Earth Year 2840. Forward Operating Base Aegis.
Four days of living in the FOB had burned away their adrenaline leaving only profound exhaustion.
"He owed me fifty credits,"
Chang whispered as he stared into the campfire flames and shuffled a frayed deck of playing cards.
"Omar never paid his gambling debts anyway,"
Daniel replied.
"He always said he would pay us out after the next planetary drop"
Daniel added hollowly.
"I had his hand during the breach,"
Daniel breathed erratically staring at his shaking palms.
"I felt his fingers, Chang, he was looking at me before that thing wrapped around his waist and pulled, and I let go,"
Daniel confessed.
"Dan, you didn’t let go, that thing ripped him away,"
Chang argued as his voice was thick with unshed tears.
"If you hadn’t let go, it would have taken you into the dark too,"
Chang stated, dealing the Queen of Spades into the dirt.
"I can still hear him screaming every time I close my eyes,"
Daniel insisted, rubbing his eyes furiously.
"We were supposed to serve our four years, take our citizenship stipends and open that mechanic shop on the orbital ring,"
Daniel wept.
"Look at me, Dan,"
Ruby commanded firmly, kneeling in front of him and pressing his trembling hands between her own.
"You are nineteen years old, a kid from the hydroponic farms handed a rifle and told to fight cosmic monsters,"
she said fiercely.
"Omar knew the risks, he loved you guys and he wouldn’t want you sitting in the dark tearing your own mind apart over a fight you couldn’t win,"
Ruby assured him.
"The Abyss wants us to drown in the ’what ifs’,"
Zeon said softly, resting a comforting hand on Daniel’s shoulder plate.
"It feeds on our guilt and wants you to feel like you failed him so that the next time you hold a rifle, your hands shake too much to pull the trigger,"
Zeon explained swallowing the lump in his throat.
"Zeon, How do you and Ruby act so calm?"
Chang asked, his face broken.
"We aren’t calm Chang, I’m terrified every second,"
Zeon admitted as he sat beside the fire.
"But back in Ark City, when the Enforcers used to sweep our block, if you stopped moving to cry over the people who got taken, you were next,"
Zeon recounted.
"You didn’t get the luxury of grieving until you survived the night,"
Zeon stated grimly.
"We survive for Omar now and we carry him with us,"
Ruby told Daniel quietly pressing her shoulder against Zeon’s to anchor themselves.
"Every time you fire that rifle and every time we take a breath on this planet, it is for him"
Ruby concluded.
Daniel slowly nodding before squeezing Ruby’s hands and picking up his rifle rag.
Three miles away, Captain Eva Diane sat on a fallen bone wood log in the humid, luminescent jungle as her plasma machete resting across her lap.
"Take a break and let your suit’s servos cool down,"
Eva had told N032 twenty minutes ago though the armored man had not moved since.
The manual override sequence you used to seal the quarantine door back on the Aegis,"
Eva said casually, taking a slow swig from her canteen.
"It’s a highly classified fail safe cipher that only ranking Engineering Officers and federation Intelligence are taught,"
She pointed out as N032 stared into the glowing foliage.
"Standard protocol,"
N032 replied, his featureless visor giving nothing away.
"It is not standard, just like your combat stance isn’t standard,"
Eva countered, leaning forward.
"I’ve watched you parry, you drag your left heel slightly like a street brawler but you compensate for it with flawless elite military footwork,"
Eva analyzed.
"You know our weapons intimately, you know our comms frequencies and you knew how that psychic parasite operated,"
the Captain pressed.
"The universe is vast Captain, and patterns repeat,"
N032 deflected smoothly.
"Don’t give me cryptic deflections, I have four traumatized kids relying on you in that cave,"
Eva demanded, her voice shedding its sharp military bite for weary sincerity.
"Maroon trusts you because you are a weapon, but I don’t trust weapons I don’t understand, I need to know the man holding the sword,"
she requested.
"I am not on any roster you possess Captain Diane,"
N032 replied with an exhaustion that transcended physical fatigue.
"Then take off the helmet and show me your face,"
Eva asked quietly.
"If you are human, show me you bleed like the rest of us while we sit in an alien jungle waiting for monsters to find us,"
She requested.
N032 slowly running his metal fingers over a scar carved into the side of his helmet plating.
"If I take off this helmet, it will break someone you care about,"
N032 whispered as the vocal distortion failing to hide the bleeding sorrow in his voice.
"It will break the life they are supposed to walk,"
N032 warned.
"Break who, Zeon or Ruby?"
Eva frowned, her tactical mind hitting a wall of impossible implications.
"There are wounds that flesh can heal from Captain, and there are wounds that shatter the mind,"
N032 continued.
"Seeing the face beneath this iron and seeing what the future does to a soul is a reality they are not ready to bear,"
N032 explained, staring up at the violet cracks in the cosmic sky.
"They need to believe that they can win because if they look at me, they will only see what it inevitably costs,"
The anomaly revealed.
"For what it’s worth, whatever life you walked to get here... you don’t have to carry it alone anymore because we are a squad,"
Eva said softly, resting a gentle hand against his cold pauldron.
N032 offering a slow nod to her before hoisting the colossal supply crate back onto his shoulder with a quiet groan of metal.
"Rest time is over Captain, let’s go home,"
N032 murmured.