There's a fire running along the length of her face, searing from chin to her neck all the way along her jaw. The furrow is oozing slowly and collar of her uniform is stained with her blood, surprisingly red against the now grey fabric. Just yesterday, it was blindingly white and pristine, courtesy of Finnegan's obsessive desire with cleanliness. Now, three hours after dawn, it's as grey as the dust choking the air and singed to holes in places where the smoking shards of shrapnel have rebounded off the titanium stock she wears underneath.
Kyu doesn't manage to stifle the hysterical grin before it stretches her face and makes her hiss in pain. Finnegan would have a fit to see his lieutenant looking like a common soldier if he was still alive. Now that he's about a hundred metres ahead of her and lying motionless on his face, it seems as if he'll never scold her about image again. The grin reemerges again, born from memory and the sheer terror of battle from which she simply wants to turn her back to and flee from. Almost before she realises it herself, she laughing like an irrius addict, doubling over with mirth that burns her face and cramps her lungs until she's wheezing.
Her temporary insanity is lost in the thunder of a chain of explosions somewhere to her left. A ragged chorus of defiant yells follows the momentary deafness and Kyu chokes her way back to a semblance of normalcy. She glances quickly around, thanking Terra-Sol-Luna that she's alone. It would be a bad thing for any of her men and women to see her acting like a raw new recruit.
She brings the gun up with her left hand again and draws the long knife with the other. Even Issuelt got over the shakes and the guilt before their fifth major engagement and he's the youngest of them all by at least a decade. Of all people, at least she should keep herself under control. Kyu begins padding to the west, moving towards the explosions and slipping along the edges of the streets. Urban warfare is a nightmare of blind spots and sudden confrontations and all thought of Issuelt is quickly banished from her mind.
She goes two blocks before someone literally runs around a corner and into her, barging her off her feet. Her legs tangle with the person's arms and hits something painfully sharp. The gun is caught beneath her and so she scythes her other arm around, stabbing before her mind catches up to her reflexes. In close combat, it's about disabling or shocking the other person into submission. Often a person recoils from pain before they're seriously injured. Kyu plants the knife in again and again and again without regard to any training or technique. The person is too close, there's flexible spiderweave under the conventional body armour and he's too close, too close, too close! They wrestle on the ground in a maddened tangle of flailing limbs and when Kyu's knife catches in bone, she lets go to rather than waste time heaving it out. The man's arm is suddenly around her neck, his massive knife is nowhere to be seen, thankfully kicked to the ground when he smashed into her, but he has muscles like a bovalent and she's gasping for air that doesn't come.
In utter desperation, she cranes her head around and sinks her teeth into a bulging bicep. He roars with pain but doesn't let go though and she clamps down harder, scissoring her jaws together like she's chewing on dried meat, shaking her head to worry the flesh in her grip. The soldier finally releases her and Kyu drops away, rolling to avoid his stamping feet. There's a sharp prick in her side and she grabs his lost knife with the strength of sheer panic. It cuts into her palm but she brings it up between them even as he's lunging towards her with her own knife newly freed from his collarbone.
He has the longer reach but she's confident that she's faster. His slash still catches her on the top of her head as she ducks under the blow and rams his ridiculously long blade into his stomach, levering it upwards at best as she can to hook it behind the ribs and into his heart. There's a moment of impossible stillness and then his hand closes around her neck with awful finality. The fingers compress with the strength of a machine and Kyu leans all her weight into the knife, ripping upwards with a strength that she never knew she had. His face is centimetres from her own and it contorts into a hellish snarl, unknowingly mirroring her own twisted features. It's a war of attrition to see who dies first now but even if Kyu's won already, her opponent refuses to acknowledge the fact that his is a mortal wound.
She wakes up beside a twitching corpse, neck burning worse than her face. From the looks of it, she hasn't been unconscious for more than a minute or two. Kyu coughs and her throat rips itself apart with the spasm. There's blood caking her lips and when she tries to make a sound, more comes welling up in her mouth. She doesn't try again. She's halfway into a standing position when she remembers that she savaged someone's arm and that some of the blood isn't actually hers for a change.
