My alarm went off at eight. I had set it the night before for nine, so ringing an hour early caught me off guard. I was rubbing my eyes and contemplating going back to sleep when the alarm itself—a digital box fairly reminiscent of a fancy clock from back home—flickered to life with an image of Crunch.
“Oh great, they have Facetime here too,” I said, pulling the covers up a little to block my chest from the camera, not that I knew where it actually was.
“Good morning!” Crunch announced, his voice chipper. “How did your first day of training go?”
I shook my head. “We got our asses kicked, but at least I learned a bit. Got some experience as well. Speaking of which, what will happen when I reach level two? I don’t really know much about the system yet.”
“Not every level is the same, but level two will get you another ability. For Medic, I can’t remember exactly what choices you’ll have, but something related to internal injuries sounds right. You’ll just have to see when you get there. And hey, that’s what I’m calling about. There’s a team going into a mission today without a Medic. They posted a bounty, but no one has taken it yet. You interested? Should be a ton of experience.”
I thought of good ol’ Surf and Turf and leaving them behind. If we had another battle today, it would be a shitty move to leave them behind. “Is there a way I can check my own schedule? No one has really shown me that kind of thing yet.”
“Go to the Hiveboard in your room and hit the blue button on the bottom right of the screen. That should do it,” Crunch explained. “Go check your shit and get ready. Meet me in the Hive in thirty minutes.”
Crunch signed off, and the clock screen went blank. I turned it away from the bed, cleaned myself up a bit and brushed my teeth, then went over to the Hiveboard. My name was highlighted at the top next to the other members of my training cadre. Everyone in Team B was in the three hundred ranks while everyone from my losing team was about a hundred ranks below them. Curiously, I was the highest ranked player from my group of nine. Being the Medic probably moved me up a bit, though I was just guessing.
I clicked the circular blue icon on the bottom right, and the rankings faded away to reveal my schedule. My group had two training sessions, one on either side of lunch, though they were both listed as classroom instruction.
“Looks like I’m gonna take my first bounty,” I said with a smile. Training could wait.
I swung by the cafeteria for a pair of what Archon-6 had in place of Pop Tarts and then headed straight for the Hive. Crunch was there with a group of other people I assumed were his friends. Like yesterday, everyone in the Hive was glued to the main screen. Hercules was on full display again, weaving his nimble starship through a huge black canvas, adeptly dodging incoming fire from a much larger ship. The way he spun and turned his ship looked so effortless, but I remembered enough physics to know that the forces inside his cockpit had to be crushing. That was, of course, if there wasn’t some high tech way for all that force to be countered. There probably was.
Crunch spotted me as I finished my second fake Pop Tart. “Hey, let me show you the bounties.” He led me to a small board off to the side and tapped on my name from a list of what appeared to be only Medics. “Once you get into your name, it’ll filter the bounties to only show what you can actually accept.” He tapped on a left arrow and reversed the process. “From the main screen, you can see all the bounties no matter what.”
I used a finger to scroll all the way to the top. Almost every single bounty was looking for a Medic with Pilot being the second highest demand. At the very top, the highest bounty offered 1.6 million credits for a Medic at least level fifty to join a mission for a minimum of three weeks.
I went back into my acceptable bounties, and Crunch showed me the one he wanted me to take.
“This one is to join my team. Our Medic, ironically, is off on a super high bounty for the next few days, and we have a match. A big one. It pays 10k. You in?”
From what I had seen in the retail area, ten thousand credits was enough to build a full kit of decent gear. I’d probably be able to afford an appetizer at Sal’s too. Not a full meal and certainly no wine, but at least some flatbread and olive oil.
“Do I get paid if we lose? How does it work?” I asked. I had already committed to taking the bounty, but I didn’t want to come off as too eager.
Crunch nodded. “You actually get paid the moment the battle starts. Even if you get smoked two minutes in, you still get the credits. That said, I don’t recommend it. The top teams all talk, and a shitty bounty Medic not worth her credits isn’t the reputation you want.”
I reached out my hand, and Crunch gave it a firm shake. “I’m in. Let’s do it.”
“Kickass. Come on, I’ll introduce you to the guys.”
I followed Crunch down one of the hallways, and instead entering into a classroom, we arrived right in a staging room. That was a bit surprising, but it didn’t take long to figure out why.
“Got us a Medic, boys,” Crunch said with a smile as soon as we entered.
“About damn time! Fucking hell. I thought we were goin’ in bloody,” one of the others responded.
“Oh god, I was the only one you could find, wasn’t I?” As soon as I said it, everyone in the staging area stopped and turned.
