The squadron was back together and, thanks to Trapp's heroic save of McKnight, undamaged. From above the battlezone, Ari couldn't help but smile at that outcome. Watching her fellows pilot their MASs up, with the aid of the thruster packs, Ari angled up to do the same. As she triggered her pack and rebooted her MAS's OS into zero-g mode, she was glad to feel the influence of gravity slowly ease off of her. When they arrived in space, she was at first alarmed at all the possible contacts dotting the battlefield. She hurriedly swung her MAS around to face the nearest one to get a visual, but her targeting AI didn't trigger, and she didn't see any contacts. After a moment, she realized what this was, a graveyard of ships and suits. Her COM panel displayed the variety of distress signals from pilots, but Ari knew that the Astelion wasn't exactly equipped to be a rescue vessel. Surely, though, the Captain would send out rescue shuttles for their own. Safe in that assumption, Ari piloted the MAS back to the Lincoln's hangar.
As she guided the Astelion into the bay, machinery locked into place to help guide her to the Astelion's spot in the bay. When it got there, Ari leaned back in her seat for a few long, precious moments as she took a deep breath to gather herself. As the Astelion's cockpit slid open, Ari was immediately struck by the riot of smells that didn't belong in a hangar bay. Predominant among them was the smell of gunpowder, but also a slightly more sulfurous smell Ari surmised to belong to an explosion, it was a smell she'd become familiar with during heavy weapons training. These were, most likely, related to the Ferir she'd seen being dragged out as they approached. However, where there was the smell of gunpowder and explosions...
Suddenly, Ari felt no great hurry to disembark from the Astelion, guessing that whatever lay outside in the hangar bay was nothing that she wanted to see. She knew she couldn't wait in the cockpit forever though, and so with no small measure of reluctance she gingerly extricated herself from the cockpit, allowing her eyes to cast around. Thankfully, her pit was clear of casualties, and she first registered her fellow pilots landing and popping their own tops open. It was then that her eyes caught on something unfamiliar in the corner of the bay. A few neat rows of roughly man-sized olive bags. At first, she assumed they could be bags to help police the debris, but a nagging voice in the corner of her mind reminded her she'd seen cargo bags and containers in training and when she'd come aboard, and those were certainly not cargo storage bags. Against her own better judgement, she slowly ambled her way over to the bags, but as she approached she already regretted her decision. The smell of shattered bowls reached Ari, making her gag as the previous day's meals threatened to make a second appearance. Every logical impulse in her told her to turn back, that she didn't have to see this, but a macabre curiosity drove her onwards to peer at one of the bags that was still open.
Lying there was a Marine, one of the Lincoln's own, clearly dead from the gaping hole in his chest. Ari's eyes grew wide as saucers when her eyes beheld the gap in the man, and she stumbled back a few paces, her stomach no longer content to remain quelled. She rushed to a corner and expelled yesterday's dinner violently. As the yellowed bile rushed from her throat, Ari's mind raced in her head "That...that was a dead body. Oh my he was so...destroyed, torn up. Did..did he have a family? Friends? Almost certainly so! He had a whole life, stripped from him...just like you've been doing to those pilots. Like you DID to those men on the ground, with lasers and plasma. They had families too! Friends, loved ones, people they cared about, and you took that all away! Just because your weapons don't leave a body behind doesn't make you any better than the one who killed this man, in fact it makes you worse. You're a monster, a monster who kills people and doesn't even leave a body behind for their families to bury. Every other pilot here deals with it, makes allowances to try and atone, but not you. No, you just keep going cheerfully on, content to try and get all buddy-buddy with your squadron."
As these thoughts passed through her mind, Ari finally stopped voiding the contents of her stomach to the bay below her. She could already hear crewmen shuffling uncomfortably behind her, but for now she paid them no mind. Slowly proceeding out of the corner and to a nearby wall, she slumped down and stared blankly at the bay door, wanting nothing more than to be left alone with her increasingly self-deprecatory thoughts. It had been no small shock for Ari to see a dead body for the first time in her life, and to know that she'd been killing people with weapons even more horrible than the ones that had killed that Marine mortified her. She hardly noticed a few stray tears from her eyes as she found she couldn't help but dwell on these thoughts. An oddly detached part of her mind absently noted "I didn't kill him, or anyone in this bay for that matter. It's almost hypocritical to be so distressed by the product of work similar to yours when you see it in person, but not to be bothered when you don't have to see the dead body." This unwelcome thought aside, Ariana found herself staring blankly at the bay, wondering how her squadron mates dealt with the realities of killing in this terrible, terrible war.
ActRaiserTheReturned
Master EffeX