Her gun and knife go back in their respective sheaths and she picks the dead man's weapons cautiously. The firearm is heavier than hers and the recoil is probably damaging as hell but it fires bigger kinetic projectiles and has a denser energy output. Similarly, the knife is both bigger and longer, designed to be used by a giant of a man. Kyu hefts them both and turns to the south gate. The shouting is louder there and judging by the incessant beeping of her commkit, the retreat is being called right now.
The streets are deserted. The few civilians that remain have barricaded themselves in whatever shelter they can find but once or twice, Kyu catches the flicker of a curtain or a shadow moving across a window. She runs on and eventually catches up to a knot of Free Worlds soldiers moving in the same direction. Like her, all of them are wary to the point of wanton fire and she risks calling out to them before moving into view. Her uniform isn’t enough to convince them of her allegiance and she has state her name and her rank before they lower the weapons. Kyu unashamedly uses her field marshal rank and isn’t surprised to see the blind trust in her that it brings. News has indeed spread fast and anyone who served directly under Troube seems to have been elevated to a minor deity.
When they reach the river, most of the barges are loaded and moving already. She scans the remaining men for her 56th and her heart sinks as she sees the knot of soldiers defending the bank from one of the last boats. There are less than fifty of them from first glance and she starts sprinting towards them, hoping beyond hope that there are more she can't see. What remains of the docks are slippery with blood and ice and mud and corpses. Kyu falls twice before she gets within hailing distance of the barge and when she shouts at them to cast off, her throat blazes with fire and fails on her. Her frantic waving is steadfastly ignored. It's another fifty metres before she scrambles up the netting hung over the side and the barge finally, finally pulls away from the shore.
Kyu is pulled up the rest of the way and she flops to the ground when her muscles refuse to work any more. It's the sudden collapse that sends the sniper's bullet over her head and into Doxi's head where she was standing and helping with the pulling. The woman drops in a welter of blood and spraying brain matter, falling over the rail and disappearing into the black river. Everyone else drops to the ground and the sonic crack of the rifle sounds again without another explosion of death. Kyu is suddenly grateful for the roar of the cannon across the river and the wild lurching of the barge as its helm turns freely. There's no-one hearing the wild, mad chuckle burbling from her swollen lips. There's no-one looking at the shaking that's overtaken her muscles and turned her into a quivering jelly. No-one realises that their commander is losing it right there, right then.
The barge tosses in the Starshine's current for an indeterminable period of time before the world is suddenly obscured by white light and furious sound. The boat bucks as if alive and even though she's on deck with her eyes trained on the planking between her boots, Kyu is still blinded and deafened by the explosion at the docks. Sight is the first thing to return and her eyes swim with bright speckles when she can see anything other than radiant whiteness. The brilliance returns as a glaring flash in her blinks. Kyu swivels slowly towards the side of the barge and clambers to her feet to see over the high rail. The docks are more than two hundred metres away, pluming snow-white smoke thick as the down feathers of this world's aviiv. Before her eyes, the entire bank collapses into the river with a tectonic rumble felt more in the feet and the chest than heard by the ear.
Someone is pulling at her shoulders but Kyu absently bats them away and continues to stare at the destruction. There's no possible retaliatory strike from anyone over there now, if anyone was left alive at all. Her hearing is slowly filtering back and dimly, she registers Doyle shouting at her to "get bloody down already!"
She waves him down and towards the other people lying on deck. Her wounds are relatively superficial and she's unlikely to die any time soon as compared to some of her brave soldiers. By the time they land on the other side of the Starshine, more than half of them in her semi-experienced opinion, will probably be buried in the river's black depths. The butcher's bill has reached a terrible accounting today and for what? Kyu watches Doyle move away from a man whose leg is missing at the knee and keening in a voice like a baenshidhe of age-old Terran legend. Mercifully, he's turned away from her and she can't see who it is.
