"Aftermath" by James K Bowers

        Dannel ached. The pounding, all-over ache assaulted his senses with shrieks from every muscle and nerve in his battered frame. Blood? No, he decided, not his own but sticky on his skin and clothes just the same. “How long?” his groggy mind asked.
        The floor was hard and cold beneath him and a dim light – Marrik’s? – shone at an eerie angle, rising from the floor a few feet to his left to cast surreal shadows on the walls. Why so dark in here? His weapon lay on the floor to his right and instinctively his hand groped for it. Gaining purchase, he dragged it closer with a rasping sound that echoed in the silence. The feel of the stark, cool metal offered him some primal comfort.
        He struggled to a sitting position and bone-jarring pain surged up Dannel’s spine dashing itself like a wave on the back of his skull. He winced and sardonically acknowledged to himself that the battle must have gone well if he could accomplish so much. The surrounding carnage and the fact that he seemed intact told him it could easily have been much worse. “How much worse?” he thought with a start.
        There were bodies and parts of bodies everywhere. His eyes sought familiar shapes among the dead. The light – Marrik’s! The dim light escaping from beneath his crumpled body shone an ugly red. Dead. Very much so. No doubts -- torn nearly in half.
        There… some ten feet away… Lirra. Slumped against the wall, bloody, a gash in her face running from her forehead down her right cheek nearly to her chin. Her weapon was still in her hand. Well, she never was one to retreat.
        Dannel revised his initial assumption. The battle had not gone well at all. He crawled across the gore-strewn floor to Lirra. Maybe, just maybe…
        No – now that he was close to her, Dannel realized that “gash” simply did not convey the severity of her wound. It was a narrow wound, to be sure, but it was much, much deeper than he had first guessed in the near-darkness. There was not the slightest glint of life in her still open eyes. He closed them for her with an unsteady hand then forced himself to sit beside her.
        So, she, too, had fallen victim to the enemy’s futile last stand. Futile, yes, but at such cost. As far as Dannel was concerned, it was all but impossible to distinguish victor from vanquished. He grimaced at the thought. So many good Marines. From all appearances, Dannel, just a common grunt sergeant in the assault force, might be the only survivor of the battle. A bleak prospect considering the fact that the R’hu-Lyyl would certainly mount a decisive counteroffensive as quickly as they could. He knew – they had all known – that if the enemy could stall the Regiment’s advance and launch an effective counterattack, humanity’s last hope for victory would falter as well.
        He pondered that thought for a moment before focusing on his grim tactical situation. The butchery must have come from the explosion of an anti-personnel device, the enemy’s final option as their defensive position was overrun. Had to be AP, he thought – in the confines of the complex, the concussive force of a high explosive charge would have killed them all, friend and foe alike. Even the force of an AP charge would have been enough had this been a smaller chamber with fewer open corridors leading from it. Even so, it appeared the fragments or flechettes had been more than enough. His eyes wandered back to the lifeless heap that was once Marrik. Dannel recalled those last seconds -- the final assault -- as Lirra, Marrik, and he charged into the great underground vault. As the designated rear guard for the assault force, they had been partially shielded by the remainder of the squad, not that this fact was of much comfort to Marrik or Lirra.
        He turned his head to the right again, back to Lirra. From this side she looked like she was only sleeping. He pushed the wishful thought from his mind and focused on the situation at hand. He pressed the small self-test button on the grip of his gauss rifle. When the indicator failed to flash blue, he pressed it again. The result was the same – as dead as his fellow Marines. Without an armory specialist, his high-tech weapon was no more than an unwieldy club. He checked Lirra’s rifle then. It was dented along the upper surface of the accelerator coil housing, but tested blue. He tugged and her death grip loosened on the grip.
        Lirra’s comm-gear also appeared intact. Regiment would want a report. What would he say? What could he say? “Sector 15 secure, Colonel. Third Regiment all present or accounted for. Casualties slightly higher than predicted. Moving on to primary objective.” Laughter echoed in the dimly lit chamber, down the dark corridors. It took Dannel by surprise, an awkward moment as he recognized his own muffled laughter in his left ear. Instinctively, he reached to his other ear and felt the wetness. The concussive force of the blast had been enough to deafen his right ear and dull his hearing in the other. Well, no one here was going to be talking to him, anyway.