“Shit, what level are you, Med?”
Another guy stepped up and gave me a scrutinizing once-over. “Eleven? Twelve? You’re green as hell, Med.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. These guys were hardened soldiers, and they thought level twelve was green… they were in for a wild ride.
“Level one, gentlemen. Fresh off the boat. Ready to rock and roll!” I slapped the nearest guy on the shoulder and went right to the gear table to start loading up with healing equipment.
Pretty much everyone other than Crunch let out a hail of groans and curses. I knew it was coming, and it probably wasn’t the first time I had so clearly let down a room full of men, so I let it roll off and grabbed the red med kit from the table. It was similar to the one I used the day before though far larger. I took a quick peek inside, and the pack had just about everything: tourniquets, syringes, pills, gauze, scissors, and a few high tech things that looked like miniature portable x-rays. I also grabbed a full combat suit with hardened ceramic plates over all the vital areas.
Once I was dressed and armored, Crunch introduced me to the third member of what would become our little combat trio for the upcoming mission. Seeing my first alien up close was intense. The creature was vaguely humanoid which struck me as a little odd, though it towered at least seven feet tall.
‘It’ had a name in some alien language that I couldn’t hope to pronounce myself, so like everyone else on the team, I called it Gorb. That wasn’t a nickname or anything, just a random moniker that the big alien was apparently used to hearing. Gorb was also half machine, sporting an array of gears and actuators along its right side. Curiously, Gorb didn’t speak. As Crunch explained, Gorb had certain innate psychic abilities naturally found in its species that let it impart bits and pieces of its will into the minds of others. Essentially, when Gorb really needed healing, I would know it in the back of my mind like intuition. As such, it made sense that Gorb was a Psi Operative.
Our mission also revolved around Gorb. Crunch’s team was tasked with infiltrating a well-defended fortification and using psychic abilities to gather information from a handful of targets. Making things more complex, we weren’t allowed to kill any of the targets. Victory in the mission depended on the targets surviving.
Competing against us was a team from the Black Nova Coalition, a major guild on another planet that had been a strong rival of the Hanseatic League for years. Both teams had the same objective. The main difference was that the team from Black Nova had a pair of Psi Operatives matched with a pair of Medics. We only had one of each, and that was only if I actually counted as a Medic. At level one, I had my doubts.
I pulled out my membership card and checked the balance. Four hundred. “You idiots ready to kick some ass?” I asked.
More groans.
Crunch snickered. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Stephanie. Just stay calm, stay with us, and we’ll be fine.”
“And how will I be able to heal the rest of the team if just the three of us are going on our own to play the objective?” It seemed like a risky plan to have the Medic in a position to only heal two members of the team, even if those two were the most important.
Crunch pointed to a short woman dressed like she just stepped off the set of Tron. Our Tech Specialist, Mia. She has a limited use teleportation beacon.” He took a blinking red disc from one of his pockets. “When anyone in the main force gets hurt, she can send them to us. Or rather, she can send them to the beacon. Stick with me, and you’ll be able to patch them up. It only goes one way, so once the main force dwindles enough, they’ll come to us. Make sense?”
It didn’t, but I nodded anyway.
“Five until drop,” someone else announced.
“Drop? What—”
By drop, the other team member meant the floor was going to vanish, and by five, he meant seconds, not minutes. The floor did exactly that, and the whole team landed with a crash on top of a burned out school bus. The setting looked like something from Terminator.
“Come on, this way,” Crunch said, quickly leading our trio away from the parking lot where we started.
The three of us ran into a ruined movie theater, not caring at all for stealth, and then emerged out the back fire door into a tight alley.
“As a Bounty Hunter, I get access to some maps and things right when it all starts. Not much, and the system doesn’t let me tell everyone, but I just have a sort of sixth sense about where to go. This way is next.”
Crunch shouldered through a metal door into an ice cream shop and quickly vaulted the glass counter. Gorb and I took the more pedestrian route of walking around the counter, and then the three of us were standing on the shoulder of a wide street. A big shopping area stretched to either side.
“Where to next, hotshot?” I asked. It was dusk, probably an hour or two until dark, and the whole place was abandoned. Without Crunch’s sense of direction, I would have absolutely no idea how to pick where to go.
Crunch thought for a minute before pointing left. “There. The car dealership.”
We took off down the cracked and burned sidewalk, and I quickly found my lungs aching in my chest. My physical stat was still only five, and according to Rifle Guy, the higher it went, the more endurance and stamina I would enjoy. I made a mental note to hit the gym again as soon as I got back.
