Rene woke in darkness. Pain blossomed across his chest and the world went black again. Consciousness returned in stages, somehow the stepped increase of pressure and pain made it more bearable. He seemed to recall he should be doing something but the particulars slid away from his intellect like pieces of oiled glass.  The details of the attack, present in his mind only as disconnected facts, crashed over him like a shower of winter rain. The vision of Bowie’s body smashing against the berm, Van Heck spinning into the dirt and the flashing reports of automatic weapons echoed in his mind shocking him into crystal clarity. With a strangled shout his body convulsed but the sandbags pinned him more secure than security restraints could have done.


Forcing down his rising panic he steadied his breathing and tried to relax his muscles. Bunching his shoulder he managed to move his left wrist precious inches towards his belt. The belt was gone, torn in the fall or in the avalanche of sandbags. Something sliced painfully into his palm and he bit down on his lip to keep from screaming. It was the razor wire of course, the coiled ribbons must have come down with the sandbags, he was probably lucky not to have been wrapped in the stuff and sliced to bloody ruin. Carefully, he found one of the small metal bladed and took it between blood slicked finger tips. With swift sharp strokes he began to slash the canvas casings of the sandbags, spilling the dirt into the interstices of the pile.

Progress came quickly after that and fifteen minutes later, gasping for air and covered from head to toe with dirt adhered to sweat, Rene pulled himself free of the pile. The humid night air was the sweetest thing had ever tasted and for long moments he could do nothing but suck in great lungfuls. Everything hurt, it was amazing that he had avoided breaking any bones, but he had received enough bruises and contusions to compensate. Pushing it from his mind he forced himself to take stock of the situation. 

The base was quiet in the deeping twilight. Fires, started by grenades or by enthusiastic Gids in the aftermath, still smoulderd at a dozen points. Thick ropes of acrid smoke curled from the windows of the communications trailer and all three barracks units. The whole place stank of burning insulation, burning flesh and the sweetish reek of corpses beginning to superate in the tropical heat. Of the Gids themselves there was no sign, a good thing because Rene hadn’t given them a second thought in his desperation to escape entombment beneath the sandbags. The armored vehicle was gone, the impressions of its tracks evident even in the uncertain light of burning buildings, as were both of the marine patrol vehicles. Looted by the Gids Rene presumed. 

There were bodies also, a haphazard collection laid out against the berm. Rene stumbled towards them, realizing as he did so that he had lost a boot in the collapse, the lack making his gait awkward as he crossed the twenty meters to the rank of bodies. All of them were dead, Rene hadn’t held out any hope but there was a finality to seeing the dead that he hadn’t been prepared for. Most had been killed in the initial volley, though a few had received a coup de grace in the form a shot between the eyes which distended their features horribly. The Gids had obviously dragged the bodies to the berm to search and count them. It was a reasonable step though there was no way they could have accounted for the bodies that had burned up in the trailers. Bowie’s body was at the end of the line. He had been dead when the Gids found him, killed by the blast which had sheared the antennae. There was surprisingly little visible damage, overpressure from the blast Rene figured, dredging the information from a half forgotten military first aid course. Bowie’s face was frozen in a sardonic smile, doubtless the result of random muscle contraction rather than a genuine expression of emotion, but it suited his friend so perfectly that it made Rene’s heart lurch. Tears welled in his eyes and he sank to the ground beside his friend and stared sightless at the uncaring stars. 

[b]New Concordia - Day Two[/b]

The soldier zipped up his fly and tossed his tab stick into the irrigation ditch. The burning end of the stick fell so close to Rene that he could have reached out and grabbed it. He didn’t move. He tried not to breath. The soldier let out a sigh of relief and ambled back towards his companion. Rene relaxed by a minimal increment. He had reached the outskirts of Armistice, the administrative capital of New Concordia in a little under two hours. The base had been thoroughly looted by the Gids and he hadn’t been able to find a weapon or any functional communications gear. He had made his way to one of the nearby hamlets and stolen one of the six wheeled trucks the locals used to deliver crops to the Starport in Armistice.

