File 10.15 - Returning Hero

Schir rocked around in her seat feeling like the ship would fall apart while trying to escape the Earth’s atmosphere. The violent shaking and warnings sounding off through the bay made it easier for her. They drowned out the sounds of her memories. She couldn’t stop hearing all of them dying. Each one remained fixed, burned forever into her mind. Nothing she said could allow her to escape it.

Leaving the Earth felt like she ran away from them. She left them behind on a terrible land, a foreign land. She couldn’t even bury most of them. ‘Commander…why me?’ Schir dropped her head down no longer even feeling the shaking. Noise drowned it all out.

Raw and numb, her mind tried to problem solve the situation. ‘If I had stayed out…’ All the ‘what ifs’ she made didn’t go for long before she cut them all. Any solution she tried to find just ended with them dying still. She could do nothing to stop it. They were dead no matter what she tried. She just didn’t understand it.

The loud ringing in her ears from breaking away from the Earth calmed. With the aid of the hands over her ears that it provided her, she couldn’t stop the voices of her team returning to her. The anger, tears and pain they all felt assaulted her at once. She clutched her hands to her head trying to block them out, but she still heard them. And with their voices came the memories, the images. Watching the hole carved out by that Devil machine that killed Wells to the knife that cut Elle in half. Every gruesome and bloody bit played in her mind.

There was no escape for her.

The port to the cockpit of the ship opened. Rinn stood up and poked his head through the entrance. “Come sit up here, Schir.”

Still buckled into the seat, remained still with her head hung low. Persistent calls from Rinn trying to cheer her up eventually broke her silence. “That’s the Commander’s seat.”

“Then just stand.” He walked into the bay and hit the emergency release on the belt. Pulling Schir back up to the front, he placed in the middle giving her a splendid view of the black ocean before them. Filling the sight was the Earth-Moon L3 region. An array of massive colonies filled the background to the edges with the member nation of Lyra in the center. The Capital Lyra 1 quickly grew to fill the screen. And filling with dots that shimmered like stars of their own was the vast ECF fleet already gathered for Operation Silence Break.

Tracking lights for the dock to Lyra 1 came out, opening arms to the returning heroes of the ECF. Once the immediately procedures finished, he looked back up to the despondent Schir. “Look at it this way. You’re home.”

“Home…” she repeated with an empty feeling. She stared out the window, but had trouble seeing anything in front of her. All that filled her vision and mind were the sounds of all of her team dying around her. She bit her lip as the echoes repeated. “It shouldn’t…be me…”