Chapter Forty-Five: Heart to heart
April 20th, en route to Kentares system
"Tell me why I need to start working on this now?" I asked Sheppard and the assembled staff.
"Because if you don't then we're going to let Kerensky know where you've been hiding." Sheppard grinned at me.
"Fine," I responded. "Give me the list that I know Dunham has prepared, and we'll start going through and getting staff together for both the planet and Sharpshooter Manufacturing."
"Thank you," Peterson said. "We don't want you working yourself into an early grave like you were doing after the Lancers."
"I'm going to be asking for y'all you help me sort out this noble bureaucracy stuff." I shrugged. "I've never been a noble before."
"We'll help you out." Sheppard said. "Now I believe I have a bet to win." Sheppard nodded at Mathis, and they both grabbed onto an arm.
"This is mutiny I say! Mutiny!" I yelled. "Packer help me out, please." I made sure to look as pitiful as possible.
"Sorry Colonel, no can do." Packer said, turning his back on me. "I'm getting a cut of the proceeds after all."
"Peterson?" I asked
" Sorry boss… I Promised Hanse I'd help Sheppard with this plan…"
"Mutiny?" Sheppard chuckled. "We're just making sure our CO is well taken care of…"
Kentares IV Draconis March, Federated Suns April 27th, 3011
It was nice being home again. I smelled the fresh air, and looked around at the farm I had left. The Chickens and pigs had been taken care of by Peterson's wife Francesca while I was gone. And the farm air was pleasant to me. I made to walk inside, reaching for my keys, but something seemed off to me, and I began to back away from my house, moving to the pistol I always had on me. I didn't draw it yet, I didn't know what was wrong, but I could feel something off. My chickens were unusually quiet as well. As if they knew that there was a predator nearby. Finally drawing my pistol, I went for my comms device to call in backup when my house exploded.
"Ahh Fuck." I said as I pulled myself to my feet. I looked down, seeing a shard of metal embedded in my left arm right below the artery. Quickly, I grabbed the tourniquet from my med pouch and went through the process of threading the velcro through the belt style clip and yanking towards myself as hard as I could. "Dammit." I grit out as the wound throbbed worse while I turned the windlass until my arm began to go numb. Locking it into the notch, I latched the velco down. Running my hands over the rest of my body to do a status check, I noted that I had blood draining from my ears. Probably because my eardrums had burst. There were other minor injuries, but the worst one was my arm. Well, that and the broken wrist on my right hand.
Keeping my weapon in my hand, I began to analyze my environment. If someone had bombed me it stood to reason that they would have someone stationed to finish the job. With that in mind. I dropped down, making sure to get low and behind cover. If someone wanted me dead, they'd have to try a lot harder than that. I couldn't hear anything, so if someone was trying to be sneaky they'd probably succeed.
Once I had reached reasonable concealment at the very least, I began to try and figure some things out. Not being able to hear more than muffled sounds was making me angry for once. And the fact that I wasn't able to hear if backup was coming or not was a really bad thing, especially if it were more than just me under attack.
With me not being able to hear, I knew that I would need to stay down until someone came to bail me out. I grabbed one of the smaller sheets of metal that had made up a part of my house without thinking about my broken wrist. Grunting at the pain, I dragged it over to my brick wall, and leaned it over as a makeshift shelter which I then climbed in to finish treating my wounds.
Grabbing my medbag and ripping it off of my hip, I opened it up. I started with the shears and cut my shirt off. I had been wearing body armor for years and so had three layers on. When the shirt was off, I grabbed the cleaning pads, and began to go over the biggest cuts and scrapes first. Making sure that everything was cleaned out before doing anything further. My tourniquet hurt, but it was making sure that I wasn't bleeding out and so I left it. The shart of metal that was in my arm had gone entirely through the meaty part of my muscle just below my artery and there was still a good six inches sticking out.
It took a little while before someone had managed to get to me. It may have been five minutes, it may have been three hours. I wouldn't have been able to tell. My perception of time was skewed right now. When I saw a suit of Mithril lifting up the sheet of metal I had used as cover, I pointed my sidearm at it. Not caring that it might be one of my people. It wasn't like I could hear them identify themselves after all. After about a minute of them trying to communicate with me, the Mithril operator pulled her helmet off. Kerensky had shown up to rescue me.
"I can't hear anything." I repeated. Making sure that I was understood. "I need a medic." I then took stock of my left arm, right wrist, and the rest of my body. "Correction. I need surgery."
