Empyrean Iris

Chapter 32

Captain Vir sat at the helm of his ship, hands resting gently against the controls. His hand still hurt from earlier, and it was only the comfort of flying that gave him any real solace, the only way to stop his hands from shaking. All around, the rest of the bridge crew noticed nothing, and it was only the soft whimpering of his service dog that might have alerted anyone to his current mental state.

He adjusted the controls on the ship and then reached down with his free hand to run a hand over her coarse fur and soft velvety ears. She pressed her head into his hand, the cold wetness of her nose cold on his skin.

Her presence calmed him, as it had always done since his involvement with the war.

A war he had almost not come back from.

He shook himself slightly, trying to clear the thoughts from his head, but with Sunny aboard the ship it was hard to forget what had happened, and what he had done: A concern he hadn't had before the Drev brought it up.

He had done some pretty horrible things.

"It hurts."

"Don't worry soldier, we have something for that."

He squeezed his eyes shut again, taking a deep breath though the nose, holding it for several seconds and then repeating until his racing heart calmed again: A trick an old friend had taught him when the VA couldn't get him a decent therapist.

"You have to make sure you breathe with your belly and not your chest. My doctor says it activates the vagus nerve which stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system or something like that.... Whatever it is, it helps me."

"The drugs were better."

"Yeah, but you can't become MORE addicted to breathing."

As his heartrate died down, he found himself thinking about the strangeness of war. They always said that history was told by the victor, and in that case this was true. There were large parts of the story that others were missing, large chunks of that history that had been omitted, redacted in black ink and sealed under the stamp of permanently classified, never to be revealed to the public unless a thousand years and a thousand scars had been healed.

Not the least of which was project Steel Eye.

The project that had won them the war.

***

"When you wake up, you'll be a new man. The kind that can help us win this war."

That is what the admiral had said to him, lying on the floor of the triage tent, the stump of his leg held up on stacks of soiled towels and uniform jackets. The overhead lights had been a sickly yellowish grey, and when they beat down on him they revealed the colony of sweat droplets that lay siege to his skin, visible on his face and neck, and through the stained tan of his shirt, soaked in sweat and stinking.

The pain had been unbearable, but so had his guilt, his guilt for being taken out during his first real battle on the ground.

Was he only a use in the air?

And now he was only a hindrance to their plight as the ash rained down on them from the outside, battering at the tent which bulged inward with strong winds, filling the little room with violent flapping noises.

At the end of the room, the tent flap had been thrown open, and he had turned his head in a tortured twist to find shapes filtering into the room. They peeled off their suits to reveal men and women in clean powder blue scrubs carrying large white cases stained with ash, now being sterilized by orderlies.

They passed through the first few lines of men and women, nursing stab wounds or slashing injuries, and made their way to the group at the back of the tent: the ones missing limbs.