Chapter 17 chapter eight

South Brescia is at a stalemate, and the space battle has not been resolved quickly, which cannot change the situation of the battle.Except for feints and the occasional violent firefight, the Ousters kept a tight grip on everything in Brescia's three AUs.The air combat unit of the military department fights and retreats, keeping the entire fleet within the range of the teleporter, protecting the most important space jumping spacecraft. The war that was once predicted to end in two days lasted for thirty days, then sixty days.The war was back in the 20th or early 21st century: long and brutal battles fought over ruined buildings and the corpses of civilians.The first 8,000 soldiers of the army were wiped out, and then 100,000 were replenished. When calling for another 200,000 reinforcements, these 100,000 soldiers were also slaughtered. Billions of people on "the big picture" and the AI ​​Advisory Council recommend evacuation, but Meina Gladstone and a dozen other councilors are relentlessly stubborn, keeping the fire alive and the troops dying.

Kassad understood the change in tactics almost immediately.Even as early as the people in his division were dying in the "Battle of Stone Pile", his street fighting instincts were activated on the front line.The other corps commanders, who were almost indecisive and indecisive because of the violation of the new Bushido, Kassad, commanded one of his regiments, and temporarily commanded the division of this regiment after the D command group was destroyed by the nuclear bomb. , can only use the number of people to exchange time, and then take the lead in calling for the strike of fission weapons before counterattacking.Ninety-seven days after the army began to "rescue" Brescia, the Ousters withdrew and Kassad earned a double nickname: the Butcher of South Brescia.It is said that even his own troops were afraid of him.

And Kassad also saw her in a dream, which was both real and illusory. On the last night of the "Battle at the Stone Pile," Kassad and his hunter-killers cleaned out the last Ouster commando stronghold with ultrasound and T-5 gas. Falling asleep screaming, he felt her long fingers touch his cheek, her breasts lightly touch his. They entered New Vienna in the morning after Kassad called for space strikes. The troops followed the glass-smooth twenty-meter-wide burning trench into the cut city. Kassad stared at the heads lined up on the sidewalk without blinking. They were placed there carefully, as if welcoming the rescue of the soldiers of the army with condemning eyes.Kassad returned to his command electromagnetic vehicle, closed the hatch, and then, huddled in the warm darkness, smelling rubber, hot plastic, charged ions, listening to the chatter of channel C3 and built-in decoding Her whispers were heard.

The night before the Ousters retreated, Kassad left the command conference on the USS Brasil, transmitted to the Indolibo headquarters in the north of the Hyni Valley, and drove his command car to the top of the mountain to observe the final bombardment .The closest tactical nuke strike was forty-five kilometers away.Plasma bombs bloom like orange and blood red flowers in a perfect grid.Kassad counted, there were at least two hundred green beams of light, it was the whip of hell tearing the vast plain into pieces.He sat on the gleaming engine mount of the electromagnetic car, shaking the aftertaste of pallor from his eyes.Just as he was about to fall asleep, she came.She was wearing a light blue dress, and she walked slowly through the thick dead roots on the side of the mountain.The breeze lifted her skirt, her face and arms were so pale that they were almost transparent.She called his name, and he could almost hear it, and then the second wave of bombardment swept across the plain below, drowning everything in flames and noise.

It seems like a case in this ironic universe that Feldman Kassad survived the worst ninety-seven-day battle in the history of the Overlord unscathed, only to be killed by the last of the Ousters as they retreated into them. Two days after his escape, the wandering ship was injured.He was answering silly questions from World.com reporters at the Civic Center in Pai Kim Min Si (one of the three remaining buildings in the city) when suddenly a plasma booby trap not much bigger than a microswitch appeared at 15 An explosion on the upper floor sent the reporter and two of Kassad's lieutenants out of the ventilation windows onto the road, while the building fell on Kassad.

He was taken directly to division headquarters by a rescue helicopter, and then transferred to the space hopping spacecraft orbiting Brescia's second moon.There he regained consciousness, lying on full life support.At this time, the head of the army and the overlord politicians are discussing what to do with him. Thanks to Brescia's teleportation links and real-time media coverage, Kassad was now, in a sense, the subject of a sensational lawsuit.On the one hand, the billions of people horrified by the unprecedented brutality of the Battle of South Brescia would be delighted to see Kassad court-martialed or vetted for war crimes.On the other hand, CEO Yueshi and others felt that Kassad and some other military commanders were their saviors.

