Yanibar Tales/Iron Maiden

The rifle is familiar in my hands. It’s smooth and comfortable, fits in my hands like a well-worn glove. I know the feel of its stock against my shoulder, the worn composite of the grip, my eyes lining up along the sights as if by instinct. I hear the rasp as the magazine slides into place and just the sound tells me that it’s in place properly. Even the weight of the weapon feels just as it should. Everything’s just the way it should be.

I’m not even using a helmet-I don’t need its gadgetry to do this job, and even without the AI loaded into it, it’s far too distracting sometimes. Right now, it’s just me, the weapon, and the target. The way it should be. I line the long muzzle up and squint down the scope. It’s a firing range, so there’s no crosswinds to foul up the shot, but I check the readings anyway. My finger tightens on the trigger, applying precisely .75 kilos of force on it. It takes a full kilogram of force to squeeze the trigger. The rifle moves with the rhythm of my breathing, up and down, up and down. I synchronize my shot with that timing, and the 10 X 90 mm tungsten-durasteel alloy round cracks forward from the rifle at about five times the speed of sound to impact into the target with a satisfying thwack, just like it should. The butt of the rifle kicks against my lightly armored vest and shoulder, but it’s nothing new. I don’t check to see if I shot well-no professional does. I just prepare to fire again, timing it, one-two-three-BLAM! And then again. And again. Eight times, I repeat that routine, until the clip is empty. Now, I check the targeting.

Perfect shooting, eight of eight drilled right through where the center of mass should be on a humanoid. A fatal shot for at least ninety-nine percent of known humanoid species, and certainly a serious wound for those that can take such a round and keep going. The rifles are nice-the Kraechar Arms boys did a good job when they came out with the S-5X. Magnetically accelerated like the Verpine jobs we used to have, back in the old days, and similar ammunition, but a lot tougher and with two more rounds in the mag. Steady as a rock. Hard as kriff to jam them too, a good deal harder than the Verps were. When you fire ‘em subsonic, they’re practically silent. Only thing you hear is a little whirr-chirp sound from the rotating magnetic coils inside the gun. Whirr-chirp, someone’s dead. Simple as that.

It’s my job to know my weapon. I’m a sniper. My name is Feran Slayn, Sergeant Feran Slayn. You want to know about me? Every day, I wake up to the possibility that I will be taking a life in cold blood. Now, granted, I’ve never killed anyone who didn’t need killed real bad. Everyone I’ve ever shot certainly deserved the express shuttle to Chaos. That doesn’t mean I still can’t see them at night when I sleep, but it usually doesn’t bother me. I’m good at what I do.

I’ve been doing this for five years now, long enough to earn my sergeant’s rank and the respect that comes with it. I was there in the first official battle of the Yanibar Guard, and the new ones, the ones still wet behind the ears, look at me with this strange kind of awe when they connect the service record with the face. Even the other Cresh Squadders, aside from the lieutenant, know that I’m just about in a league of my own. It’s respectable to be me in the Guard. But something’s still not quite right.

It must have been the last deployment. Saloch, that was what they called that planet. The Guard doesn’t get a lot of time offworld, and it was sort of weird how things played out. Being that extreme minority that doesn’t like to shove our heavily armed noses in other people’s business, we were all surprised when the orders came down. But not that surprised-our whole squad is commando now. Special ops. Black ops. Tough jobs that nobody else can pull off. We got moved out of regular infantry a few years back, after we convinced the brass that our little stunt with some pirates was an isolated case.

It was three weeks ago that it first came down. We were going to Saloch discreetly, which for us meant we weren’t kicking open doors with blasters blazing. In fact, we weren’t even supposed to need our blasters. Our job was helping other people figure out how to fire their own blasters. I suppose that needs a bit of background. There’s this nasty bunch of people called the Lortans, or more appropriately, the Lortan fanatics. Somehow, they got it into their head that the surrounding alien species were going to result in the doom of the galaxy, or something like that. Anyway, they decided to ravage a few star systems in order to avert that, including Saloch. Never mind that the native Tunroth and Duros there hadn’t done anything to deserve that. Our job was to ensure that some export-quality arms were distributed to the locals and help them figure out how to defend themselves. Strictly on the low-down, of course. When the reigning galactic government doesn’t and shouldn’t know you exist, it’s probably a good idea to keep a low profile, which is exactly what we intended to do. Too bad it didn’t work out that way.
 * Saloch, 2 weeks earlier
 * “Hey Slayn, getting bored out there yet?”

A young Human male’s voice cut through the quiet evening, filtered through an earpiece comlink. That would be Private Leskins, a newer guy from Freedom’s Sons, but a steady shooter and a good medic.
 * “Not yet,” I replied, emerging from the underbrush where I had been hiding, dusting off the leaves and dirt from my outfit.

Saloch was a reasonably temperate world, filled with the assortment of plants found on such worlds, and the weather was quite nice, I had to admit. The local flora and fauna didn’t have any particularly nasty defense mechanisms built in, and the locals weren’t hostile-in general.

Straightening up and checking the scope on my rifle, I looked around. Myself and the Cresh Squad scout, a Shistavanen named Yloor, had been quietly skulking in the woods for the past four hours, surveying a weapons drop between six members of the team and a group of local Tunroth and Duros leaders. It had been a simple exchange-the team leader, Lieutenant Beblos, was a Duros, and that had apparently helped break up any tension that might have existed-the locals seemed at ease with the Guardsmen. Of course, the fact that we weren’t in full armor might have had something to do with that-over the objections of some of the newer members, the squad was only wearing lightly camouflaged versions of standard tunics and pants, and even Yloor and I only sported a more specialized camouflage poncho to conceal our identities. We all wore cloth masks to hide our faces, but that was about it. The lieutenant had decided that it wouldn’t do for six strangers in battle armor to appear out of nowhere, sporting blaster rifles, so instead, he had quietly arranged this meeting with the aid of a contact that Intel had set up.

I had kept my scope on the meeting and its perimeter during the exchange, sweeping down and across the conversing sentients to the wooded outline surrounding the clearing they were near. It was an odd place for a meeting: a clearing on the side of a road heading away from one of settlements closest to Lortan activity, but it was remote while still close enough to town that the leaders wouldn’t be alarmed into thinking it was an ambush-and their half-dozen hulking Tunroth bodyguards gave them no small measure of re-assurance as well.

