead, looking for a sign they were coming.
“We’re out of grenades, Corporal. If they hit us again like that, we’re dead. We’ve got to pull back,” Beckett said.
“No. We hold until the Marines arrive.”
“Why? We’re not equipped for this! We’re a freaking damage control team, for the love of God!”
“Look, we don’t have many Marines on this tub. All of us are trained to repel boarders, just like we’re all trained to fight fires. Keep it together, Beckett. We can do this.”
“Aye aye, Corporal,” Beckett muttered, finally getting his rifle reloaded.
“Marines? I call them the Terran Coalitions misguided children,” Munford said.
I guess she was going for humor after all. For all the calm David portrayed, his mind was a roiling sea of fear that threatened to break free. He knew they likely wouldn’t survive another push, and was on the verge of ordering them to fall back when the communications panel beeped. “Damage control team fifteen, this is Sergeant Morrison. Are you still with us?”
David slapped the control. “Yes, Sergeant. Not sure for how long.”
“You must hold your position. League boarding parties are all over deck five, and if you let them get past you, they’ll flank our defense and overrun the section—maybe the ship. We’ll be there ASAP, but it’s all on you, Corporal Cohen. Can you do it?”
Without even thinking through what he was about to say, fire shone in David’s eyes. “We’ll hold, Sergeant. Whatever it takes.” He stepped back from the panel and eyed the other two. “Now we hold. No matter what.”
Beckett and Munford nodded grimly, courage, resolution and fear flooding their faces.
Seconds later, another wave of League troops surged forward, firing down the passageway. David saw terror and panic in the eyes of the soldiers that faced them, akin to his own, but they weren’t stopping. He realized bursts weren’t cutting it, and toggled his battle rifle to full auto. “Full auto!” he ordered, hoping the others head him clearly above the din of battle.
Holding down the trigger, fighting to keep the gun level rather than wasting its precious stopping power on the overhead, he emptied the magazine in one long burst. Beside him, he heard his fellows doing the same, sending dozens of rounds down the passageway in a storm of steel.
The carnage from going full auto broke the enemy assault. Twisted bodies lay on top of each other on the deck, some screaming in pain. The smell of propellent was thick in the air, as were spent shell casings scattered about the defenders.
When a big, bulky power-armored League Marine came into view behind more cannon fodder, David’s heart sank. Power armor, even the less effective League variant, was extraordinarily potent and made its wearer difficult to disable or kill. “Goliath! Aim for the upper body and head!”
Munford leaned out and sprayed the enemy formation with unaimed fire from her battle rifle. As it clicked dry, return fire from the Goliath’s directed energy weapon ripped into her arm, throwing her to the ground and bringing forth a grunt of pain.
“Beckett, when I fire, pull Munford back,” David yelled over the din of battle, reloading his rifle as he spoke. He was on his last magazine. He leaned to the right and opened fire, trying to distract the Goliath. Beckett grabbed Munford’s good arm and dragged her out of the passageway and the line of fire. “Get her to the rear and find a corpsman.”
“They’ll overrun you, David,” Munford said, trying to stem the flow of blood from her arm. Funny, she called me David, not Corporal. Probably the pain getting to her head.
“Yeah, Corp, we can’t leave you,” Beckett said.
“I’ll be all right. Get moving. She needs medical attention.” David fired blindly down the passageway as he spoke. “Now go!”
To cover their escape, David leaned back out and emptied his rifle into the Leaguers.
It almost worked.
Dragging her across the deck, Beckett had almost gotten Munford to safety when a stray energy beam caught him in the chest. He fell to the ground in a heap as Munford lay behind him, frozen in shock.
A moment later, she found the ability to flee, scrambling a few more feet to land behind the next bulkhead. Munford’s harsh grunts of effort echoed in David’s head, distracting him as he felt for his sidearm, knowing he was out of bullets for the rifle. With the practiced muscle memory of his training, he slipped the pulse pistol into his hand and brought it up while turning the energy setting to maximum. Firing through the bulkhead opening, he felled another Leaguer who made the mistake of blindly charging forward.
A stray bullet connected with David’s shoulder, sending him backward and causing searing pain to radiate through his body.
His pistol clattered to the deck.
He knew he was about to die.
Any moment now, the Goliath would crash into the junction, and even if David could kill him, there would be one coming right after the other until an enemy finally ended his life. His thoughts ran wild. I don’t want to die here… I never wanted to kill anyone! I cost Beckett his life. The last thought caused a wave of guilt that distracted him from the task at hand.
