Once the task force had gone out of sight of the press and left the plaza for the hotel district, the cadets began to spread out again between themselves,
"Elena, I can't believe you really tried to take out a journalist and didn't get arrested." Zoey grinned as she moved to be walking along side Elena,
"Oh come on Zoey, the guy was with CNN plus he was literally asking for it, you know the MP's wanted to do it themselves but had to hold themselves back, I did them a favour." Elena smirked, putting an arm around Zoey as they walked on,
"I can't wait to see the headline those propaganda hounds put out, 'Innocent journalist violently assaulted by Russian aggressors
"It's gonna be great!" Zoey laughed, brandishing an uncontrollable smile across her face as she put an arm around Elena,
"You know your hardly innocent, right?" Isaak, a sixteen year old cadet who'd recently transferred to Tambov from a smaller scale cadet program ran in his former school, shouted from in front of them, "Technically speaking, you just broke multiple parts of the Geneva convention which would now make you a war criminal." He continued,
"Oh please, you can't break a law that doesn't apply to you, it's like movie piracy, do that in the US and five seconds after clicking download, the FBI is breaching your front door, meanwhile in Russia it's perfectly legal." Elena said rolling her eyes,
"Even so Elena, do you really think that the world press, including your new friends in CNN, won't be up in arms about a cadet who's only fourteen managing to break the Geneva convention twice while being out to do humanitarian work, also movie piracy isn't legal back home at all." Isaak sighed looking at the two girls who seemed to not be taking his argument seriously,
"Yes, but look at her now, apparently punching liars with press passes is therapeutic for her." Zoey chuckled making Isaak simply sigh, choosing against responding to her, as Elena smirked looking towards her,
"It really is, you ought to try it sometime, really relaxes the mind." Elena laughed trying to divert her thoughts away from the executions which were slowly creeping back into her mind after what Zoey had said.
Half an hour passed as the task force neared the hotel district, being close enough for the crashed French transport to be visible in the distance through a clearing in the trees and the scarce buildings all spaced out between each other by a significant distance leaving the crash exposed to see from a great distance. The paras stopped the company of cadets as they tried using their binoculars to scout the wreckage,
"There's no one there, its completely clear." Stepochkin declared yet all his squad mates remained staring at the wreckage, one of the marks of the child's utopia being turned into a dystopia. The paras all wore a disturbed look as they looked at the wreckage of what was carrying innocent men women and children away from the conflict having been mercilessly downed by the terrorists, they'd all seen it on the news and wanted to nail down the First Son's coffin and set it ablaze to end them for good, but seeing it with their own eyes was a completely different matter, they all simply stood still and silent.
The paras remained like this for another five minutes before there was the sounds of shouting in English, at first they thought nothing of it, thinking they must have just ran across a patrol of US marines, a few seconds passed until the realisation hit that the patrol they had found wasn't as friendly as they had thought in the form of automatic gun fire zipping passed them,
"Oh shit, Contact!" Stepochkin yelled as he began to return fire with his rifle along with the rest of the paras as the cadets armed their rifles, the fire fight having caught them completely off guard.
It didn't take long before most of the cadets had set up their own rifles and were joining in on the action, with the task force now laying down overwhelming suppressive fire on the terrorists position where they lay in cover, yet the odds of coming out of the engagement on top would quickly be turned against them with the sound of a pick up driving around the corner and into the firefight before the gunner turned the barrel of the fifty calibre LMG towards the task force, picked a target, and lit her up, quickly killing the seventeen year old cadet called Lena Putinova, yet not stopping the barrage of bullets being unleashed on the cadet, tearing her body apart, giving the paras time to prepare an RPG, upon the sight of the rocket launcher, the gunner stopped shooting Lena's corpse and turned the gun towards the paras, shooting blindly in panic having been robbed of the advantage of superior firepower, but nothing the gunner did would have saved him as the para with the RPG squeezed the trigger, sending a rocket flying into the front of the pick up giving no time for the driver or gunner to bail before it exploded into a fireball with shrapnel of the truck being spread out in all directions before the rest was left to burn, leaving the task force now uncontested as the survivors fell back out of sight, running as fast as possible. The cadets looked around to see who was hit and found that the gunner had decided against shooting lots of hostiles, to instead make sure one was really dead, the sight of her corpse lying in a pool of her blood made most of the cadets sick while the paras got on the radio to report what had just took place. Both the cadets and paras would be cut short by multiple whistles coming from the sky before the culprit's of the noise landed all around them, mortar shells, yet these one's were different, they hadn't exploded on impact, none of them had, it only took a moment for Stepochkin to realise what was going on in horror,
"Gas! Gas! Gas!" He yelled as loud as his lungs let him as his squad mates unclipped their masks and put them over their heads and the cadet frantically started searching through their kit, then the realisation sunk in, despite all the kit the cadets were issued, a lot of which being unnecessary, the thought had never crossed the mind of the people in charge of issuing kit to give the cadets gas masks like every one else, the mortar shells opened up and a white gas began to pour out, blocking everyone's vision, as more and more poured out the cadets started coughing and struggling for breath until one by one, they all passed out.
It took at least twenty minutes for the gas to clear, and as soon as it did, it became apparent how effective the gas was against the unprotected cadets. Stepochkin ran over to where Zoey lay motionless apart from her breathing weakly,
"Someone call a god damn medevac!" he shouted in a blind panic as he frantically tried to wake Zoey back up,
The radioman immediately set the long range radio to the emergency frequency and put out a call for immediate help, it was only fifteen minutes before the first helicopter's landed, both of which were Russian Mi-24's but only capable of taking three at a time, but to the paras it felt like fifty minutes had passed, it wasn't long before another landed, this one an American army medical variant of the black hawk, taking another three of the wounded cadets to a hospital under the control of the UN peacekeepers and the red cross, not long after that a flight of two British aircraft, one a standard Chinook and the other a medical variant of the Lynx, which took the remaining casualties to the hospital leaving the paras waiting for some GAZ's to take them back to the base.
An hour later at the base, the paras were sat down on a table outside the terminals food court which had been abandoned when the government handed the termnal over to the Russian forces, discussing the engagement, contemplating what they could have done for the cadets to have all walked away fine, when one of the officers walked over to them, pulled up a seat to the end of the table and sitting down, something clearly troubling him as he lay his cap on the table,
"Gentlemen, you did your country proud out there today, don't beat yourselves up over this." He started, struggling to bring himself to say more, "Two more of the cadets were declared dead on arrival and all those surviving so far are still in critical condition." He finally continued nervously looking down,
"Fuck." Stepochkin sighed as he became stressed from the thought of Zoey being among the fallen, "Who were they?" He finally brought himself to asking nervously,
"Roman Kuritsyn and Marianna Rykova." The officer announced making Stepochkin breath a sigh of relief with his fear being laid to, at least for the time being.
YOU ARE READING
inFamous: Red Star
FanfictionBased immediately after the events of inFamous First Light, inFamous Red Star follows a team of Russian Cadets during their time deployed in Paris following the resurfacing of the First Sons.