Surprisingly, our seven foot alien friend was the slowest of the group. It practically lumbered rather than ran, and if it was any shorter, it wouldn’t have kept up at all.
We reached the ruins of a spacious Chevy dealership and crouched low behind what was left of the sign. I took the minute of respite to check my membership card again. Ten thousand four hundred credits. Fuck yeah. I was practically rich. Or rich by my standards.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“The hell are you doing?”
Crunch pulled me out of my newfound wealth and back to reality. Well… maybe not reality. I tucked the membership card back in my pocket and refocused.
“On the other side of the dealership should be the first resistance. Just a guard, maybe two, but we can’t be seen. If they raise the alarm, we’re screwed,” Crunch explained. He peered over the sign and then ducked back down. “No one on the front. We should be clear through the offices.”
“Can we go around?” I whispered.
“Not that easy. We have to get to their guard station and disable a silent alarm before the other team can advance.” He checked a digital watch strapped upside down to his wrist. “The main group should be hacking a netcom unit right now. We have thirty seconds.”
The thirty seconds elapsed, and we were off once more, running right through the blown out front doors of the dealership and past a downright sexy seventies Corvette in British racing green. It would have been perfect if not for the hundred or so bullet holes in the passenger side door and quarter panels. Still, I stole a few seconds to admire the ride. My dad had an old Corvette that he paid to ship all the way from Detroit to France when my parents moved. He tried to raise me as a gearhead, but I never took to it. Changing oil on my back during a hot Michigan summer held exactly zero appeal. The cosmetics of a fine car, on the other hand, I could certainly appreciate.
A little mental nudge in the back of my mind brought my attention back to the group, and I immediately saw Gorb glaring at me. It felt like it was trying to ask me if I had taken my ADD meds. “Screw you,” I said under my breath as I darted by the alien oaf.
We took a flight of stairs, leapt over a hole that looked like it was made by a rocket, and came to a halt in an office with two huge plate glass windows and more metal filing cabinets than I cared to count. The other side of the dealership, perhaps where a car lot or service center would have been, looked like a photograph of the Berlin Wall from a history textbook.
Two stark concrete walls, separated by about twenty feet of no man’s land and topped by barbed wire, made up the outer fortifications of whatever it was we were actually infiltrating. Maybe every mile or so, a wooden guard tower broke up the monotony of concrete. One of the towers was only about a hundred yards away to our left. The dealership gave us a solid vantage point.
Crunch checked his watch again. “We should have a window where their communications will be limited. Not down entirely, but they won’t be able to signal everyone and put the entire compound on alert. They will, however, be able to signal other guard towers if we’re spotted.”
Gorb fixed its eerie, unsettling gaze on the guard tower. Nothing happened for a few minutes, and I didn’t want to risk breaking the alien’s concentration by asking about the plan.
Then, all of a sudden, an overwhelming feeling of success penetrated my mind. I simply knew that Gorb had tricked the guards with its psionic abilities, and we were off to the races once more.
We launched out a broken window and skidded down a collapsed section of ceiling. Using the blind spot created by the wall itself, we hugged the concrete and sprinted in a line right for the guard tower. Once we were beneath it, Crunch pulled a small grenade from his armor.
“Stun. Won’t last long. Can you climb?” he whispered.
I shook my head. For the second time in an hour, I made a mental note to hit the gym when I got back home.
Closing his eyes, Crunch summoned his huge kinetic hammer, and then tossed the stun grenade high over his head. It flashed and boomed—not nearly as violent as I expected, though my eyes and ears were covered—and then Crunch set to work clearing the barbed wire with his hammer. It didn’t take long, and then he and the seven foot alien were climbing over the concrete wall and up the side of the guard tower.
A few seconds later, Crunch’s face poked over the side of the guard tower. “All clear. Gorb will lift you up.”
The alien reached down over the wall, and I grabbed its hand. It was so slimy. It didn’t look slimy, but somehow it was. And fucking wet. It felt like grabbing a fistful of live catfish. But Gorb was strong despite his apparent lack of running ability. He basically tossed me into the guard tower like a bag of groceries, and I quickly dried my hand on my armor as best I could.
Two human guards were dead, their faces the recipients of Crunch’s beloved hammer. It was a brutal sight. Gorb shoved the pair of corpses out of the tower to give Crunch more room to work, and they landed below with a sickening thud.
