Corporal Vladimir fell to his knees due the sudden motion of the drop pod. He looked around the small pod and saw a couple of straps hanging from the wall. He crawled over and grabbed the longer strap to help pull him into a standing position. He tightened both straps over his body, once he found where the hooks of the strap connected to wall of the drop pod. He checked his forearm radio and found no human frequencies.
None.
Impossible! I should at least be able to detect non-encrypted civilian radio stations.
He checked the diagnostics of his suit to see if the radio was damaged. Everything checked out normal. Vlad held on to the straps and mentally prepared himself for what they called at boot camp, a “hard insertion”.
As he got closer to Earth, a great weight sat up on his chest, preventing him from breathing for a few moments. The shift from artificial gravity to true gravity was always imperfect, even on Lizzie ships it seemed. Dealing with double gravity, even briefly, was never a pleasant experience. Purple sigils appeared on the walls of the drop pod, moving too quickly for Vlad to decipher. Like most marines, he picked up a little bit of the Reptilian language, but quickly translating the pictograms was the forte of linguists, not jarheads.
The purple slowly shifted to red and the thrusters on the bottom of the drop pod kicked in. He braced himself for the landing. When it came, it was much softer than he expected. The sigils turned blood red and then faded from the walls. With a hiss, the door of the drop pod opened. Vlad untangled the straps and stumbled out of the drop pod, pistol at the ready.
Other than himself and the drop pod, everything was sepia-colored. The sky, the grass, even the dusty road leading off into the hills. He looked into the sky and the only color he saw were the thousands of drop pods coming down onto the earth.
Vlad pulled off his helmet, but the sepia coloring was not due to a flaw in his visor, it was everywhere. He put it back on and pulled up the display overlay.
With no radio communications on his radio, he activated the GPS map to see where he was. Nothing came up. There was no connection to any satellites.
Where am I?
Walking down from the top of a nearby hill came a couple of men, also sepia-colored, wearing simple garments out of an old sword and sandal holovid. They chatted in an unknown language and did not notice Vlad, despite looking straight at him.
When am I?
“Hey! Over here! Can't you see the Lizzies coming?”
They did not respond and kept walking. Vlad ran over and yelled in their faces.
Still no response.
He punched one in the side of the head, the kind of a punch that would knock an unaware person out cold. He connected, but the man barely reacted. A sepia hand effortless brushed Vlad aside and scratched the cheek, were his fist had just been.
Looking up the road, he saw that the hills were the tallest natural feature around, so he walked up, hoping to get a lay of the land. Once at the top of the hill, he looked around and saw what, to him, were primitive buildings.
The damn ship did it. I am in the past.
A squad of Reptilians were sniffing around in the distance near Vlad's drop pod. They were snacking on something, so Vlad zoomed in with his helmet cam and wished he hadn't. They were chewing on the limbs of people. He shuddered and zoomed out.
In his mind, he forgot about the existence of PFC Nathaniel Robinson, for he no longer had an ancestor.
Vlad looked around the hills for some sort of shelter. The entire human race was depending on him to fight off a thousand Reptilians with only 2 mags of flechettes and 3 rounds in his pistol. He needed a base to launch anti-Reptilian activities. Vladimir wandered about in the hills, until he came to a cave at the top of a hill, overlooking a small town.
Perfect.
He heard the sound of sheep bleating from within and peeked inside. He stepped inside to have a better look. There was no room for him to set up a small area to sleep in.
“Damnit!” he yelled. The cave was already occupied. Too much, it was all too much for him to handle. The black void of despair swallowed him up. It was finished. If the Reptilians could come this far in the past, they could kill the descendants of everyone alive in the modern day. Nothing mattered.
He picked up the Colt 2211 and looked it over in his hands. The smooth metal, the comforting weight, the serial number he had memorized in boot camp; it was all there.
It would be so easy to end it all...
The sharp cry of a baby distracted Vlad. Within the cave, along with a couple of sheep and a donkey, Vladimir saw a man standing next to a woman reclining on a feeding trough. In her arms was a baby wrapped up in a cloth, but its face, the only part of the baby that Vlad could see, was in full color.
PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V (Coming Soon!)
Picture Credit: "UEE marine defending his Vanguard Hoplite on moon Daymar" by Glenn Batuyong is licensed under CC by 2.0. I cropped the picture and resized it.