Humanity Endures

Part 6 - The Cesspit | Chapter 4

An inexorable wave of pain crashed against Velan's mind; his head throbbed, his spine tingled, and had the agony he suffered not been suppressed by a well-timed injection of MECS, Velan would have fallen unconscious for the second time after his crash. Checking that his contact lenses were still in place, that he wasn't bleeding, and sighing with relief when he discovered that he was fine on both these fronts, Velan felt his pod's harness recede back into the device, finally allowing him to move again. As he brought a weary hand to scrape off the dust on his armor's visor, Velan's implants chimed in, broadcasting the message across his shaken mind, "No internal or external bleeding detected; fractured bones in spine and arm being stabilized; no broken bones detected."

Truly, escape pods were brilliantly designed, if Velan could be thrown from space into the side of four buildings and only suffer a fractured spine — something that was easily fixed in the modern era. His wounded hand from his battle on the Poseidon had already recovered; these other injuries were similarly of no concern.

A moment later, Velan's escape pod's front half burst open automatically, revealing the devastated floor of a commercial structure, now reduced to nothing more than a metal box filled with rubble, dust, and broken glass. His hazy vision being sharpened by MECS, Velan then understood his precise whereabouts — his pod was, at present, embedded in the 157th floor's ceiling.

As his restraints had been unfastened, however, the moment Velan slipped out of the last vestiges of his harness, he fell out of his pod and landed with near-comedic flair on the debris-littered floor — face first, though his helmet managed to barely keep him alive and conscious.

Around him, many of his remaining crew members, still numbering in the hundreds on the 157th floor alone, were sluggishly climbing out of their own variously damaged escape pods, checking their weapons, adjusting their armor and inspecting their suits' microbial shields with a fearful vigor that was dampened by the shock of their arrival; this shock would fade with time, but their fear would not. Next to Velan was Terxah, unharmed, clad in light, highly mobile infantry armor, and as alert as ever, despite having had nearly no sleep in the past day; near her was a fully armored Korthekar, whose suit had been so durable that even after suffering from atmospheric entry it looked reasonably intact, if scorched. A few meters away from Korthekar lay a shattered civilian hypersphere, contained within which was a tattered outfit, and a pile of dried gore that had mixed with the dust on the war-ravaged ground — no doubt, the morbid remains of the hypersphere's occupant. Not only was this an unfortunate sight in and of itself, but it also served as a reminder that, considering the stresses all of the Cesspit had gone through, it was unlikely that any hyperspheres remained functional; even if they were, as this unfortunate person had found out, they were unlikely to be safe. The corpse within the hypersphere's wreck had been viciously desiccated by time, and by the terribly hot climate borne of countless nuclear impacts; its garb was tattered, and, judging by the pool of vicious, partly-dried blood that accumulated in the bottom ridge of their hypersphere, he was clearly long-dead. The lack of any civilian presence besides the corpse in front of him reinforced Velan's theory that most civilians had fled to the other side of the planet, underground, or both, in their pursuit of survival. Fleeing underground was a wise choice — the firestorms, sonic debris, and nuclear fallout of the surface was not conducive to the survival of anyone not covered by armor, and though the subterranean sections of the world were more likely to harbor alien monstrosities, that was a risk Velan would be willing to take, were he a civilian. As he wasn't, it was a risk that Velan would thankfully not have to take; he simply had to find a way off the Cesspit before the Kalithiharian navy began to nuke it again.

Standing up, Velan, wanting to bring his remaining, weary crew members together before they marched to the nearby space elevator, began to use his implants to track the locations of all his other sailors — as people's implants were so interlinked, tracking the locations of everyone, and even viewing the record of everything they had recently done, was a possibility, and indeed sometimes a necessity, for high-ranking officers. Becoming aware of the locations and status of his remaining subordinates, Velan cursed emphatically: as he had predicted, a fair number of them had been spread throughout the surrounding area, making rendezvous and survival even more difficult. Yelazar and Illtera had landed on a slightly subterranean floor of Velan's skypiercer; a few other, more junior crew members occupied various other floors of the skypiercer below Velan; roughly ten other people — including Falmenec — had been spread throughout the nearby, still-human cityscape; a few unfortunate, and likely doomed sailors had crash-landed within the limits of the corrupted city. Fifteen of his crew had died as a result of the violent landing, but, as hundreds of thousands of Kalithiharian vessels had been destroyed as well, their human crews, numbering in the thousands in Velan's local area alone, stood to potentially replace some of Velan's many fallen, and to aid him in taking the nearby space elevator. In order to test their humanity, Velan intended to make use of the few alien-detectors he had stored in the escape pods of his crew — though they hadn't been proven to work, they were theoretically better than nothing.