Against the Odds

http://i.imgur.com/WCKMa1S.jpg At the academy, everything was so much easier. Some days after school, I would like to sit back with some of my classmates and gaze out into the sky, or what was left of it. It was an amalgam of human infrastructure that stretched out into space. You could barely see the thin red line on the horizon that was caused by the refraction of sunlight on the Martian soil. I was born on earth, but most of my class was Martian. They welcomed me like this was my home. . . . There were 4 of us left. http://img08.deviantart.net/76d4/i/2013/079/b/f/interior_control_room_by_josearias-d5yncza.jpg “I did it! I rigged the bomb!” I was brought back to reality when I heard Romeo and the others cheering. I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, we did it! We can finally go home! Thanks to what we did, we will have a home to come home to!” It was hard to see her expression under her mask, but I could imagine her smile. Her name was Ces Locksley. She always sat by me in class and was exceptionally intelligent. She knew more about the enemy than any of us. Always optimistic. Romeo looked at the temperature reading on the monitor. “It’s already started to melt through to the core. We’ll have 15 until the reactor overheats and burns, opening up this ship like a can-opener to the vacuum of space.. Make the call, leader.” I nodded and pushed the button on my suit. “This is foxtrot…we did it. The reactor is melting down. Is beta team ready to make the evac happen?” “This is command…Thank you for all you’ve done. You are the best team that the academy has ever trained. Well done.” A loud sound of drilling could be heard on the other side of the door. “They’re going to break through any minute now!” Ratz shouted. He was breathing hard because he was already shot in the shoulder. Blood was streaming down his arm, but he was tough. The toughest guy I ever knew. He saved us so many times before. “Command, we appreciate it, but we don’t have much time. We need the way out now!” “This is command…We are deeply sorry. Beta team went dark about 15 minutes ago. We didn’t tell you before because we needed you to focus on the mission. We have another evac ship on the way, but you need to make it there yourselves. The enemy ship will detect us if we get within 50 meters of the exterior so you have to make it back to your space ship yourselves.” My legs almost dropped. All of the people in my graduating class were part of the first wave. Of the 122 people involved, most passed away buying us time to break in. What started out as a surprise attack became a suicide mission. Our survival depended on beta team’s survival. Who knows what we would face on the way out now. For the first time, I saw my team starting to fall apart. “I can’t! I can’t take it anymore!” Ces shouted, hunching over, shaken. I’ve never heard her cry before now. Ratz and Romeo could only look at her. They didn’t say anything. “Alright, this is going to be a bitch, isn’t it? Hey, this still isn’t going to be as bad as getting through one session of Romeo’s karaoke.” Everyone laughed. “Oh, like you’re any better, Elliot!” Romeo jabbed back. “Alright, everyone back in the zone? Alright, let’s open that other door and hope we don’t get our asses melted!” Romeo ran up to the other door and planted the charges. They went off and we charged through. The corridors were empty, but footsteps echoed from the different levels of the ship. One down. Two Three down. Flashes of my gun. A bullet bounced and tore through the skin on my left leg. It was so loud I couldn’t hear anything else. Of course the doors were on lockdown now. “Wait!” Romeo said. We all took cover near the next closed door. “There’s a terminal here.” He stopped at the terminal with bullets barely missing his head as he furiously typed. “I can open all the doors to the escape point!” “Just do it, Romeo!” Ratz shouted. “…Thing is. It has to be done manually. The doors will close automatically otherwis –AGH!” Romeo was hit by a bullet right in his shoulder that spun him to the ground, but he continued on like it was nothing. He shakily took out one dice from his pocket. “…Let’s decide who stays behind on a game of chance. The winner decides…” We all knew about the game. As a last resort. To decide who lives and who dies. We reluctantly picked numbers and the dice rolled. . . . There were 3 of us left. We all stumbled through the hallways. Romeo was locking all the doors around us giving a somewhat clear path. We had already ran out of bullets and were simply running, hoping that the next bullet wouldn’t be the one that takes us down. A high velocity round came in so hard it knocked my helmet clear off. We