Typically over two meters tall, Tunroth were generally peaceable creatures, but if sufficiently provoked, could turn their immense strength into a sizable force of destruction. According to what I had heard, they were roughly equivalent to a Wookiee up close, and I had no desire to enter into combat with one-especially since Cresh Squad was here to help them.
 * “All right, let’s go,” sounded off Lieutenant Beblos as he and the rest of the squad rejoined Slayn and Leskins.

The negotiations completed, the Tunroth and Duros delegation had taken their twenty new blaster rifles and energy packs and left, apparently satisfied with the sincerity of the strangers.
 * “Where to now, sir?” asked Leskins.
 * “Back to the safe house,” the lieutenant replied. “We’ll give ourselves a pat on the back, and do it again tomorrow.”

The squad silently formed up into an uneven group and headed back towards their house, looping around the town. Ironically enough, it was a shack on the outskirts of the settlement, meaning that we had come in the same direction as the local leaders, but that had been deliberate. The less the natives knew about their mysterious benefactors, the better off they would be.
 * “What did they say about the idea of training the locals to use those blasters?” I asked the lieutenant.
 * “They were open to it,” Beblos said curtly. “They know how to get a message to me if they need to-I left an untraceable one-way comlink that’s keyed to the local leader’s thumbprint.”
 * “Where to tomorrow, sir?” Leskins inquired.
 * “Somewhere different,” Beblos replied, and his tone signaled that the conversation was at an end.

We’re different enough from other military units in that being special ops, we have a little leeway with what we say and how we can say it, but the lieutenant still runs the show.
 * Yanibar

And that’s how it started out-an easy enough job, if a bit unconventional. We’d show up, make contact with the locals, offer weapons and our services as trainers. Our primary standing order, though, was not to engage the Lortans. We were strictly there as arms brokers and advisors, not soldiers. High Command had specifically ordered Lieutenant Beblos not to attack the Lortans unless fired upon directly, and we stuck to that order.

Some nights, we could see distant flashes and plumes of smoke and we knew the raiding parties were at again. Yloor could almost see them in his macrobinoculars, about fifty klicks out, and we usually moved out pretty fast after those-Beblos didn’t want us even close to the Lortans. We didn’t see them, they didn’t see us, and as far as everyone was concerned, we were never there. The idea is called plausible deniability-it keeps our involvement hidden, and since we didn’t sport insignia, nameplates, or fire off our weapons, nobody knew who we were, and the Guard wouldn’t have to take responsibility for anything we did. Sound idea-in principle.

Still, it ate on us some. We had our full equipment with us-stored in cylinders in our safe house or field camp, wherever that was, and we could have easily put it on, grabbed our guns, and discouraged any single Lortan raiding party from attacking any more Tunroth or Duros settlements. A tungsten-durasteel slug in between the eyes of your leader is a real confidence-destroyer for his underlings. However, Beblos knew better and we stayed out of it, for about two weeks. By that time, we had given out all the weapons the Intel spooks had given us to pass on to the Tunroth-old Clone Wars models that worked well, but weren’t the most up-to-date. We contented ourselves with keeping watch and training the locals how to use their newly acquired firepower.

That’s when things started going wrong.
 * Saloch, ten days earlier

Cresh Squad marched along in a single file line, eyes alert on the surroundings of the road they were following, but not with the hyper-aware senses that appeared during heated battle. We were in friendly territory, on a road we had explored before. Our manner was relatively casual, with none of the edge that we would instantly assume if we suspected danger.

As usual, we were dressed in only vaguely military garments, with camouflaged masks, pants and tunics of various hues, in order to maintain the pretense of being paramilitary or mercenaries. Our boots raised small clouds of dust on the road as they hiked along it; being nothing more than a dirt speeder track, it didn’t serve much more than as a clear path for vehicular traffic from one settlement to another. This part of Saloch was rolling country, with gently sloping foothills dotted with clusters of trees making up most of the land. Green and blue-leafed trees stood out in the morning’s sun, pockmarking the ridge they were ascending and adding contrast to the gray-green grassy ferns that carpeted most of the landscape. Only the single ribbon of tannish dirt road indicated any sign of civilization and Cresh Squad enjoyed the refreshing scene even as we mentally prepared for a long day of training the local militia. Our destination was just over the next ridge, the settlement of Om Sagnor. It had been near a number of recent Lortan raids and from past experiences, they knew all the residents were on edge. The Lortans typically appeared out of nowhere, landing their ships near the edges of the city, and showed no mercy if they managed to overwhelm any resistance.
 * “Hey, Slayn, how much longer do you think we’ll be here?” Leskins asked.

I shrugged noncommittally, not really in a mood for speculation.
 * “I heard a rumor that the Empire is supposed to be showing up here soon,” growled Yloor.
 * “No joke? Are they here to help the locals or blast ‘em?” Leskins replied, curiousity mingled with skepticism evident in his voice.
 * “One of the locals told me that Moff Shild made a big deal about how the Empire was going to deal with the Lortans, so apparently they’re here to help,” Beblos put in from his position at the head of the column.
 * “Impossible,” Yloor snarled-his hatred for the Empire was well-known, even if the reasons for that hatred weren’t.
 * “Yeah, doesn’t sound much like the Empire we know and love,” Leskins commented.
 * “I’m just saying what I heard from-hold up!,” Beblos said suddenly, just as the squad was just about to the top of a sizable foothill.

The squad froze, each member checking a different area of their surroundings out, weapons at the ready. After a tense moment of vigilance, Beblos looked around and nodded.
 * “We’re clear,” he said, but we did not relax.
 * “What is it?” I hissed.
 * “Over the ridge,” Beblos replied. “Keep low.”

The squad advanced a bit farther and saw what had triggered Beblos’s warning. Below them, we could see Om Sagnor less than two kilometers away, but something was clearly wrong. Smoke was rising from the town, and even from this distance, the stench of death was evident.
 * “They were attacked,” Leskins noted, aghast.
 * “And defeated,” Yloor commented as he peered through his scout’s macrobinoculars. “Looks like it happened about four hours ago. The fires are still going, but nobody’s here.”
 * “Are you sure?” Beblos asked.
 * “I’m pretty sure, sir,” the scout answered. “Lortans don’t like to stick around. It gets in the way of their speedy crusade.”
 * “What are your orders, sir?” I asked Beblos.

The Duros officer chewed his lip. On the one hand, if there were Lortans still down there, they posed a security risk and should be avoided. On the other hand, there might be injured survivors down there that needed aid.
 * “We’ll go down and check it out. See if anyone is left.”

