Tevun-Krus #22 - Best of 2015

(Military Science Fiction) Company D - @bloodsword

I

He let a long sigh ease out as he stared at the readout in his hand. The words were a blur, the diagrams meaningless. But there was no mistaking the word at the bottom.

Terminal.

"We think it was extended exposure to the power cores in the mobile armor you piloted that corrupted your DNA, captain," the doctor in combat fatigues said. He knew the guy was a doctor because of the caduceus on his collar.

"The cores were supposed to be shielded, but combat wear and tear must've breached that shielding and let the rad from the core leak into your cockpit," he went on to say, trying to explain in words what the report in his hand already said.

"So, there's nothing, ..." he began to ask. The doctor quickly shook his head.

"We could've tried gene reconstruction, captain, if we were back in the Fed's core systems. But out here, on the battlefield, ..."

The doctor didn't finish. He didn't have to. The captain already knew what he would've said.

You're expendable.

He had heard it hundreds of times since leaving Boot and flying 10,000 light years to fight against an enemy that not only threatened billions of Fed lives. But had overrun the colony his family had taken refuge on as well, a world supposedly so far from the front, it would never be in danger. That attack took his wife, his son, and his eldest daughter. Took them after the government told him they'd be safe.

Casualties of war.

They were collateral damage in a war that saw thousands die everyday. Expendable, just like he was supposed to be. Yet, in his heart, and deep in his soul, they had never been collateral, never expendable, an afterthought in government records. He had fought to keep Them safe, nobody else.

Now only his youngest was left, an eleven year old daughter living with a cousin somewhere in the core systems. Eleven, with ten of those years spent without a father as he fought on distant battlefields to keep her safe. To her he wasn't expendable. He was all she had left.

And now he was going to die. Ironically not by the enemy's hand as he, and the government expected. But by being made terminally ill from leaked radiation inside the very piece of war tech meant to keep him alive.

"Is there anything we can do for you, captain?" the doctor asked, breaking him out of his reverie.

"Do I have enough time to fly back and see my daughter?" he asked, grimacing as his pain meds began to fade and the grinding agony set deep in his bones, the pain that had sent him to the sick bay to begin with, returned. The pain seemed to triple when the doctor shook his head.

"You've got days, captain," he grimly revealed. "Not the weeks needed to jump all the way back into the core."

He sighed again. He should've expected that.

"Then all I need is a data pad so I can update my will, and write a good bye letter to my daughter," he said, fighting to keep the hopelessness and misery out of his voice.

Nodding, the doctor turned and left, leaving the captain to his dark thoughts in the spartan examination room. So engrossed was he in that introspection, he didn't hear the door to the room open almost immediately after the doctor left.

"You look a little dispondant there, soldier," a hard voice dryly noted.

Instead of being startled, he felt a surge of anger wash through him at having his thinking disturbed.