Proximal Flame's Fiction

The major looked down at his huge gauntlets; they were stained with blood. The freshest blots were from a young ensign who’d been skewered on the end of a bayonet. She’d never even seen what killed her, the alien creeping up behind her, invisible and impaling her on the end of its rifle. There were some sounds that you never thought a human could make until you heard them for yourself, straight from a dying throat. Leibowitz had heard too many of those. He’d killed the ensign’s murderer. Not very forgiving, but he hadn’t joined the Corps to proselytize mercy. Especially not to some tentacle-faced monstrosity that had just gutted a helpless girl like a fish. The Marine leaned back against the scarred bulkhead, listening to the comm channels as more of his people died. I hope this tub is worth it.

“Human,” Admiral Foraker stated, still unable to come to grips with the concept. If Captain Drake Winters, the hive’s senior physician, had had glasses to adjust nervously, he would have done so. Over the past two days, he’d been feeling more than a little like Alice staring down the rabbit hole. Only there was a saying about looking into the darkness too, wasn’t there? He nodded, taking a moment to settle himself. Almost all of BG 97’s senior officers were here, in addition to Special Envoy Diana Pierce and none of them looked entirely happy. A rather attractive redhead, whom he realized was Commodore Archer, appeared the most discomfited out of them all. He’d heard rumours about a disagreement between her and one of her captains during the final moments of the battle for Hyperion Hive and she’d been a consistent voice for more aggressive action against the Lefu. To find out that the ‘alien bastards’ she’d lost friends to over and over again were human themselves… it had to be unsettling.