Crunch checked his watch again. “We should have a few minutes to raise—”
A single shrill beep erupted from Crunch’s body. He fumbled with his pocket, then grabbed the red disc he had showed me in the staging area and pushed the center button. A second later, an injured team member materialized in a swarm of dancing pixels. As soon as his entire body was present, it was like someone hit the play button on his agony, and the man screamed in pain.
Without missing a beat, Crunch clamped his hand over the man’s mouth, though it didn’t do much good.
I activated Identify Injury, and my vision quickly blurred with a myriad of colors identifying injuries all over his body. He was burned, mostly on his back, and had also taken a bullet to the bicep. “Uh, flip him over,” I said, deciding to work on the burn first.
The supplies in my first aid kit were labeled better this time. I found a tube of burn cream and generously applied it to the man’s crispy back, then quickly remembered the syringes of pain medication and gave him one of those too. Thankfully, his agonized howling died down to a whimper within seconds. Still, I knew we didn’t have much time. I slapped another handful of burn cream on his back, wrapped an entire pack of gauze around his back, then used one of the flat tourniquet ties to secure it all in place.
“Alright, flip him back over. I need to patch up the gunshot.”
Gorb and Crunch rolled the injured soldier to his back, and I took a look at the arm. It was a small hole, and it didn’t go all the way through.
“How long is this mission supposed to be?” I asked.
Crunch looked confused, but he answered. “Maybe another hour, two at the most. Why?”
“I’m leaving the bullet in his arm. I don’t think his arm is broken, so he should be able to use it a little if I get it secured.” I remembered a trauma class I had taken for my RN that dealt with bullet wounds. It was more geared toward EMTs and other first responders than nurses, but the training was the same either way. If there wasn’t a desperate need to pull the bullet out, I was supposed to leave it, stop the bleeding, control the pain, and let a surgeon dig it out later.
There wouldn’t be a surgeon on our mission, but that didn’t matter. As soon as it ended, the man would be fine. I gave him another half dose of pain meds to his shoulder and then went to work closing up the entry wound. Luckily, my advanced medical kit contained a wound gel similar to what I used on old people who cut themselves at Sunnyside Manor. I sprinkled a healthy amount into the hole, then slapped four butterfly bandages over it to keep it all together. Another pack of gauze and some tape, and the man was as good as I was going to get him.
He took a few seconds to come to his senses, and then his eyes opened and his yelling stopped. “Holy shit,” he gasped. “That was fucking wild.” Then he found me and smiled. “Not bad, Med. Solid work for a noob.”
“Yeah, well, don’t get too confident. Your back is fucked. And when those pain meds wear off, you’re gonna be in rough shape.”
The man tried to get to his feet, and his face screwed up in pain.
“I told ya it was going to hurt like a bitch. Just take it easy for a few minutes.”.
Crunch shook his head, his eyes on his watch. “We don’t have a few minutes.” He took a quick glance toward the fortress we were supposed to be assaulting and then looked back to the team. “Cover us until you feel good enough to move, then join us. We have to get going.”
Without any more parting words, I repacked my med kit and followed Crunch and Gorb down the backside of the guard tower and across no man’s land. Again using his hammer to clear the obstacle, Crunch had us over the opposite wall in no time.
The fortress stood on a hill probably twenty yards higher than the guard tower and surrounded by another wall. It also had, judging by the moving lights, a set of guards patrolling the perimeter.
Crunch got down low as we all observed. “James back there—and never call him Jimmy—is a Space Marine. He has wicked aim on the gauss rifle, but don’t call it that either. He’s a stickler for details, and technically his gun is a smoothbore, not a rifle. We can engage the patrolling guards up the hill, and he’ll smoke at least one from the tower for us.”
I got the feeling from our alien companion that it was ready to fight. Finally, I saw Gorb materialize its weapon of choice. It looked like a series of tubing that could form the exhaust system on the world’s smallest car. The strange alien manipulated a few levers and switches, and a pilot light ignited on the front, right beneath a wide-angle barrel.
I grinned from ear to ear. Seeing the plasma flamethrower in action was going to be awesome. Then I thought of James’s ravaged back and the rough job I did putting him back together, and my smile turned into a frown. It wasn’t real, I reminded myself. There was pain, immense amounts of it, but death wasn’t permanent… yet.
Steeling my nerves as best I could, I followed Crunch and Gorb up the hill, trying to stay a few paces behind them with a hand on my pack just in case. The ground leveled off a few paces before the next wall. We didn’t quite catch the patrolling guards unawares, though another of Crunch’s stun grenades made up for our lack of surprise. Two guards stumbled and swung their weapons high, reactively pulling their triggers. A hail of bullets launched far over our heads, doing little more than adding a bit of tinnitus to our ears.
