Yankee Knights

Chapter 10

Pilots and People

The silence of space could be deafening at times. All James could hear was his own heavy breathing inside his bulbous pilot's helmet. The flashes of light and the chaotic scene around him seemed oddly detached in that silence. The thought touched lightly on the top of his head before his heavy mag boots thumped back into the dust, his muscles struggling in vain to move fluidly inside his bulky black flight suit.

The minute he touched back on the asteroid's surface, the sounds came back, muffled but no less recognizable. Explosions, gunfire, and the insane shrieks of the Gauna's placental clones loping unnaturally towards the Marine's positions. The signature red streaks of the clones' miniature Higgs beams and the tracers from the Marine's small arms and heavy guns lashed out around him as James fired several rounds out of his sidearm. The heavy bullets tore through several placental clones and threw him another few yards back. The chaos around him turned to silence once more.

He couldn't remember why he was on the asteroid, or how he came to be chased by a veritable army of hideous caricatures of human beings as he moon jumped towards a group of Fleet Marines filling the vacuum around him with flying bits of led and the occasional bolt of ionized gases. Before he knew it James had landed again and the air in his helmet was once more filled with the sounds of hell itself. He fired another round off, but no matter how many clones he or the Marines behind him killed, there were always more. Always more shrieks. Always more death.

James landed again and was immediately thrown to his back, landing heavily and sending up a small cloud of dust. He couldn't feel anything, but he could see the thin trail of smoke from his chest, smell the burnt flesh cauterized by the Higgs wound in his chest. That much radiation should have immediately fried his heart, but he could still hear the blood pumping in his ears as a grotesque, humanoid lump of placenta jumped on top of him. He knew that it had pinned his arms to the ground with the hardened blades it had for arms, but he still couldn't feel a thing. It gave off a shriek before lifting one of its bladed appendages from his body, dripping with blood, and jabbed forward at the visor of his helmet.

James jerked back so suddenly that his rolling chair fell backwards, his head hitting the steel deck so hard he started to see stars. He felt that. James winced against the harsh luminescent lighting in his small Toha Heavy Industries office as he started to take in reality. He hadn't slept since the battle with the asteroid sortie more than thirty six hours before. At least it had been thirty six hours the last time he checked, he must have dosed off at his terminal working on trying to bridge the gap between Sidonia's tech and the Fleet's. A shadow passed in front of the light and he thought he heard a voice through the ringing in his ears. He must have hit his head harder than he thought.

"James, James are you ok?!" Yuhata seemed to yell at him. She was only a few feet away, she didn't need to do that. The thought came to James slowly through a fog, and all he could do was stare at her as he tried to process everything.

"Oh, shit, I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to startle you like that. Here, let me help you up." She was still louder than normal, but since his muscles had suddenly decided to stop working, he decided to forgive her that small transgression for helping him up.

"Oh, shit." She repeated. It was an effort to turn his head to look at what she was staring at. It was another solid effort to blink at the small pool of blood on the floor and force his mind to figure out what that might mean.

"You're probably concussed." Yuhata continued, kindly providing an answer for him, allowing his sleep, and now concussion, addled mind to rest for a moment. "Let's get you to the infirmary, I think the closest one is in Pilot Country."

He still wasn't processing right, but she sounded reasonable enough, so he gave a drunken nod as she tried to pull him up. Yuhata grunted, being a little over half his size at fifty or so kilos, as she got her arm around his back and pushed him into an upright position; helping him coax his legs into standing. He noticed she was wearing her pitch black Sidonian dress uniform.

"The ceremony." Was all he said as he tried to push away from her when he finally got to standing. He didn't have any dress uniforms with him, no one had thought they would be useful in the emergency kit, but he did have a spare flight suit he kept well enough pressed for occasions such as the mass funerals which were unfortunately common after Sidonian combat operations. The whole standing thing didn't go so well and he nearly fell to his knees.

"Whoa there" Yuhata said as she grabbed him. He wasn't good at noticing those kinds of things even when his brain was working at full capacity, but even he could see the look of worry on her face. "The ceremony ended half an hour ago. You didn't show up, that's why I came looking for you." She blushed a little at that, but James had already met his quota of social insights for the day.

He started to come around to his senses and started kicking himself mentally for missing the ceremony. How could he have missed the funeral of eighty-seven pilots?! How selfish had he been to sleep through it and deny those men and women the massive respect they deserved?! He pushed away from Yuhata again, still wobbly but stable enough to stand on his own and picked up his chair; sitting in it with a heavy heart and weak legs. He glanced at his desk, strewn as it was with designs and concepts; some of them his own, some of them Sasaki's that he was double checking and making suggestions for. He had prioritized the haphazard stacks of datapads and old fashioned papers over the deaths of living, breathing human beings, and he was hating himself pretty hard for it.

"Nobody blames you for not coming." Yuhata said comfortingly, as if she had read his mind, "Everybody pretty much knows by now you and Sasaki are down here working to make sure that doesn't happen again." He continued to look down at the desk in a fairly obvious cloud of self-loathing. Yuhata gave a consternated look and bent down in front of him, "If it hadn't been for the MAC guns YOU built, every single person on that sortie would be dead."

He twitched at that as if to argue, but his brain was still addled, and he couldn't really think of a retort anyway. Realizing his self-pity only made his self-loathing worse. She pressed on.

"Nagate, Izana, Seii, the Honoka sisters, and Samari would all be dead right now, not to mention me."

He looked up at that.

"Come on," She continued, putting an arm around him in emotional comfort and physical support, "let's get you to the infirmary."

OK, so reasons for the short chapter-

I've been accepted into Norwich University and NROTC – Marine Option, My time is mostly filled up with looking for a job, studying for placement exams, taking said placement exams, paperwork, etc., etc. (Not to mention PT) I need to make somewhere in the vicinity of two grand before August in order to pay for uniforms and books, so becoming a real Marine takes priority over writing stories about Marines, sorry (no sarcasm, really love writing this, but priorities)

I also want to make my chapters longer and more professional in the ~5k word range, so multiple uploads will increase the frequency of updates instead of going months without

It also allows for you guys to make suggestions mid-chapter on character events and the like, I really like hearing your thoughts on everything, PM is probably the best way to get a hold of me. If you want to post you're email you'll have to disguise it to get it past the censors, even in PM

Sorry for any inconveniences - Projective