Trainer

Chapter 2: Parting Ways

Minutes passed, or was it seconds? Joan couldn't tell which. The loud crack over the ship's coms had left her ears ringing and the live video footage of her commanding officer's body crumbling to the ground had left her mind dazed. She needed time to process watching Captain Haldane fall to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. He had been shot. Those aliens they just met shot the Captain. She knew this all to be true, but her body refused to move. Just as well, since her mind didn't know what to do. It felt so surreal; to watch a man be actually shot, to have it actually happen one sand ridge over from her location, while she was safe inside the ship.

Joan took a quick look around the control room. The Artemis certainly didn't feel safe anymore. The gunshot echoing throughout its walls had seen to that. The more Joan thought about it, the more it seemed to permeate the walls, smearing them with her doubts. Her safe haven was gone, replaced with vulnerable tin can with engines.

"Nate, move," Eddy shouted over the coms. Joan jolted. The order wasn't met for her, but the sound of a familiar voice pulled her back down to Home. Her mind began to reorient itself and her training started bleeding back into her instincts. Her crew needed her. They were under attack. A man was down. A medic was needed.

Joan threw herself out of her chair and down to the dining hall. She dashed past the kitchen table in the center of the room and slammed her fist against her one of the consoles on the wall, opening up her locker with her own set of weapons. While she was designated as the Artemis's Medical Officer, she was still a Marine, and the creed past down from the first marines on Earth to the United Colonies was that every marine was a rifleman first and foremost. In short, she was trained to fight like everyone else. These thoughts were of course furthest from her mind as she snapped on her exosuit's helmet and let the head's up display warm up while she checked her MIR-A for anything that might prevent it from being unprepared for combat. Her years of Academy training began flashing through her mind. This was it, this was going to be her first real taste of combat.

Moments ago, outside with the three-man search team, Nate had just witness the famous Captain Haldane being shot dead like a common extra in a war movie.

In a flash, Nate was brought back to the Academy on the United Colonist's Capital planet Gaea. Where Nate, Joan, and the rest of the cadets were being trained on how to react to a combat situation. Their drill instructor had roused them out of bed at 0400 to march in full gear to the obstacle course 10km away from the barracks. The heavy rain clouds pounded them the entire day, sinking their boots deep into the mud. When they arrived at their destination they were made to crawl towards an assistant instructor firing a live machine gun inches over their heads. The only thing standing between them and a hail of bullets was a net of barbed wire adorned with pig guts hanging above them. Some cadets made it through as quickly as possible, others froze up entirely, and when Nate had the gall to hesitate, his drill instructor was on him like one of the Furies.

"You wanna live?" The drill instructor screams into Nate's ear. "Then get the fuck to cover."

Nate snapped out of his day dream, turned, and shot after a large jagged chuck of debris, his heels pounding against his boots and his boots kicking up plumes of sand. The gunfire, the beeping, and the screams filling the coms were only so much noise to Nate now. A distraction from his one and only goal. All else fell away as tiny metal infernos skimmed against his backside. With a final great leap, he slammed into the upturned ship parts scattered about. For a terribly brief second, he was okay. He was safe. He exhaled.

"Nate?" Some voice spoke into his ear. Although Nate couldn't tell who or what. All he was focused on was how out of breath he was.

"Nate? Don't you freeze up on me, you look at me," the voice ordered, once from the radio in Nate's helmet and again as an echo from its real-life counterpart. Nate turned to Engineer McCain who was crouched behind his own chunk of crashed ship with his MIR-A rifle raised and cracking off shot after shot.