"It's all right, stay with me. Collins? Collins?" Her head slumped while I was holding her, a last bubble of blood came out of her mouth, and she was gone. Her last words had not expressed fear, she had been telling me that she did her duty, that she hadn't killed hamsters at the school. Somehow, through some combination of circumstances, Collins had gone from being a little girl, to joining the Army, to helicopter flight school, to volunteering for duty with UNEF, qualifying to pilot a Chicken gunship, to here. Dying in the arms of a total stranger. Killed by an alien species who did not have their own concept of 'humanity'. There was no good reason for her life to end there, that day. I broke down and cried.

I wasn't alone in standing with my shoulders slumped, sobbing quietly. Lt Collins wasn't the only person we lost that day, her death was the last straw that broke our reserve. She hadn't been killed in combat, she'd been murdered by beings who were supposed to be our allies, our protectors, our saviors. The whole situation on Paradise had gone to shit so fast, we'd lost almost all hope in a matter of a few months.

Rivers tapped me on the shoulder, looked me in the eye and shook his head once, silently. I got the message. The senior officer needed to set an example. I straightened up, angrily wiping my eyes with the back of a sleeve. Handing the zPhone back to Rivers, I told him to give a sitrep to UNEF HQ, as I didn't think I could keep professional at that moment.

None of us knew what else to say. There wasn't anything to say. After a while, we got the two bodies out of the Chicken and loaded into the back seat of the truck I drove. After we crossed the western bridge, instead of following the road through Habitrail, I directed us to drive across fields in a wide circle, which we could do now that we weren't loaded down with trailers. It took an hour to bypass the town, involving a lot of hunting around for paths to ford streams, bumping across dirt and mud, the work and concentration kept people focused on the task of getting back to base. I lagged behind in the truck, keeping enough distance from the last hamvee that if the lizards decided to take me out with a railgun strike or a missile, there wouldn't be collateral damage among my people. It also made sense to let hamvees scout the best path across country, as the truck wasn't as capable off road.