Amerish – Mekala Tech Plant, 1300 hours
"Three… two… one… 'Aight, boys, let's get wild!" The young man by the door yelled. He pulled the pin on two grenades – one a short-fused flash grenade that would go off first, the other a heavier concussion grenade he'd traded for at a bar with a fellow New Conglomerate soldier. Barely peeking around the door, he tossed both grenades inside, listening for two quick blasts to go off in quick succession before darting inside with his comrades close behind. The room quickly devolved into chaos as Terran Republic soldiers staggered about, deaf and blind and very, very angry. The young man took to the air with his jetpack, hovering across the high-ceiling room with his shotgun pressed tightly to his shoulder, raining a fiery hot spray of lead upon the few soldiers who weren't staring at the flashbang when it went off. With the rest of the TR soldiers detained by his friends, the young man pointed to one of his friends who had just stepped into the room. "Race you to the top, Dan!" he yelled over the roar of his jetpack, darting up to the next floor.
"Ah 'course you're gonna win, I gotta take the fuckin' stairs," the man yelled back. The only reply he got was the rapid pops of gunfire, spurring him up the staircase to the left of the door as fast as his legs could carry him. Just as he reached the top of the stairs, he watched as his jetpack-riding brother, James, was gunned down by several Terran soldiers hardly a few feet away.
The man shook his head in disgust, sighing. That's the third time he'd died this week.
Fingering the trigger of his NC1 Gauss rifle, he braced the heavy railgun-assault rifle hybrid against the stair railing and opened fire, downing each of the approaching men with surgically-accurate three-round bursts to the head. "Two for the bull, one for the rider," he thought as he swiftly pulled the trigger three final times, watching as the first two rounds riccochetted off of the over-armor shields of the last Terran, draining the shield batteries. With nothing left to stop it, the third round did the dirty work, sending the enemy soldier tumbling to the ground.
Seeing no more targets, he grabbed his rifle by the sling and threw it over his shoulder, pulling out his medical tool. With the squeeze of a large trigger, a laser-like stream of nanites shot out of the device, sinking into the chestpiece of his fallen brother's armor. The New Conglomerate's medical officer's school had taught him the science of it - that the nanites swarmed over the life support system of his armor, kicking the device into an overdrive frenzy that would heal critical wounds within seconds, even kick-start the heart of someone as shot-to-hell as James was. It was a painful process, but his little brother never seemed to learn that charging ahead solo got you shot. That, or he was a masochist that took pleasure in the pain of being revived.
Like a desert flower after a storm, James popped up from where he lay, dusting himself off as he crawled to his feet like nothing had happened. "Thanks, Dan. Where'd I be to claim the win without ya!" he said with a shit-eating grin.
"Jesus Christ James, you've gotta stay ALIVE to win a race," Daniel retorted, breezing past his brother to a cylindrical computer terminal with a hologram screen, surrounded by server banks. "Gettin' to the finish line don't mean shit if they pump your guts so fulla lead it knocks you flat on ya ass five feet away. Besides, it ain't good for ya to be usin' the Tubes a whole bunch. I been hearin' all sorts a nasty shit 'bout them mixin' up DNA, leavin' people half-disfigured 'n crap. I may be a doctor, but I can't do a lick o' good if they rebuild ya with ya head up ya ass."
James shrugged nonchalantly. "So what? You're always there to pick me up 'n all, so why do I give a damn?"
Suddenly, Daniel glanced away from the computer screen, shooting his brother a dirty look. "You been raidin' my painkillers again?"
Another shit-eating grin. "…and if I did?"
Daniel let out an exasperated sigh as he returned his attention to the computer, typing away into a command console the mission codes he'd been given to run. "Motherfucker, I'ma leave ya cold, dead body on the ground for those Terran fucks to toe-tag ya and stick ya in a freezer. I pay my good damn wages for those, ya dirty fuck…" he muttered. Despite being a medic for the New Conglomerate, the only regular medicine they handed out were for non-combatants, such as off-duty soldiers, civilians, and of course, the big-dog CEO's. The Medical Nanite Applicator, his healing tool, was a fix-all so long as the combat life support module in a soldier's armor wasn't shot to hell, and even if it was, an engineer could fix it right quick with a Repair Nanite Applicator – the equivalent tool for fixing mechanical stuff. Between the two, there wasn't technically a need for traditional medicine, but when shit hit the fan, there wasn't an injury alive he, Daniel Wilde, felt like he couldn't fix with a good old-fashioned field medical kit.