At first Rene no plan beyond to get away from the slaughter at the Rat Trap but as he had driven along the darkened country roads a plan had began to form in his mind. Rebellions were not uncommon in an entity as large as the Stellar Empire. Usually it was a matter of the local army crushing whatever aggrieved section of the populace had been forced into an orgy of looting and destruction. This had to be something different. The Gid attack had been carefully planned and well executed, not a spontaneous riot of drunken or mutinous troops. That kind of attack only made sense in the scope of a much larger rebellion. Rene’s duty was clear, he had to report what had happened to his commanders, the simplest way to do that was to reach the Imperial Embassy.

Unfortunately that plan had hit a snag when he reached the first roadblock. Gid troops were searching vehicles coming in and out of the city. Rene had pulled off onto a side road before he was noticed and ditched the truck behind a stand of trees. He had thought to approach the city through the semi rural suburbs but had almost ran right into a Gid patrol as he crossed a field bordered by a low stone wall. It had been pure good fortune he had managed to dive into this ditch when the locals emerged from behind one of the low stone structures.

“Why are we out looking for this bitch again?” one of the soldiers, still only ten or a dozen meters away griped. Rene frowned, he had imagined they were trying to stop him, or someone like him, from getting into the city.

“Look how the fuck should I know?” another voice responded. Rene had seen three soldiers in the brief instant before he took cover, this one had the bored superiority of non coms the galaxy over.

“You gotta know something Xui, I saw you talking with the captain before we got sent on this miserable goose chase.” There was a long pause and then a long suffering sigh.

“All I know is that some broad bolted from the embassy earlier, or so they think, couldn’t match her body to any of the stiffs they pulled out of there.”

Rene’s stomach sank. The embassy was one of the few places on the planet sure to have a PEA. Positronic Entanglement Arrays, or PEAs, were insanely expensive communication devices for real time transmission across interstellar distances. Because they were so expensive and because each PEA could only send to its partner device, they were only used for sensitive military and diplomatic traffic. He had planned to use it to call off world to report the attack but that hope seemed dashed with the soldiers world. Who was this woman though.

“Sarge!” it was the first voice again, and it had dropped to a low whisper. Rene risked a look over the lip of the trench. The three soldiers were focused on a low stone wall, their backs to the marine. As Rene watched he saw movement. It was a woman, moving slowly but not quite as well concealed as she evidently thought.

“By the stars we will all be rich,” the Sergeant breathed his voice hungry for more than money. Rene stifled a curse as the soldiers began to fan out. He had no idea who this woman was, but her couldn’t stand idly by and let her be taken by these Gids. Steeling himself he pulled the length of razor wire he had bought with him and pulled it taught between his fists. These were very poor odds. The soldiers spread out like the claws of a scorpion, anchored by the sergeant. The woman froze and dropped behind the stone wall, either spotting her hunters or simply spooked by the sudden quiet.

“Stand up slowly and keep you hands where we can see them!” the sergeant shouted. Rene sprang from concealment like an uncoiling spring. The sergeant was only ten strides from him and didn’t even realise the marine was there until a moment before the loop of razor wire closed around his neck. Rene reefed with all his strength. The wire sunk into the man's throat with shocking ease, cutting to the spine with a spray of arterial blood. The other two soldiers spun, alerted by the sudden commotion. Rene let go of the wire, his right hand snatching the pistol from the sergeant's belt, letting gravity complete the draw as the corpse slumped to the ground.

As a squire Rene had spent countless hours training with both pistol and blade. His body settled instinctively into a dueling stance which would have made his Mistress-at-Arms proud, profile to the first assailant, pistol leveled. The stolen weapon boomed, powerful electromagnets accelerating the round down the coiled bore. The round punched into the mass of veins and arteries just above the soldiers heart. He was already pivoting to the surviving Gid when the spinning man opened fire. It was wild and from the hip but something hot plucked at his shirt a heartbeat before he fired the second round. Rene hadn’t corrected for the lift of his first shoot and the second round smashed the right cheekbone of the soldier, dropping him in a boneless heap. For a moment the night was silent as the gunfire died away. Rene let the pistol drop to his side while his left hand reached down to his chest. Blood welled from a narrow graze across his ribs. He examined his fingertips with a combination of exhaustion and wonder.

“This really isn’t my day.”