A hand slapped against the side of Jeff's head, startling him. He looked up and saw a biosuited figure he recognized as Sergeant Johan Wing of the anti-tank platoon attached to his company. Wing's lips were moving behind his helmet but no sound was coming out of Jeff's audio system. Wing, looking frustrated, slapped him on the side of the head again and held up three fingers. He then pointed to the controls for Jeff's biosuit.
"Oh... shit," Jeff said, looking at his companions, who were just as perplexed. "It's a different platoon. We're on the wrong tac channel. Switch to three."
They all switched to channel three on their bank and Wing's voice immediately started chewing their asses. "What the fuck is the matter with you morons?" he asked. "You come walking into another unit's trench without announcing yourself and with your com system on the wrong fucking channel? Are you trying to get your asses shot off before the Earthlings even get here?"
"Sorry, sarge," Jeff said. "We forgot."
"Well don't fuckin' forget again," Wing said. "We just got the shit beat out of us up here and we're a bit jumpy. Fingers get loose on firing buttons when that happens. You here to help us, or what?"
"Yeah," Hicks said. "They sent us up to help evac your wounded."
Wing nodded. "Good," he said. "We got eight that need to be brought down to the LZ right away." He pointed further down the trench. "Go talk to the doc down there. She's the one with the fuckin' red cross on her helmet in case you forgot that too."
They moved further down the trench, passing two more dead bodies stuffed indifferently into the recesses as they went. They then had to push themselves into the recess in order to let a group of four soldiers pass by that were carrying two wounded between them. The group went by fast but not so fast that Jeff didn't see the horrible hole that had been blown open in the chest of one and then sealed with a medical patch.
"Jesus fucking Christ," Drogan said when they were gone.
They continued down the trench, stepping over more discarded batteries and collapsed sandbags, passing two soldiers that were standing watch over the openings, staring down over the battlefield. Finally they came to the group of wounded being attended to by the medic. She was kneeling down next to one of them, drilling something through the leg of his biosuit with a power tool of some sort.
She looked up at them. "Who the fuck are you guys?" she demanded.
"Hicks, Drogan, and Creek," Jeff told her. "We're from second platoon down below."
"Static," she said without much enthusiasm. "Okay, you two," she pointed to Hicks and Drogan. "Take that guy there." She pointed to a supine soldier lying just behind her. "He's a neck and chest wound, probably bleeding internally. Took shrapnel from an eighty through the gap in the sandbags. I've sedated him, patched the suit, decompressed his left lung, and gave him some synthetic blood. Hopefully that'll be enough to get him back to Eden alive. He's tagged priority so be sure to get him over to the priority section of the triage area when you're down there and be as gentle as you can with him."
"Right," Hicks said, squirming past her. Drogan followed him and a second later they picked him up — Drogan at the head, Hicks at the feet — utilizing the handles that had been installed in the biosuits for just that purpose. They squirmed back by in the opposite direction and began heading back the way they'd come.
"Nguyen," the medic barked over the tac channel. "This is doc. Get your ass over here!"
"On the way," a voice replied.
She looked up at Jeff. "Very nasty head wound here," she told him. "An eighty went off just outside his opening while he was firing on a tank. The AT blew up in his face and ripped through his face shield. As you can see..." She took a deep breath, a little of the strain she was under leaking through, "Well... he's hit pretty bad."
Jeff looked at the soldier's face. Her words were perhaps the worst understatement he'd ever heard. His entire face shield had been blown inwards, peppering the poor guy's face with plastic shrapnel and bits of the AT weapon body. A large shard was sticking out of his flesh just to the left of his nose. His entire left eye had been torn out of its socket and had smeared over the remains of his left cheek. The socket was slowly oozing blood down the side of his face even through the gauze the medic had stuffed in there. His teeth had all been smashed in and his tongue appeared to have been ripped in two, part of it hanging out of his mouth, part of it occluding his airway. His right eye was undamaged but obviously sightless, bulging out of its socket from the pressure change the loss of his face shield had caused. She had covered the hole with an opaque film to restore that pressure and had drilled a breathing hole in his neck and hooked an air hose connected to his auxiliary outlet to the fitting that protruded. He was gurgling and twitching, his arms and legs spasming.
"This is an intraosseous line I've just drilled into his tibia," the medic told Jeff. "I'm giving him a sedative/paralytic right now so he'll stop moving around."
"Right," Jeff said, having no idea what she was talking about, staring in horror at the man's ruined face.
She removed the drill and put an air syringe against the port that protruded from his suit. She injected something and a moment later the man stopped twitching and moving.
"There we go," she said. "He'll stay still for the trip now. His suit will automatically keep him ventilated, so don't worry about that. Just get him down there as fast as possible." She looked up at him, her eyes showing sadness even in infrared. "He's probably not gonna make it to surgery. Even if he does live... well... he'll be blind and probably brain damaged." She shook her head. "I have to try though."
"Right," Jeff said again, shuddering, picturing himself in the man's place.
Another soldier suddenly appeared, the Nguyen to whom she'd spoken apparently.
"Yeah, doc?" he asked.
"You and uh..."
"Creek," Jeff provided.
"Right... Creek. You and Creek here get him down to the LZ. Take him to the priority area. If his light turns red on the way, well... just put him in the trenches and come back. Got it?"
Nguyen obviously knew the man they were speaking about. "Yeah, doc," he said. "Does he have... I mean... is he gonna... gonna... make it?"
"It's possible," she said. "Unlikely, but possible. The faster you get him down there the more possible it'll be. Okay?"
"Right," he said, leaning down and grabbing the foot handles. "Come on, Creek. Let's get him down there." He looked meaningfully into Jeff's eyes. "He's a good guy, okay?"
"Right," Jeff said. He reached down and grabbed the upper torso handles. They lifted and began working their way back through the trench. As they went they turned their com sets to the extremely short range frequency to keep their chatter from overloading the main tactical channel.
"We thought we were safe after the arty, you know?" Nguyen told him. "They walked those 150s all over our positions and not a single one of us got so much as a scratch."
"Yeah, us too," Jeff said. "A couple of them blew pretty fuckin' close too."
"But those tanks," Nguyen said, shaking his head. "Goddamn, man. There were so many of them out there and their rounds came flying in from below instead of from above. The barriers absorbed most of them but some got through the holes because that's where they aim 'em. I saw Jenky get her fuckin' head blown clean off — well, not clean, it kinda exploded all over the back of the trench. You should see what happens to blood out here when it comes out. It boils, man. It boils and turns into vapor and goes drifting off into the air in this big fuckin' red cloud."
Jeff tried not to show any reaction to this horrifying description, knowing that it would soon be his fate to see it firsthand when the infantry attacked — or perhaps he wouldn't see it. Perhaps his companions would see his head explode into pieces, his blood go boiling upward. "You held 'em though," he said, fighting to keep his voice even. "You pushed their thieving asses back over the horizon."