David forced himself to pick up the fallen sidearm, fighting through excruciating pain to aim at the bulkhead opening. Time slowed as the Goliath burst through the bulkhead, the immense armor suit even more foreboding at close range. He squeezed the trigger of the pistol. The energy beam connected with the Leaguer’s helmet, its weakest piece.
The heavy armor held as the Leaguer brought his own weapon up. He fired, sending a burst of rounds into David’s center mass, slamming into his thin body armor. More pain swept over him and his pistol jerked up as the beam finally penetrated the helmet and sliced through the enemy’s head. Little blood or human matter sprayed due to the cauterizing effects of the energy weapon.
David let go of the trigger, and the Goliath collapsed to the ground. He gasped, shocked he was still alive. The wind knocked out of him, he barely registered the curses and shouts from the remaining League troops. He was trying to force his body to com
ply with the mental command to raise the pistol once again, when shots poured down the passageway from behind him. For a moment he despaired, certain the enemy had flanked them, until he realized from the distinctive sounds of the weapon it was friendlies—the Marines had finally arrived! A group of six, heavily armed and armored, thundered into the passageway junction.
“Report, Corporal!” the lead Marine, Sergeant Morrison, yelled as they filed into ready positions, weapons up and searching for targets.
David couldn’t force a word out. He still reached for his sidearm, hands shaking, brain foggy. Morrison came over and shook his shoulder roughly. “Corporal!”
The loud word snapped David out of his trance. “My guys got hit. Beckett and Munford.” He pointed toward Beckett’s fallen body and the bulkhead Munford hid behind.
The sergeant spoke into his communicator. “I need corpsmen on deck five, passageway 3B, ASAP.” Taking in the scene, Morrison’s eyes widened. He looked back to David with surprise. “Damn, Corporal, you want to transfer to the Marines? There’s got to be thirty dead Leaguers out there—and you took out a Goliath to boot.”
Shock began to set in, and David shook uncontrollably.
“Corporal, are you wounded?” Morrison asked.
“I’m okay. Take care of Beckett and Munford first.”
Morrison knelt, putting his hands on the bullets sticking out of the armored vest over David’s chest. “Damn lucky, son. You’re going into shock. Lie still, okay? Help will be here soon. Your fight’s over for today.”
David nodded at Morrison without trying to reply. Taking in the death and destruction around him, he stared at the dead bodies of the Leaguers and back at his hands several times. What did I do? he thought. I…killed them.
Even though the commandment Thou shalt not murder didn’t really apply to war, it still roared into David’s mind with the punishing tone of an angry teacher. It was them or me. Does that make it okay? Eyes fixed on Becketts’s body, David focused on a traditional prayer for the dead. He whispered to himself, “God, filled with mercy, dwelling in the heavens heights, bring proper rest beneath the wings of Your Angels, amid the ranks of the holy and the pure, illuminating like the brilliance of the skies the souls of our beloved and our blameless who went to their eternal place of rest.”
Two corpsmen ran into the passageway carrying a medical bag, and a portable stretcher. One knelt next to David. “Corporal, can you hear me?”
“Privates Beckett and Munford need medical assistance before me.”
“He’s got a shoulder wound; looks like it went straight through. Leg abrasion consistent with a graze,” the corpsman beside him said. “Likely rib fractures from the bullets and possible internal bleeding.”
Out of the corner of his eye, David watched him check Beckett’s vitals. “This one’s dead,” the other corpsman said. One of them pressed an auto-injector against David’s neck. It stung for a second, then reality receded into a fog.
Drifting in and out of consciousness, David was aware of being placed on the stretcher and felt himself being carried down the passageway. “My team,” he said, his voice distant and slurred.
“Munford’s going to be fine, Corporal. Lie back and enjoy the ride,” one of the corpsmen said. Unconsciousness finally took him, followed by nightmares of being shot over and over again.
2
Thanks to Terran Coalition medical technology, physical wounds healed far faster than mental ones. Standing in the lobby outside of the counselor’s door, David felt a sense of trepidation. I really don’t want to do this, he thought to himself. But the sooner I get it done, the sooner I get back to my duties and finish my time. Then I can go home and never have to kill again.
After the battle, the Artemis had been rotated back to a military space station for repairs and replacement crewmembers. On light duty during his recovery from the physical wounds he’d sustained, David was ordered to see a counselor—which was the only reason he’d come.
Next to the door under the counselor’s nameplate was a button with a sign over it that read, “Please Press to Enter and Be Mindful of Others.” Under that sign was a nameplate marked Dr. Amy Ellison.
He hesitated for a long moment, debating just walking away. Finally, he pushed the button.
A moment later, the door opened and a petite woman in her mid-thirties with straight, short, natural blonde hair motioned David in. “Come in, Corporal Cohen!” the woman said in a bright and cheery voice.