As such, he carried the kit wherever he went, but that also resulted in some scuffles with his younger brother, James Wilde, the squad point-man. Pilot extraordinaire, he was just as equally top-notch in a jet craft like the New Conglomerate "Reaver" fighter as he was taking to the skies with a jetpack, so he did whatever was needed most at the time. His gung-ho style of guns-blazing, in-your-face aggressiveness caught his enemies off guard, and was often the kind of break in the enemy defenses his squad needed, but it also frequently resulted in him getting shot by the first enemy to react. Because of this, James had developed a habit of preemptively raiding his older brother's painkiller cache whenever he was out on duty, so if a bullet got through his over-armor shields and hurt him bad, he could keep fighting just that half-second longer it took to clean a room for his squad.
Daniel looked over the codes one final time before hitting the "enter" key. Suddenly, the lights went dim throughout the gargantuan manufacturing plant, then flickered back into life. The CEO's of nearby mining corporations who controlled Mekala Tech Plant's operations on a daily basis always held the upper hand, in the form of secret, hard-reset codes for the entire plant. Although the occupying Terran soldiers had changed the priorities for the building's defenses, such as the hardlight energy shields that blocked the doors, a quick backdoor login with the administrator codes could put everything right in a jiffy. That also included resetting the automated defense turrets.
A loud alarm sounded out across the facility, indicating that the defenses were coming online. Like a roar of thunder, all of the Spitfire defense turrets across the facility focused on the nearest TR soldier in their vicinity and simultaneously opened fire. Within seconds, Daniel knew, every enemy in the facility would be face-down in their own blood. He stepped back from the terminal, giving his younger brother a well-deserved fistbump for clearing the zone around the computer terminal. "Now that's what I call doctor-assisted homicide," he said.
"Hell yeah, that was pretty sweet," James replied, changing the magazine in DIY-modified shotgun he'd affectionately named the Brawler. With the magazine secure, he reached into his pocket and began slipping individual shotgun shells into the underbarrel shotgun he'd used moments before his death. Terran and Vanu soldiers thought the NC just had a bit of a shotgun fetish, but when you're up close and personal with the enemy and your shotgun magazine runs dry, the last thing you wanted for an underbarrel weapon was any sort of grenade launcher. James could tell you that from experience. "Let's go clear out that spawn room so we can get the hell outta here."
Two hours and some four hundred gallons of spilled enemy blood later, the spawn room was cleared out of the last of enemy reinforcements. Thanks to the other skilled medics his his squadron, there were very few casualties that had to be sent back to the Respawn Tubes through the ordeal. Most of his squad sat around the room, cleaning their weapons or overseeing the return of Mekala's working engineers to the reclaimed facilities, even helping out with a few repairs where necessary to fix the damage after such a quick, brutal takeover.
Since technical work wasn't his favorite thing in the world, though, Daniel opted to take a seat on a bench in the spawn room near an equipment terminal, idly playing with his favorite piece of kit: a gold-plated .357 caliber snub-nosed revolver he had been given upon graduating from the New Conglomerate's Combat Medic school, presented to him by his favorite old fogey on campus, who happened to also be his commanding officer. Each combat school's senior officer picked the student who was the top of their class and presented them with a revolver like his, complete with their full name etched on the side. Most people saw it and assumed it meant he was the smart-ass valedictorian of his class, that the powers that be chose him over all others because he kissed enough hairy asses to weasel his way up to the top. To him, though, it meant the world. It symbolized how much he cared for his brother, that he worked so hard to become the best medic so that he could keep his brother fighting.
Holding his pointer finger straight, he spun the loaded revolver around his finger, tossing it into the air in a casual juggling game. As the revolver dropped out of the air, he snatched it by the grip, looking over the detailed engravings. Daniel Thomas Wilde, the words read. "Hope they're done with them damn repairs soon," he thought. He pressed a button on the side of the gun. The revolver's cylinder split in half, rotating out a few degrees to either side of the revolver frame to expose three cartridges on either side, their untouched primers glinting back at him in the dull blue-ish light from the halogen lamps above. Satisfied that everything about the gun seemed in order, he pressed the two halves of the cylinder together, the spring-loaded latch that held them together locking shut with a muted click.
"Hey, Dan," he could hear his brother call. He glanced up to see James standing in the doorway, leaning up against the doorframe with his helmet under his left arm. His short, spiky light brown hair had suffered a pretty bad case of helmet head that made Daniel chuckle under his breath.. "CEO's of AmeriCorp just phoned in," James said. "Says his facilities need a supply drop, so I'm headed out to go guard some dropships. I'll be back tonight, 'aight?"
Daniel nodded. "I'll save ya a brew. Have fun, don't die, all that crud," he said, waving his brother off. Locking eyes with the young man, he nodded once and watched as his brother turned around and stepped out, disappearing behind the doorframe. "Ten to one odds I'll be having to leave another bottle at the Tubes depot again," he sighed, shaking his head. Stowing his revolver in its leg holster, he picked up his gauss rifle and headed for the door. "Probably should help out if I wanna get out of here faster…"