Humanity Endures

Part 12 - Bravery and Bloodshed | Chapter 3

The interior of the EWCC over Nahmatiix was as bloodied as the tenebrous void surrounding it, and only through the strength of her armor, the vastness of her prowess, and to no small extent the scale of her luck, was Felcamaxa still fighting. An endless cacophony of gunfire eclipsed the patriotic roars of those still fighting, and the desperate cries for help emanating from the dying. Mountains of tattered corpses stood amidst the banks of computers, now riddled with bullets, that made up most of the EWCC — many of these morbid mounds had formed just below Traitor boarding tubes, and these piles now threatened to touch the ceiling itself. Despite all of this death, however, such was the power of a cause, and such was the power of MECS, that the battle continued to rage, and the mountains continued to grow.

Swirling within the tight, bloodied confines of the all-important space station were hundreds of thousands of bullets, coupled with enough explosive ordinance to destroy a frigate, and melee combats so vicious they would be indistinguishable from those of the aliens by mercilessness and body-count alone. There was scarcely a square inch of the floor that wasn't drowned in human blood or covered in a layer of corpses, and there was not a cubic inch of air not filled with lead; wherever one looked on the station, there was steel and slaughter. Those still living were forced to use the piles of the dead as cover, while brutal melee duels between plasma-sword wielding soldiers were fought atop the dying wherever ammunition reserves failed — Felcamaxa had never seen, or even imagined, anything so gruesome in her entire career.

The Loyalist forces had suffered losses amounting to over half of their original force; the Traitors, having attacked carelessly, had also suffered losses numbering just under half of their soldiers. The Loyalist divisions on the surface of the station, after destroying dozens of Traitor SDPs and waging a pitched battle with the warships above and the hostile marines around them, had been all but eradicated, while some of the lower decks of the station had been claimed by Traitor forces, forcing the Loyalists to retreat to more defensible positions where they attempted to stem the seemingly endless tide of foes before them. Stray armor-piercing rounds frequently impacted communications servers, and the resultant detonations of failing hardware proved just as deadly and gruesome as any grenade; their explosions sent rains of bodies flying throughout the macabre rooms of the station. The fires of the servers' dead metallic hulks provided a fittingly gruesome light to accompany the ruthless slaughter around them, but the gruesomely poetic imagery of the rapidly-unfolding atrocity was scarcely noted by any, for on the EWCC, even a moment's hesitation could kill. In Felcamaxa's room, just under seventy Loyalist enforcers, cut down by anti-armor fire or their own traitorous counterparts after prolonged duels, lay propped up amongst the continuously-sown fields of marine corpses; the scene was as nightmarish as any from an alien battlefield, for both sides were working to be as savage to each other as this alien foe was with them.

The bridge of the station had weathered assault by the most elite of Traitor forces for some time, though as the Loyalists defending it were amongst the galaxy's most skilled, the combatants were more than evenly matched; with Loyalist reinforcements streaming in from other parts of the station and with Traitor reinforcements raining down from the perforated ceiling, the bloody battle showed no signs of stopping. Sprawled across the chamber were at least two SDPs' worth of fallen, and their number was added to with each passing moment — it seemed as if marine armor, intended to make such hostile battles more survivable, merely delayed one's death by a few minutes, or even seconds, at most. Such carnage was characteristic of the civil war, and it indeed was tragic, but after having witnessed and propagated so much violence, Felcamaxa, and indeed much of the galaxy, was numb to catastrophe that would have reduced them to tears a week ago. Felcamaxa was not altogether unhappy with this — a force reduced to tears could hardly fight well, while an army numb to suffering was well equipped to deal with what awaited it, now that humanity was both battling itself and an alien scourge. She would rather be insensitive than dead.