The third patrolman was unaffected. For some unknown reason, he fired right between Crunch and Gorb. A series of small explosions on the hillside traced the path of the man’s bullets as they struck dirt—but they were headed right for me. I leapt to the side in the nick of time, though it felt like a rock or some other piece of shrapnel kicked up into the bottom of my foot. Whatever it was, it hurt! And it would have to wait.
From the tower down below, a soft whirring quickly slipped between the cacophony of gunshots, and then a beam of icy blue death caught one of the soldiers directly in the chest. The blue shot lingered for a moment as an afterimage in the air, and then the acrid smell of burnt hair filled my nostrils.
I didn’t have time to appreciate the perfectly-aimed shot. My foot was practically on fire. I ripped off my boot, and blood seeped out from a tiny bullet hole just below the metatarsals. “Fuck!” I yelled, tearing into my medical supplies once again.
The shot was a through-and-through. My great toe was probably broken. At least it was a high velocity rifle round and not some big slow pistol shot or worse, a musket ball. The image of someone dressed for the Revolutionary War carrying a Kentucky long rifle amidst plasma flamethrowers and gauss rifles almost made me laugh. Almost. But my foot fucking hurt.
I grabbed one of the syringes and pushed its contents into my leg. Relief was almost instant. Whatever was in the syringe was similar to morphine, though the whoosh of narcotic dizziness was much less profound. I could still think enough to patch my own wound. Fortunately, there wasn’t much beyond a simple patch that I needed. In the real world, I would have gotten a CT scan and almost certainly surgery. In the field, I got a heavy dose of coagulant powder, a metal splint on my great toe, and a tight gauze wrap followed by a second layer of heavy duty cotton bandage.
Unfortunately, my boot no longer fit. It was also shot straight through. With a sigh, I chucked the boot down the hill and then painfully pulled myself to the top. The battle was over. To add insult to injury, I missed the cool flamethrower. Judging by the vaguely human-shaped scorch mark on the concrete wall, Gorb had toasted a guy.
“You alright?” Crunch asked.
“I took a round,” I answered. “I’ll be fine. Just slower than our alien friend now, and he isn’t quick.”
Gorb transmitted a feeling of empathy mixed with insult directly into my mind. Down the hill, James was making an even slower ascent. The man could hardly move. He had dismissed his rifle and was using both hands to basically climb. The whole display just looked needlessly painful.
“Should we leave him behind?”
Crunch shook his head. “He’s a trooper. He’ll make it.”
I shrugged and hoped for the best. If James took another shot, I doubted there was much more I could do for him.
Back at the action, Gorb was just about as tall as the outer wall and easily lifted Crunch right over. I was next, and then James followed thirty seconds later. Once Gorb dropped down, our fearless hammer-wielding leader set up a plan.
The central compound had a handful of buildings, though no more guard towers or barbed wire. Our targets, according to Crunch’s class-granted intuition, were prisoners inside a square building with only one entrance and no windows.
The nearest building to us was a single story brick structure that smelled a bit like a laundry facility. It had a series of pipes extending from one wall and then turning skyward to follow the building up to the roof. “Think you can climb up there, James?” I asked. It wouldn’t be perfect, but the view would be better for a crippled sniper than anything on the ground.
He sized up the pipes and flashed a grin. “Check it out,” he said, and then a metal grappling hook launched from his belt and slammed into the top of the pipes. He followed the cable shortly thereafter, flying through the air.
“That was so—”
I was about to say “cool” when James got absolutely smoked. Something fast and massive hit him in the chest, and he was done. His corpse, completely ripped in two, fell off the roof.
“Fuck me. I can’t fix that…”
“Come on, time to go!” Crunch yelled.
We darted for another building, something industrial with a lot of doors and windows, and I followed Crunch through the very first one. The inside was a manufactory with huge steel crucibles suspended from chains as thick as my body. The whole place was in disrepair, though not nearly as destroyed as the city streets where we started.
“That was an ion blaster,” Crunch said breathlessly. “That means we’re running behind. Black Nova has a couple on their main team. Most people don’t like ions as they take a massive amount of aether to fire, but they’re always one hit kills. Damn.”
“If they’re already watching the rooftops, we’re fucked.” It was the obvious statement to make. Crunch already knew it. Gorb emanated a feeling of agreement. We couldn’t go back outside.
Crunch stretched his back. “Well… Time to look around for plan B. Maybe this building connects to the one we need. Could be a tunnel or basement. Let’s split up. We don’t have much time.