As an Echelon Elite, soldier 542 was bound to care for all the troops in her command. However her link to 591 was so much deeper, the two of them being bunk buddies for several years until 542's genetically coded leadership skills had established themselves. At this time she was separated from her tube bred brethren. However, this had not stopped the two of them from being lovers, their chances for sex few and infrequent. This, if nothing else had heightened their passion for one another.
In a blinding rage, soldier 542 immediately triggered every weapon in her suit's formidable arsenal. The Ghastling corridor In front of her vanished in a rolling wave of energy dispersal; red explosions sweeping into black clouds as debris from the roof overhead collapsed. Her suit's limited AI screamed warnings at her. Heat overload, power reserve fluctuations, limited breaches in the armour and possible core contamination, they flashed up visually on her heads-up display and also via her neural shunts. She ignored them all.
Coded messages forced her armour into motion, spinning around before adopting a power assisted headlong run down the wide passageway which was cut directly through the native rock of the asteroid. It took 15.257 seconds for soldier 542 to arrive at the rearguard's position. She didn't even need to see the disaster in front of her to know that the situation was critical.
Dead and dying humans littered the passageway, which had now broadened into a small cave. Her command AI feed fed tactical data directly to her brain analysing the position of the bodies, the scars on both armour and the surrounding rock a tell tale history of violence. Grief threatened to overwhelm her as one by one the virtual icons of her fallen troops appeared in her skull, each representation emotionally overlaid with feelings of despair, loss and remorse.
One by one, the symbols representing friends and some part time lovers, turned black and faded from virtual existence. The artificial telepathic bond they represented had now each terminated at source. The last resort of any human suit armour was to wipe the core brain and the resident artificial host to prevent any loss of key data to the enemy.
The last icon rotated into 542's brain so dark in its redness as to be almost black. 542 fought back the urge to vomit in her suit. Between her legs she had already voided her piss into the black absorbent plastic kept there for such a purpose. The dying symbol belonged to 591. Without a moment's hesitation she sent a neural request for positioning coordinates of the signal. Her suit responded with glowing green tactile projections forming an overlap on her internal screen. A suite of other information flooded over the sides of her display, most of them a warning red.
The human troops had been bred for war but they had also been given an enormous capacity for love and affection. Command Copernicus had decreed that all human troops would be female. Although they could never breed, the instincts and genetic traits of their sex would instil a level of control and moderation into them that their male counterparts solely lacked. Unfortunately in extreme circumstances what would have amounted to a blind fury and killing rage in a man, more often and not led to an emotional overload in the females.
Now was possibly such a time. Salty tears were in her eyes as she bent down in her power armour to pick pitifully at the scarred remains of her friend's blasted suit. Her AI was still screaming its warnings, classing the whole location as a red-one death-trap. Her mission and duty now lay in returning immediately to the waiting evacuation ship and informing control of the situation. The asteroid's mass and complex density blocked most out going communications including for some as yet unfathomed reason, Quantum Tunnelling. For now, 542 ignored her AI.
