Eve Berg

Location: Yangon-2, Yangon System, Eastern Block

Eve screamed.

She screamed because there was nothing else to do. It was an act of defiance and a way to release the pants-shitting terror that was spilling out of her. She couldn’t think of anything better to do as she charged headlong into the enemy troops surging from underground right in front of her. She rapid fired all of her missiles at the openings to stem the tide of death rolling toward her.

SGT Sullivan was still out cold on her shoulder, and she had to reposition him as she charged into the belly of the beast. It didn’t help that she was firing her Buss from her hip like some old-fashioned holo action hero. Her LACS targeting software was helping her hit some of her targets, but it was a shitty way to fight. Unfortunately for her, she was shit out of luck at this point.

Eight loud BOOMS shook the ground as her missiles found their marks. Blockies screamed as they were ripped apart by the explosions, doused in flames, or buried under collapsing tunnels. Eve kept on shooting. She’d blown her load on closing those tunnels, but that didn’t stop the two dozen soldiers who’d survived, that were standing between her and freedom, or the thousands of other Blockie troops in the PDC who were coming to check out why everything was blowing up.

Her mind told her.

There was no fancy tactic to utilize here. She was in the open with no more cover for a hundred meters in any direction. Everything behind her was on fire, everything immediately in front of her, that wasn’t standing, was rubble, and everyone that still was standing wanted to kill her.

A terrible clicking sound filled her ears as the Buss ran dry at the worst possible time. The Blockies, who’d been trying to take cover behind chunks of rubble, immediately noticed and started returning fire. It became merciless in the seconds it took Eve to rotate her weapons chamber. She stumbled mid-stride when several rounds smashed into her legs. They were the 1mm of the Blockies’ standard infantry weapon, so they didn’t penetrate, but the kinetic force of those rounds had to go somewhere.

Eve bit her tongue and tasted blood as she attempted to get her stride back under control. When you could move as fast as an air-car it was important to control your movements or you’d wreck. Eve couldn’t wreck with the injured SGT on her shoulder. Not only would he be totally fucked, but the Blockies would swarm her like hungry ants and tear her to shreds.

she prayed as she got her feet under control, retargeted the enemy with her Buss, and returned fire.

Small booms started to rake the Blockies’ impromptu firing positions as her 40mm grenades started detonating all around them. Her shooting wasn’t great, but a 40mm grenade with a five meter kill radius didn’t need to be completely on target. The bad part was that a Buss didn’t hold nearly as much 40mm ammo as it did 3mm rounds, so it felt like she’d just started firing when the barrel ran dry again.

“Berg, on my command go up and peel to the left at a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree angle,” the SEAL team leader’s voice ordered over the coms.

Eve bit back a couple colorful responses of inquiring where the SEAL had been when she was fighting for her life, and instead toggled back her acknowledgement. Then she went to work. Yangon-2’s gravity was slightly below Earth standard, so when she jumped she jumped higher.

She was three meters off the ground when she activated her grav-skates. They hummed gently to life and kept her on course as she skated away the prescribed angle. At the same time she activated her LACS’ armor, and with a special emergency code, slaved the SGT’s armor to hers and activated his cammo as well. Her being relatively unseen didn’t do shit if the SGT was painting a big “shoot here” sign on her back.

She was blending and pumping her legs furiously to gain altitude on her prescribed trajectory when the SEAL’s answer to her problem came roaring in. Three low-flying 250mm artillery rounds shrieked in and blasted the remaining Blockies to whatever underworld they believed in.

“Fuck yeah!” Eve screamed as her starved body sucked in oxygen and the thumping of her pulse in her ears began to fade.

A waypoint appeared on her HUD and she took a least-time approach. The Blockies were still scouring the area for her, and she needed to get out of the sky fast. The rest of Team Two was waiting for her on the ground in a small perimeter.

Eve hit the ground in the middle of their formation in a textbook landing, but her leg crumpled underneath her.

“Shit,” she cursed.

During the brief, but intense, battle, she’d minimized all her screens to focus on the targeting software. The most important thing at that moment was to kill the bad guys, but it came at the cost of her situational awareness. Now that she was the relatively safe with the rest of her team, her armor insisted on telling her how fucked she was.

“I’ve got a suit breech!” she pulled up the first window blinking red. Apparently, her armor on her left leg hadn’t held as well as she thought it had. “And…” she saw the medical window blinking and felt her stomach sink.

It was a seeing is believing moment. The moment she pulled up the medical status of her suit was the moment pain lanced through her leg. Her vision wavered, and she toppled over onto her back. The combined fire of the Blockies had punched through her scales and duro-steel beneath as she charged them. Only one, maybe two rounds had punctured her suit, but it tore up her leg between pelvis and knee pretty good.

