Seek and Find
Posted on 04 Apr 2021 @ 7:41pm by Staff Sergeant Kyle Zebrov & Corporal Eric Minton & Corporal Pax
Edited on on 05 Apr 2021 @ 9:50pm
Mission:
M2 - Sanctuary
Location: OC, Recovery Ward, Rm 09
Timeline: Following Debbie Wins
1075 words - 2.2 OF Standard Post Measure
“Is she….” Eric Minton play acted looking confused and then crouched with emphasis. “Under the table?” Eric and the three little Zebrov girls were still trying to keep themselves entertained in the community room of the Recovery ward.
There was no one there of course, though there came a giggle from behind an empty serving cart. When Eric turned around to look, the end of a pigtail was sticking out. The twin preschoolers were laughing and pointing. “Sissy! Sissy!” They screeched.
“Where? where?! I just give up. I can’t find the best hider in the galaxy.” Eric let his arms flop comically. "It's totally impossible."
“Here I am!” Debbie revealed herself. “Now you hide!”
“You gotta close your eyes and count to like, Two Bajillion”
“I can only counts hun-derd and three-ty” She held up four fingers then opened and closed her thumb to demonstrate.
“A hundred and three-ty. That’s enough.” Eric agreed.
Debbie put her hands over her face.
“All of you. The twins too. Not gonna fall for your spy organization here.” He picked up the blanket from the floor and threw it over all three of the girls. The whole thing became a writhing mass of covered laughing and counting.
Eric ducked behind a protruding edge of a storage cabinet, into an empty narrow alcove its shape formed in the corner.
In his memory’s continuous replay, Eric’s back was against the wall, the same wall where Syimmi had climbed down to follow Captain Finn away. Zebrov was taking up a position with the squad, leaving him and Pax with Nathans, the gunner on the pulse cannon mount. He was busy trying to get the thing past a restart from the EM black out pulse. It started a very reassuring deafening charge up whine. Eric grit his teeth against the beautiful pain of that high power draw whistling through his brain.
The shields came down in the last few feet of advance between the Mercs and their position. Eric could see their suits and weaponry and markings. They might have boarded with a load of numbskulls when they first began, but the attacking force had been whittled down to their best, and now they had come loaded for Marine bear.
The front row of them were knocked back by a phasic blast courtesy of Nathans, who was on the control arm compressing the trigger, leaning back on his heels, and hollering along in harmony with his cannon.
The following pressure grenade exchange on the front left a swath of knocked out bodies on both sides of the barrier. The hold became too weak to keep and the enemy began pouring in physically over the intermingled bodies of their own and Fifth Squad.
Nathans kept working the cannon, but the phasic blasts had longer intermittent pauses as the coil was over taxed.
Pax and Eric filled in the gaps with rifle fire, putting energy bolts into anyone who tried to come at the gunner. A lobbed grenade meant for them was at its zenith and Eric caught it out of the corner of his eye, instinctually nailing it in the air with a perfectly timed phaser shot. It detonated with an impressive display of light and sound, but never made ground. That was a satisfying shot. Before he could brag, he felt Pax lean her back into his back as she used his weight for a counter brace in order to launch and kick her powerful Grazerite legs into someone who had gotten around behind them. It was a familiar move she had performed in training simulations and he was reflexively ready for the push off, angling his own leg in a triangular brace against it.
The fighting duo turned, shifting their back-to-back positions to get a fuller view of the field. Everything was gone to shit and 1st and 5th Squads were falling back, taking shots or cutting people all the while as they walked in reverse.
Eric put a rifle shot into a merc’s belly. “Where’s Sarge Zebrov?”
“He didn’t fall back?” Pax clubbed a guy with the butt of her rifle.
“I didn’t see him—” Eric traded his rifle for his pistol.
Swearing indelicately, Pax looked back to the overrun entry, and then to the fallback of the fallback. She repeated the swear as she turned and shoved Nathans. “Fall back!” She screamed at the gunner. Nathans’ cannon was whirring and clicking helplessly as it couldn’t overcome the over heated coils and as Nathans figured he was no more use here without it, he pulled the specialized power cable out completely to carry off with him so the canon couldn’t be conveniently deployed against their own, then drew his phaser and headed off with the rest of the squad.
Pax tried to make heads or tails of the bodies. Some were moving, some weren’t. She put extra-special-be-sure shots into anybody on the ground whose outfit she hated. Eric honed in on Zeb’s blocky form hunched over a crate. He grabbed his Team Lead by the collar and tried to heave the big ugly guy up. “We’re falling back, Sarge!”
As Eric pulled him off, Sarge’s guts came spilling out over the crate he’d been draped over and Eric froze—
“I found you Unca Eric!” Debbie shouted.
Eric startled and held a hand over his belly.
“You did, you found me, Debs.” Eric put out a fist for a bump and the little girl jumped to reach with her own mini chunky fist. “I think Uncle Eric is about done today though. Maybe tomorrow, yeah?”
He headed down the hall with his trailing entourage of three little girls, and stopped to look in the door of the hospital room, about to tell Ebrianna he was heading out. But he stopped short. Ebrianna was asleep, sitting in a chair with her head on the sheet over Sarge Zeb’s chest, her ear pressed into his heart.
“You know, on second thought,” he told the girls, “I could really go for a burger. Do you chicks dig fries and shakes?”
“Yeah!” They all cheered in unison.
“It’s way past your bedtime. I’m gonna get into trouble taking you home after curfew,” he said as he football carried a twin under each arm and little Debbie jogged to keep up with Uncle Eric’s long strides.