        Dannel set himself to the grisly task of removing Lirra’s comm harness, a task made much more difficult with Lirra’s blood making everything unmanageably slick. Yet, it had to be done. It was a messy, gut-wrenching chore and Dannel paused several times fighting back the urge to empty his stomach.
        “Come on, baby, talk to me. Give me a green light,” Dannel prayed. With the mic in one hand and the harness in the other, he thumbed the power switch. Nothing. He tried it again – still no luck. He slapped it hard enough to make his palm sting, thumbed the switch again, then grunted an anatomically impossible obscenity. So, that settles that. Dannel flung the useless equipment across the chamber. There was a short series of plasteel clacks as gravity reclaimed it, then the comm gear skittered noisily across the floor until it came to rest in the not so distant darkness.
        Without tactical comm capabilities he could expect no help from Regiment HQ, or anyone else for that matter, so he had to assume it was up to him to complete this mission. His head throbbed. Damn, Dannel, think! First things first. Get your bearings, Marine.
        Fighting back the nausea and dizziness, Dannel stood shakily for the first time since the assault force was chewed to bits. Being cautious in the near-darkness, he stepped over and around the remnants of the squad to Marrik. There, he knelt down to retrieve Marrik’s mini-spotlight, wiping the corporal’s blood from the warm lens as best as he could. Dannel used it to search out his helmet and headgear, carefully avoiding the area where Lirra was sprawled. He had seen enough of her in the dim light to know he didn’t want to see more.
        Blood notwithstanding, his headgear seemed to be in serviceable condition, so he slipped it on and jacked into his pack. He slid the IR/UV goggles down over his eyes and the chamber came to garish life in the unearthly hues of the enhanced visual display. He toggled off Marrik’s spot and was about to drop it when it occurred to him to keep it just in case. He clipped it to his web harness.
        Dannel had his “eyes” back and began reassessing the mission’s chances as he donned his helmet. He wondered why he even bothered with it. The weapons on this battlefield were capable of producing destruction far beyond the protective attributes of his lightweight plasteel brainbucket. He shrugged, and acknowledged it as simply one more odd fragment of deeply ingrained military training.
        He set off toward the far side of the great chamber, to the leftmost of three large corridors that led deeper into the complex. Along the way he managed to pick up three magazines of ammo for his rifle. No, he corrected himself – for Lirra’s rifle. They each held fifty steel-jacketed depleted uranium pellets. He ignored other magazines he passed along the way. If he needed more ammo than that, he reasoned, the R’hu-Lyyl had won this round anyway.
        Before he began the trek down the long, darkened corridor, Dannel turned and shouted back to his comrades, “Sorry, guys. We all knew where this was going when we signed on. See ya soon.” He gritted his teeth and started off at a slow, painful trot.
        Hewn from the stone deep beneath this remote mountain in the Canadian Rockies, the corridor sloped gently downward, making Dannel’s progress slightly less arduous, but the headache was refusing to go away. At the moment, that didn’t matter – the mission wasn’t over. And, he reflected, when the mission was over, it still wouldn’t matter. He continued on, ever deeper into the facility.
        Dannel passed several branching passageways, dozens of sealed doors. The air was heavy, and worse for the smells of battle. Trusting his pre-mission briefings, he located the blast door he sought. It was small, as nondescript as any of the others he had passed. But this one was marked “G-Level, N42”. The numeric pad of the cypherlock glowed a ghostly pale blue. Dannel strained to remember. His head pounded with every beat of his heart. His fingers punched in “25540 63468”. The glow panel flashed “DENIED”.
        He stepped back for a moment. He took a deep breath of the stale air to try clearing his head. He unslung the gauss rifle and leaned it against the wall beneath the cypherlock.
        25540 64368…
        “DENIED”
        Dannel couldn’t have felt worse if he had been kicked in the stomach. He was sweating in the cool corridor. What was it they had said about the cypherlock and the third try? Dannel dug into his memory… He closed his eyes and forced himself to “see” Gunnery Sergeant Saxxon in his mind.