The lieutenant left it unsaid. The Lortans didn’t leave survivors-they were out to kill all non-Humans they came across. The squads’ grips on our weapons tightened as we entered the burned out shell of Om Sagnor.

As expected, there weren’t any survivors. The bodies of the slain were strewn around in the streets. Many of the non-Human ones bore signs of mutilation or torture, and the whole town had been looted. The lingering tang of ozone from blaster fire combined with the stench of blood and burned flesh to give the ruin an altogether unpleasant smell. Refuse and fresh corpses decorated the streets, and the harsh calls of carrion birds were already being heard.

Cresh Squad silently filed through the deserted settlement, weapons at the ready in case of any lingering Lortans. However, no other sentient, friendly or hostile, greeted us.
 * “At least our work did some good,” Beblos noted, indicating a pair of Lortan bodies that bore signs of blaster fire.
 * “Too bad it didn’t help them any,” Leskins said bitterly, trying unsuccessfully to tear his eyes off the gruesome spectacle of carrion birds picking at the face of a Duros youngling.

Younger and more inexperienced, he wasn’t as inured to the horrors of war as some of the others. I’d seen it before, perhaps not as bad as this, but I wasn’t a stranger to carnage. Battle and death were ugly up-close, however glorious they sounded in holodramas. The squad stood around silently, regarding their leader, who was contemplating their next course of action while sweeping his holorecorder over the town to create a record of the wartorn panorama.
 * “What now, sir?” Yloor asked.
 * “We head back to the safe-house,” Beblos said. “There’s nothing we can do here.”
 * Yanibar

Nothing we can do. Those words rang out through my mind on that day, and they’ve kept echoing inside my head ever since. As the Lortans swept through the foothills, they left a nice swathe of destruction wherever they decided to stop. One time, we saw flashes of light in the distance. By the time we arrived to investigate, it was clear that a refugee convoy had been mauled, badly. That one wasn’t pretty-the bodies were literally stacked on top of each other, usually bearing expressions of surprise and fear. The Lortans had gunned them down as they tried to flee, and then used explosives to deal with any remnants. That was not the way it should have been.

It wore on us, to keep seeing the deaths of so many people and be almost powerless to do anything about it. Sure, we could try and warn the villages, and we could do our best to equip the locals with what little knowledge we could impart to them in brief training sessions. They kept looking at us imploringly the whole time, as if we were a team of superheroes come to save them, almost begging us to enter the fight on their side.

But we couldn’t, for a number of reasons.

We were just eight people, all fallible, and there were hundreds of Lortans. We wouldn’t have had much of a chance, even with our gear, against a full raiding party, and we certainly would have been discovered. As much as we disliked it, we also had our orders to consider and they said to not engage the Lortans. I can’t remember how many times I had a Lortan scumbag in my sniper scope and requested permission to fire, only to have Lieutenant Beblos turn me down. And because I’m a squad sergeant, I maintained a cool expression the whole time, when I wanted to rail at him that innocents were being killed while we just sat there. It was the singularly most frustrating time of my life.

I’m sure he was chafing to engage as well-I could tell it in his tone. Any sane being with the power to stop more wholesale slaughter by personally intervening would have, but we could not. And did not. I wonder how he sleeps at night, having had to give an order like that. Then again, I wonder how any of us do.

It’s at times like this that I think about my old sergeant, Pec Deplisk. He’s got the dubious distinction of being the first member of the Yanibar Guard killed in action, defending the refuge from a nasty group of pirates. I was there on that mission, my debut performance as a member of the Guard. I remember how we creatively interpreted our orders to save a group of slaves-but it cost Pec his life. I wonder what it would be like if he was here now, what he would say. I looked up to that old man-okay, he was maybe thirty, but a few years in combat mean a lot-even if I never told him that. Would he have re-interpreted his orders again and had us open fire on the Lortans? Or would he have kept his mouth shut and expression steeled against what he saw, like the professional soldier that he eternally reminded us of? I just don’t know. I wish he was still here.

Thankfully for us, we managed to escape, but that’s not a memory I care to think of either. Just like everything else on Saloch, things went from bad to worse to even worse, and in a hurry, too.
 * Saloch, three days earlier

Full gear. That was the order of battle for us, the way it should be. We finally cracked open the storage cylinders we kept at buried near our safehouses. Inside was a small arsenal of weaponry-all our usual gear was in there except our blasters, which we had carried the whole time. It was weird at first, being back in armor after a couple of weeks of roaming around in just a pretty normal tunic and mask. The sensation of being weighed down, the one every new recruit gets upon first suiting up, was present, but our bodies and minds quickly got re-accustomed to the full suits.

The Lortans had done their best to fully overrun Saloch, and, according to all reports we had received, were rampaging at will. In light of that, High Command had decided it was time to get us out of there, before we were discovered aiding the Duros and Tunroth. They’d moved in some unspecified naval assets into the system and had set a rendezvous for us to be extracted. As we strapped our gear on, Lieutenant Beblos also told us that we’d finally get a chance to give the Lortans a taste of their own medicine. Our instructions were to mark targets for some sort of orbital strike or aerial bombardment, and then get to the extraction point.

So, we grabbed our gear and loaded up. This was much more to our liking-fully armed, fully cleared to open fire on any kriffing son of a murglak Lortan fanatic that got in our way. That’s not to say we would be strolling around like we owned the planet. No, the gearheads at Kraechar Arms had made some serious revisions and upgrades in light of that pirate battle I mentioned earlier. The latest model of their signature Battlesuit52, the B model, came with a slightly improved armor design to help distribute load or physical impact across the surface better, and more importantly, an option for two different equipment packs. The older model only carried a shield generator, which was more than worth its weight in platinum when it came to a straight fight. However, the Bs packed the option to use a different module-an active camouflage design based on ancient stealth technology that Kraechar Arms recovered from somewhere. It was only good against infrared, ultraviolet, UV, and EM sensors, so we’d show up nicely on magnetics or sonic sensors, but Command wagered the Lortans didn’t have those in general use. The camo meant that we were almost guaranteed the element of surprise, and while it couldn’t be activated for more than about thirty minutes at a time, we had a huge advantage of the Lortans. The only downside was that it was too demanding on the battlesuit’s power systems to accommodate both a shield generator and a camopack, meaning that it was one or the other.