Oh great. It had to be someone that’s bubbly and happy, he thought to himself as he tried to smile. Making his way into the small office, he sat down on a couch that had a pillow on it that proclaimed, “Prayer is the Answer!”
“I’m Doctor Amy Ellison. How are you doing today, Corporal?” she asked.
“I’m…okay, Counselor.”
“I’m not in the CDF, Corporal Cohen. There’s no need to be formal here. Please, call me Amy.”
“Yes, ma’am… Amy.”
“It’s been challenging to get you down here to talk to me,” she said, an easy grin showing.
“I… haven’t wanted to talk about what happened,” David said, his voice hesitant.
“Why not?”
David looked down. A voice inside his head screamed at him, Because you killed eight people!
“May I call you David?”
David looked back up and met her eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”
Amy leaned forward in her chair. “I see soldiers all day long that have been through a trauma such as you have. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, from what I’ve read in the after-action report, the commanding officer of your ship thinks you were directly responsible for preventing the League from gaining control of the Artemis.”
“I killed… I don’t know, at least eight people. Maybe more. I shot one in the head with a pulse pistol and watched the beam slice through his brain.”
“Eight people that were trying to kill you and the two crewmembers who were with you.”
“I look down at my hands now and see blood. I wanted to be a rabbi. I wanted to help people. How can I do that now? How can I do anything? I violated one of the Ten Commandments.”
Ellison sat back, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Why do you want to become a rabbi, David?”
“To minister to people, to help them learn. The word ‘rabbi’ means teacher after all. I wanted to do good.”
“I think there’s more to it than that. I think you want to make up for something.”
Wow. She’s good. “What do you mean?”
“Where were you on September 28th, 2533?”
September 28th, 2533 was one of those days that if you were alive during it and able to remember, you never forgot. It was the day that the League of Sol, a super-national entity that controlled Earth and many colony planets, invaded the Terran Coalition.
That was also the day my father left for the last time, David thought, his heart sinking.
“I was at home with my mother and father,” David whispered, tears forming in his eyes.
“Would you like to talk about it?” Ellison pressed.
David’s mind flashed back to that fateful day that would forever be burned into his mind. “I was eight. My father was on terminal leave from the CDF. He was a reservist with twenty years in service. He’d spent the previous two years on active duty to top off his retirement earnings. He loved us. He’d do anything to protect us. He was a good man.”
As he spoke to her, David’s mind wandered back to the night his father, Levi Cohen, died. In his childhood, David knew that his father was an officer. Later, he came to understand that he was a major in the Coalition Defense Force. David’s mother, Sarah, was a homemaker and a traditional Jewish wife. They lived in an Orthodox enclave on Canaan, where his father was stationed at the main Canaan space dock. Every morning, the family would rise together at five a.m. His father would go off to work, and his mother would drop off David at school. In the afternoon, she would pick him up
after he’d finished with his after-school activities.
That night, raised voices coming from his parents’ bedroom was the first indication that something was amiss in the Cohen household. David recalled creeping down the hall to listen in on the conversation in his parents’ room.
“Sarah… I’ve got to do this. I’ll come home as soon as I can,” he heard his father say.
“I’m scared, Levi. I’m scared you won’t come home this time. What if it’s an invasion?” his mother said through sobs.
“Then we’ll hold the line. I’m not going out alone, that’s for certain. Let me finish getting dressed, and you go get David. I want to tell him goodbye before I leave.”
“The party tomorrow was going to be perfect.”
“Just postpone it a few hours, okay?”
“Okay,” Sarah said, her voice level once more.
David took the cue to run back into his room, busying himself with his tablet that contained learning games and a GalNet link. His mother came into the room, calling for him as she wiped her eyes. “David, come say goodbye to your father. He has to go to work.”
David put down his tablet and glanced at her, a confused expression on his face. “But I thought Dad was on leave for the next few weeks.”
Sarah shook her head. “He’s been recalled, so he’s got to go in. I’m sorry. I know you were looking forward to him being here for your birthday.”
David followed his mother as they both walked into the bedroom, where his father fussed with the rank pin on his collar.
Sarah laughed softly, then walked over to Levi and adjusted the pin.
“Thank you, dear,” he said, a twinkle in his eye.
“You can never seem to get that pin right for all the trouble it caused you to earn it,” his mother said with a hint of a smile on her face.
His father looked over at David and motioned for him to come over. “Son, I’m sorry. I have to take command of a ship for the next few days.”
David sat down on the bed. “You’re retired, though. Why are they calling you now?” he asked with a baffled expression on his face.