        “Listen up, troops. I’m gonna ‘splain this to ya just once. And unless ya want a filthy R’hu-Lyyl bastard datin’ your sweet Suzy, you’ll listen up. You got me, jarheads?”
        “Yes, Gunnery Sergeant.”
        “I can’t hear you…”
        “YES, GUNNERY SERGEANT!” The shout was deafening...
        “Thursday’s assault is gonna knock them R’hu-Lyyl down and put ‘em in their rightful place in the cosmos. For that to happen, YOU WILL remember the objective. You WILL remember the ACCESS CODE. We don’t know how many of us are gonna make it through to the objective, but we DO know that we only got three chances to unlock that door. If the code is entered wrong three times in a day, the door will lockdown for 24 hours. Now, just in case I need to remind you, YOU DON’T HAVE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. Get it right. You’ll all get the code in your specialized training sessions, but for any of you hardheads what can’t absorb things that way, the code is…”


        25540 63648… Dannel’s hand trembled.
        The glow panel flashed green and the door opened with a clatter and hiss. Dannel snapped up Lirra’s gauss rifle. He took one last look in the direction he had come and then slipped into the room. He engaged the main switch on the wall to the right of the door. Again, the door spoke with metallic finality as it closed him off from the outside world.
        Slowly the room flickered back to life. For decades this room had lain dormant, a relic of a nearly forgotten age: the ultimate deterrent.
        So this is it. This is the legendary Ragnarok control room. Well, let’s just see if my training sessions at Regimental HQ did any good…


        Dannel knew just how serious humanity was that the R’hu-Lyyl would expand their empire no further into human-controlled space. Now, they, too, would know. The insignificant blue planet, third from the star the humans called Sol, ceased to exist in the flash of the induced supernova. In an infinitesimal instant, his atoms were shredded into countless subatomic particles and scattered outward in the fierce burst of light.
        The R’hu-Lyyl Lord Commander, his flagship, his elite shock troops, his combat divisions, his armada, his swarm of air/space superiority fighters… In less time than it takes to blink, all vanished in the expanding wave of intense energy. In the deep silence of space, the humans, once thought soft and weak-willed, had raised their undeniable shout of defiance.


        With a shudder, Sergeant Dannel Grant “woke” as the signal to his simjack cut off. He blinked in the fluorescent glare of the Regimental Training Center. Across from him, Corporal Lirra Neil was also “reorienting”. His eyes met hers. Her tears said it more poignantly, more eloquently, but Dannel also knew: Thursday was gonna be hell no matter what…









I, James K Bowers, hereby grant permission to writers participating in installment seven of 'The Project' to post in Elfwood the segment I wrote as the creative focus for Project#7, which includes the title 'Aftermath' and the first six (6) paragraphs above (totaling approximately 300 words). This permission for any given Project writer shall become null and void should that writer be in violation of any of Elfwood's restrictions, which may include, but are not limited to (a) non-genre subject matter, (b) profanity, (c) excessive violence, (d) graphic sex, (e) fan-fiction, or (f) any other just restriction imposed by the staff or management of the Elfwood site. Whether any given writer's Project#7 work is accepted at Elfwood will be left to the discretion of the Elfwood moderators, coordinators, and/or the ERB. Permission for Project writers to publish or post this segment somewhere other than Elfwood is not granted by the above statement, however such permission(s) may be requested separately.