Reclamation

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Warning! This chapter talks about suicide. If you have problems with this content please consider before reading.

Internally I'm exhausted and it feels like I'm stumbling through the hall. Externally I have mastered the skill of looking put together, so long as no one talks to me. The walk to the chow hall will give me time to internalize my external appearance. As I follow the light that was designated to get me to my destination, I occasionally look up to see other soldiers following their own lights, the colors lightly bouncing off them is the only reason why I can see it. Following the path leads me to where the meeting is quickly. In a regular looking table sits four soldiers. A woman who seems tall even sitting down wears the bars of a captain. She has silver blonde hair, emerald eyes and sharp features. The first man wears the rank of 1st Lieutenant one with curly red hair and surprisingly, bronze colored skin. The second wears the same rank with sable skin and short black hair. The last, a woman, wears a 2nd lieutenant bar like me. She has lighter brown hair and light blue eyes.

As I walk up to the table a chair seems to bubble out of the floor allowing me to take a seat. The Captain looks up from the tablet she was working on and looks like she was waiting on me to start the meeting. I follow everyone's example and take out my own personal data assistant to take notes.

"Good, now that you are all here we can formally meet. I am Captain Sloan and I will be your company commander. I have had a separate brief on what we are all doing here and why we have been brought back. We were brought back because there is an insurrection on one of their trade hub worlds and our benefactors, The Wa'lin, want us to put it down. They told us in the briefings that they suspect their rival species, the Bacral are behind the unrest so they want us to exercise caution. What we are authorized in terms of equipment and personnel is a heavy weapons platoon, a scout section, two light mechanized platoons, and a support section. I've been looking at your backgrounds and trying to figure out your strengths and weaknesses. First Lieutenant Holder I want you to take command of 1st, the heavy weapons platoon, given your background in the engineers. First Lieutenant O'Brian I want you in the second platoon and Second Lieutenant Mohammed, I want you to take third which are the mech platoons. That leaves Second Lieutenant Reigns with the support and scouts in fourth. You will find that I have sent a full roster of your people to you to look over. We will have plenty of time to get to know each other over the next six months as we get the training over our respective systems. Unless there are any questions, we will talk about the training schedule."

I am struggling to keep my eyes from glazing over. These kinds of meetings have always been a small torture, but needed. Captain Sloan spends the next 30 minutes going over our plans for the next two weeks outlining that we need to do what has been called death by power-point to learn the specifications of our equipment and it will be broken up by medical treatments as soon as we are deemed to not be at risk of disassociation. It would be painful for the person that it happens to and dangerous for everyone else if they gave us weapons before that from what she says.

"Now it's time you meet your new platoons, dismissed." She said, finally drawing the meeting to a close. As I get up, I see a herd of soldiers coming into the dining facility. I grab my tablet and send a message to my platoon for them to come to the back corner of the chow hall. I see several of them peppered through the crowd, look down at their tablets and start moving in my direction. I know from looking at the roster last night that my platoon sergeant is a woman named Sergeant First Class Lopez. I see who I think that person is because she is lagging behind the other soldiers, taking a good look at them.

She only comes up to my shoulder with raven hair and a dark tan complexion.

"Sergeant First Class Lopez?" I say with a calm but firm tone.