The city billows white smoke behind them and Kyu slumps to the deck when her legs give way on her again. The thermades buried under the mud by the sapper squads did their work well. The dock's piers and loading cranes and conveyance portals have turned into splinters. The warehouses have been levelled. Where there were docks, there is now only the new bank of a raging river. The enemy won't be following for days at least and every second gained is another second that they have to live.
Kyu doesn't manage to stifle the hysterical grin before it stretches her face and makes her hiss in pain. Finnegan would have a fit to see his lieutenant looking like a common soldier if he was still alive. Now that he's about a hundred metres ahead of her and lying motionless on his face, it seems as if he'll never scold her about image again. The grin reemerges again, born from memory and the sheer terror of battle from which she simply wants to turn her back to and flee from. Almost before she realises it herself, she laughing like an irrius addict, doubling over with mirth that burns her face and cramps her lungs until she's wheezing.
Her temporary insanity is lost in the thunder of a chain of explosions somewhere to her left. A ragged chorus of defiant yells follows the momentary deafness and Kyu chokes her way back to a semblance of normalcy. She glances quickly around, thanking Terra-Sol-Luna that she's alone. It would be a bad thing for any of her men and women to see her acting like a raw new recruit.
She brings the gun up with her left hand again and draws the long knife with the other. Even Issuelt got over the shakes and the guilt before their fifth major engagement and he's the youngest of them all by at least a decade. Of all people, at least she should keep herself under control. Kyu begins padding to the west, moving towards the explosions and slipping along the edges of the streets. Urban warfare is a nightmare of blind spots and sudden confrontations and all thought of Issuelt is quickly banished from her mind.
She goes two blocks before someone literally runs around a corner and into her, barging her off her feet. Her legs tangle with the person's arms and hits something painfully sharp. The gun is caught beneath her and so she scythes her other arm around, stabbing before her mind catches up to her reflexes. In close combat, it's about disabling or shocking the other person into submission. Often a person recoils from pain before they're seriously injured. Kyu plants the knife in again and again and again without regard to any training or technique. The person is too close, there's flexible spiderweave under the conventional body armour and he's too close, too close, too close! They wrestle on the ground in a maddened tangle of flailing limbs and when Kyu's knife catches in bone, she lets go to rather than waste time heaving it out. The man's arm is suddenly around her neck, his massive knife is nowhere to be seen, thankfully kicked to the ground when he smashed into her, but he has muscles like a bovalent and she's gasping for air that doesn't come.
In utter desperation, she cranes her head around and sinks her teeth into a bulging bicep. He roars with pain but doesn't let go though and she clamps down harder, scissoring her jaws together like she's chewing on dried meat, shaking her head to worry the flesh in her grip. The soldier finally releases her and Kyu drops away, rolling to avoid his stamping feet. There's a sharp prick in her side and she grabs his lost knife with the strength of sheer panic. It cuts into her palm but she brings it up between them even as he's lunging towards her with her own knife newly freed from his collarbone.
He has the longer reach but she's confident that she's faster. His slash still catches her on the top of her head as she ducks under the blow and rams his ridiculously long blade into his stomach, levering it upwards at best as she can to hook it behind the ribs and into his heart. There's a moment of impossible stillness and then his hand closes around her neck with awful finality. The fingers compress with the strength of a machine and Kyu leans all her weight into the knife, ripping upwards with a strength that she never knew she had. His face is centimetres from her own and it contorts into a hellish snarl, unknowingly mirroring her own twisted features. It's a war of attrition to see who dies first now but even if Kyu's won already, her opponent refuses to acknowledge the fact that his is a mortal wound.
She wakes up beside a twitching corpse, neck burning worse than her face. From the looks of it, she hasn't been unconscious for more than a minute or two. Kyu coughs and her throat rips itself apart with the spasm. There's blood caking her lips and when she tries to make a sound, more comes welling up in her mouth. She doesn't try again. She's halfway into a standing position when she remembers that she savaged someone's arm and that some of the blood isn't actually hers for a change.
