[Tshombesha] The Game Has Changed

Shit!

The trooper opening the doorway would have found the end of Kenlin's pistol greeting him, quickly lowered once friendly status was assessed. He looked down at Yori, pulling a vial of medigel out and applying it quickly, before lifting him up once more.

"Yeah he can move. Ish. Let's get out of here." The salarian limped forward, injured comrade leaning against him, and followed the trooper out. His suit reached out once more, refreshing the scramble on the local net, reducing the local areas sensors, cameras, and other security equipment to nothing, before setting out with the group.

"Please tell me they've got it as bad or worse than we do."

Fuck this shit.

He wasn't afraid, he wasn't some motherless bastard, hatchling from a cast off clutch to cower and whimper. He was better than that. He was better than that.

So why, here, now, alone on this rooftop, was it happening? That cold, dead, writhing feeling in the pit of his stomach, clawing its way up his throat. Like graveworms bursting out of a corpse's gas bloated body like something dark and nameless slowly rising out of the darkness of a trench. He was afraid.

I'm not afraid.

He was afraid.

Fuck you fuck this fuck you fuck me.

All around him the shuttles, the Eclipse gunships they'd borrowed to aid in the extraction, were peeling away with their lovely hard-won cargo of insurgents and terrorists in their metal bellies. Screeching out EM chaff, shrouding themselves in electronic masking, anything to get the edge, to slip the net. They'd probably make it. They'd almost certainly make it.

Small mercies.

A hand settled on his narrow shoulder, she probably could have snapped it like a twig. Would have been the perfect fucking ending to this whole steaming pile of shit. A trio of bullets grazed the rooftop, gouging great chunks in the cheap metal and concrete. Aalos didn't even flinch.

"Sir."

There was a pause, a half second where he seriously considered just standing here and letting the pressure wave of the missiles shatter him like glass, letting the heat and flame crisp his armor and skin. Half a second, would barely hurt, and he'd never have to deal with this shit again.

"Sir."

He obediently took a step back, until he was standing in the shuttle bay, the doors folding closed. Right, of course. The Suns were coming, they had to leave.

But even as they lifted into the air to join their fellows, even as the Suns CAS tore through the storm darkened sky like giant mechanical birds of war, even as their payloads chewed apart the rooftop he had been standing on not a few minutes prior: he watched. He watched as the shockwave shattered it and the fires consumed it and the whole structure was swallowed up by the billowing cloud of ash and dust.

He stayed there at the viewport, just watching, as they fled back into the embrace of the storm; until it was out of sight.

-Fin