I had been a soldier for the better part of a decade. As I said before, I had been involved in twelve planetfalls during my long career. I say long, because most soldiers don't live out their first year. By the fifth year of service, almost ninety percent of soldiers that began serving in the same year have died.
Our military machine is that inefficient, at least in terms of keeping its soldiers alive. From the perspective of successfully combating the enemy, it is extremely effective. With humans spread across the galaxy in such numbers, we can afford to throw soldiers at the enemy like cannon fodder. Even a group of people armed with nothing but solid-shot weapons, a technology unchanged for thousands of years, will be effective if there's enough of them.
So we throw ourselves at the enemy en-masse for the most part. We suffer a horrific casualty rate. It works. About sixty-three billion people across the galaxy entered the service the same year I did. That was nine years and eight months ago. Now there were probably no more than a thousand of us left. What did my "generation" sell their lives for? I used to think it was for nothing until I was given this mission.
This is all by way of saying that I may be the most experienced foot soldier within seventy solar systems of Tark. I had seen my share of battles and then some. As a direct result I had lost consciousness a number of times. The first time was in my first battle, when an enemy vessel decided it would be a good idea to fire on our ground force from orbit with a quick burst from its N-gun. Since a short burst from an N-gun only negates the very first thing it makes contact with, the atmosphere of that particular planet was eliminated, rather than us.
We were spared being erased from existence, but suddenly the air we were breathing was gone. Exposed to a sudden vacuum it took me eight agonizing seconds to lose consciousness. Of course, the air from outside the effective zone of the n-gun rushed back in after a short time. That's how I survived, but I was unconscious for a few days from the effects of vacuum exposure.
The second time was when I took a laser through the neck during a siege of an automated enemy emplacement on a large asteroid orbiting a gas giant. The emplacement had heavy weaponry that could seriously damage our fleet, and I was part of the group selected for the 'honor' of 'covertly' 'disabling' it.
To this day I'm not entirely sure how I survived being lasered in the neck through my vacuum suit. If the laser hadn't killed me you would think the vacuum would. Even though I survived, it must have been bad because I woke up weeks later in a regeneration chamber. It took me about nine more days to remember how to swallow.
Ive had dozens of similar experiences, all of them involving a loss of consciousness that lasted anywhere from a day to a month. There in the crater on Tark 5 was the first time I had passed out for less than a minute. When I awoke the first thing I saw through my groggy vision was the automaton that had attacked us. It was a ruined pile of mangled metal smoldering on the crater floor. I grinned as I deliriously thought 'that will teach you to mess with me'.
Then the logical part of my brain awoke, and I realized that Mariv was likely responsible for its destruction. I turned my head weakly to see how my companions had fared, but to my surprise they were gone. Even through my muted hearing I could detect distant high pitched weapons fire. Karen and Mariv were unarmed, so the weapons fire must belong to the enemy. They wouldn't still be firing if Mariv and Karen weren't alive; apparently they had fled.
Part of me was glad they had escaped, and part of me was upset that they had left me for dead. Looking down at my body though, I wasn't too surprised they had arrived at the wrong conclusion. My uniform was scorched and mangled, as was the flesh beneath it. I wasn't dead yet, but I would be soon. The pain was probably so great that my brain couldn't make sense of it, and thus I was spared experiencing most of it. Instead I felt this general sensation of unease, like my whole body was waiting for the pain to start.
After a few moments, one of them crested the lip of the crater and began to slide down the incline, pushing Renaldo's headless corpse aside as it went. It came fully into view as it landed on the crater floor. It was even more hideous than I had expected, sporting a head with thirty eyes pointing in every direction, several arms all holding that unique looking projectile weapon they often carried, and a single tentacle like leg it used to propel itself across the ground with surprising speed and efficiency. It came right up to me, head splitting apart in what I belatedly realized was an attempt at a sneer.
I had heard of this as well. Even as we learned about the enemy, so too did they learn about us. Those reports from early in the war also mentioned their attempts to emulate our speech and facial expressions. One chilling report I had been allowed to read mentioned a particular alien capable of assuming a form that closely resembled that of a man, at least from a distance. Nothing like that had been seen since, but the fact that it was possible for them to appear so much like us was troubling.
So the chill that went down my spine a moment later was because of that thought, not my injuries. The thing's oil black skinned head split open horizontally and I saw teeth and lips and a tongue being formed right in front of my eyes.
"This is the result of negotiating with rocks." it said.
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