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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ledded" data-source="post: 1683035" data-attributes="member: 12744">[PLAIN]We were like gods once... [Left hanging out][/PLAIN]Outskirts of Arnhem, 20 minutes later. … “C’mon boys, lets pick up the pace. We gotta make it to the extraction point” growled Captain Smith, adjusting his eyepatch. “Ya hear that Moose? Better pick up the pace, I’d hate for ‘em to leave us here with our assess hanging out” Smitty grunted. He was slung over Moose’s shoulder, with Hank over the other. Moose’s wounds had been slowly closing, as had been Smitty’s, albeit slower; Hank didn’t quite have the knack for healing that they did. He lay over Moose’s shoulder, barely conscious, occasionally spouting a string of slurred and delirious ramblings before lapsing back into unconsciousness. Moose was tired, and still injured, but still insisted on carrying the both of them. Frogbot and John weren’t much better off than he, and he was a good bit stronger. Plus, if something jumped ‘em, those two were a heck of a lot faster. Captain Smythe smiled with no humor and shook his head. Smith looked back at them grimly. “Less talk. More moving.” Smith patted the bag slung over his shoulder, the one holding the book they had paid so dearly to recover, and kept moving. After several more minutes, they came up on a three-man checkpoint, near where some of the paratroopers had originally dropped. The field was littered with parachutes and gliders.  (see <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=13814" target="_blank">attachment</a>) One of the men advanced quickly and spoke with Smith. “Sir! We were worried that you weren’t going to make it back in time. We have a glider ready, sir, but we need to move. The Jerry’s are demolishing the houses of Arnhem one by one with tanks and arty; there’s probably no Brit’s left now. We have reports that a couple German SS Panzer platoons are rapidly closing in on this location. Our scout reports Talent activity is pretty high with ‘em sir. Ubermensch, most likely an entire unit of Goering’s Entscheidende Soldaten.”  The last was delivered with a slight amount of hesitation; a lowered voice and a sidelong glance at the five bedraggled and wounded men bringing up the rear. “Lets load this motley bunch up and get out of here”, came Smith’s reply. The ESSes that arrived with Smith and Smythe started moving rapidly towards a glider near the center of the field. One of the soldiers from the checkpoint approached Moose, reaching for Hank’s barely lucid form. “Hey buddy, lemme help you with those guys…” Moose turned the shoulder with Hank on it away from him with a grunt and kept plodding for the glider. “Hey! Look, we gotta go blockhead, you’re not gonna make it moving that slow…” the guy continued, grabbing Moose’s sleeve. Moose spun on him with a low bass rumble from in his chest. His eyes blazed for a second, then his form expanded explosively outwards in size, the rumble becoming a bear’s roar. Moose towered over the man from his nearly 10-foot height. The young soldier fell back on his backside in alarm, mouth making a little ‘o’ of shock. “I said… I’ve got ‘em”. Moose turned and took great loping strides towards the field of gliders. “Wha… but… wha… um… “, the guy muttered, trying to get to his feet. “Hey, buddy, lemme help ya there”, John Brighton said as he helped the young man to his feet, roughly dusting him off. He continued without missing a beat, turning his dusting of the man’s jacket to a patting of pockets. “Don’t mind Moose. He’s a big teddy bear. Kind of a bad day, and all that. I’m sure you understand”.  John fished into the man’s breast pocket while talking to him, pulling out an open pack of Lucky Strikes. He pulled one out, put it in his mouth, and pocketed the rest of the smokes. “Hey buddy, got a light? Hey?” he snapped his fingers a few times in front of the young man. The guy shook his head.  “Wow, I never saw a Talent do that before, I mean, I’ve seen a bunch of ‘em, but I…” “Yeah yeah yeah. Whatever. Light?” John interrupted waving his hand in front of the young man. “Yeah, sure”, he said, taking out a zippo and lighting it. John lit his smoke, closed the guy’s zippo in his hand, deftly taking it into his own and dropping it into another pocket as the man looked at Moose’s massive form striding across the field. “Thanks pal”, John clapped his shoulder and walked off behind Moose. …… “So you sent us in, knowing what kind of reception we’d get, as a friggin’ test?” Smitty spat. He was sitting against the wall of the glider, feeling a bit better from his wounds. They had loaded into a glider, one of the plywood-and-not-much-else deals that they somehow convinced a lot of infantry to get into and actually get dropped under battle conditions. John had stepped in, and had been about to question their sanity, when the two men sitting in the pilot’s seats, obviously twins, had nodded to one another silently, joined hands, and closed their eyes. The glider then had slowly lifted and began gaining speed and altitude. As they silently sped away, John had noticed several paratroopers still on the ground, firing weapons with obvious futility at the approaching SS columns. Smith had said the glider had taken all it could carry, including several badly wounded paratroopers, then ordered them to take off leaving some of colonel Frost’s Red Devils to fend for themselves. Smythe’s reply brought John back to the present, and helped him swallow the burning lump he had felt forming in his throat. “You cannot possibly fathom the dearth of intelligence we have about Talents, about your actual powers and how they manifest”, Smythe said with his comforting English brogue.  