We split up into four two-member teams for the mission. Most of the rest of Cresh Squad got easy assignments-marking known Lortan landing sites for blasting and heading back to extraction. However, not myself and Beblos. Ordinarily, it would be considered unwise to pair up the squad sergeant and squad commander, as the unit’s command structure would be vulnerable in case those two were killed or cut off. Beblos decided otherwise, though, for our objective, and at any rate, we trusted the others on the squad to do what they needed to and get back for extraction without kriffing anything up. At first, I had no idea what was going on. Pairing up the sergeant and lieutenant broke all the rules of military logic, and Beblos wasn’t being forthcoming with the details when he first gave out the pairings.

It was right after that he took me aside privately while I was strapping on my armor and explained what was going on. Apparently, some of the Lortan quasi-spiritual leaders, or whatever passes for cult headmaster in their deranged society, had decided to show up and have a little victory parade at a ruined town about twelve clicks from our location. Since Command didn’t want to betray our naval presence with a lot of spy satellites or scout fighters, it was our job to get in close enough to put a targeting beam on those clowns’ choobies. That suited me just fine-the Lortans would be quite shocked when a bunch of their leaders were being glued back together in itsy-bitsy pieces. The only thing I regretted was that I personally wouldn’t be doing any of the shooting. Beblos wanted me for the job because the S-5X is totally silent and totally invisible-and most importantly, it can be fired without disrupting the camo. He was also carrying one, a spare that the planners had tossed in our gear cylinders, but we both knew I was the best shot with it in the squad.

The hike wasn’t so bad at first. The Lortans were pretty dispersed, and we only occasionally saw parties of them, and those that we did see weren’t too vigilant. They were more intent on just causing destruction. Beblos and I saw one group of them torch a settlement, complete with its inhabitants still stuck inside, just for the fun of it, like on an old war holodrama about the Mandalorian or Sith Wars. Bastards. We didn’t do anything about it. We couldn’t-all it would take is one comlink signal and there would be screaming crazies all over us. We’d hold our fire and get our blows in on their leadership. Not that it didn’t infuriate us, though if Beblos was affected by the scene, he didn’t show it. He just kept us skirting around the kriffers, out of the sight lines and away from searching eyes.

As we got closer and closer to our destination-a formerly sleepy hamlet town called Om Crestos-the Lortan presence dramatically increased. We moved a lot slower, crawling and crouching, using camo when we had to, but conserving the power when possible. Our ETAs-Electronic Tactical Advisors, little computer AIs built into our helmets-tipped us off to approaching fanatics more than once. Handy little gadgets, once you get used to them. It was getting dusky by the time we reached the outskirts. The sun was a wispy red ball hanging low in the sky, surrounding by thin streaky clouds that made for a pretty holograph. Too bad the lieutenant and I were busy with other things, namely cannics.

Cannics are mammalian predators of sorts native to Saloch. Normally, they’re pretty shy during the day and they avoid large creatures, standing only a meter high. In the evening, though, they move in packs in search of prey, even though they’re normally scavengers. Ordinarily, they didn’t give us any trouble-we didn’t move much at night during most of our stay on Saloch, and we always traveled in groups of eight, which was far too much for even the most ravenous pack of cannics. Now, we were only two, and even worse, we found out later that some kind of ultrasonic vibration that our suits’ micro-repulsorlifts emitted seemed to bother them, inciting them to attack us. Even the camo didn’t work all that well against them-their sense of smell was good enough that they just kept on coming. Typically, we might expect to see few cannics around a town, as the locals saw them as a nuisance creature and hunted them down where they were prevalent, but all the locals were dead. Furthermore, all those corpses just lying there had to be like a giant all-you-can-eat banquet for the cannics, and they resented our presence.

The first attack took us sort of surprise. The lieutenant and I were resting, leaning against a ruined stone wall and checking our maps to see how much farther we had to go-not more than a few klicks. Then we heard some noise and turned to see a cannic pad out of the shadows not five meters away. It looked at us and growled, and we could see blood staining the matted blood around its jaws.

We pulled our vibroblades-our blaster pistols weren’t silenced and it was too close for the rifles-but didn’t attack it. Unfortunately, cannics are pretty smart, as well as agile, and that one was just a decoy so we didn’t see the three that jumped over the wall and attacked us from above. It was a quick, but furious melee as they tried unsuccessfully to tear our throats out, which is how cannics kill live prey. My life flashed before my eyes when one heavy paw, complete with poisonous claws, swiped across my neck but the battlesuit held with nothing more than a scratch. As tough of predators as they were, they couldn’t pierce our armor and their fur was no defense against a vibroblade. After we killed two of them, the other two ran off yelping. Beblos and I checked each other over, but no real harm done aside from some scratches. The unfortunate thing was that our brief little tussle had caused a lot of noise and we got out of there quickly in case some of the Lortans decided to investigate.

From then on, we were more careful around cannics and our ETAs started keeping watch for them as well-the computers do a good job of serving as eyes-in-the-back-of-our-heads when they use our suits’ sensors. We slunk through the deserted streets of the town like a pair of shadows, slipping through burned out buildings, scrambling across deserted open plazas, evading Lortan patrols. It was sort of a cloudy day, and the low-lying gray haze gave us plenty of cover. Everything in that town seemed to be this pale shade of gray, and while it was probably just due to the make-up of the local minerals, it gave Om Crestos this lifeless feel to it, as if the whole settlement had a deathly pallor. The corpses on the streets and obvious devastation did little to assuage that impression, and the Lortans we saw were obviously hostile. On one occasion, we ended up diving under a ruined speeder to avoid detection-our camopacks needed recharging and the patrol wasn’t going anywhere. If we had moved, or if they had been a little more vigilant, they would have seen us. To make matters worse, we discovered that there was a massive rat spider nest under the speeder.

Rat spiders are communal arachnids that dwell in large colonies. They love to make traps to catch larger prey, and some of locals have reported that occasionally, aggressive rat spiders have taken down cannics. So there we were, not daring to move lest we alert the patrol, and with hundreds of spiders crawling around us and on us. Thankfully, our suits are fully sealed and none of the spiders got inside our helmets, but the sight of all those pointed waving legs crawling around on my faceplate is not one I care to recall. It still gives me the shudders. Eventually, the patrol moved on, and so did we. The rat spiders fled when we stood up-they’re skittish creatures, and like much of everything else on Saloch, only attack when they are positively sure that they can win. The instinct to survive is surprisingly strong in everything that lives there, a lesson we should have taken to heart a little earlier.

It was getting dark by the time we got into position near the Lortans’ little victory parade. The lieutenant and I scrambled onto the roof of a nearby bombed out house. We climbed into position and carefully surveyed the area, watching for any Lortan activity directed our way. They had set up in the middle of what had been a town square of sorts, with a raised platform lit by lots of torches that was obviously meant as a stage for whatever ridiculous theatrics they had planned for the evening. There were a few dozen Lortans milling around, but the party hadn’t started yet, apparently.

