_Chapter 2_
I looked up. Flint. She caught me; right above the gap in the Earth's crust, the "drop to hell". "Nice jump," Derek walked over to us and grabbed my wrist. "Need a hand?" He pulled me up, walked me over to the bench and took off my helmet. "Captain wants to talk to you." I looked up at him as he handed me the earpiece.
"Didn't I tell you not to kill yourself out there?" Captain Numan asked with a little more ease in his voice.
"Yes, sir."
"You scared the hell out of me, you know that?"
"I do now."
"I need you to get your ass back up to this bridge. ASAP. You hear me?"
"Yes, sir."
I could still hear Captain Numan yelling commands to the crewmen on deck as the short distance COM slowly shut off and burst into static. I took out the ear piece and dropped my head to the wall of the Pelican as the pain from every wound on my body started to take over.
"Spark? What did you do to yourself?" Flint asked. "Saved your guys' asses, that's what." I replied. Flint found a few biofoam canisters and tossed them across the cabin to me. Internally, the bleeding stopped after the biofoam was injected, but the pain was still piercing underneath my skin.
Me, being branched from the Army, not the Navy like the others, gave us different ways of thinking. I would go right, and the rest of my team would go left. I'm not sure what all they taught them, but the one thing Officer Samson taught us was: Show no fear, have no pain. That was his secret to winning. I tried to sit up as straight as I could when I noticed team Saber looking in my direction from the other side of the Pelican. "So," I said, trying to start a conversation. "How many kills did you get?"
"What the hell?" the Pilot muttered. The forward screen flashed a warning signal for an incoming projectile; but the tracker read nothing. "Something's wrong." The co-pilot replied. "Something's wrong with the tracker." The Pelican swung to the right then plunged nose first towards the canyon. "I can't get control of the pilot controls!" A burst of electricity surged through the control panel and blew out most of the lights and screens. Sparks flew from knobs and buttons and sprinkled the panel with light. "The COMs are dead. We're going down! Spartans, get ready for a hard landing!" one of the pilots yelled.
The Spartans instinctively reached and grabbed onto something; which happened to be each other. The metal of the Pelican bent and squeaked as the machine rolled and begun to ark towards the ground.
For a second, I didn't feel pain. Just my stomach turn and my heart pump in my throat. "Everyone," I yelled. "Keep your armor locked." Flint looked at her HUD. "twenty hundred meters!" She paused. "I don't think we'll be able to get back in the air! We're gonna get grounded! There's no way we can slowdown. We're moving at terminal velocity." I looked up at Derek and then over at Saber team when I noticed my helmet rolling back and forth along the wall of the cockpit. I reached up to my head for confirmation. I could feel the strands of my slicked back hair. "Damn it."
The Pelican then tilted to a ninety degree angle towards the ground and accelerated fast. "Deploying emergency chutes!" the Pelican slowed, but not enough to guarantee survival. They all braced for impact.