Smith interrupted with his impatient midwestern growl. “We had no idea what you were capable of. You didn’t even truly know yourselves. We also didn’t know if you were a spy planted by the friggin’ Nazi’s either. Either way, we figured this would help us figure that out, and we’d be a short while behind you to provide backup if you needed it. You did fine. You should be proud, soldier.” “You should be shot”, Smitty countered, “Sir”. Smith stared off into space for a few seconds in the sudden, uncomfortable silence of the glider. His ordinarily craggy visage slipped slightly, a barely perceptible change. It was like watching a series of pictures taken of a rocky, storm-beaten mountainside over thousand years, all played together as a film lasting only seconds; the force and effect of constant erosion and weathering evident when taken as a whole. Smith’s voice was barely a whisper when he replied, breaking the tense stillness. “Boy… if you only knew…” More silence, then John Brighton spoke his peace, softly. “You… you left ‘em. Those paratroopers. Left ‘em to die or worse.” Smythe piped up again, shaking Smith from his moment of reverie. “Boyos, this is war. One that we are catching the rough end of. If it seems like we’re being hard, it’s only because the alternative is far harder. Men die. More men will die before it’s over. Jerry is taking this one seriously after how they came out in the Big One. We all have to make sacrifices, some more than others. And I tell you buggers now if I bloody well have to sacrifice every one of us, myself included, to end this war, I’ll bloody well do it without a qualm, and Bob’s your f*&^ing uncle.” Smith, regaining his normal presence, continued for Smythe. “Smythe’s got the right of it. He served with those men, the Red Devils, before joining the ESS. They knew what they were getting into. And so did you. Don’t think he left them lightly.” Moose just stared at them, afraid to move around in the creaking and popping mess that was the glider, as it quietly streamed back towards American lines. He saw the NijmeganBridge as they passed over, could see the remnants of boats and hundreds of 82nd Airborne bodies in the river, more scattered around the bridge like toys. He could see the Shermans and trucks lined up on the highway below them when he cared to glance out. Too far away to be of any use to the paratroopers they left behind. There were several choke-points along the thin highway to Arnhem, and in several places the burning wreckage of tanks and trucks had been pushed casually off of the road to burn, the result of German ambushes. Sometimes Moose wondered if any of them would survive this war. At least they had survived another day. And picked up a new… friend? He wasn’t sure at all about the new guy. He seemed to be pretty well-disposed towards the allies, even though he wore that weird frenchy uniform, and he sure was hell on the Jerry’s. But he acted so strange that it made Moose a bit uncomfortable. Like he wasn’t quite human. Frogbot sat rigidly upright on the troop bench in the glider, accessing repair nodes in his own internal systems. His <a href="http://www.jgi.doe.gov/News/news_10_03_02.html" target="_blank">enzyme</a>-rich replenishment nodes quickly provided a curd-like substance, that when mixed with certain bacteria he filtered from the surrounding air and stimulated with nano-electronics, repaired the simulated flesh covering that surrounded his temporal-ferrosteel mesh frame. Frogbot wondered briefly at the apparent upset of his new comrades, these altogether too-fragile carbon-and-water composites. He attempted to compute that sensation again, this ‘wonder’, and the effect these strange anomalies were having on his core programming and sensory processors. ‘Truth’. ‘Anticipation’. ‘Anger’.  These were not programmed behaviors.  Answer: Most distressing. There! There it went again. ‘Distressing’. Frogbot decided that futher investigation would have to take place later. “Um, Frogbot? Did you say something?” said John, hoping to break the tension in the glider. Query: last interrogative spoken aloud? Without computational foresight? MOST distressing. “Oui? I am Frogbot. I said nothing of consequence, mon ami.” John nodded his head, then decided to just plow ahead with what he really wanted to ask. “So, um, ‘Frogbot’. I was wondering…” “Oui?” “Well, um, aw ta hell with it. Just what on earth *are* you?” John finally blurted out. “Me? I am FROGBOT! French Resistance Operative Guerilla-Built Operational Trooper!”, Frogbot shouted happily, flags erupting from his shoulders, and the French national <a href="http://www.mms3.com/data/ringtones/46019.wma" target="_blank">anthem</a> blaring with a tinny quality from a speaker hidden in his chest.  “I am ze representative of ze greatest country in the world, her shores be beautiful, her wines ze greatest, oh, her many marvels…” Long before the trip was over, John regretted ever wondering. ...</blockquote>

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