So, we sat and waited, perched on that roof and keeping a constant watch on our friends down below. About an hour later, as it was truly becoming nightfall, we saw a little column of gleaming yellow lights headed down one of the nearby streets and heard a bunch of noise, namely raucous singing and chanting. The Lortans paraded down the street, filing into the town square by the hundreds, led by a dozen or so of outrageously attired leaders in full war regalia. These head types took the stage and began speaking. I didn’t bother to catch what they said; I was too keyed up about what we were about to accomplish. This was great. Hundreds of Lortans and their butcher leaders were here, and we were in position to blow them all to pieces. The lieutenant and I quickly marked down the coordinates on our position and prepared them for transmission to the Fleet boys who would deliver the hot stuff right on top of them. Our job was done, so we got the kriff out of there, and that’s when everything went to pieces.

As we were crawling off the roof, part of it, apparently weakened, collapsed under Beblos’s weight and he disappeared in a cloud of dust and loose masonry, plunging down into the house with a loud clatter that every Lortan on Saloch must have heard. Damn. I dropped down into the house to find the lieutenant alive, but hurt.
 * “Feran,” he told me. “I think my kriffing leg is broken.”

I heard the pain in his voice; he wasn’t bluffing.
 * “Well, fix it then,” I replied brusquely-false bravado in the presence of impending doom is a specialty of ours.
 * “Get out of here,” he said. “Transmit the coordinates to the fleet and get me later.”
 * “Hell no,” I shot back. “I’m not leaving you behind just because you weren’t watching where you were going.”

I picked him up, telling my ETA to dial up the repulsors in my back and shoulderplates so he wouldn’t feel as heavy and began running out of there. However, a blaster bolt sailed by me as I darted out of the building, and I knew we had been spotted. Ordinarily, we just would have camo’d and used the rest of our battery to get out of there, but the fall had blown out Beblos’s camopack. When it goes wrong, it all goes wrong.
 * “Can you still shoot?” I asked.
 * “Am I still alive?” he replied, and that told me that he hadn’t given up yet.

After sprinting for about four hundred meters, I set him down near the entrance of a building and left a pair of small anti-personnel land mines in the shadows around an alley. We had already been spotted, so there was little point in being subtle, and the explosions would tell me that the Lortans were hot on our tails. Once I was done laying the presents for the Lortans, I got out of there in a hurry, picking up Beblos and slinging him over my shoulder once more. Meanwhile, he got on the comm with the Fleet guys upstairs and signaled for an emergency evacuation-we weren’t going to make it back to the original pick-up spot. They told us that help was on the way. Helpful as always, the Fleet.

Amazingly, the Lortans somehow lost our trail, and the fact that they were that incompetent speaks volumes about how woefully unprepared they were to fight a real military force instead of almost-defenseless civilians. Beblos told me that the shuttle was inbound and would meet us on the rooftops while our airstrike distracted the Lortans. All we had to do was confirm the coordinates. I set Beblos down near where the shuttle would land, and then went back. We hadn’t come this far just to let the kriffing Lortans get away.

I was on my own, behind enemy lines, and on a very tight schedule. However, I had the advantage of technology and I knew what I was up against. Once more, I slipped through the night, scrambling over low walls, through hulking remains of buildings in wartorn Om Crestos. Nobody saw me as I got back into position near the square. Only about twenty minutes had elapsed since I had hauled Beblos out of there, and I had camo’d most of the way in to make the trip faster, but when I arrived, it looked like the Lortans were getting ready to clear out. Their leaders were apparently a cowardly lot who loved to brag about killing people and burning towns, but couldn’t handle a couple snoopers spying on their parade. The desire for revenge burned inside of me, and I knew I couldn’t let them go. I rounded the corner of a greystone house, locking my visor’s viewscreen right on the group of fanatics still in the town square. I can still see them there, their brightly colored flowing robes and ridiculous headgear distinctive as they prepare to dismount the stage and board a pair of waiting speeders. I see the hundreds of armed Lortans running around the square like crazy, checking for us as their boots echo on the pavement, but it’s too late for all of them. Good night, motherkriffers, I think as I lock in the coordinates.

I duck back around the wall, intent on racing back for extraction, and run right into a Lortan who appeared out of nowhere. He’s just as surprised as I am-my ETA didn’t warn me about him, because I shut most of its functionality down to save power for camo. I quickly pulled my vibroblade and whip it back-handed across his throat, but not before he gets off a sort of scream. He collapsed in a heap, blood spurting from his destroyed jugular. One down, hundreds to go. However, the game of hunt-and-seek is over. Now, it’s just a foot race to see who is faster, and who is dead.

I camo’d again and headed off, but my ETA warns me that it’s almost out of power, and it’s either camo or the micro-repulsors inside the suit, which I need to move quickly. A few minutes later, the camo field weakens, blinks, and thens shimmers off and I feel more naked than I’ve ever been in my life, despite still being in full armor. I can’t just head straight back for extraction now-that easy of a trail will let the Lortans find me. So, I laid a false trail or two, one of which led straight to the land mines I’d laid earlier. To my surprise, the Lortans again lose my trail and I don’t run right into a mob of screaming blaster-toting crazies. Dumb kriffers.

I’d just about convinced myself that I was invulnerable, that I was about to defy all the odds and get away from these maniacs twice in a row when it hit me. And by “it”, I mean the largest, ugliest cannic I’ve ever seen. It plowed straight into me from its ambush position, knocking me to the ground and sending my rifle flying. I struggled for my vibroblade, but the beast was all over me, growling and trying to get to my throat. This time, it’s using its jaws instead of its paws, and an irrational urge to protect my head wells up inside me. Now is not a good time to find out just how strong the neck armor is, and even blunt trauma could be enough to kill me. I threw my left arm in the way and the cannic took the bait, biting down hard. Stang! The plates took most of the punishment, but I still felt my arm being compressed and it hurt like having it trapped inside a vise. I reared back and punched the cannic in the face with my right, but it kept its jaws clamped on my left arm. I punched it once, twice, three times, but that only angered it. It went for my throat again, and I was losing the strength to fight it. Instead of trying to block its head, I resisted all my instinctual urges and let it lunge. As it darted in for the kill, I clamped both my hands around its neck and twisted. The gauntlets on the battlesuits can be increased to greatly enhance my strength, and I’ve seen people’s necks snapped just by squeezing. A cannic, tough though it might be, is just as vulnerable to a broken neck as most other mammalian species. It froze lifelessly and I shoved its stinking carcass off of me as I scrambled to my feet.

