Interlude – Crisis Mode Two

Interlude – Crisis Mode Two

Libre seemed to think that everything was going well, and Cecilia was very much of the opinion that they were a hair’s breadth away from being chewed on.

“We need more ammo at station six!” she shouted over the constant din of gunfire even as she scampered along the inside of one of their exterior trenches. She turned, then sighed as she saw two militia members stumbling over with a crate of 7.62 between them. They fell, spilling the end of a bullet chain onto the ground, but they were quick to pick it back up… along with some mud and detritus that she was sure was going to clog something up down the line.

The militia was… good, but not ideal. A few of them had some amount of prior training, but the majority of them were either volunteers or people that saw the amount they’d be paid for militia work and jumped on the opportunity for free food, decent pay, and work that they could have pride in.

It meant that some of them were professionals who’d taken the job out of pride and others were people that were living on the streets and didn’t mind trading work for a warm meal and a cot somewhere. The quality varied a lot.

She wondered if Libre was taking that into account in his grand plan. Probably not. Genius the man may be, he had blind spots the size of mega-buildings.

“Injured!” someone called out. “Medic!”

Crisis Mode looked up, head snapping in the direction of the call. Medics were in short supply. Sometimes, she was it.

The battlefield, such as it was, was according to Libre, a ‘forward low-attraction position.’ She didn’t know what that meant in the grand game of strategy he was playing. In practical terms, it meant that they’d gone out in the middle of the night and had dug out trenches that had collapsed a week ago with some tractors that had shovels on their backs before they set down mobile defences.

The goal was something about pulling Antithesis attention in this direction, but only to a certain degree.

She didn’t get it, exactly. It wasn’t her thing, thinking like the enemy.

Crisis Mode jumped out of the back of a trench, boots crunching on loose gravel before she ran, back low, bag held at her side. The battlefield, such as it was, was covered in foot-long spikes. They’d rebuffed a lot of spine-slingers a few hours ago, but the aliens had had the time to spray the area with plenty of their natural weapons.

She found the wounded being dragged backwards into one of the connecting trenches. These had tin roofs overhead, with LEDs inside to provide cold white light that was brighter than whatever sunshine they got… actually, they had plenty of light.

It was a disturbingly pretty day. The sky was a bright, searing blue, the clouds fat and slow and separated by plenty of room. Even the air was crisp, when it didn’t stink of freshly cut grass and gunpowder.

“Ma’am! You’re here, we have an injured!” someone said.

She could see that. A young man, on the ground, face covered in sweat and teeth grit. She crashed onto her kneepads next to him. “Hold his arms back,” she ordered.

Once, she’d been polite and nice about this kind of thing. Since, she’d discovered that rude and direct worked a lot better.

Two militia men put their weight into stretching the injured out. She grimaced at what she said. Large wound, entrance at the front, next to the calf, exit out the back. His militia-issued fatigues were blown out.

Gunshot? “Did he shoot himself?” she asked.

“Accidental discharge,” someone said. “Uh, not his own?”

“Dammit,” she muttered. About one in five of their injuries were stupid things like this.

Her bag was opened, she grabbed a pen-like device and flicked the top off, then she stabbed it into the man’s leg, above the wound. It took all of three seconds for him to slump and start breathing out, much calmer.

“Keep him down,” she warned. Protector painkillers kicked ass. He could probably run a marathon at the moment. Or hop it? Whatever.

She pulled out bandages, then a small device that she ran over the leg. The feed was the same as an MRIs, fed directly into her augs. She saw bones and veins and meat and muscle, colour-coded for convenience and spun around every which way.

Gruesome, but no bullet fragments were left, and the wound had somehow passed between his fibular and posterior tibial arteries. Lucky. The healing would suck, but that was a problem for later.

She shoved muscles back into place as best she could, then injected him with a nanorepair solution. Even as it started to stitch things back together, she cut off the fatigues at the knee with a knife then wrapped the leg in bandages.

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Two minutes, maybe three, and she was done and covered in more blood than most people saw in a year.

“Bring him back to the wall and get him to the med-wing,” she ordered. By then, someone had come over with a hover-stretcher. They loaded him on while the man joked and laughed, a little delirious, but he’d live.

She took a step back before grabbing the water flask at her hip. It was important to stay hydrated, but she mostly used it to rinse her hands off after tossing the gloves she’d been wearing onto the ground. She hated that latex-y smell that slung to her hands after wearing gloves, but didn’t want to waste points on something as stupid as disposable gloves.

“How’s the situation overall, Crylin?”