reached what looked like a loading dock. The corridor we needed to go into was on the opposite side, on the second level…and the bridge leading up to the door was completely destroyed. “Damn! They anticipated we’d try to come here!” Ratz shouted. Ces was griping onto my arm. She wasn’t trained as well to run in low oxygen environments and was at her limit. I quickly looked around for another solution and found a loading crane that was hooked onto some steel palettes. “Look! We can use that crane to lift up the steel platform like an elevator to that second level!” We ran over to the crane. Ces and Ratz provided covering fire. “Yes! The keys are still in the ignition!” I powered the massive crane on and swung the steel platform the crane was attached to like an ax and chopped through the enemies that were firing at us from the other side. Finally silence filled the room, but we knew it wouldn’t last. “One of us needs to stay behind to operate the lift…” I said. I strained to think of any other option. Any other option to get us all up on that second level but time was running out. We had to roll the dice again. . . . There were two of us left. Ces was hanging onto me as we laid flat on the platform. It swung in the air as Ratz was having to move it quickly. The enemies were all focusing their fire on him. Blood was running from his mouth but he kept his focus on us, and we were lifted to the second floor. An explosion. The cockpit of the crane was blown away and we fell in front of the door. We didn’t have time to react. We threw ourselves through the opening. The doors were not closing behind us anymore. No, they were all closing in front of us now! Romeo must have forced it on lockdown when he got overrun. “Look! There’s our exit!” Ces exclaimed. My leg was leaving behind a trail of blood from the bullet wound, but I was at a full run with Ces. My vision was getting blurry. My body was now running on it’s own. All those years of training came down to this moment to make the final push. Ces was right ahead of me and ran through the final door to the docking bay room. I fell. I opened my eyes and noticed I was resting my head in Ces’s lap. “Are you okay?” she asked me. She had slid up the visor of her helmet and I could see her beautiful red-tinted eyes. “How many fingers can you see?” “Two.” She let out a sigh of relief. “What are we still doing here?? We need to get into our ship now!” I could hear the footsteps gathering on the other side. “About that…” She looked towards the window showing the void of space. I stood up to look out the window. Floating outside of it were the remains of our ship. I slid down the wall and sat. “Well, I guess this is it huh?” Ces was now looking at her watch. She then pressed the comms button on her wrist. Oh, that’s right. I can’t contact command because my helmet was blown off. “Command. This is Ces from foxtrot team. Elliot and I have made it to the evac point. Our ship has been destroyed. Please advice.” “Foxtrot?? You are still alive?? The ship is in route, but we will converge with your location eta one minute. You need to make your way out of the ship--” A deafeningly loud explosion rocked the ship. The ship was depressurizing at a rapid rate. Our time was nearly done. “Command. Say again?” “You need to make a dry walk outside of the ship. That is your only chance…” I laughed. “That’s crazy! Any other sensible options, command?” I said over Ces’s comm. “The suits in the pod room should have enough oxygen to get you halfway there.” “We can’t get the kind of thrust to make it that far in time!” I shouted. “Hold on,” Ces interjected. She took a charge out of her side-pocket . “I still have one left. We get into the space suits here, I set the timer for the charge, plant it, and we hit the manual open for the vacuum seal door. We’ll be sucked out into space, but if we time it correctly the explosion will not kill us and will give us the velocity we need to make it a safe distance away from the ship. “Ces, if it was anyone else that suggested that plan I would say that it’s suicide. If anybody can do this, it’s you, Ces.” She smiled. Thankfully fortune smiled on us because two fresh spacesuits were sitting there. We actually had a chance to make it out of this together! I promised myself that I would ask Ces to marry me right after we get back. I thought about Romeo. He was one of the first friends I made at the academy. Short hair, thin. He was always thinking about girls. We would talk about them all the time after school. Other people thought he was full of himself, but he really did care about his teammates more than anyone in the world. Would he of decided to settle down if he were here to make it back?