Searching around, I quickly retrieved my rifle. There’s no way even the Lortans didn’t hear that, and sure enough, a patrol of three came around the street to see me in plain view. I was ready for them, though, crouched in a kneeling position with my rifle braced against the fatty inside of my left elbow in a classic shooting stance. My first shot took one of them down before I think they even saw me, the slug exploding into his chest in a blossom of blood and pulverized bone fragments. The second probably saw me before I put him down with a head shot, and the third fired off one wild shot, the bolt whining by my ear, before I shot him too. Nobody I’ve ever shot with a sniper rifle has lived to tell about it, and these were no exception. I didn’t spare these three any more consideration than they deserved, but the Lortans were onto me.

They started hunting me down, chasing me through one building and alleyway after another, and my ETA, which I re-activated, saved me a bunch of times. Blaster bolts were exploding behind me as I ducked into one building, dropping a mine behind me just inside the doorway where they wouldn’t see it if they charged in. I raced upstairs to find a small bedroom, the bed still unmade and furniture largely undamaged, but with a dead Duros corpse covered in rat spiders gracing the middle of the floor. I dashed over to a window overlooking the street, scattering the rat spiders, to see red flashes in the distance and tried to check them out with my sniper scope. It looked like it was coming from the town square, but movement caught my eye just outside of the scope. A group of about twenty Lortans was racing up the street to charge into my building, and this was a perfect opportunity to thin their numbers. I lined up the shot, drilling a metal slug right through one of their numbers’ temple and followed it up by pitching a concussion grenade into their midst. That scattered them some, but they charged right into the building after seeing me. I ducked back as the window frame exploded in a flurry of blaster bolts.

To this day, I regret my aggression and impatience. In my desire to hit at the approaching Lortans, I failed to notice what was going on in the town square. My ETA would later show me what the sniper scope had seen just before I pulled it away, and the sight dropped a massive boulder of guilt squarely on my gut. However, at that moment, I couldn’t spare any time to think about it. ETA tried to tell me, but I cut it off, saying that we needed to get out of there first. I drew my pistol and blew a hole in the slanted roof, jumping up on a chair to crawl through the ruined ceiling onto the roof. The mine I had left downstairs went off with a crackle and I knew more of the Lortans had just made their last mistake. I left them a little surprise and dashed over to the edge of the roof. There was nowhere else to go but either a painful drop down four meters to the ground, or a risky leap across an alley to a neighboring roof.

One way was sure to hurt. The other only possibly could hurt, so I slung my rifle across my back took the leap across the alley. I almost didn’t make it, and I realized that with horrified fascination as I flew across and started falling. I slammed into the upper part of the wall with enough force to drive the wind out of me, but I managed to catch a hold of the roof’s lip with my hands. Slowly, gingerly, I hauled myself up and onto the roof, as ETA showed me a brightly colored diagnostic indicating all the ribs I’d cracked and bruised. I ignored it and took one last look at the building I had just vacated with thermals.

The visor showed a half-dozen Lortans crawling around in my recently vacated sniper’s perch, and as I watched, one of their kriffing tatooed heads popped up through the hole I’d blown in the roof. He was bald and scarred, with wavy blue tattoo patterns along the side of his shaven skull. I smiled, and even though he couldn’t see that through the helmet, he saw me and shouted, jabbering excitedly. At that exact moment, I spoke a single command to ETA. “Detonate.” A small explosive charge I had slid under the bed exploded at that command, sending gouts of fire through the hole in the roof and shattering the windows with explosive force. A fireball burned through the Lortans in the room, and weakened the house’s structure enough that the whole second floor collapsed in a fuming cloud of gray smoke, dust, and broken masonry. That certainly got their attention, and so I got out of there in a hurry, dropping down off the edge of that roof in a bit more of a controlled manner, taking the landing with bent knees so I didn’t break my legs. Wincing with the pain that breathing now brought, I scrambled back through the empty streets of Om Crestos back to the extraction point, but I knew I wasn’t going to make it. ETA told me the shuttle was almost there and that was good, but I also knew that they wouldn’t wait long for me to get over there.

It was a straight footrace now, but I somehow managed to half-stumble, half-run, gapsing with pain, back to where Beblos was waiting for me, sitting with rifle at the ready. I commed him to let him know I was coming, so he wouldn’t shoot me, but no sooner had I reached him, then the Lortans found us. We were ready, though, hunkered behind a fence and a ruined statue respectively, rifles pointed in their direction. Our slugs tore through them as they entered the clearing, and not even the armor that some of them were wearing was enough to withstand the sheer firepower we brought to bear on them. Their fire was inaccurate at first, but as they began to pinpoint our position, their bolts came uncomfortably close, pinning us into position as even more of their forces arrived.

The statue I was standing behind was pockmarked from blaster fire, and it was only a matter of time before they flanked us. They were just out of grenade throwing range, and I was out of mines. Red light flew by as they pummeled our positions with energy blasts, and one grazed my thigh, nearly sending me to the ground. If we had shields and blaster rifles, we would have just rolled out and blown them all away, but our gear was more suited to a subtle encounter than direct confrontation-our armor would only stop a few glancing blaster bolts and our rifles only had eight-round clips, meaning that reloading was necessary. Beblos and I staggered our fire so that neither of us was reloading at the same time, but the Lortans just kept coming. We were cooked, but still we ducked, shot, and reloaded with stoic determination. I don’t know how many we killed, but even untrained blaster-boys have to get lucky some time. A bolt caught me in the chest, knocking me to the ground with its searing heat and inflaming all the ribs that I had already injured. The armor deflected most of its energy-the key word being most. The smell of scorched flesh filled my nostrils and I felt the heat burning my skin. Several more blasts impacted on the ground nearby, and I knew I was going to die in short order, followed by Beblos shortly afterward.

As I lay on the ground, scrabbling for my blaster pistol to take a few more of those Lortan bastards with me before I went, I vaguely heard this dull rumbling as I stared at the cloudy night sky and waited to die, wondering if it would hurt a lot.