In the end, Kassad was put on an ambulance gyroship and began the long journey back to the Ring.Since all physical therapy takes place in a "fugue state," it makes sense to use this ancient therapy ship to heal those who are seriously injured and who still have a life to spare.By the time Kassad and the other injured players return to the World Net, they will all be back on duty.What's more, Kassad will have a time debt of up to eighteen months, and no matter what controversies he is currently surrounded by, it will all be over by then. He woke up and saw the figure of a woman bending over him.For a moment he was sure it was her, and then realized that it was a doctor from the military department.

"Am I dead?" he whispered. "You were about to die. Now you are on the USS Merrick, and you have woken up and fainted many times, but you don't necessarily know all of this, because the 'fugue' has side effects. We are now going to the next step of physiological Treatment. Do you think you can get up and walk?" Kassad raised his hands to cover his eyes.Although the "fugue state" left him dizzy, he recalled the pain of the treatment, the long bath in the RNA virus, and the surgery.He remembers most of the surgery. "Where are we going?" he asked, the hand still covering his eyes. "I forgot how we got back to the Ring."

The doctor smiled, as if Kassad would ask her this question every time he woke up from his fugue.Maybe so. "We're going to Hyperion and Garden," she said. "We're starting to get into..." The woman's words were interrupted by the voice of the end of the world, the loud and clear brass horn sounded, the metal was torn, and the angry roar.Kassad fell off the bed at one-sixth gravity, wrapped in the sheet.The hurricane blew him across the deck, and flying jugs, dishes, sheets, books, dead bodies, metal tools, countless things flew towards him.Men and women yelled, their voices quickly fading to falsetto as the air rushed out of the room.Kassad felt the mattress slam against the wall; he clasped his hands and held his head, eyes peeking out from between his fists.

One meter away from him, there was a "spider" the size of a soccer ball with frantically shaking long legs trying to squeeze out of the crack that suddenly appeared in the bulkhead.The thing's long, jointless legs flapped papers and other odds and ends as they whirled around it. Spider turned, and Kassad saw that it was the doctor's head; she had been decapitated in the initial blast.The long hair billowed across Kassad's face.Then the crack became as big as a fist, and the head flew out of the hole. Just when the cantilever stopped spinning at high speed and the "gravity" disappeared, Kassad stood up.The only external force now was the force of the hurricane, which was tearing everything in the ward toward the breaches and gaps in the bulkheads, pitching and rolling the ship violently, making him dizzy.Kassad floated in the air, swimming against everything, toward the doorway leading to the corridor, beyond which was the cantilever.He used every handrail he could find to move forward, and in the last five meters, he let go of his hand, took a fish leap, and swam forward.A metal plate hits his brow bone; a corpse with a bleeding eye almost scares him back into the ward, the emergency airtight door is jammed by a dead sailor in a space suit trying to close it , but that's just useless work.Kassad swam into the cantilever tunnel, pulling the body behind him.The door sealed shut behind him, but there was much less air in the corridor than in the ward.A high-pitched siren-like scream somewhere was too thin to be heard.

Kassad screamed too, trying to relieve the pressure and keep his lungs and eardrums from bursting.The air in the cantilever was still being pumped out; he and the corpse were being rolled towards the main cabin of the spaceship a hundred and thirty meters away, and the two rolled along the cantilever channel, dancing a horrible waltz. It took Kassad twenty seconds to flip the emergency escape switch on the Marine's space suit, and another minute to drag the body out and slip in himself.He was ten centimeters taller than the dead man, and although the spacesuit stretched to a certain extent, his neck, wrists, and knees were still squeezed and painful.The helmet pressed against his forehead like a vise was biting him through the pad.Small patches of blood and white secretions stick to the inside of the mask.The shrapnel that claimed the sailor's life had left access holes in the spacesuit, which did its best to seal the air inside.Most of the airtight indicator lights were flashing red, and Kassad ordered the suit to display a status report. It didn't respond, and the rebreather system made a worrying scratching sound, but it was functioning normally.