And then there was Ratz. He was pushy, and always challenging others at the academy. Maybe he had something more to prove because he was the oldest one there. He already had a daughter that’s turning 7 next fall. He was originally chosen as leader, but he always refuses to be the leader. Said it was too much responsibility for him. The wife and kids were all he could handle. I finished putting my space suit on and checked the oxygen levels. My heart sank. It was at a mere 10%. I quickly ran through all the oxygen deprivation training I have been through and made some quick estimates. I’d have to spend 5 extra minutes of no oxygen than I’ve ever done before. “What is your oxygen levels at, Ces? ….Ces?” She was looking at her wrist reading on the suit. Just staring at it. “What is it at?” I asked in a serious tone. She gulped. “17%. You?” “10%” She knew as well as I did there was no way that she could make it that long without oxygen. She was average at best in the oxygen deprivation training. I slammed my fist repeatedly against the door and screamed. Why?!? Why does this have to happen when we are so close? Meanwile Ces was arming the charge. “What are we going to do, Ces?” I said in between tears. I was no longer a leader. I was her friend. I was that same boy that joined the academy all those years ago. Ces placed the charge on the door and it started beeping. She walked up to me and attached a tether to my space suit. She then connected our oxygen through the life support tube. “There. Now our oxygen is connected.” “Can we make it, Ces?” She smiled at me. I could see the optimism in her smile again. “Hit the switch, Elliot. Don’t want to die in the explosion, right?” “Oh! Here we go!” I slammed the button for the door, and gripped the side wall bar tightly. The room slammed us around as the oxygen blew us out of the room, leaving us floating in the void of space. The tether was the only thing keeping us from spiraling away from each other. I pulled on the tether to draw us together face to face. “Are you ready?” She asked through her radio. “…Yeah.” I replied. “Good.” She pushed a few buttons on her wrist. “What are you doing?” I saw the reading of the oxygen levels on my screen going up. “What are you doing, Ces?!?” She smiled, holding back her tears. “I rolled the dice when you were looking. You had already said two. I guessed six, so I won. I get to decide.” I gripped the life support tube and tried to prevent more oxygen from going into it, but it was already too late. “How do I reverse this?” I said, trying to work my way through the buttons. She had already unhooked her life support cable. “No! Put that back in! I need to! I need to…” I said through tears. “Just look at it. Isn’t mar’s pretty from here? I never been on an actual space walk before.” http://i.imgur.com/3fRldjO.jpg I tried to calm my heart rate knowing that I would just waste precious oxygen we both couldn’t afford to waste. http://avvesione.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/space_brothers-41-damian-astronaut-panic-distress-helmet-light.jpg “Please…just reconnect the cable, Ces. We can both get through this.” “20 meters until I can safely detonate…” “Ces, please. Please just listen to me…” “10 meters until I can safely detonate.” She said. She was straining to breath and her helmet was getting foggy. He eyes were locked onto me. “My oxygen…will let you live…I’m happy about that.” She was tearing up from the corner of her eyes. “Please, just think about this. I love you, alright?” She weakly laughed. “I know. You never asked me out though. I was waiting, you know?” She disconnected her tether from me and I held her close. I could tell that she was fighting to stay conscious. There was nothing I could do. With the last of her strength, she pushed me away from her. “0 meters. Goodbye Elliot…-was happy to be by your side…” She took a shaky hand and hit the detonation switch. “No!” I called out. http://www.ilikewallpaper.net/ipad-wallpapers/download/24044/Gravity-Lost-Astronaut-ipad-wallpaper-ilikewallpaper_com.jpg An explosion rocked me through my core as I was pushed out into space. I tried to gain my bearings. I could see a faint image of another astronaut in the distance. She was floating further away from me. http://i.imgur.com/O6kmp5M.jpg “Ces!” I called out over the radio. I was met with static. I was out of range. . . . I was the only one left. I drifted. I don’t know for how long. The warning sound for my oxygen levels came on in my suit. Before I lost consciousness I saw the glow of a ship approaching me, with some voice coming on the radio. However, I was too sleepy to answer it. The dice game. I had lost all of my dice roles. The winners chose themselves as the sacrifice. That’s how we promised to each other, as a team. More than our own deaths, we feared the deaths of each other. We’d do anything for each other. And I, remembered as the lone survivor from the battle as the hero. We always laughed at the concept of a hero. The real heroes were the ones who didn’t come back. Mars was saved. Millions and millions of lives were saved. All because of the students from a single academy. Ces would be happy. All of my friends would be. http://nhanfiction.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/aircrafts-uniform-army-gloves-military-indoors-original-purple-hair-red-eyes-hangar-anime-girls-5_www-wallpaperfo-com_60.jpg