Suddenly, there was a whooshing sound and streams of smoke ending in a fiery point filled my visions, followed by loud explosions, fire, and concussive waves from the direction of the Lortans. I craned my head up, ignoring the pain it caused, to see that the cavalry had arrived, in the form of a Javelin shuttle sent to pick us up. Large, ugly blunt-nosed beasts, Javelins were designed to pick up, ferry, and land troops and small vehicles and take some punishment while doing so. They could also be loaded with rocket pods to give anyone shooting them a nasty kick in the teeth, and that’s exactly what this Javelin driver was doing by pounding the kriff out of the Lortan scumbags. The ungainly shuttle sent another barrage of rockets at our would-be killers, sending those who survived scattering. The shuttle lowered with a whine of its repulsorlifts, its twin laser cannon turrets continuing to pour discouragement at the Lortans. Those chin turrets can hold off airspeeders or even light starfighters, and a person hit by them isn’t just killed, they’re vaporized. The stream of purple energy blew through the last of the Lortans’ resolve and they scattered. The shuttle settled down to a hover around us as eight armored soldiers jumped out of the side hatches, S-2F rifles at the ready, and ran over to Beblos and me. A stray blaster bolt from one of the Lortans hit one of them, but hissed and sparked off a fully activated energy shield. A millisecond later, a purple blast ended that Lortan’s miserable existence. Two of the new arrivals ran over to me and began carrying me back to the shuttle, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw two others doing the same for Beblos while their buddies covered them. They were professional about it, and I didn’t know any of them, since they were from a different outfit.

I felt rather than saw the roof of the shuttle replace the night sky as they pulled me onboard. I felt weak and I was in pain; I had already used my suit’s internal concoction of stimulants and painkillers after the alley-jump incident, and though the pure adrenaline was coursing through my system, I could barely move. One of our rescuers knelt over me, her shoulder patch identifying her as a medic, and slipped something into my suit’s injection line. There was a faint sting in my right bicep and then everything started to get real fuzzy from the sedative.

Just before it did, I felt the shuttle rock and looked out the hatch to see a series of explosions in the distance as the airstrike that I had targeted landed. Another explosion detonated right where the extraction point was, wiping out any Lortan witnesses, as the Javelin ascended into the night sky. I don’t remember anything else besides that.

The next time I awoke, I was back in my quarters on Yanibar, wearing a hospital gown and with most of my gear piled in the corner of my room. My dark blue nerf-wool sheets felt good against my bare skin, somewhat chafed from the armor, and I felt I was up to the task of moving again. There was a blinking message light from my datapad on my dresser, but I would attend to that later. First things first. Groaning slowly as I pulled myself out of bed, I took a long sanisteam to clean the filth and dried sweat from my body, noting as I cleaned the fresh accumulation of scar tissue just to left of my sternum and on my left arm. Washing out my hair, which had sat bunched up and knotted under the helmet, took a long time, but it was worth it and I almost felt all my anxieties be washed away under the stream of steaming hot water.

Since I wasn’t going anywhere, I dressed simply in a white tank top and shorts, and then I sat down at the military-issued chair in front of my otherwise spotless desk to read the messages on my datapad, doing so slowly because my ribs were still tender. The first was from the company medical officer, giving me a list of all the injuries I had suffered and the appropriate steps I should take in the coming days to speed my recovery-namely, take it easy and don’t go wrestling any Gamorreans. Our doc has a quirky sense of humor. The next was from our company commander, congratulating me on a safe return and wishing me a safe recovery. As I watched his face on the screen, though, something in his tone and facial expression told me that something was wrong. I had leave for the next two weeks, and that was good, but the words “successful mission” never crossed his lips. Something was definitely wrong.

Without even continuing to see the next message, I linked my helmet and ETA to my datapad.
 * “ETA, what went wrong with the mission?” I asked.
 * “I assume you mean besides two Wounded In Action, blowing of the squad’s deniability factor, and total alteration of the evacuation plan?” the computer replied.

In an oddly ironic twist of fate, I received Sergeant Deplisk’s old AI, which has a lot of his mannerisms and sounds pretty close to Pec’s voice. I could have wiped all of that, but I found the veteran soldier’s voice oddly comforting, even if it still brings back a twinge of pain at his memory.
 * “Yes, besides that. Colonel Darslorn wasn’t happy about something, and it wasn’t just those. What went wrong.”

The miniature holographic face projected on my datapad’s screen that served as ETA’s avatar sighed.
 * “Are you sure you want to know? You’ve just sustained a significant amount of trauma and your psychological profile indicates that-,”

I cut it off.
 * “I don’t care about any of that. Tell me what happened, ETA.”
 * “Oh, fine,” the AI replied resignedly. “I’ll show you instead.”

The AI’s avatar shrunk down and occupied the bottom left corner of my screen as a view from my helmet-cam filled the datapad’s screen.
 * “This is the view from your helmet at 2117 hours, local time, three days ago,” the AI said.

I recognized the feed. It was from the house that I had blown up shortly thereafter. Once again, I saw the spiders crawling over the floor and the body of the Duros, saw myself planting the bomb underneath the bed. The view changed as I put the sniper rifle to my eye, peering towards the town square. Now I remembered-there were some mysterious red flashes that I had wanted to investigate, some sort of disturbance, but I had been distracted by the approaching party of Lortans. The view shifted suddenly as I turned to put my scope on the oncoming marauders, freezing one the chest of the first man I had shot on that occasion.
 * “Did you see it?” ETA asked.
 * “No, I didn’t. Not all of us perceive and comprehend all things at the speed of light.”
 * “One sec then. Reversing the image by five seconds, slowing to ten percent speed and enhancing at maximum optical resolution.”

The image reversed and proceeded at slow motion, at an almost frame-by-frame rate. This time, I saw the town square clearly, and, although it had only been a fraction of a second in real time, I saw the source of the disturbances clearly now in slow motion. The red flashes had been blaster fire. The disturbance had been caused by a lightfight on the square, between a group of locals, Duros and Tunroth, and the Lortans. Apparently, they had had the same idea as we did, in that they were trying to take out the Lortan leadership, and I recognized some of the weapons as ones we had given them. In agonizingly slow detail, I saw the pitched battle take place as the Lortan leaders were escorted into their speeders.
 * “How long was this before the airstrike?” I asked ETA, dreading the answer.
 * “Less than five minutes,” the AI replied with clinical detachedness.

My heart sank, but a slender ray of hope held out.
 * “Do we have telemetry from after the strike?” I asked.
 * “Yes,” ETA replied. “But I was told not to show you . . .”
 * “Show me, damnit!” I half-ordered, half-screamed at it.

