Fabienne Gschwind - The Fallen Heroine

"You must stay limber, even on the ground and when a wriggling repro is on top of you. And one day, a rock may be the only weapon you have left!", Tartelette explained to me - the others seemed to have already heard this lecture.

Thibault provided us with the final information. With the weird clubs called “flame grenades”, we made a big fire. For repros are attracted by enormous flames. We stood guard until dawn.

The second day in the field was exceedingly instructive. Gabin, our expert tracker, took a lot of time to explain the tracks to me as we hunted repros remaining on the beach.

The rest of the afternoon was spent searching the many salt marshes. There were still tons of repro birds there. The Backcountry ReS unit Rochefort helped us by dropping grenades. We would have liked to do without their help, because they shot their rockets everywhere where something moved, and several times we were knocked over by the shock waves.

Covered with a sticky mixture of mud and salt, we struggled out of the swamp onto a road. It was quite a bit higher up, and we pulled ourselves over the side of the road on our bellies. "Oh man, my armor batteries are about to wear off," Gabin groaned.

"Guys, wipe your cameras clean! I can't see anything anymore," Thibault cursed. But I would have been happy to see something myself.

Suddenly, something big stopped perfectly silently right in front of us. I quickly tried to wipe the dirt off the battle visor and recognized a hover tank. Emily dropped back into the mud to avoid coming under the hover jets.

Gabin and I did the same. Only Tamara sat in the middle of the road, cursing as she tried to clean the muddy visor with a clump of salicorn. The silent tank came to a stop in front of her.

Only now did the boss realize that something was wrong and opened the visor.

The head of an old woman came to light above the large canoning tube. I saw many rank insignia and medals stuck to her fancy uniform.

"Well, what a catch! The famous Tamara Arlette, right in front of my cannon," the old officer joked with a smile. Tartelette pulled herself to her knees and raised her arms.

"I surrender," she said with a grin as she looked up at the overdimensioned cannon barrel. She then stood up and unscrewed the helmet completely. She saluted the woman.

"Senior Commodore Cortaux, good to see you.”

It was the senior commodore, the head of the entire ReS. I looked at this woman who had been in command for over 30 years now; she had to be over eighty. Thibault had told me on the first day that the woman held the whole asylum together. Without her, chaos would break out. The two women had known each other for two dozen years and exchanged a few friendly words.

"Oh, we're almost done," Tartelette explained to the head of the ReS.

"I can see that, but I have some USDU representatives with me to check the island again ..." I saw Tartelette grimace. The commodore nodded knowingly along and continued.

"So I wish you a good hunt. Driver, be careful not to get our legend under your wheels..." Her voice disappeared inside. As the tank began to move, even our living legend had to make an inglorious backpedal and jump into the mud.

As we walked down the street after the incident, the mud-encrusted Tartelette cursed, "I hate these USDU people. They're all freeloaders. Zero clue about repro-fighting."

Our drivers were on their way to pick us up. Still, the boss seemed unwilling to give us a break, so instead we marched on. Emily dropped back with me to explain the whole problem.

The idea itself is good; you have on-call special units that come to support the local ReS units in emergencies.

The USDU - Unité Special de Derniere Urgences - which meant Special Emergency Combat Unit , was just such a unit. Well, in theory at least.

But the problem is that there were no prerequisites to get into the USDU elite group. You just had to be good friends with the king president. Or have good connections with the nobles of the French government.

As the years went by, former officers, jaded politicians or similar people got these posts. The whole thing was extremely lucrative, since one collected huge hazard pay, but was hardly ever employed. Or they only appeared when the danger had been averted. We heard Tartelette swear that these older ladies and gentlemen would now certainly spend a whole week visiting the Île de Ré and staying in a sinfully expensive hotel in La Rochelle. For that, every single one of them would collect three times my annual salary.

"Tartelette has been dreaming of her own special unit for a long time. But not even the Commodore could allow her to have it. The king president himself won't grant the ReS one; after all, the USDU already exists," Thibault said languidly over the radio. He had switched to the private frequency, so only Emily and I could hear him.

"Tamara doesn't have enough friends in the big leagues to put in a good word for her anyway." At that, he fell silent and we caught up with the others. I already knew by now that our boss didn't mince words and really told everyone what she thought. Because of that, she had many enemies, especially powerful politicians and nobles.

Tamara went on: ”I swear to you, at some point an operation gets out of hand and many others die besides the USDU representatives."

We were silent for a long time and I gave Gabin the rest of my drinking food that we carried in our suits. For me, I looked for an energy bar, but I had eaten them all. Emily dropped back almost a hundred meters and chatted with her sister, reassuring her that everything was going well.

"But mon Capitaine , I don't understand why it's so difficult? All we need is a few extra weapons and more training. Maybe if you asked the king nicely? He just praised you for the mission last night, this is the perfect time for a request, isn't it?" Gabin said almost childishly.

Tamara pondered this and fell silent as the drivers finally joined us.

After servicing our equipment, the captain invited us to a bistro to finish up. Her mind was elsewhere, thinking hard about something, so she even left it to Emily to put dessert together for her. I just wanted to go to bed and tiredly finished my crème brûlée while Gabin polished off a piece of St. Honoraie.

"Okay guys. Now that we've worked through more than two days in a row, you get tomorrow off. Unless there's an alarm, you guys can do whatever you want. We'll meet then at four in the afternoon. Very well, I'll go back to the barracks, I have some work to do," she added mysteriously and stood up.

"Chief, don't you ever sleep?" asked Gabin, but got no answer.

At home, unshowered, I just fell into bed, and slept through it.

By the time I was finally awake, showered, and had eaten some leftover bread for breakfast, it was lunchtime. I quickly tried to chat with my family. I caught up with my brother, who was in the throes of studying for his final school exams. He wanted to study history so badly, but we didn't have the money to buy him out of the job obligation and pay for university. The job office had already provided an apprenticeship for him to become an robot engineer.

I exchanged a few lines of text with my little sister, too. Suddenly the message tone beeped and on the screen of my small multicomputer my somewhat senile, ancient great-uncle Actéon appeared. He had served in the ReS himself. But not in an active unit. He had developed the combat armor instead. He must have been proud that I served in the ReS. At least that's what I thought I heard from his words.

After that, I sat back and looked around the small apartment.

Oh yes, this apartment! It was as good as empty, I had only a suitcase with some clothes, my favorite books and my tiny little multicomputer. In addition a bed, a table and a chair, which had already stood in the apartment. Transportation and public transport were extremely expensive, so I had arrived with only my large trekking backpack and an old rolling suitcase. But that was not a big problem until now. The clothes I wore were provided and washed by the ReS. My place to stay was a service apartment, and most of the food I ate with my colleagues was paid for out of the unit's budget.