Her gun and knife go back in their respective sheaths and she picks the dead man's weapons cautiously. The firearm is heavier than hers and the recoil is probably damaging as hell but it fires bigger kinetic projectiles and has a denser energy output. Similarly, the knife is both bigger and longer, designed to be used by a giant of a man. Kyu hefts them both and turns to the south gate. The shouting is louder there and judging by the incessant beeping of her commkit, the retreat is being called right now.
The streets are deserted. The few civilians that remain have barricaded themselves in whatever shelter they can find but once or twice, Kyu catches the flicker of a curtain or a shadow moving across a window. She runs on and eventually catches up to a knot of Free Worlds soldiers moving in the same direction. Like her, all of them are wary to the point of wanton fire and she risks calling out to them before moving into view. Her uniform isn’t enough to convince them of her allegiance and she has state her name and her rank before they lower the weapons. Kyu unashamedly uses her field marshal rank and isn’t surprised to see the blind trust in her that it brings. News has indeed spread fast and anyone who served directly under Troube seems to have been elevated to a minor deity.
When they reach the river, most of the barges are loaded and moving already. She scans the remaining men for her 56th and her heart sinks as she sees the knot of soldiers defending the bank from one of the last boats. There are less than fifty of them from first glance and she starts sprinting towards them, hoping beyond hope that there are more she can't see. What remains of the docks are slippery with blood and ice and mud and corpses. Kyu falls twice before she gets within hailing distance of the barge and when she shouts at them to cast off, her throat blazes with fire and fails on her. Her frantic waving is steadfastly ignored. It's another fifty metres before she scrambles up the netting hung over the side and the barge finally, finally pulls away from the shore.
Kyu is pulled up the rest of the way and she flops to the ground when her muscles refuse to work any more. It's the sudden collapse that sends the sniper's bullet over her head and into Doxi's head where she was standing and helping with the pulling. The woman drops in a welter of blood and spraying brain matter, falling over the rail and disappearing into the black river. Everyone else drops to the ground and the sonic crack of the rifle sounds again without another explosion of death. Kyu is suddenly grateful for the roar of the cannon across the river and the wild lurching of the barge as its helm turns freely. There's no-one hearing the wild, mad chuckle burbling from her swollen lips. There's no-one looking at the shaking that's overtaken her muscles and turned her into a quivering jelly. No-one realises that their commander is losing it right there, right then.
The barge tosses in the Starshine's current for an indeterminable period of time before the world is suddenly obscured by white light and furious sound. The boat bucks as if alive and even though she's on deck with her eyes trained on the planking between her boots, Kyu is still blinded and deafened by the explosion at the docks. Sight is the first thing to return and her eyes swim with bright speckles when she can see anything other than radiant whiteness. The brilliance returns as a glaring flash in her blinks. Kyu swivels slowly towards the side of the barge and clambers to her feet to see over the high rail. The docks are more than two hundred metres away, pluming snow-white smoke thick as the down feathers of this world's aviiv. Before her eyes, the entire bank collapses into the river with a tectonic rumble felt more in the feet and the chest than heard by the ear.
Someone is pulling at her shoulders but Kyu absently bats them away and continues to stare at the destruction. There's no possible retaliatory strike from anyone over there now, if anyone was left alive at all. Her hearing is slowly filtering back and dimly, she registers Doyle shouting at her to "get bloody down already!"
She waves him down and towards the other people lying on deck. Her wounds are relatively superficial and she's unlikely to die any time soon as compared to some of her brave soldiers. By the time they land on the other side of the Starshine, more than half of them in her semi-experienced opinion, will probably be buried in the river's black depths. The butcher's bill has reached a terrible accounting today and for what? Kyu watches Doyle move away from a man whose leg is missing at the knee and keening in a voice like a baenshidhe of age-old Terran legend. Mercifully, he's turned away from her and she can't see who it is.
The city billows white smoke behind them and Kyu slumps to the deck when her legs give way on her again. The thermades buried under the mud by the sapper squads did their work well. The dock's piers and loading cranes and conveyance portals have turned into splinters. The warehouses have been levelled. Where there were docks, there is now only the new bank of a raging river. The enemy won't be following for days at least and every second gained is another second that they have to live.