I had to know. I had to know if I had doomed those people, and no computer was going to stand in my way. It demonstrated obvious reluctance, and I realized that acting irrationally was not going to help. I took a deep breath, calming down somewhat, and rephrased the request.
 * “ETA, please show me the post-raid visuals,” I said, enunciating each word slowly, clearly, and politely with great effort.
 * “I still think it’s a bad idea, but here it goes,” the AI replied and the view on the screen changed.

The fleet had used a new high-altitude bomber for the raid, dubbed a Valkyrie. Exactly what that was was classified, but apparently it could quietly drop guided ordance from a great height without being detected. They had used high-yield proton bombs for the raid, specifically fitted with a nose cam that transmitted data feed back to the bomber until detonation. I watched each successive view of the town square, each one larger than the previous as the proton bombs neared the ground. On the last one, I clearly saw the outlines of Duros and Tunroth on the grainy image, their silhouettes distinctive from those of the Human Lortan fanatics. They had the Lortans on the run, as the little Human silhouttes were falling back, and the speeders housing the Lortan leadership were nowhere to be seen. The picture was taken from about two hundred meters up, meaning that at the velocity the bomb fell, it would have arrived about three seconds afterward. That was the last image. To an untrained observer, it would be hard to tell the difference between a Human and a humanoid alien like a Duros or a Tunroth, but as a sniper, I’m trained to distinguish the difference between minutiae. It was obvious and as unambiguous as you could get. The next images were from after the bombing raid. Where the town square had once been, there was only a series of massive craters. ETA painted fatal ranges from the bombing on the screen, and I knew that there was no way that anyone had survived that.

At that point, I sat in abject shock, utterly and completely horrified by what I had done. I had gone to Saloch to help the locals there, and I had ended up being the one who blew them to pieces. I might as well have held my rifle to each of their heads and pulled the trigger. A midnight black wave of guilt washed over my soul, tearing at my spirit and drowning me in a sea of despair. Images of afterward, of the crippled survivors, of the bodies of the slain remained on the screen, and they were seared into my mind forever.

I killed them. I killed those that I had come to help, and what was worse-if it hadn’t been for my efforts, those people never would have been there. I put them there, at that place, and then I murdered them. I looked down and my hands were shaking uncontrollably. To my mind, they were dripping red with sticky crimson blood. All my typical shell of self-control was shattered into a thousand pieces and I felt this urge to scream in sheer anguish.

Forlornly, I looked at the last message on my datapad and saw that it was from my mother, wondering how my mission had been. I ignored it. What could I tell her? “Hi, mom. I just killed a bunch of people that I came to save. Blew them into tiny bits. How was your day?” There aren’t words to adequately describe the emotions that ran through my mind. Nobody could possibly understand. I turned the datapad off silently and went back to my bed. I pulled those sheets over my head, curled up in a little ball, and cried like I hadn’t since I was a little girl. Waves of grief racked my body and I stayed in my room for three days. I didn’t eat-my appetite was nonexistent. I left a message for my squad telling them that I was fine, but that was a lie. I was not fine. I couldn’t sleep. Every time I tried, I saw their faces, the faces of the Tunroth and Duros that I killed. I saw myself as a screaming Lortan fanatic, butchering civilians and cackling as I enjoyed it. I saw blood on my hands, saw the ghosts of every person I had ever killed reaching out to pull me down. Worst of all, I saw Pec, shaking his head with disapproval.

His ghost said one thing, and one thing only.
 * “You’re finished, Slayn.”

Those were the words he used for new recruits that had utterly washed out of the Guard, that had doomed themselves to miserable failure, to those that he no longer considered valuable. To hear that from him was like being shot in the heart by my own sniper rifle. I cried until I had no more tears, and I threw up until my heaving stomach had nothing in it but the taste of burning acid against my tongue. I tried alcohol, but no matter how drunk I got, I always had to eventually contend with reality, and sooner or later, someone would see me. I stayed in my room instead, because I couldn’t handle the judgment I would face if anyone saw me. This is not how it should be. This is not what I signed up for. I’m a murderer, a traitor, and nothing will ever change that. How does anyone cope, to keep on living with the full knowledge that an atrocity is on their hands? How does it not drive us mad, to know that we’ve killed those who don’t deserve death? How does a traitor go on living, knowing that they’ve betrayed the lives of those who trusted them? You tell me. How can anyone wake up in the morning and face themselves with that realization?

So, now I’m here. Taking out my frustration and anger with the drill of shooting, of practicing that deadly skill at which I’m so good. The methodical nature of firing one round after another allows me a temporary sort of peace, the comforting rhythm of my firing pattern granting my tormented mind a reprieve from the thoughts that threaten to overwhelm me. When I’m shooting, everything else disappears as my mind focuses on the target and the trigger. I look at the score display with satisfaction; I’m still eight for eight. Perfect, as always. Until now.

I lay the rifle down, swapping it out for my pistol. This isn’t the usual S-1B blaster that I used on the Saloch mission. It’s a newer model, the S-5XP, a smaller pistol version of our sniper rifles. Uses the same ammo, eight round clip, same trigger mechanism, also fires magnetically accelerated projectiles, but at lower speeds and with more rapidity. I lay down a neat pattern on the next target, going into my firing pattern again. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven times the oddly soft whirr-chirp sound of the gun’s report reverberates through my head. I glance down at the gun and see the datacard I prepared before I came here, explaining the choice I’ve made.

I just can’t take it anymore. I can’t go on like this, and nothing will make it better. There is no escape for me from the black well of despair, and I can’t make the faces go away at night. I’ve destroyed the trust that people have placed in me as a defender of Yanibar-if I can bomb the people that trusted me, how can I be trusted with anything now? I’ve wished a thousand times I could go back in time and fix it, that I would be little more focused on the town square instead of being eager to take out the approaching Lortans, that I would have not shut up ETA, that somehow, I had called off that airstrike. But I didn’t, and there’s nothing I can do to change that. And people are dead because of it. I’ve tried to tell myself that I didn’t mean to do it, that I’m sorry, but it won’t work. Sometimes sorry isn’t good enough.

Pec, you understand, don’t you? In your years of battle, you had to have seen something like this. Is that why your eyes were so hard at times? Maybe you can explain what’s running through my head. I’m coming, Pec. You’re the only one who can help me now, and since you can’t come to me, I’ll go to you.

The pistol’s barrel fits neatly under my jaw. I know exactly that what the round will do, and the instance solace of death that it brings will finally bring me peace. One-two-three, time the shot with your breathing. Keep your hand steady on the trigger, pull it straight back, one kilo of force. Here I come, Pec. Are you waiting for me?

Whirr-chirp.