DT 2022: Nightfall

The darkest night Sergeant Viktoria Bradford ever knew descended upon the rubble of Camp Iskandar. Where the occasional fire from wreckage and fuel burnt brighter in the shadows, their glow became miniscule like hundreds of candles in a sealed cavern.
The lights could bring no depth to the dark. A blackness deeper than night where even night vision became almost useless. Distant voices whispered in the remains of the blinded, dusty battlefield – soldiers calling out to one another and wondering if the enemy really did leave the fight.
The Jiralhanae brutes spent the last week pounding the human military base into dust with rocket artillery, vacuum bombs, and plasma fire. By the beginning of the assault, the Covenant military already controlled the skies as they invaded the distant human colony of Minab. Their bombers and ships rained hellfire down on civilians and military alike.
Building structures melted into lava or lahar, joining waves of melted metal and mud in sinking entire towns across the planet. Iskandar and its UNSC Army garrison put up a valiant fight. On three separate occasions, they took the fight outside their fenced perimeter into surrounding enemy-conquered territory only routed back behind their security walls every single time.
The Jiralhanae shock troopers pushed into the camp from the holes they made and introduced themselves to Army Rangers by ripping off limbs and biting off heads. The UNSC troopers called them Brutes for a reason and for once Viktoria was glad to go sleepless for days on end. It kept the images of her friends’ faces in alien jaws at bay. Teeth sliding into soft flesh, squirming broken spines, and blood gushing from open tears. And even in the flashes of gunfire, watching their eyes dilate as souls left their bodies.
Becoming a medic meant firing a weapon and bearing the lonely weight of staying near those beyond-saving in their final moments. Viktoria held the hands of the chaplains as they joined their gods on Days Two and Six of attack. Since then, she wore more than one hat and one role among the friends and fellow survivors she had left.
Viktoria lost count of how many bear-sized aliens she gunned down through the smoke. She lost count of how many hands she held, goodbyes said, and faces she could not offer medicine too. They ran out of bio-foam and medical gelatin on Day Three. Pain killers, stimulants, and makeshift numbing cocktails soon followed as Viktoria ran out of ways to take away the hurt.
The medic out from beneath the bent and scorched overhang which once wrapped around the subterranean bunker she peeked from. Nuclear cruise missiles brought down two SDV-type alien corvettes during a first glassing attempt. Viktoria could still imagine even in the darkness how they floated, stalled, and crashed into great dust clouds on the base’s periphery. They still burned large portions of Camp Iskandar’s open grounds with their plasma lances but the base survived then.
Not this time. A quick glance towards the high pressure, reinforced doors proved a second attack would be successful. The doors were still there, at least most of them. But set at a thirty degree off-axis incline and major morphology in the shapes meant they would never seal again.
Viktoria looked up into the sky and spotted twinkling lights through the ever-familiar, smoke-choked clouds. She didn’t see stars. The silhouette of a sharp fin joined the darkest outline of several more indigo fins and edges. Trace it long enough and the medic grasped the clear picture. The end was near.
Her mind searched for the right words through her sleep-deprived mind, processing through years of military jargon and research on the Covenant military. Her mind locked on her husband words as he described the distinct profile of a dark purple alien warship the aliens referred to as “executioners.” The UNSC Navy knew them as a variety of destroyer-type vessels, most often of the CPV family, but not in the sense of historic or even contemporary definitions for naval destroyers by human terms.
No. It was a destroyer and an executioner. Not an escort or line combat vessel. A single purpose to destroy and decimate in support of groundside operations. CPV destroyers carried some of the strongest plasma lances in the Covenant Navy, specifically designed for glassing operations. Neville Bradford called them “city killers.”
There were no missile silos or racks left to launch munitions from. No ship-grade mass drivers or point-defense guns left to fire. There was no stall and no defense.
Camp Iskandar’s radio and laser transmitters long since died. Help wasn’t coming.
The end arrived.
Viktoria’s eyes dropped back to the obscure landscape hidden behind unfettered smoke, poison rain, and a night without evening. She heard boots clacking across stone, asphalt, and dirt and saw human shadows piercing through the debris to find cover and each other. Shouldering her MA5 assault rifle, she pinged her flashlight rapidly on-and-off barely piercing the darkness but having the intended effect.
Boots changed course, shadows shifted growing darker and closer. Soldiers punched through the fog of death and destruction and found each other at the last remnants of shelter among their fallen base.
The survivors exchanged few words, many breathing hard or covered with haphazardly strapped breathing masks. Some carried each other over shoulders and in fireman carries. Others limped and some sprinted by into cover. Viktoria forced herself to log every name tag that went by her.
Rivers, J. Bask, K. MacGregor, E. Adda, M. Lee, C. Tang, B. Melbourne, F. Livery, J. Tough, N.  And so many others.
