Chapter One: Into the Breach

You ever get the feeling that you're falling while you sleep? The feeling of falling, being unable to stop it leading to an unavoidable splat on the ground, just no longer exist, and suddenly wake up at the last moment. Do you sometimes wish that to out would have just not woken up? That you would have gone splat? I had one of those dreams when it started and I do wish that I had just gone splat.

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The sensation of falling surrounded me, the feeling of inevitable demise, just for everything to rush away and for me to fall out of my bunk. The first thing that I noticed were the screaming of the alarms that sounded up and down the ship, notifying the crew that the CO had sounded all hands. Something was going down and it was going to happen soon.

I push myself off the floor just in time for the Staff Sargent to start walking down the aisle way yelling at US to get our collective asses in gear. This was supposed to be an easy mission, I thought in my head as everyone ran like a well oid machine. Say what you will about the era of peace, we had not let it go to our heads that there was no fighting and had continued to practice drills. The collective History of humanity had made sure of that.

I had recently been promoted to a second lieutenant in the marines in the Royal Majesty's Navy and given a Platoon. You'd think this would be an honor, and normally you'd be right, but there have been some disappearances recently. Those, mixed with the smell of multiple cover ups, had left me on edge and unsure what to really believe. I had to ask the Sargent the next time we had another serious conversation, but that was for another time, now I had to get to my Platoon.

We had just a generic name, given to us by the higher ups, which was Platoon Whiskey, but to those in the actual Platoon called it Death Trap. The reason for this was because every simulation that we did, every "camping trip" that we were sent on, we always seemed to come back with a few members killed. If I didn't know any better I would say that command's trying to kill me for asking so many questions. Like that hasn't happened before.

I made my way through the twists and turns of the 15km ship to the rally point that was designated for us. They just had to put it by the most likely spot to be slightly damaged if an enemy were to shoot it and, if that happened, you'd just have to mark it off as a mistake.

I made it to that point to see the rest of my Platoon, or I should say surviving members since we had just had an "exercise" that had left us understrength, and was bombarded with questions.

"Is this another test, Platoon Leader," a serious man who had survived in my Platoon for about six months and had the scars to prove it said from my right side.

This was Lucas, who had been unfortunate enough to be accused of getting with an Admirals daughter and had been put here. From what I could dig up, he had a promising career ahead of him, but he had, unfortunately, made a couple of powerful enemies causing him to now be here.

"Yeah, I thought we already had done our latest culling," said the man to the right of him.

This was Ron, my second in command only through trust and me pulling his ass from the fire. He had been here the second longest, which is how he was my second in command. When peoples lives are normally single digits when it comes to missions, this was a remarkable achievement. Believe it or not he had actually had his choice on where he wanted to go and had volunteered for this. It left me wondering if he regretted that decision at all.

This was the three members that were left, the ones to survive a particularly bad mission, and they were not happy. Not that I blamed them, it's just that with the repeated cycles it numbs the feeling's and left you almost feeling holo. I looked at each of them and told them the fateful news, "No, this is not a planned Mission, this is an attack on our ship that has given them the opportunity to have us join in."

Ron looked at me and asked, "so in other words they are most likely to try to send us in first?"

I nod my head as I get a ping informing me that we would be the first ones to go through and I took a moment before I let them know the news. "You've hit the nail in the head. We have just got our orders to go into the breach and try to push out the invading force with minimal backup," I informed them.

This was going to be a long day indeed.