A Reassembled Man

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Saint Erasmus Naval Hospital - Veterans Wing, 2526
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“How did it happen?” The technician stopped adjusting a screw in the back of the man’s wrist actuator for a moment, “if you don’t mind me asking.”
The man involuntarily winced from the nerve pain as the technician resumed his work with a twist his tiny screwdriver. 
“I lost it back when I was in the navy,” he replied.
Which battle?” Asked the technician, raising an eyebrow. 
“It wasn’t a battle. Weren’t really many of those during our campaign."
“Oh?” the technician removed the screw he’d been working out, placing it in a metal dish on the table beside him with a clink, and started working on another.
“It was back when the Insurrectionists hijacked Phoenix Spaceways Flight 320 from Mirage, if you remember the news coverage.” The man looked down at the exposed electromechanical linkages that made up his lower right arm. “When they sent out their distress signal, my ship moved to intervene but we hit a mine on the way.”
“That’s terrible.” 
“It holed us across three decks. I was asleep on a stowage locker on damage control duty when the alarm went off. Not that we needed it to know what had happened.”
“When were you injured? During the blast?”
“No,” the man said, shaking his head. “We had fires throughout the ship and the damage to the environmental controls was so bad that we couldn’t vent to put them out. The damage control officer had us manually vent off the compartments one by one, but a bunch still had crew in them. It was slow going and their oxygen burned out before we could get to very many of them.”
“Jesus Christ...” the technician shook his head.
“Last thing I remember is we were cutting into a collapsed bulkhead to get to whoever was still alive in the starboard mess. We got through the bulkhead and started to pump them pressurized O2…” The man swallowed dryly. “When we got the compartment back up to one atmo and got them breathing, the hydrogen alarms started going. Guess a line in the wall ruptured and had dumped the entire compartment with hydrogen. When the room oxygenated it found a spark and...well.”
“You’re lucky to be alive, sir,” the technician said. Another screw clinked into the metal dish. “You could have lost a lot more than just your arm in a blast like that.”
The words sat in the man’s head like a boulder in an empty field as the technician continued his adjustments. To him, he had lost a lot more than an arm. He had lost people who he had served next to for years. He had lost friends. He had seen things, felt things, that no average civilian could possibly understand. That’s partly why he stopped trying to get them to. 
And for what did those friends die? The man asked himself that a lot. He felt he had grown more aware now of what the conflict with the Insurrection really was: A big ole’ clusterfuck in which they call us fascists, we call them terrorists, the UEG doubles down on defense spending so corporations make trillions, and then hundreds of thousands of people die.
The man didn’t hate them necessarily. The Innies. He hated their methods but not them. He understood that most of the time the UEG had given those systems no other option than armed conflict, and many politicians on Earth were using the perpetuation of the “Innie” to drive fear into the heart of the public so that they didn’t see any issue in buying another multi-trillion dollar warship to fight organizations that rely on retrofitting sixty year old tugboats with mining drivers for space defense. The man was sick of the conflict and sick of the almost pointless nature of it all. That’s why the man left the navy after his recovery. He had not only lost his arm but also his will to fight as a citizen of the UEG.
“Alright, how does that feel?” The technician’s voice disrupted the man’s thinking.
Flexing his newly reassembled hand, the man noticed that the nerve pain he had entered the hospital with that morning was mostly gone. The technician seemed to have done good work. Say what you will about the terrible lines at the Veterans’ Wing, the staff are amazing.
“Better,” the man said as he rolled down his shirt sleeve. “Thank you.”
“If that’s all, you’re good to go,” the Technician returned his tools to a tray on the opposite side of the examination room. “You can pick up your patient data-card from Molly at the front desk when you check out.”
“Alright.”
The technician left, leaving the door open as he went. The man sat alone in the examination room for a moment, listening a while to the commotion of the office hallway outside, before heading for the check out desk. When the man stepped out of the building with his patient documents in hand the sky was a bright blend of blue and violet and the city air was hot and stagnate. He had almost reached for his chatter to call a ride-share but decided he wanted to walk the twelve blocks back to his apartment instead, taking his usual route home.
Along the way he noticed a few pods of pedestrians huddled together watching something on the screen of a chatter. Not an unusual sight as insurrectionist terror attacks were growing more common as of late. The news services usually obsess about the story for a week then move on until another skyscraper is bombed or another ship is stolen in some distant corner of the galaxy. 
The man decided he would catch up when he got to his apartment and left the chatter in his pocket as to enjoy the walk free of distraction. Rounding the last corner before his building, he was stopped by a crowd of people so large it blocked the entire sidewalk. They were all standing in front of the coffee shop the man liked to visit in the mornings and were staring up at the screens that were mounted on the building’s wall in the outdoor seating area.
Seeing as he couldn’t pass, the man stopped to see what they were watching.
"“BREAKING NEWS: Harvest Colony Annihilated. Hostile Intelligent Alien Life Encountered For the First Time.
An estimated three million dead…
Dozens of UNSC ships destroyed by an unknown alien warship... 
An anonymous reliable source from the Office of Naval Intelligence has leaked to us a transmission from the Aliens sent out during the first engagement…
"Your destruction is the will of the gods, and we are their instrument."
We are left unsure of their further intentions. The UEG has prepared a joint CMA and UNSC press conference for...”" 
“Oh my God,” someone in the crowd said.
“What happens now?” Asked another.
Soon people in the crowd were calling family members on their chatters, covering their open mouths with their palms, or walking away entirely.
The man knew what the alien's “further intentions" were. He quickly used his chatter to request a ride-share, walking away from the crowd of frantic civilians on the sidewalk. Soon, a slick black sedan pulled up to the curb and the man got in. 
“Where to?” asked the driver.
“The naval recruitment depot at Wesley Spaceport.”
This was the first time since before he had left the Navy that the man felt like there was something in the world worth fighting for that wasn’t entangled with corrupt interplanetary politics, terrorism, and greed. A cause that everyone alive had a stake in, no matter their world or ideology. 
The man had regained a will to fight for something.
Humanity.
Category:The Weekly