"Sarge, you okay?"

"Yeah, why?" Enders asked as one of his Marines came up to him.

"You took a hit," the kid said. "Back of your left shoulder…bleeding like a motherfucker." Enders vaguely remembered something that felt like a bee sting early in the engagement, but the adrenaline was pumping so hard he didn't think much of it. He reached back over his shoulder with his right hand, and his glove came back soaked in bright red blood.

"Well…shit."

"Take a seat, Sarge," Corporal Fields said and motioned for the private who had noticed it to help him. "Give me a hand taking his harness and armor off."

They carefully peeled Enders out of his gear, and Jackson pulled back his undershirt to see what he was dealing with. There were a few moments of grumbling before Enders sucked in his breath as the disinfectant hit the wound, followed by a clotting agent. Lastly, a field dressing was slapped on, and the cooling relief from the drugs the bandage was impregnated with made him sigh.

"It hit your combat harness and lost most of its energy. The round wasn't even in there. Just punctured your skin and stopped before even tearing into the muscle," Fields said. "Lucky bastard."

"If I was lucky, I wouldn't have been shot in the first place," Enders grumbled.

"Fair enough. You want help putting your shit back on?"

Enders nodded and lifted his arms so they could slide the armor back on, and then his combat harness over that. He hauled him to his feet, and by the time he'd collected his weapon, the numbing effect of the bandage had taken all the pain away, though his shoulder now felt stiff. He took a moment to look around the room and saw Lieutenant Pritchett making her rounds to the seven other Marines who had been wounded. There was a circle of people surrounding the prone form of Sergeant Walker, hands on his chest and heads bowed.

"Walker bought it," Fields said, following Enders' gaze. "He led the charge to the right through the entry…took one in the neck."

"Fuck."

"Yeah," Fields said, his voice flat.

It was nearly twenty minutes later when Pritchett came up to where 1^st Squad was posted near the secure doorway and waved Enders forward.

"We have the access codes to open that door, but we don't know what we're going to find inside. Battalion says they lost access to internal sensors nearly an hour ago, so the colonel had teams go and blow the network nodes," she said. "If we can't use them, neither can they. This door leads down to a security zone that will give us access to the backup command and control systems."

"And if the enemy is already there holding it…" Enders left his statement hanging in the air.

"We'll be walking into a slaughter." Pritchett nodded. "It's designed to funnel aggressors into a kill box while giving the defenders ample cover and protection. We can't get enough people down there quickly enough to overcome that advantage, even with those shit weapons they're carrying."