freosan

Yay I am doing it! This part: 2,209 words. So far: 2,209/50,000.

I am so behind.

Ever been on a bombing run? No picnic, let me tell you. For one thing it’s always at like oh-two-hundred hours, and for another there’s freaking terrorists with antiaircraft fire underneath you. Let me paint you a picture: it’s dark, it’s cold, you’re ten centimeters away from being impaled on a surprise skyscraper, you’re going way faster than any human being should, your flight suit is bunched up around your ass ‘cause you forgot and wore the jeans that aren’t tight enough, your face is sweating ‘cause your flight goggles don’t breathe, you can’t see shit out your window ‘cept the other guys’ bombs exploding and you don’t have targets ‘cause no one’s dumb enough to light candles while this’s going down. Oh, and sometimes your radar doesn’t grab the missiles coming your way until they’re in the same plane as you and you realize you’re only alive right now out of sheer dumb luck.

Best adrenaline rush in the galaxy. I try to keep my headset off ‘cause otherwise the guys say I scare ‘em. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one with a crazy laugh though.

I have fucking amazing dumb luck. I was in between two skyscrapers when someone’s little antiaircraft missile nearly took my tail off, which of course means it didn’t, which means, again, I’m the master of lucky breaks. And when you fire, you give off your position, so that was my next target settled. I dropped the bomb and pulled out of my dive, getting some air again before I went back –

The world shook and I went down. Shit. Not my idea. Checked the window, checked the controls, going down waaaay too fast to even think about pulling out, hit the eject without even thinking about it and sprang up into the night sky. Sitting duck up here, not even Kevlar on me, not that it would’ve helped a whole lot against the kind of thing they were firing. I had no freaking idea where the ground was so I pulled the ripcord as soon as I started falling again, making me an even bigger target. Colder out here with the wind and, you know, the pants-shitting terror. On a parachute at night you may as well be target practice.

Bullets started ripping by me as soon as the ‘chute filled and I kept getting shot, dropping faster, stabilizing, and doing it again. Including one really heart-stopping time that someone got in two shots in a row and I dropped twice as far as I should’ve. With some kind of supernatural willpower I let every muscle in my body go limp and played dead. Surprisingly enough they didn’t hear my heartbeat and I got to drop without getting shot at. Straight down through a pair of buildings.

I stopped faster than I really would’ve liked with a jerk, a crunch, and a shout. Jerk because my ‘chute caught on something, crunch because human ribcages weren’t meant to do that shit, and shout because having your ribs broken hurts like hell. Then I shut the fuck up. There was bound to be someone here to check if I was actually dead.

Problem with playing dead when you’re dangling from a building is that nothing wants to hold as still as you do. I kept waving in the breeze, or the ‘chute would slip, or the pressure on my ribs would just get to be too much, and I’d tense – which’d make everything worse not to mention being a real obvious clue that I had a little more life in me than I should’ve – or I’d try to keep still and come up against a couple of million years of evolution telling me to get the fuck out.

I waited. I tried to will blood to go through my fingers and waited some more. I tried to calculate the compressive strength of human lung tissue impacted by bone in my head and continued waiting. I got a really awful, really catchy song stuck in my head for timing purposes, and waited out sixteen verses of it. Then it got real quiet.

And no one was coming, no footsteps, and the sky was starting to turn grey, so it was time for me to give in to evolution.

Looking around gave my location as ‘former main street’, full of the usual junk, all the windows gone but most of the walls still there, and looking up showed me that I’d got stuck on a bit of exposed I-beam. If I remembered right I’d been in this bit of the city a couple of weeks ago. For all I knew this could be one of the buildings I’d hit. Is that irony? At just above shoulder height there was a piece of intact floor. So that was my target sorted then.

I could be really badass and roll up the ‘chute lines like this guy I saw in a movie once, but my ribs told me that badassery was not in the cards for me. I probably already had enough cred, anyway. Doing the more logical thing, I flipped so my foot was up above my head and hooked an ankle on the edge. That should’ve hurt anyway, but I hardly felt it. Thank God for adrenaline, that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

My arms weren’t working as well as they should’ve either so it was taking a lot of concentration to pull myself up – I couldn’t jerk anything or the ‘chute lines would slip in a threatening manner. I’m as in favor of gravity as the next guy but seriously, can’t it give a guy a break once in a while? So anyway, it was my frozen fingers against the entirety of Earth’s mass, and that’s why I didn’t notice the rocks until they hit me in the leg.

Actually I didn’t even notice the rocks then, what I noticed was my leg going ‘CRACK’ and pain going ‘FUCK YOU’ right up to my knee. I dropped to the end of the ‘chute lines, jerked around cursing, and when I got my breath back, I looked down to see three little kids all lined up with freaking slingshots. I mean, seriously, what the fuck.

I didn’t want to shoot kids, but I didn’t want to fall onto them more, and anyway, two seconds after I saw them my gun was in my hand. Instinctive response to human threats.

“Get back or get shot!” They didn’t move. In fact, at least one of them giggled. Fucking ace.