Thirty-seven warm bodies all into the short cover of their former bunker. Once accepting she found the last life in a desolate field of death, Viktoria turned and staggered back down the stairwell into the shelter. At the base of the stairs, another dreary medic—Corporal James Travis—pressed into an abdominal wound already wrapped in a tight belt over a pair of sanitized towels now soaked in deep maroon blood. The wounded was Sergeant Paul Reisinger, an Army Ranger designated marksman. Someone she knew for a long time.
Nodding softly, Viktoria directed Corporal Travis to pull his hands away from the wound. She softly pressed her hands down on her teammate’s wound with a grim smile plastered on her lips as she looked on his strained, pale face.
“I guess help isn’t coming,” Reisinger muttered. He already took off all his combat gear and webbing. His helmet lay over the tossed gear to the sharpshooter’s side.
Viktoria didn’t exchange words, shaking her head. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t want to hear her own voice.
Travis punched the permacrete wall behind him in half-hearted frustration. They all knew the reality, but it was human nature not wanting it spelled out for them. It was in their nature to hope even in the end.
Viktoria forced herself to speak, coughing briefly to clear her throat from the smoky air she picked up from her brief break-and-reconnaissance up the stairwell.
“CPV destroyer overhead. I got as many people inside as I could. I’m sorry Rice… Paul… I’m sorry we couldn’t get you home.”
The sharpshooter’s hand rose to rest on Viktoria’s helmeted cheek. “Don’t guilt yourself. I didn’t get you back to your husband and daughter. I hope Neville and Andra are alright.”
“I hope so too…” Viktoria mumbled distantly as her eyes glanced back towards the stairwell but felt as if she looked further through it, across light years. To home.
There was a time she called the battlefield her home – because it was easy. Easy to focus and escape into the simplicity of war. The home front complicated so many things. But now, she missed it.
The warm embrace of her ever-loving husband. The familiar and always-close weight of a daughter she rarely held but would squeeze so hard to keep her far away from the monsters of this universe. She came to the world of Minab to protect them both. But now Viktoria was so far away from them too. She sought her warm bed and a loving embrace. The childhood coos of her mother, and caring voice of her father. She missed her homeworld and her home. She missed her friends and a warm, blue sky.
Burning tears dripped down Viktoria’s eyes and she attempted to blink them away to little success. She lifted her hands from Reisinger’s wound and adjusted his makeshift tourniquet to offer the gravely wounded man any degree of respite she could.
“Thank you,” the sharpshooter whispered as he continued to look pale but offered his own reassuring smile. Tears streamed down his own cheeks. “You’ve done all you could. I appreciate it. I always have.”
Viktoria nodded in acknowledgement. She could already feel the hair on her neck stand at attention. Goosebumps fluttering at the rising of new, rapid heat. The medic refused to look behind her as a new sun seemed to burn into the bunker from the breached security doors. She took up the thermal blanket that Reisinger left on his lap. She adjusted it up to his chest as a final act of goodwill which he nodded too even as the light and heat seem to grow closer in extreme intensity.
“Fuck,” Travis mumbled nearby as desperation leaked in his voice. “They’re just going to cook us, aren’t they?”
Viktoria ignored the curse and remark, instead adjusting herself against the permacrete wall next to Sergeant Reisinger. She unstrapped her Army CH252 helmet and set it on the ground, unfurling her highlighted, sun-kissed brown hair from its ponytail. She laid her loose hair on the sharpshooter’s shoulder along with her head, making herself comfortable.
“This is it then,” Reisinger noted, closing his eyes against the intensity of light as the rumbles of wind and earth rocked around them.
Viktoria hummed loudly in affirmation as sound became harder to hear. Travis wrapped his arm around Viktoria’s shoulder as many Army Rangers huddled against the coming hellfire.
Her mind flew far away to another planet and another time. To the daughter who waited for her to come home and the husband who hated to see her leave. Viktoria felt a pane of regret, knowing this path took her away from them. But she felt a dash of pride, knowing this long path she decided to go down so many years ago brought her these loved ones into her life. Viktoria made peace with this path a long time ago, but chose it even longer before.
She was a child again, briefly. Viktoria remembered hearing about the Covenant as a rumor on the horizon of her young teenage life still obsessing over a mountain climbing scholarship and which colonial university she wanted to attend. Not wars and death.
Viktoria chose to step down this path then. She would do it in a heartbeat again if the choice or opportunity arose in the infinitum of existence and the universe. She didn’t regret this. She refused to regret her choice. She lived her life; she went through all this struggle because she chose to protect her family. Now all she could hope was that the years spent far from home would be enough.
She could never know. But Viktoria hoped, and believed. The medic felt the heat envelop her in even greater blankets of energy as permacrete and titanium melted under intense pressure, heat, and plasma.
Light pressed through Viktoria’s clenched eyes. She knew light, and then darkness, and the nothing at all. In the void, she reserved one last dream of a youthful face with blue innocent eyes and curled, brown hair. A healthy daughter named Andra, safe and sound.
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories