As I stepped into my temporary
quarters, Mr. Morgan said to me, "So, are we going to begin now?"
"Let me check my messages
first," then I walked over to the computer console and said, "Lieutenant
Halmeruck, messages please," the computer then replied:
"3 messages, shall I play
number 1?"
"Sure."
The Captain’s hard face came
up, but he looked kind of spooked, "Uh Lieutenant, I uh, kind of told that
reporter guy tha-"
"Computer stop message!"
I interrupted, "Play number 2, please."
Along with this one came
the well known pretty boy face of Mr. Morgan which, unfortunately, was
accompanied by his shrill-nasal voice, "Uh, this is Mr. Morgan, I was wondering
when you were going to meet me for the, uh, interview,"
"Computer stop message please,"
I said, "Computer, who is the final message from?"
"Mr. Morgan," it replied
to me.
"Erase messages 2 and 3 please,"
I ordered the computer, now changing to Mr. Morgan, "Well, let’s get started."
All right, only a few questions,
how bad can this be? I put my gun on the rack, and flung my gear on my
bed, I then sat down. "Okay Lt. Halmeruck, what part of the Exo fleet are
you in?" he asked me.
"I’m a Jumptroop, uh, you
know the troopers," I stupidly responded.
"All right, can you tell
me one of your memories from the Neosapien war?"
"Sure, it was nearing the
end of the war and my squad and I were going on a raid of the moon Io,
around Jupiter," this is when I started remembering, "the heat was intense,
due to the fact that it’s a very volcanic moon. We had disembarked from
our dropship and the Lieutenant told us to use our standard pattern, since
all of the squadrons had different patterns. I then told my squad, since
I was the sergeant, to spread in our standard fashion, each one of us would
be spread every 25 feet, innermost was Salcaz, then my friend, Chalmers,
then myself, and the 3 new people wanted to be in front, they were the
first to die from the Neos. But before they died, they reported seeing
some kind of creature, that was killed them, some creature, a Neo creature.
This later became known as the Neo Cat and the Neo Lizard. At this point,
the Lieutenant cut in telling us to retreat, I burned my rockets to full
with every jump, but I was loosing ground quickly, I then saw Chalmers.
He was trapped under some rubble. He called to me, "Tom, Tom! Help me,
please, HELP ME!"
"So, what’d you do?" he asked
me. Before I could answer though, the red alert went off.
"Oh crap!" I shouted, "get
the hell out of here, the Neo base around here mustn’t have gotten the
message that the war was over!"
"Well, this is as far out
as you can get," he retorted. I grabbed my gear and ran to the closest
airlock. It was when I got to the airlock and put on all of my gear that
I realized that I had forgotten my gun.
"Oh, crap!" I yelled out.
"What?" the reporter was
still following me.
"My gun, I forgot my gun!
Go get it, NOW!" I ordered.
"Where is it?" he asked.
"It’s on the damn gun rack,
where else would it be?" I said while pushing him,
"GO!" I started putting on my jumpsuit,
the command suit. He returned with my gun and handed it to me. "You stay
here, I’ll go out and fight the Neos. STAY!" I opened the first door of
the airlock, then closed it. I waved, and opened the second door.
I looked to get my bearings
of where everything was, I immediately saw an Exo-Fighter burst into flames
and smash into a Y-Wing fighter. "Lieutenant!" a voice cut the silence
in my helmet, "Lieutenant, what do you want us to do?"
I saw the sergeants that
I was supposed to be teaching tomorrow. "What? Oh, follow me." I activated
my rockets and blasted up about 20 meters, with the sergeants following
behind. At the peek of my flight I started to fire my gun, but my boot
was caught with a blast from one of the Neos E-Frames, taking it off. I
started falling down, when I landed on the wing of a blood red Y-Wing.
I started crawling up the wing until I got to the fusion pack on it. Damn
that’s big. I pulled on it, and pulled, until I realized what I had to
do to get it out. I unstrapped the other boot on my jumpsuit. That damn
Neo leg. I strapped it onto the fusion pack, and activated the thrust on
it. It took a little pushing and pulling plus that to get the thing out,
but I got it out.
As the Y-Wing was rapidly
descending, before the pilot ejected, I jumped off, and started up my backpack
thrust. At least that will slow me down if it won’t stop me.
When I came to, I saw the
ugly face of that reporter again. "Good morning Lt. Halmeruck! I hope you
slept well."
"I feel like a pile of fried
dog shit," I told him.
Just then I saw the Captain.
"Well, thanks to you, we caught, Thrax, Phaeton sent him out here when
he disappointed him, he also cut off contact with him, so he thought that
the war is still on. We Located the secret base that was in the Kuyper
belt, and eliminated it."
I motioned for the Captain
to come closer to me. He did. I whispered to him, "Get that damn reporter
out of here, I don’t want to see him ever again."
"He only has one question,"
he said back.
"Why do you have a Neosapien
foot?" he asked.
"It’s the end of my story.
Captain, can you and the Med-Techs please leave for a couple minutes, please?"
The Captain motioned and all but Mr. Morgan left, "Where was I in that
story?"
"Your friend had just called
to you," he responded.
"Ah yes. So I flew down,
and I tried to pull up some of the rubble on him, but I couldn’t, so I
said, ‘I can’t get it off, what do you want me to do?’, then he said, ‘Just
shoot me, kill me, it’s better than what the Neos would do to me, they’d
torture me, get all my secrets, and then they would kill me in cold blood,
it’d be a lot worse, so kill me, shoot me with that gun, now,’ so I pulled
up my gun, took aim and I-I-I I shot him, and then his cold lifeless body
started to float up. Another person started jumping past me, and I started
to move, jumping back to the dropship, and we were about 20 meters away
when a volcanic eruption went up right under him, burning through his armor
and sending him out into space, but when I was about 10 meters from the
dropship a Neo cat came up and bit off my right leg upto the knee, I made
it into the dropship, and it immediately left. Out of my entire squadron,
two survived. They gave me a Neo leg because the technology wasn’t good
enough to make me a human one, and I didn’t want a machine. From that point
on, I have been that much more like the enemy."
"I’ll leave you alone now,"
and with that, Mr. Morgan walked out of the room.