Had to make good on my threat, so I fired in front of them, hitting the ground – I’m not a great shot but I can miss if I want to. They jumped back, but not far enough, and one of them had another chunk of concrete. I lined up again.

“Drop the gun.”

That was new. And a voice like that sure didn’t come from someone under thirteen. I looked behind me, up a little, and right into the barrel of a .33. A very steady barrel.

Behind it was the single most gorgeous man I’d ever seen in my life, with a glare in the running for the top five scariest. There are worse things to die of than a beautiful sniper, but let’s be honest, I don’t want to die. I especially didn’t want to die dangling from a parachute being menaced by preteens with rocks.

I managed to keep the gun steady on the kids. “Sorry, beautiful, I’m kind of using it.” I don’t think I kept the stress out of my voice, but it at least didn’t crack. Small favors.

He didn’t look at all impressed by my witty repartee. “Three seconds and I’m shooting. Put the safety on and drop it.”

“Get that thing out of my face or /I/ shoot,” I told him, or tried to, because before I finished half the sentence I had a bullet in my shoulder.

That shit hurts. I screamed some kind of curse, dropped the gun – of course – and the kids scattered off behind the buildings. The sniper barely even twitched at the recoil and had /his/ gun lined up again before I’d even got my vision sorted out.

“That was a warning. Don’t struggle, or you die.” Very calm sort of guy. I believed him. I might’ve tried to struggle anyway, but it was at that point that my brain decided it’d had more than enough of this bullshit, and punched out.

***

The pilot was bleeding enough that it didn’t come as any kind of surprise when he passed out. I holstered my gun and climbed up above him.

“Ross, Marc, Melissa, get up here!” I called out. The three of them, slingshots hastily stuffed in pockets, came out of hiding and ran up to me. They’d had fun. I should probably have discouraged that, but who could blame them? It wasn’t every day you got to use Spacer trash as target practice.

The four of us pulled him up and cut him out of his parachute, and I slung him over my shoulder. Boss wanted any Spacer we could catch alive, so this one was safe. For now. Hopefully, if it became necessary, Boss would let me shoot him. I don’t appreciate having the children threatened.

“Make sure you pick up the parachute,” I told them. Melissa immediately grabbed as much of it as she could hold and smiled at me. Ross picked up the train.

Marc, being Marc, immediately challenged the pair of them to a race back to HQ and ran down the stairs. I waited until I was sure they weren’t going to get tangled up and hang themselves, then followed with my load of bloody Spacer pilot.

On the walk back, I passed a lot of triumphant grins. As far as I’d heard, there hadn’t been any fatalities last night, and this idiot’s ship wasn’t the only bomber we’d shot down. He was, however, the only one left alive. That meant, for last night at least, Spacers 0, Earthsiders 4. A small enough gain for our side, but still a victory.

HQ, despite the name, isn’t particularly impressive. It’s a small former gym in a good location with strong walls, surrounded by better targets. This being the reason we picked it, of course.

Boss was at the front desk looking harassed, like he is every morning at or before sunrise. So was Silvie, his girlfriend, and Dirk, the doctor, though rather than looking busy the old man lounged on a bit of equipment we hadn’t taken out yet.

“Heya, SingKueh. Don’t tell me ya got more good news, my heart might not take it,” Boss greeted me. Back at her computer desk, Silvie took her hand off her pistol and waved.

I nodded politely to the other two and told Boss, “You might want to sit down, then.”

“So he is a pilot!” Boss exclaimed. “Awesome. Drop him in the cells. Dirk, keep ‘im from dyin’ on us.”

The doctor followed me down the little hallway to the ‘cells’, actually jury-rigged barred doors on the locker rooms. I gave the keys to Dirk, since my hands were full of pilot, and let him unlock it.

“Five-thirty in the morning you drag me from my bed and all the use I get is on a filthy Spacer,” Dirk complained. I ignored him. I generally do, unless he’s telling me something to do with my personal survival. It’s either that or go insane listening to him rant.

“Put him on the ground, it’s good enough,” Dirk told me, so I dropped him less than gently and got him lined up.

“His leg’s broken, I put a bullet through his shoulder and he was hanging from a parachute, so check his ribs,” I said. Dirk just shook his head at me.

“Kids telling me how to do my job. Go on, get out.” He waved me off and opened his medkit. I left before he got too far into things. I’m not delicate, but I don’t much like the sight of blood. Though at that point I needn’t have bothered, since it was already all over my hands. I wiped them off on my trousers.

I wasn’t two steps into the main room before Boss verbally collared me. “’Kueh! Get yourself out to Nueva and take an engineer, there’s a ship down. Apt to be dangerous.”

Silvie, who’d actually looked up from her desk, added, “But clean up first. You look like an axe murderer.”

“On it,” I told them both.

The water in the bathrooms was running today, for a change, and I spent some time trying to get the blood off of me. There was a lot of the stuff. If he bled out, it would be my fault. Boss wouldn’t care a great deal, and it wasn’t as if I would be demoted or anything, but – I’m not a fan of killing. Not if I don’t have to. I don’t particularly care for failing Boss, either.

But I had other things to worry about, so as soon as I’d got all the red off my hands and face I went out to inspect a downed airplane.