In spite of her self Junebug couldn't help smile at the pilots continued banter. It was the kind of thing that wore a person down.

"I was a trooper in Andor's Armored, a heavy mechanized regiment, hover tanks and fighting vehicles," she explained as she clicked through a number of readouts on the console, idly checking the ships databases.

"I was a vehicle commander, although I saw plenty of dismounted service too, we all did from time to time," she went on. That was the gods honest truth. The armored had had two companies of infantry mounted on fast moving personal skimmers but there were never enough ground ponders to go around.

"As for Junebug... We were moving the regiment onto Hagira but the place didn't have port worth shit so we were all split up over small landing fields rather than one big list. My platoon, six skimmers, and maybe 30-35 effectives, were on board the Samothrace. The Sammy was an old bucket but we had used her before and we knew the crew. On the way down we took some hits." Sayeeda remembered the sound of the hull ringing like all the bells in the universe as hyper velocity slugs had gutted half her engines in a single racking burst, the crashing of equipment as the ship augured into a barely controlled crash.

"When we hit the ground we knew the Nationals would get to us days before anyone from the regiment could. So we started to get ready to pull out. The crew of the Sammie were pretty torn up about it. The Nationals didn't have a good rep for dealing with prisoners and we couldn't take everyone on our few vehicles. It took 10 hours just to get the bastard things out of the holds with the hatches all buckled like that." It had been work, even using thermite and cutting charges to blast the worst of the hatches off. Most of the vehicles were hardly serviceable and needed most of their fans replaced.

"We got to drinking, once night came us and the Sammies and talking about defending the ship. It was a bloody stupid thing to even suggest but we were all to tired for a route march across the swamps and so with every jar that hit the bar we swore we would remain." She trailed off shaking her head at the questionable decision making powers of a much younger Junebug Cyckali.

"So we dug in," she said, putting her feet up on the console.

"Next morning the Nationales showed up with half a regiment of their militia. A ragged bunch but fanatical and better suited to the swampy terrain than we were. Some general comes out and starts screaming at us to surrender. I told him that we were fine where we were and he just went insane, screaming about how he was going to snuff us all out like junebugs. Then they came at us then, some real human wave shit and it was dicey as hell." In her minds eye Sayeeda could remember running through the halls of the Sammi, her hands burned from firing her over heated weapon continuously, fragments of a grenade lodged in her arm.

"We held out for the better part of a day but we screwed for sure. There were only about ten of us left when the old man got a flying column up onto a plateu about a thousand clicks west and scratched our backs with rocket howitzers. That broke the Nattys for sure." Not many of the nationals had survived the rain of glass fiber shrapnel that Colonel Andor had reigned down on them while Sayeeda's troopers had huddled inside the hull of the Sammie. She remembered carpets of dead when she climbed out of the smoking ruin.

"Anyway after that people started calling me Junebug, I guess as kind of a joke, but it stuck."

[@POOHEAD189]