Commander Raethor understood the gravity of the situation. There would be no end to the bodies and on all sides he could see his subordinates’ growing fatigue. They were used to combat, but even suppression fire wasn’t meant to be sustained in perpetuity. You brought along reserves to cycle out the active combatants. All the soldiers being active meant a failure of command, but in this case there was nothing to be done. There were four halls and fourteen soldiers, yes, but four halls and an endless sea of the enemy from all sides. Anya’s group was holding, and Lulululululu’s enhancement of the others’ firing potential allowed them to make faster shots with less of their energy (using the extra autorepeaters she had brought along for this purpose), but Dio’s group of four was still incapable of holding the line, and Peter only had Henry to back him up. His flamer would fire for a long duration, but once it tapped out its nutrient vat the firing mode would switch to real-time and Peter would be hard-pressed to blink, much less stand or run, and that was if he could sustain the rate in the first place. He was good, but Raethor didn’t think anyone could do that, even him. And though he was the best or second best shot in the unit, it wouldn’t matter in the face of a thousand thousand thousand of the enemy. Henry could fire quickly, but for what purpose? He could pick off the stragglers and hold the line, but once Peter had to switch firing modes or drop the flamer for a rifle, the two of them simply didn’t have the man or firepower to hold their position.
So Raethor did the only thing he could and ordered a retreat but there was nowhere to go. In practice this order was a death-sentence as he would have to take Alissa and Alex from Dio’s group and put them in Peter’s. But Peter overheard the order and demanded it be changed.
“Let me stay behind instead.”
They didn’t have the manpower to push forward on one side without losing it on one of the others. This meant whichever side was chosen would lose the ability to hold off the enemy and would be killed in action. Dio shouted back.
“You don’t need to sacrifice yourself, Peter; It’s a good day to die!”
But Raethor knew what Peter was thinking. Even if he let Dio hold the line as best he could, Jessica was with him. She didn’t object to Dio’s proclamation of courage in the face of death, but even if they were both telling death to go fuck itself as it swung the sythe down on them, it would mean losing two soldiers instead of one. And Raethor wasn’t supposed to lose any… But it was almost too late now, and if he tried to save them all he would end up saving none.
Peter had faced death before and came out alive, Raethor knew that, and he knew why Peter had chosen a flamer as his weapon of choice. It was for moments like these when there was no hope left of success, only that one soldier would be able to hold the line long enough to allow the others to escape. Peter had chosen the flamer to prevent his allies from getting too close, but more than that he had chosen the flamer to hold the line alone. If someone had to die to protect everyone else, Peter would be the one.
Dio, Jessica, Alex, and Alissa made the swap with Peter between lines, as Raethor and Yuna suppressed the enemy as best they could with his shoulder-mounted cannon and her tiny pistol. It was enough to prevent a total loss from happening in the second they swapped, but the enemy did gain some meter or so in the duration. The other groups began bunching up, moving inward toward the center of the four-way intersection of halls and preparing to make the death march down the hall Peter had defended and would give his life to take, but as they stepped backwards Anya did not make the switch to Dio’s forward line as she was supposed to. Instead she motioned to Lulululu to defend their combined position and made the quick strides to join Peter hand-in-hand.
There was no time for Raethor to object before Peter felt the flamer’s growing weight in wide-eyed disbelief. Was she dual-firing it? How? Even the best soldiers he had ever worked with would fail doing that. It required a perfect synchronization of pulse and nerves with the target by way of the rifle or other armament, but given Anya had sprinted the distance between them and had been engaged in active combat in the second prior, there was no chance her heartbeat should be soft enough to match Peter’s still holding of the trigger.
And yet the vat below the flamer’s barrel grew heavier in each passing second as though to laugh in the face of Peter’s impossibility; as if to spit in the face of his resolve to die. What Peter didn’t know was that in the mad dash to his position Anya had taken another pill to make six, then she took her seventh, and then in the knowledge seven would not be enough took an eighth. It only just gave her control of the pulse, but her mind was blank. Every muscle ached in the lacking oxygen. Her brain throbbed in its deprivation of life, and yet it almost felt right, as though this was how it always should have been. Choked and made to feel nothing; mind blank and veins throbbing as her finger grasped Peter’s finger on the trigger and veins connected to the same armament as his. This was what it meant to be a soldier. Not sitting in the base training. Not eating and sleeping and training to watch each other die. It meant risk. It meant doing the impossible because it must be done. It meant killing the enemy to protect your comrades no matter who they were and what they felt. It meant scoffing at the impossible and doing it anyway to kill just one more hostile combatant and protect just one more ally. It meant killing infinite bodies because it must be done and who else could? Certainly no one she knew.
Certainly none of the other soldiers staring in disbelief at the fact Peter was no longer destined to run out of nutrients and die in his defence of their rear position. Consequently, the whole unit was able to immediately reposition forward with Anya and Peter at the rear. There was no pause as they came to terms with what had just happened, and Dio did not shout obscenities at her for being better than him, nor Will, nor Jesús, nor Jessica. And as Anya felt the weight of attention press into her the fire grew hotter as she and Peter adjusted the flamer’s output to match the newly-increased nutrient input rate. It was so high the flamer was no longer operating in the stored operational mode, it had switched to real-time nutrient consumption, and even in this state both of the operator’s had energy to spare the movement of feet to keep up with the rest of the unit now pressing forward.
