Tal turned his head downrange while she adjusted her posture, idly keeping both arms up as guides for her to shape her posture around. His mind was wholly elsewhere, absorbed in the stillness of the various sizes and shapes of robotic targets sitting at the end of the lanes, and it was only when she spoke up that he snapped back to attention.
“...Uh, yeah. Sure,” was all he said, empty gaze looking over her new stance that now passed muster. From here, it’d just be a lot of training and drilling until she assumed it during any confrontation, for the acquisition of that aforementioned muscle memory. “If you’re feeling confident, we can take some shots today.” Not quite the alcohol type, no. Slowly, he turned and stepped towards the armory, his old hiking shoes clacking on floor tile with each step, searching quietly for wherever he’d tossed that rifle’s powerpack. Starting with the bench but finding nothing, his eyes wandered back up to the gun rack, thinking he might be able to pull a spare from one of the other Bretonian rifles, but instead, he fixated all of his attention back on the Corsair samples, narrowing his eyes and inspecting them with much scrutiny. It’d been months since he’d seen one of these, not since the end of the Battle of Las Palmas.
Unlike her, he’d lived the fantasy, or rather, the nightmare that was combat on Gran Canaria. His response to the Captain over the Neural Net, the one that netted him this accursed reassignment to begin with, had not contained a single shred of exaggeration: for the month-and-a-half they were fighting in Las Palmas, they’d turned it into one of the worst places in the sector as tens of thousands of insurgents bore down upon and encircled the settlement and its defenders. It was Bretonia’s forgotten war, by most accounts, overshadowed mostly by the long-going Gallic invasion as it reached a climax, and it remained perhaps one of the most unpopular conflicts in terms of interfactional opinion, but nonetheless, it was one that slowly and painfully became theirs, a group of primarily-Libertonian contractors fighting and dying for a foreign flag half a sector away from home.
He couldn’t remember if it was one of these types of weapons that’d wounded him badly enough to take him out of the fight. It’d happened so quickly during a particularly risky street-crossing roughly three weeks into the course of battle, that all he could recall was running as fast as he could, suddenly feeling a sharp sting in his left knee, then total numbness of that entire leg as it gave out underneath him, sending him tumbling forwards onto the pavement. For a half-second, he had thought he was dead, until he was shaken back to reality by a missed follow-up shot that pinged off the asphalt right next to his head, mere inches away from turning his face into a canoe, and he was whisked away to safety by the shoulder straps of his ruck. The man who rescued him, Jasper Kincaid, was struck in the neck in the ensuing exchange of gunfire but survived; that same man renewed his contract and was the one who commented on how Tal managed to trash talk his way up to the top.
He’d looked down to see a weird, burnt mess, small specks of exposed, bright-red unscathed muscle shining through a sizeable smouldering crater that occupied most of what used to be his knee. His personal shield generator had absorbed most of the strength behind the energy weapon blast, likely saving him from losing his leg below the knee, but he was combat ineffective from that point onward. The focus on the Gallic war had, for the most part, drawn most of the BAF’s assets and attention away from Sydney, the skeleton Stirling battlegroup struggling to keep up with logistics whilst staving off well-organized Corsair forces in orbit, and it took significant effort to secure casualty evacuation. To make it worse, the adrenaline rush wore off ten minutes after their brief firefight, leaving him in a state of unbelievable pain for nearly two hours until a Clydesdale, pock-marked with scorches and dents from ground fire came to pick him up and deliver him to Port Jackson, where he was treated at an aid station.
Doctors were miraculously able to save and fix his leg with a hasty but highly-effective patch-job: cleaning the wound, surgically separating any traces of uniform that had fused to his skin, filling the joint with adaptive synthflesh, and sealing it back up with copious amounts of bioglue. After that ordeal, he was told he’d get two days to rest and heal before going back into the fray, and once two agonizingly-long days spent sitting on the floor in an overcrowded medical tent surrounded by the constant cries of the dying were up, he was put on another battle-scarred Clydesdale and flown back over to Las Palmas, where he continued carrying out his duties.
Fast-forward five months, and Las Palmas was doing no better. It wasn’t until after the Gallic war that the Bretonians truly began to rebuild the city, and progress was still slow. Of the ninety-six men and women comprising eight Cold Harbor Special Projects teams deployed on Sydney at the battle’s onset in April, twenty-eight had died as a direct result of combat by the battle’s closing in mid-May, with an additional two dying after the battle when their medical freighter crashed moments after takeoff. Evergreen, despite being the first of these teams to arrive on-station in the city, held the dubious distinction of being the only Special Projects unit lucky enough to avoid any deaths, although seventy-five percent of the team had been wounded-in-action at least once, while a third were rendered totally combat-ineffective within the first week and had to be evacuated to hospitals on Planet Cambridge, and less-than-half ultimately renewed their contracts with the Kingdom of Bretonia.
Tal didn’t know why he did it. After spending almost a month on New London before, during, and after the attempted glassing of the planet, he claimed he was done, but ended up deciding to come back to Sydney, where Bretonian involvement and interest was growing and there was really no place for contractors anymore. Then, him of all people ended up here, in Chateau d’Or, a far cry from the grassroots in the FOB at Port Jackson, to train the Captain’s half-sister for a month, leaving behind the men and women he fought so viciously alongside for these artificially-greener pastures, even if it was only a temporary arrangement. It was ridiculous how untouched things felt on the other side, how the assignment was almost presented to him as some kind of reward for the innocuous, empty bragging of his military prowess over the Neural Net. Instead of anything meaningful, he was promised lodging and bonus pay, as if it’d just all turn out to be okay, but the worst part? He took it. He willingly turned his back on his people, and for what reason? He couldn’t answer that, but one thing was abundantly clear.
He didn’t deserve any of this.
Taking a deep breath, he forced his mind off the subject and the weapons in question, spending a total of five Sirian Standard seconds staring at the rack blankly before finding the powerpack on top of a stack of folders on the bench. Of course it’d be in the last place he looked.
“Alright, here you go,” he sighed, handing her the pack. Not that he could load it for her any better than she could—the weapons he was familiar with from the service were on the rack underneath the Bretonian rifles and on his body. “Load up, fire at that target directly down the lane. Go at your own pace, I’m not timing you today.”