Seg 2.2

Flashes of lights. Bolts of raw energy fly by my face as I run and dive into a higher clump of grain. A few more shots hit the dirt right beside me. I need to get out of where I'm at, find a way to escape them, but its all just grass, waist high. They would see it if I moved, but if I stay here...

A laser blast hits someone to the right of where I'm crouched trying to avoid being hit. The guy had stood up to get a quick shot off, but the enemy had been waiting. Half of his head was just gone, and what was left of it was charred beyond recognition. No time to scream, he had simply stood up, and that was the last thing for him. His lifeless corpse hit the ground with a soft thump, collapsing like a sack of potatoes.

If the lasers could burn straight through a human, battle gear and all, why the hell am I stuck using a projectile weapon? I quickly search  the "memories" of my character. Apparently, humans didn't develop personal use laser weapons, even after several decades of space exploration in faster than light ships. Which is stupid, because now - I thought to myself - now I get to fight aliens, on an alien world, against laser weapons, with something that works on gunpowder and a piece of lead. Dumbest idea in the book.

Another bolt flashed through the grass, scorching the ground beside me. Even though it had burned the ground, it made my arm feel cold, as though the side that had been closer to the bolt had just been dumped into cold water. If this is what it felt like to just be missed by one, I couldn't imagine what being hit by one would feel like. Looking around, I can just make out a shack rising out of the grain. It's a little ways off, but I should make it there safe if I move slowly through the grass.

I start to shuffle towards the shack, keeping at a low crouch to make sure I stay beneath the waist high grass. Suddenly, an alien stumbles into the path I'm on towards the shack. Without thinking, my "training" kicks in. I swing my gun up from the resting position I was holding it in, and with a quick precision, I fire two rounds into it's skull, and then another round into it's chest as I roll to the side to avoid any returning fire.

There isn't any. I return to my low crouch from the prone position I had ended my roll in and move towards the alien body. It's helmet is broken, smashed in from the impact of the bullets, the ceremonial carved inlay providing stress lines along which it shattered. There's a thick liquid bubbling up from the shots to the chest, or at least what passes for a chest on these creatures. Their long curved bodies and spindly legs make it look almost like a cross between a snake and a spider, except the legs are all bundled together at the base of the body, and then you get your snakeish looking bends, and then a pair of hands, two on each side that can fold together to be one on each side, and the the helmet and the long hair that's always floating up as though they were swimming all the time. There's a kind of deadly beauty to them, a sort of flow to their body, each piece of armor and gear attached to their bodies without disrupting it, merely accentuating the remarkable smooth design of it all.

Marvelous work they've done with this one, I thought. Usually shooter 'scapes don't get such artistic or detailed enemies.

In the few seconds I spent studying the dead body, a flood of "memories" flushed in. The first discovery of these aliens, when our separate colonization efforts met on several worlds. Highly territorial, they didn't like us trying to use the same planets they thought they had claim too. However, peace was brokered on several of the first planets we encountered each other on. Sadly, it was short lived, as a rogue alien ran into a human colony on a new planet and slaughtered the colony. Their local planetary government wasn't going to hand him over to humans, and so push came to shove, and then from there it spread across all of the worlds we both occupied. Thankfully, the fighting has been restricted to those ares, and they don't seem to want to attack any of our established homes. Some sort of honor code I suppose.

More memories flash by, no time to understand what was happening really, just snapshots.

Leaving my Home world in a smaller four planet system to fight in a nearby system on another world that fighting had broken out on. 


Finding a girl hidden in a refuse processing unit, barely holding onto life underneath a brilliantly blazing sun.


A sunset, bright orange over a green field, black marks scattered across it. A pillar of smoke rising from a pyre of dead bodies, as we preform a funeral rite customary across all systems in the United Human Systems.  A beautiful view of the world, but I'm focusing on a girl helping move bodies to the pyre. Same girl that came from the colony whose members are now piled, going up in flames.


Night, the moon large and low in the sky, much closer to the planet than on any other world I'd seen, the craters all very easily visible. Melancholy tunes waft in the air - We won, but at a high cost on this planet.


Morning, the sun up bright and early, shining in through the window shades. Roll over, and there's the girl beside me. She's still asleep, her nose twitching as a lock of hair sneaks down her face to tickle her nose. I brush the hair back, resting my hand against her face.


Afternoon, working in the fields. I had been only seventeen when I left my home world to fight, and am now twenty four, working to support me and my wife, the girl I had found in the refuse processing unit. She's now twenty two. Our son follows me through the fields, toddling about on his unstable three year old legs. I catch him as he stumbles, off balance from throwing the spare seed he had been given in a circle. Wiping the hard earned sweat from my brow and grinning like a fool in spite of the oppressive heat and overwhelming amount of work left to be done before the day is over.


Evening again. The moon is pale, even though its full. A few clouds skirt across its face as I sit in my fields, the two freshly dug graves still laying empty behind me. My wife - What was her name? Amber? Yes, that's it, Amber - and young son had passed away from a new disease spreading like wildfire across the world. Apparently it had been a bio-weapon developed by the enemy, who had come back to reclaim "their" planet. I was one of the lucky ones, somehow immune to the disease. 


Sun. Bright lights. Flashes as laser fire burns past me. Burning heat from the sun, but freezing from the chill of the laser bolts. I dash from behind the post I was hiding behind, and gun down two of the aliens. I roll towards one of the bodies, avoiding fire from three other aliens nearby. Grabbing the downed alien's gun as I roll by it, I come up into a squat, quickly finishing off the other three. I keep the gun.


A different planet. Night. Slowly approaching a guard from behind, kill it quickly and silently with a knife. Watching with enjoyment as it's black life slowly seeps from it's body. I grab the gun the alien had been holding and head off towards their camp. 


"That was for Amber" I remember saying softly under my breath as I hefted the gun.


Day again, and yet another planet. Trenched behind a small concrete panel that used to be part of the entrance to a mine. One of just a few hidden soldiers put in place to shepherd the aliens towards the mine shaft.

It just keeps going, more and more, until finally I'm arriving at this planet, and shipped directly to where the fighting is the hardest. Where I got sent to the forward company, in the fields.

All of this happened in just a few seconds, but it was long enough for an alien to get behind me without me noticing. There's an abrupt empty feeling, as if something valuable had been lost, and an intense cold. I manage to look down as my eyes glaze over, and I'm not surprised to see a hole in my chest. A prefect circle, sides all charred and burnt. I fall to the ground, dead.