Natasha visibly sagged, and another Mithril operator hit the ground next to her. Taking of their helmet and revealing Sheppard.
"He can't hear you, Sheppard." Kerensky told him. "I'm pretty sure the explosion damaged his eardrums."
Sheppard looked and saw the dried blood in and below my ears.
"Get him to the med station." Sheppard said. "I've still got fires to put out."
I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I knew that I was about to lose consciousness. I could feel my body and brain trying to withdraw for rest, and I refused in favor of staying awake. I knew that I might have a concussion as well because of how hard I had been thrown, and so even though my body was screaming at me to rest I ignored it. I needed to be awake so that I could stay alive.
Kerensky put her helmet back on, and used the Mithril's strength and speed to take me as quickly as she could to the nearest medical facility that we had set up.
When she reached the door, it slid open quickly and let her bring me in and hand me off to the doctors and nurses at the ready. She kept a careful eye out though, if someone had been able to set up bombs in the Colonel's house, who knew what else might be in place.
Agro, Kentares IV Orbit April 29th, 3011
"Did anyone get the name of the dropship that ran me over?" I asked, pleased to be able to hear again even if I was in a lot of pain.
"I believe the word you are looking for is bomb." Natasha Kerensky said from the corner.
"Yeah, I kinda figured that." I gestured to the cast on my wrist and the slightly fixed cuts and scrapes all over me. "What with the massive hole in my arm and everything."
"You're lucky you wear body armor everywhere." The head doctor told me. "And I'm surprised that you carry a medbag with you. The tourniquet was a touch that we hadn't thought to have in our own field kits."
"Fortune, God, and Murphy all favor the prepared." I replied. "And I knew something was going to happen soon. We've caused too much damage to the Capellans for them to let us go without any responses." I tried to shrug and then winced.
"Need me to prescribe some painkillers Colonel?" The doctor asked.
"No." I shook my head and moved to get up. "What was the damage caused?" I looked at my self proclaimed bodyguard. "Kerensky, do you know how bad it was?"
"Sheppard sent me an update an hour ago." She responded. "MASK sent some infiltrators in with the private contractors we had building the houses and dorms. They smuggled in some inferno gel and shoulder mounted SRM's." She shrugged. "They screwed up though. None of them went for the stashes of gel and stuff until after your house exploded. By that time, most of us were already in Mithril and made short work of them."
"How much did we lose Kerensky?" I asked, I figured being blunt would get a direct answer.
"We lost a good bit of the factory that TTI was working on. Thankfully none of the employees were there…" She trailed off. "Peterson's wife died in the explosion, along with McKay and Commodore Frye's husband."
"Fuck." I said. "I'm going to have to hold everyone back from starting a personal vendetta against the Capellans after this." I muttered. "Kerensky, help me get up. We've got some red tape to cut through."
"I can't let you do that Mark." She told me, moving to stand in front of the door. "Doc said you couldn't get up until she cleared you of the concussion and they just operated on your eardrums." She crossed her arms in front of her chest. "Sheppard and the rest of the team have got this and we sent a courier in the Messenger for assistance in setting up a bureaucracy."
"I get it." I leaned back. "I just hate feeling useless." I confided in Natasha. "I know up here in my head that I'm not useless right now, but it always takes a while to internalize that kind of knowledge."
"Sure does." Natasha looked at me seriously. "It took the entire first year of being here to even begin to understand any of this." She gestured to the ship, and I understood she meant the Marksman in general. "Where I am from, no one is important unless they are a warrior. And you aren't even relevant then until you've earned a last name, a bloodname." she stopped and smiled sadly. "There is no family there, no love, only the cold hard forceful application of survival of the fittest. And you don't even realize it when you're in there that it's so cold and devoid of love. You're just happy that you survived. And glad that it proved you were the fittest." She inhaled. "But with that comes arrogance. For you to not just prove that you are a great warrior, but to prove that you are among the only ones to have earned a name."
"And then, you are only known by that name. All of your achievements?!" Natasha started to get loud and her face flushed with anger. "They don't even matter besides what was contributed to the name, which is never your own." She visibly took breaths to calm herself down. "What is the point of life?" She asked. "If it is never truly your own?"
Authors note: I don't actually know where Natasha's Spiel came from. I'm honestly just as surprised as you probably were at this chapter. I had started with some thing entirely different in both my storyboard and my outline and ended up with this when the characters started talking...