Here's another short story that I've been working on that I wanted to post.
It should run about the same length as Harm's Way. Hope you enjoy
Rob
Staff Sergeant John Carson's father always said that you could tell everything you wanted to know about a man just by looking him in the eyes. You could see the weight of his past, get a glimpse of his dreams, and tell where he was going. In the four years Carson had spent in the Militia, the recruits kept getting younger and the eyes of the one strapped in across from him said he was just out of diapers. Shaking his head absently, he wondered if it was true or he was just getting old.
"Relax, Private," he said and the boy looked back at him with bright blue eyes. It wasn't that the kid was scared, he was just too damn enthusiastic. If Carson remembered correctly, this was the soldier's second sortie and his name was Jackson. "This isn't a combat drop so save your energy."
"Yes sir!" the young man barked back. With the chin up and sparkle in his eye, he looked he just walked off of one of those damn recruiting posters. Carson met the dead eyes of the other men and thought about what it might be like to be that young again.
The dropship trembled as it sliced downward through the atmosphere and Carson bumped around inside his light armor. After being posted to a rear vanguard on Dante for the past seven months, he had come to miss real combat and had pushed for something more. Now he and his unit were assigned a recon mission and had been stripped down to light armor and FEN Assault weapons. He was thinking about how he missed the heft of his Warmonger and Belial-class Dogeybone when one of the men spoke up.
"Hey Top?" a voice said from his right. He looked over and saw it was Takura, one of the support grunts leaning forward in his harness. "Why couldn't we bring our regular kit? Don't they want us to hurt nobody?"
There was a chorus of agreements from the line and Carson smiled. He felt exactly the same way but couldn't find the right word to describe it. Vulnerability maybe?
"Hey Tak, it don't matter much," Foss the point man/scout said. "You can't hit a damn thing anyway!"
"Nailed your momma the other night," Takura returned with a gesture, followed by quiet laughter from the line.
"Yeah, but how many tries did it take?"
Carson smiled, glad that his men were relatively happy. They weren't a particularly jovial group, but the shiny new toys and armor along with a non-combat mission had left them as relaxed as he had ever seen. They were out of the war zone on what was about to be a regular vacation by comparison and everyone was looking forward to it.
"This is just recon on a Resource World, not combat so they didn't think we' d need it," he answered. "Besides Tak, you can't hit a damn thing and they didn't want you chopping up the landscape by accident."
More laughter down the line and Takura looked at him with surprise before he spoke.
"Respectively sir, " Tak said. "Fuck you sir and this chickenshit outfit too, sir!"
The edges of Carson's eyes folded into creases as he laughed out loud and leaned back to rest his head on the cracked foam headrest. How long had it been since he had been able to laugh? He couldn't remember and thought about the good feeling this one had. He was anxious to see what an intact Resource World actually looked like. The only other one he had been to on a search and rescue didn't have much to offer, at least not after the heavy ordinance hit and turned everything into smoking glass and cinders.
"We're on final approach to the beacon," a voice said across the intercom as the ride leveled out. It was Corro's voice, the same flight officer that had been the bus driver for the past three ops. Even though he was in the aerospace wing, the soldiers considered him good enough to let him drink with them so he was ok by Carson's standards.
"ETA seventeen minutes."
Seventeen minutes. That was a long time on Dante and he couldn't remember the last time he had a chance to actually measure that amount of peace. In seventeen minutes, a battalion is ground into hamburger, a city is burned into vapor, and all of the newbies in your command become statistics.
These seventeen minutes were a reprieve and he closed his eyes, relaxing for the first time in over two years as the echoes of war played in the background of his mind.
Comments to rw