For What It's Worth

He almost left him. It would've been that easy.
Spartan Bryce Day, once Sergeant First Class Bryce Day, knelt staring at the Marine's prone form before him, fighting the very hypertense nerves which had kept him alive day after day. Gunshots, screams, and the processed growling of Promethean war constructs echoed in the mossy crags—intentionally shaped by some alien artisan eons ago—all around him, his now-superhuman hearing screaming their alarmingly short distance to demand he scramble for cover, and yet, in the open, he held still.
The devastated body lying before him still breathed—but just barely. A dozen patches on his fatigues were saturated almost black with blood, his ribcage half-collapsed after one of the towering, steel Knights had swept him aside like a rag doll, a footnote to the entire squad its Incineration Cannon had disintegrated before the damn thing's armor was breached by Day's assault rifle, collapsing it inwards like an unstable matrix of dust until nothing was left behind. If that weren't enough, the near-miss cannon blast had evaporated the man's right arm up to the bloody elbow, and Day couldn't tell which would was more responsible for the sobbing cries bubbling up through his crimson-flooded lips.
In other words, not in fighting shape. And for that crime, Day almost left him to die.
Not to say that Sergeant Bryce Day wouldn't have done the same—all reasonable military procedure dictated you kill the enemy before you can attempt to help your friend. Anything other than that military wisdom was plain stupidity. But Day hadn't joined the Spartans to follow conventional military wisdom. He'd joined because he'd seen firsthand how the last generation of Spartans had done the impossible, held the damn line where he and every good Army trooper he'd known had failed to protect the people counting on them. Wasn't their fault, they were up against a xenophobic empire of technologically and numerically superior aliens, but impossible odds like that didn't matter to the victims. And they hadn't mattered to those Spartans, either.
He'd joined because he wanted to contribute, and have it matter like that. Spartan training, though, had nearly crushed that out of him again. Taught him you didn't make a difference with loud speeches or well-lit photo ops, but with cold, hard calculus. Those Spartans he'd seen before had only happened to save him because it made sense for the mission. And here, looking at a man who couldn't help Bryce's mission, and who Bryce couldn't do anything to save anyway, that ruthless calculus nearly let him leave a man to die alone, knowing his life had been deemed not worth the trouble. The near-perversion of his reasons for bettering himself was chilling.
A lightrifle bolt blazed by, so close Day knew only he could be the shooter's mark. Nerves yanked at him, desperate to pull away. He ignored them. As quickly as he dared, he leaned forward and made every effort to lift the prone Marine with as little movement as possible, keeping his own body, armor and energy shield oriented to take whatever shots may come—they didn't wait long. As soon as he'd taken a step towards his comrades' forward position, a second bolt slammed into his shoulder. Energy shielding flared gold with crackling, angular lines. His helmet blared shrill alarms directly in his ears, and this time Day was all too eager to let adrenaline sweep him on his way.
Even at a Spartan sprint, it was long seconds to safety, during any of which an Incineration Cannon or Binary Rifle could've swept over the field and found him as its target, but there wasn't much room for turning back now. Spying a handful of Marines peeking from behind the cover of an outcropping, Day dashed toward them and in a moment had crossed behind the safety of the stone blind.
"I need a medic, here," Day commanded, glancing rapidly for something resembling a flat surface to lay the man down on. One of the Marines left their position to approach, pulling out a scanning tool—only to close it a moment later.
"Sorry, Spartan, he's already gone."
Day looked again at the man in his arms. The blood patches covered more than the clean fatigues, now, and nothing more gurgled from his bloody lips. Shaken, Day carefully lay the body in the moss, propping his back up against the canyon wall. As if it would matter to the man anymore.
"Not often you get a body left, fighting these things." The medic remarked, and traded his scanner for a rifle as he returned to his post. "We'll make sure to call for a CASEVAC."
Bryce wondered if it had been adrenaline or the armor's insulation to keep him from noticing when the man died in his arms. Had moving him been the final straw? No, the man had been long past the point of saving when Bryce had stopped in the first place. So what the hell had he been trying to accomplish?
A flurry of boltshot impacted on the Marines' cover, blowing away chunks of powdered stone. The rest of Fireteam Discens would still be needing him. This had amounted to not much more than a distraction. All the same, Day entertained as he turned and readied himself to get back to work, maybe when the man had died, he'd known someone was at least trying to save him.
Category:Demons of Hope