The Will To Live✔️

Chapter 35: Back To Basics

This time, the light of Greg's consciousness merely flickered, it didn't die.

When the Pelican stopped moving and the interior of the cabin stilled and the dust settled, he blinked several times, groaned at the several fresh pains that assaulted his already battered body, and groped for the release on the straps holding him in place.

He tasted blood, and his vision was not tracking properly, but he'd dealt with all this crap before. Greg finally hit the release and fell right out of his chair, on the hard, slightly slanted deckplates of the cabin's floor.

"Who's not dead? Sound off," he said after clearing his throat. He hawked and spat, trying to get the blood out of his mouth.

"Present," Izzy groaned.

"Here," Coretti said distractedly.

"I'm here," Laney said.

"Nothing broken, for once," Breaker said from the cockpit.

"This is turning out to be quite the rescue mission, Sergeant," Turner said dourly.

"What an observation," Greg replied as he struggled to his feet. "Glad to see those years of no doubt prestigious education are going to excellent use, Doctor."

She actually laughed quietly.

Greg hesitated. "Larsen?"

He looked around and his eyes settled on an unmoving form near the back of the Pelican. His heart skipped a beat and his guts flooded with cold fear.

"Crap," Izzy muttered.

He staggered across the slanted interior of the Pelican and carefully knelt next to the man. Most of his fear drained away as he saw that Larsen was still alive, just unconscious, but he winced in sympathetic pain when he saw that his right leg was bent at an unnatural angle.

"Good thing he's out," Izzy said as she came up next to him and then knelt by him. "Resetting this bone and getting a split in place is gonna be painful."

"Do it fast and hit him with some painkillers so he doesn't wake up into total agony. And make sure he doesn't have any other wounds," Greg replied, standing.

"On it. Coretti or Laney, find me something to make a split with," she said.

Greg left them to it and moved to the cockpit where he saw Breaker angrily trying to reactivate the consoles and screens around him.

"What are we looking at?" he asked, peering out the front window. It seemed that the impact hadn't been too terrible.

"Nothing good," Breaker muttered. "It's shot. They warned this could happen. The effect of the aurora or lights or whatever the hell that green glow in the sky is is ongoing. So it finally caught up to us, it seems. Or...something. I'll be honest, I'm not one hundred percent sure what the engineers actually did to make this thing fly, but I do know that this thing isn't getting back up. So wherever you want us to go, we're walking there."

"That's just perfect," Greg muttered. "Do we have anything? Navigation? Radio?"

"No, it's all dead, and all I know is that we're about thirty miles short of the base. So...yeah, it's gonna be a long walk," he said.

"Oh come on!" Greg snapped. He sighed, shook his head, then turned and walked back into the cabin. Laney was searching through some of the emergency compartments. Izzy and Coretti were dealing with Larsen's broken leg. That was going to complicate things. He studied it all for a moment longer, then, after considering things, he returned to the cockpit and opened the hatch in the roof. Climbing up the rungs mounted on the wall, he poked his head up and out of the opening. He half-expected to find Flood crawling all over the hull, but there was nothing. He saw no hostile entities as he climbed carefully up onto the roof of the downed ship and looked around. What he did see was a lot of snow, a lot of open space, a lot of trees.