Her armor’s automated medical systems had kicked in and pumped her full of antibiotics and pain killers. The cocktail was meant to keep her kicking until she could get to a proper hospital. Tourniquets had already been applied, so she was going to live, but she couldn’t stop looking at her leg. Her armor had run a complete diagnostic and it looked like a three year old had tried to drill a hole through her. The round came in at an angle, smashed through her flesh and hit bone. Her femur wasn’t completely shattered, but a good percentage had been pulverized by the round, and the tiny sliver of metal was still there on the scans. It was half sticking out of the back of her leg. It had put another hole in her hamstring, and was now surrounded by a coating of Insta-Flesh sprayed on by the armor to stop the bleeding.

The only thing that was keeping her conscious was the pharmalogical cocktail, and the only thing keeping her walking was the LACS.

“Come on, Berg, on your feet.” The SEAL knew her medical status had gone from green to yellow, but he didn’t care. She either helped her fight their way out or they’d all die, and one little pin prick from a 1 mm round wasn’t going to mean shit when the met up with Blockie nutcrackers.

The SEAL helped haul her onto her feet. She reloaded her buss with a fresh magazine of 3mm before acknowledging her readiness. They needed to move fast. Not only for all of them to stay alive, but Eve’s drugs were only going to last so long, and when she finally ran dry she’d better be with a medical unit.

The SEAL grabbed SGT Sullivan and draped him over his shoulder. “We’re moving in thirty, so get ready.”

Eve wondered why thirty, but didn’t ask. It gave her time to stuff a few more 40mm grenades in her tube. They’d saved her life once already and there was no telling how helpful they’d be on their breakout.

Thirty seconds later a nearby earth-shattering explosion nearly made her drop her weapon. More than a dozen smaller explosions followed, and all hell broke out on STRATNET. Red icons were running around like ants after a pissed off human kicked their ant hill. Eve didn’t get time to see the damage because the SEAL was already skating into the air and leaving her behind. She made sure her cammo was active and followed.

A sharp sting struck her leg every time she used it in a skating motion, but she powered through the pain. The team rose up just high enough to go over the top of the wall and disappear into the city.

Eve laughed as she looked back before dropping over the wall onto the city side.

The shield protecting the PDC from orbital strikes was crumbling. She didn’t know how, but SGM Queen had completed the hardest of the four objectives. Smoke was rising into the air from some of the more fortified positions, meaning the other teams had done their jobs, but there was still plenty for Fourth Brigade to do.

The brigade-level shield was already flickering from Blockie artillery trying to push it back, but the ten thousand Commonwealth troops were already on the move. They smelled blood in the water and they were going to complete their mission. Sonic booms filled the sky as railgun rounds from ships in orbit shrieked in to kill the bigger targets, but she didn’t see any of them impact before everything disappeared from view.

“We’re rendezvousing back at the original LZ. We’ve got a bird inbound to take us home and get you looked at, Berg.”

“Fantastic,” Eve grunted back as the pain steadily built as they skated a few meters over the bombed-out cityscape.

Whatever else happened with the invasion of Yangon, Eve was going to be out of the fighting for a bit. She needed the docs to grow some more bone, pick out the bad bits, and stitch her back together. She didn’t like to think about it, but her Dad had suffered similar injuries over his lengthy career. He’d be down for a few weeks of recovery, then a few weeks of rehab, and then it was back to work as normal.

It was something no soldier ever wanted to receive, but many in her line of work ended up earning several. She just gave the whole thing a mental shrug and concentrated on getting back to the LZ.

A flight of drones passed over them as they skated. They were moving at supersonic speeds and on a bombing run toward something. That meant that the PDC’s air-defense capabilities were offline and the Commonwealth now ruled the sky.

She didn’t need to look back at the embattled PDC, her eyes were glued to the Spyder already idling behind the small hill where they’d started the mission.

SGM Queen was already there. She had no idea how he’d beaten them, and she didn’t care. The pain meds were starting to lag, and unpleasantness was beginning to spread. There were a handful of medics on the Spyder, and Eve wasn’t the only one injured. They were triaging the SPECOPS soldier by priority. One took one look at Eve and marked her Urgent Surgical.

She ground her teeth as the meds continued to wear off on the flight back up to the fleet. By the time they got her into sick bay she was a raging bitch, but that was nothing a knock-out shot couldn’t handle. It was also necessary to get her mangled limb out of the armor and her ragged ass into surgery.