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White fire burned hotly as if to propel them all forward. There was gunfire to the fore, but Anya didn’t watch it. She looked into Peter’s green eyes and he noticed, his pupils darting to the left to meet her rightward gaze. Anya felt the weight of many bodies burning away in front of them but paid them no mind. She stared a hole into Peter, but he did not cede the position. There was no gratitude worn on his face. There was no hope of reprieve. He knew they would likely die here, or perhaps that there was some secret way out deep within the base. But whatever he knew, it wasn’t shown on his face, and no matter how deeply Anya tried to penetrate Peter’s eyes he gave no information away. Finally, finally after some minute of this Anya gave in to his stubbornness.
“Fine, then keep your secrets.”
There was a pause as only footsteps and gunshots sounded out.
“Thank you.” Peter shouted because of how loud the area was.
“It was nothing. I’m sure you’d do the same.” Anya knew he wasn’t a cold bastard deep within his scientific facade. So what if he had developed a war-crime? There wasn’t any law against weapons of war, not when he created it. And it had been for just cause.
“I tried to, you know.”
“And I wouldn’t let you!” She let out a smile. Peter did not reciprocate.
“Thank you.” He said again.
Anya let the silence of a thousand gunshots take back the scene. Her tinnitus rang out too, beneath the cacophony like a wall of ringing static, but it wasn’t so bad. All the soldiers spoke loudly anyway since they all had it. And it was better than silence anyway. Ringing in your ears was an easy reminder you were alive and not dreaming. In that sense it was an excellent defensive weapon against those who would seek to put you to sleep or some other dreamlike state. Though again it wasn’t like they couldn’t craft an illusion with the ringing built in…
Anya was off topic. It was so easy to let the thoughts run wild when the action falls. You almost had to to stay sane. What kind of person dwells actively on the pervasive scent of burning flesh and gunshots choking out all other senses in the scene?
But it didn’t take long for them to arrive at their destination. Some five minutes or so had passed. Down at the long end of the halls was again a flesh lock, but this time it was much larger than the others had been. Had someone listened to her threat to place a bomb up the designer’s ass and rebuilt the base out of anxiety at the thought? The base was alive, she knew, but she had no idea why it would be scared of that. Did it even have a rectum?
Anyway… Peter was needed at the front so Anya slid her finger to the top of the trigger from on top of his to allow him to move out of the way. Behind her a few of her comrades had joined in to help shoot the stragglers that would make it through the fire now that its size and intensity diminished, but most of the sounds of gunfire had faded, and the fire grew much less small and hot than any of them had anticipated. Raethor screamed in excitement like some little girl. The vibe of his speech very much did not concur with his deep voice.
“Good to see you’re holding up lieutenant— I’d say your performance is on fire!”
“Meanwhile, Peter, you need to eat more or you’ll be skinnier than my di—”
He started coughing.
“Di—”
“Di—”
“THAN MY DICK.”
He finally managed to spit it out after hacking his lungs out. There was blood on the floor where he had hunched over, but it wasn’t even a funny joke. Anya rolled her eyes, but Will, Chris, Yuna, and a few others were all laughing. She guessed it lightened the mood, even if it cost him half a lung.
Meanwhile, Peter traced out the necessary information on the right skin panel with a knife he had procured from God-knows-where. Many of the other panels required only a trace of the finger or knuckle, but this one was special in that it was a lock-in. There had been efforts in the past to install two panels on either side of a door with the tracing mode, but it had been finicky to synchronize two people’s movements enough to perform the unlocking sequence in a chaotic environment. And if the military needed to procure heavy weapons… it was a chaotic environment. The requirement had therefore been reduced but with an increased emphasis on getting the sequence right. This had the added benefit that more people could learn the sequence as they didn’t have to also learn each other’s timings.
Peter’s dagger slid the patterns of inset rings smoothly on the skin which dripped gray blood ordinarily one of the lighter shades of red. It didn’t take him long to finish the right side, and it didn’t take him long to finish tracing along the left. In a hissing woosh the flaps of heavy skin unfolded themselves from within the center door’s thick walls. This door, unlike most others, was not exposed to the elements. Its interior would first unfurl, and then the metallic outer layer would fall into a chasm exposed from below it.
Anya’s trigger finger ached and she realized her hand was shaking from gripping far too tightly for far too long. “Just a few more steps.” she thought, entering the open door last and continuing to fire until Peter had stabbed the door-retraction mechanism on the opposite side. Only when the fire at last bloomed outward to show her the halls had been fully sealed off did Anya finally relax, dropping to her knees in exhaustion. It wasn’t befitting of a soldier, nor even of the kind of person she wanted to be, but even the strong were sometimes forced to their knees under sufficient strain.
She wasn’t sure what returned first: the color of the world or her whirling, blackened vision that had set in all at once, but when it all stabilized she knew only 75 or perhaps 80% of it was there. As before, something had been lost in the combat. Some piece of her humanity or perhaps something inherent to the world had been rendered flesh and destroyed. Perhaps it was only a feature of this base, but they hadn’t taken the chance of asking the Most High to find out. Their words had been cryptic enough, asking them whether the world had been distorted was begging for a dishonorable discharge to the back of the head by your superiors in the moment of asking the question. Asking something so stupid would cause the Most High to ask equally important questions: such as regarding the quality of the weed supply on the base. It must have been good stuff and thus they would need to requisition it for their personal supply, seeing as their name implied you should only be able to get the best stuff from them.