Our final ficlet about a commando was spawned by a section in one of Karen Traviss's books. I hope you like it.

Overloaded

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It's no mystery what happened: I was weak.

That's all it comes down to in the end—I wasn't good enough. A waste of perfectly good Jango.

My squad was fully kitted out in our Katarn armour, ready for whatever would be thrown our way. We were cocky and confident, like always. Why wouldn't we be? We were the best of the best. Or so I thought.

My feet were starting to tingle, we'd been standing in the landing craft for hours now, slowly chugging our way towards the beaches. Two-Eight punches my arm. How he manages it in these cramped conditions where we're practically held up by the men on either side of us, I've no idea.

"Stop fretting. It'll be fine. We can take whatever they throw at us."

I try for a smile. Dunno why when we're all armoured up and no one can see our faces. Two-Eight knew though, that's what brothers are for.

"Maybe we should call you Fret," he says. "Short, catchy, and not far off the mark."

There are snorts of laughter from the other members of the squad, Two-Two and Two-Sev, at Two-Eight's witticism.

"Don't you dare," I snarl. "What kind of stupid name is that? Two-Five suits me just fine."

The others ignore me and keep laughing.

"Feel like sharing the joke?" says the man wedged beside me. I don't know him, he's from another squad, another sergeant. One of the crazy Mandalorian ones I think. We were talking on a closed channel so he must've picked up on our body language.

I shake my head and turn on my speakers. "No joke."

He studies me, and then nods. "RC-1136, Theta Squad. Nice to meet you."

He's about to say something else when the light in the cabin goes green, glinting off smooth armour and matte black rifles. Everyone goes quiet. I swallow. This is it.

I shift my weight onto the balls of my feet, ready to run for it once that ramp comes down. The landing craft is a magnet for enemy fire. I can already hear blaster bolts hitting the hulls. Get caught in here and you're dead. I know this because the sarge and the flash lessons have drilled this into my brain like letters into permacrete. It's part of me now.

The ramp goes down with a bang and the first row surges out. The misssion flashes through my head; get up the beach, take the guns in sector six, neutralise any enemies you encounter. All that flicks past in an instant, shimmering blue holo-maps springing to life in my head. The second row has just disembarked. I'm in the fifth. This is taking too long, I can feel myself getting jittery, even though I know that it's been less than seconds since the ramp dropped.

Two-Two's voice is in my ears. "Easy, Two-Five. We've got this."

I grunt, watching as the next few rows of men spill out of the craft in slow motion. Then there's nothing but space in front of me. I charge out of the landing craft and drop into chest-deep water.

It's deeper than I thought it was going to be—that was my second thought. My first one was kark, and my third was to regret having crammed all that extra kit into my pack.

Lugging around our normal kit is no walk in the park, as the sarge might say. But the night before, I'd managed to smuggle some extra ration cubes, ammo clips, and dets—thermal detonators—into my gear. No harm in being prepared; another of the sarge's sayings. Apparently that isn't always the case.

The first step makes almost makes me pitch face first into the water. I stumble a few extra steps, the weight on my back pushing me forward, the water dragging at me even as it stopped me from toppling over. I can hear the sergeants are yelling at us all to 'move up' and 'move forward'. There's the hiss of rounds hitting the water around me: no simunition today. I take another step, this time controlled, as I try to make my way towards the beach. The waves are getting to be a problem; the water is too deep to move normally. This wasn't in the flash-training.

On the third step, the ground isn't there. I try to catch myself but that damn pack has got me off-balance. I go down—hard. As the water sloshes up, then over my visor, I see what has happened. I've stepped into a sink hole.

I fight to claw my way back to the surface, and succeed for all of about five seconds. Water drips from my visor, blurring my vision for a moment before it gets wiped away by the helmet. My bulging pack isn't watertight. Not anymore. I've put too much gear in, the pack won't seal, and the water seeps in, dragging me back underwater. I fight for a minute more, but the undertow has got a hold of me, dragging me along the bottom of the seabed. I see an endless parade of feet appearing in a splash of bubbles, my fellow commandos deploying from yet more landing craft. No one slows as they all make their way inland.

I don't panic. I've got eight minutes worth of air in my armour and panicking will just use it up quicker, turn that eight minutes into five, or two, depending on how badly I lose it. So I try to get free of my pack; it's weighing me down. I'll take the sarge's bollocking for losing my kit later. It's no more than I deserve for fouling up this royally. I fumble for the release catches, but nothing happens. They're jammed—full of silt and sand, no doubt.

Fine, be that way. I'm not done yet. I eject the vibroblade from my gauntlet, determined to cut the pack free and carry on with the exercise. I'm going to let the squad down at this rate; they'll be at the rendezvous, waiting for me when they could get getting on with the mission. I struggle and twist, but no matter how I contort myself, ignoring the screaming in my joints, the rising unease in my chest, I can't reach the straps. Damn.

I check my air: less than six minutes remaining. I must be not-panicking more than I'd thought. The pack stays stubbornly on my bag as I writhe and wiggle underwater. I can't budge it and I'm getting further way from the beach. It's time to swallow my pride. I can't do this alone.

I open a com channel to sarge. "Sarge, Two-Five here. I'm down and can't get up. Request assistance." I dutifully rattle off where I think I am, allowing for the current and my earlier stumbling around. Any moment now, my brothers or my sarge will come and give me a hand up.

"That's a negative, Two-Five. Continue with the exercise."

That's not my sarge's voice, but I obey anyway. That's what a good commando does. I struggle and fight. Fight the weight on my back, the tug of the sea, the insidious creep of panic in my chest. I struggle to get back up, to get back to my brothers, and get away from that little voice that's telling me that I'm really in the dwang this time. I'm a commando. Best of the best, and I refuse to be beaten by some pack, by water. Commandos don't get killed by things like that, and they don't go down on a training exercise.

But in the end, they can and I do.

Because at the end of the day, I wasn't good enough. I didn't get free of my pack. Didn't surface again. I let my squad down, my sarge down. Didn't complete the mission.

I failed, because I was weak.

A/N: RC-1136, the commando who spoke to Two-Five, is one of the main characters of the RepCom books. You probably know him better as Darman.

The quote that spawned this: "His emotions didn't have names. They were feeling that had memories embedded in them-finishing a fifty-kilometer run thrirty-two seconds outside the permitted time, and being made to run it again; seeing a clone trooper fall on a beachhead landing excercise, weighed down by his pack and drowning, while no directing staff paused to help..." So I wrote a ficlet about the drowned trooper that Darman met once.

Soundtrack for this chapter is "God's Gonna Cut You Down" by Johnny Cash. Thanks so much for reading and I apologise now for any feels you may've received reading these ficlets.