Writing PainKillers [T - LVS]

[Albert Flasher]

[FONT=Franklin Gothic Medium][COLOR=Sienna]Ok, well, here's something I've been working on. It's a sci-fi story is a sort of Starship Troopers world, where marines fight in powered armour suits against a host of other mostly-non-human creatures. Constructive criticism is appreciated.

[CENTER][b]PainKillers
Chapter One ? Splashdown[/B][/CENTER]

It?s difficult to describe the effect modern painkillers have on a wounded grunt. There?s the pain, of course, which comes in all shapes and sizes, all of them unpleasant, then there?s the sharp sting as your suit auto-injects you with the cocktail of relaxants and tranqs, and then an unnatural calmness comes over you. Your vision starts to blur, and the pain seems to drift away, a distant throbbing from across an ocean of placidity, and you start to grin like an idiot (Which, I?m sure, provides a rather amusing contrast to the horrors that surround you? assuming, of course, there was anyone around to be amused). For what is likely the first time in a long time, you?re happy. Then, if you?re lucky, someonething ? or, more likely, a team of someonethings ? picks you up no a repulsewagon and high-tails your wounded ass back to the nearest tempmed.

I got lucky. I was lying there, on the curiously-orange dirt of a foreign planet, under a Kevlar canvas, lying nude amongst rows upon rows of soldiers like myself, a slathering of tempfoam the only thing keeping my guts from falling out my side, feeling strangely pleasant. However, as the painkillers began to ware off, parts of my mind began to drift back into the real world, all of which were focused on a single thought: I don?t wanna die on a planet I don?t even know the name of! As much as I tried to focus on the positive side of my mind, the other side was far more convincing, and I found myself starting to think about the circumstances that left me in my current state.

The drop went off normally ? a regular SNAFU, if you know what I?m saying. The ships descended from high orbit to low atmosphere undetected. Marines, already packed inside their ill-fitting powerarmour, began to seal themselves into their pods, which were themselves loaded automatically into the firing chambers. This was a rather rough experience, bumpy and noisy, but it was not nearly as bad as the Wait.

The saying ?The waiting the worst part? is one that I often hear, and generally disagree with; I?ve always felt the worst part to be when someonething was shooting at you. But I?m in no way saying that there?s anything pleasant about the Wait. There you are, wrapped within a cocoon within a cocoon within a cocoon, in total darkness, breathing stank, recycled air, the only sounds that of your heart throbbing and of the ship?s engines rattling away, your only comfort the knowledge that soon you?ll be violently injected into a chaotic battlefield. You begin to sweat, and you begin to imagine things, and a terror grips you, filling your head with images and sounds and sights of the battle to come. They give you pills to combat this, of course, but all the doctors and chemheads in this sector couldn?t convince me that they?re anything more then sugarpills.

It seems to go on forever. It gets to the point where you?d rather they just hand you a parachute and make you jump, but still it goes on. You begin to think more clearly, after a point, and sometimes you start to think about your mission. Where am I? you will likely find yourself asking. I know I did, but I didn?t know the answer; besides the Suits, a few of the commanding officers, and the ship computers, no one did. Exactly one hour before the drop, every marine was given a briefing message on their helmet?s HUD, which detailed what their objectives were. It was also the first time that we would know who were fighting, a little tidbit added at the end of the message, as if an unimportant detail.

Then, suddenly, anything you happened to have on your mind is quickly knocked right off its tracks, and you are jarringly exploded out of your little barrel like a bullet from a gun, shot out into the chill of the semi-atmosphere of some foreign planet you?ve never heard of. It?s not as bad as the Wait, but it?s pretty damn close.

In keeping with the theme of military service, there is very little pleasant about the drop. For one thing, the gees produced are sickening, pushing you up against the inside of your suit and threatening to make your insides your outsides. Worse still, the pod is serrated and jagged with crags and folds which, as I?m told, are designed to confuse the hell out of radar and the like. I don?t know if it works, or if it?s just more bullshit, but it certainly makes the ride a lot rougher, as all these cracks screw with the aero, jostling you about and doings a pretty good job of making scrambled eggs out of your brain. Then, you dimly hear explosions and whizzes through your shell as the forces on the ground hurl their flak into the air to try and knock you out of the sky.

Then, quite suddenly, the pod sheds away, blown apart by pre-placed explosive charges. You go from complete darkness to a strange, unfamiliar light, and the sudden change in aerodynamics jerks you quite significantly. But, if all goes as planned, your gyros keep you steady and straight, and a succession of parachutes deploy and a series of jumpjets fire, which should slow you enough to avoid hitting the ground like a bug on a windshield. If the computer got the timing right, this should all happen just as you pass through the clouds; however, it?s surprising how often machines that are billed as perfect decision makers make such mistakes. This was the case with me; my pod opened just before it entered the canopy of cloud, leaving me at the mercy of whatever weather was stored therein.

As you may have already guessed, this was an exceptionally unpleasant experience; massive air gusts pull you this way and that, ice covers your suit and gets itself inside all your joints and servos, and there?s a rather significant chance that you?ll get electrocuted. I was forced to cut my main chutes and wait until I dropped out of the cloud coverage before deploying my backup chutes. I was lucky.

It was then that I got the first glimpse of the planet I was heading towards. I must admit, I was not impressed, not that I was expecting to be; from what I could see, it was mostly barren, with an odd orange-red dirt, highlighted by the occasional low mountain range or collection of constructions I assume the natives pass off as cities. Other then that, nothing remarkable, at least not from this height; no rivers, no lakes, nothing that looked remotely worth fighting for, and it was rushing up to greet me rather quickly.

Of course, I wasn?t the only one with this particular vantage, and I probably wasn?t the only one with these thoughts. My dropmates ? most of which had deployed below me ? were also making the descent, and my HUD was displaying the location of my Section Commander. I felt my stomach churn as I realized how far off course the winds had blown me; the little indicator lay far off in the distance, unreachable. I swallowed, and turned my eyes on the rapidly-approaching ground below me. My HUD blinked numbers in front of me, indicating my velocity and the distance to the ground; I didn?t know what any of it meant, but my computer assured me that everything was fine, which was a rather blatant lie. I swallowed again, and braced for impact.
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