After War by Tim C. Taylor

Author:Tim C. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

— CHAPTER 30 —

The rich woodland scents of Klin-Tula were ushered away by the sweet tang characteristic of the smog that choked Aries-6, a corrosive taint that even a combat suit air filter couldn’t entirely remove.

I looked down, already knowing what I would see: a figure in broken armor sprawled in a lake of her own blood that slowly seeped into the scorched hilltop.

She was inside one of the new ACE/3(N) combat suits, but even this uprated model had taken so much damage in the initial blast that it had failed to staunch the blood flow when her leg had been sliced off by a heavy flenser round.

I had staunched and cauterized her leg myself the old-fashioned way with a med kit, but we both knew she had lost too much blood before I had stabilized her.

Carefully cradling the back of her head, I removed the helmet and looked upon the face I had known so well, trying to capture every detail before the sight was lost to me forever. The heavy cheekbones like bull bars, the dainty jeweled studs that brought a feminine touch to her nose and ear lobes. I laughed at the ouroboros snake tattooed around her left eye. (We’d gotten the same tattoos the night before we married. Mine was still proudly emblazoned on my left chest, but Sanaa had always been more hard-core than me.) And the glassy eyes that had once been so white against her dark skin, when that young skin had been free of scars and burns and calluses and the pallor of blood loss.

“I’m sorry,” Sanaa said.

I shook my head. “Nothing to be sorry for,” I told her. “We’ve taken the position, medevac is on its way. They’ll fix you up with a fancy leg better than new. Just make sure to dodge better next time.”

Her eyelids began to lower. I squeezed her hand trying to will my life force into her. I wanted to give her my strength so that she might live and I die in her place. For a crazy moment, I almost convinced myself that if I believed hard enough then we could make this exchange. A life for a life. Gladly.

But of course the galaxy doesn’t work that way. I watched as Sanaa slipped away.

“No!” I shouted as I felt a vibration in the heavily armored chest section of Sanaa’s armor. “Stay with me, Sanaa. Don’t leave me, damn you. Hold on until help comes!”

“You’re sweet,” Sanaa said as she ignored me, and continued to eject her suit AI crystal through her chest so that I could retrieve it more easily for the collection growing along my spine.

“That’s why I love you,” she whispered. “We’ve had over two hundred years together, you and I, NJ. I never stopped loving you. We’ve been such lucky fools, don’t you dare spoil it by being sad.”

They were the last words she ever spoke in life. And this was a scene that had played out endlessly in my mind for a century.

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