Krill walked onto the bridge early in the morning more than expecting to find Captain Vir blasting his music and doing something subjectively stupid while waiting for the rest of his crew to wake, but when he walked in, he found the commander sitting in the Captain's chair plotting the daily course and examining the engineering statistics.

She must have heard Krill enter, and turned in the chair to look at him, "Can I help you, Krill."

"Where's the captain?"

The woman went quiet for a moment, "He won't be piloting today. He's not feeling well."

She turned away after that allowing Krill to leave the room in silence. That was weird.... As the medical officer aboard this ship, the Captain should have called him in if he was feeling ill.... Perhaps he was too sick to do so, and if that was the case.... Shouldn't krill do something?

It was decided, it was his duty aboard the ship after all, so he went to the Captain's quarters and knocked quietly. When no answer came, he knocked again.

"Captain, it's me Krill, Commander Jenson said you were sick."

There was silence then, "The door's unlocked." Something about the human's voice was wrong, not as.... Light as it usually was.

Pushing open the door, he stepped into the room as the door slid shut behind him. The man was sitting on the edge of his cot. He was a mess, his hair was tangled about his face, his clothes were rumpled, and it looked like he hadn't gotten out of bed accept for to sit up. His prosthetic leg was discarded some feet away, and his face was slicked with a light sheen of sweat. One had absently rubbed the stump of his missing leg.

Waffles, the dog, sat next to him, resting her head on his shoulder trying, as it seemed, desperately to help him though she couldn't.

"Captain, what's wrong." Krill demanded

Shakily the man shook his head, "Krill.... I it's nothing you can help me with."

He stood confused, "But you're sick."

"Not in that way." The human whispered sinking back onto his cot, one hand clutching at his missing leg pain crossing his face in a testament to his agony, "Phantom pain doesn't have a cure.... And neither does nightmares."

Krill moved forward a bit not used to seeing the human in this condition, haunted, in pain.

"Why/" He wondered

"Because, the nerves in my leg, when they were severed, they were damaged horribly. Every nerve up to my spine remembers what happened...." He closed his eyes, "Some nights, I just can't shake the dreams..... Being torn apart."

Krill stood quietly before the man spoke again, "Did I ever tell you how I lost my leg?"

Krill stayed quiet giving only a shake of his head.

"It two years after first contact, and we had finally finished peace talks. The Drev had taken over their planet and were threatening to do it to the rest of the alliance. I, and a thousand others were sent in as a show of good will. I was only 22."

***

The smoke around him was thick and choking. The sky above was a wash of burning red, blotting out the star beyond. The alien terrain rolled below his feet, as the young soldier stumbled through the mist, walking over bodies of his fallen comrades. A distant alien raptor gave an eerie call, like a raven as harbinger of death.

The rest of his platoon was dead, ripped to pieces in one horrible massacre, he had been the only one to make it out alive.

Foot catching on the edge of a rock, he stumbled to his knees. Around him, the walls of the basin rose up to enclose them. Outcropping of dark gray rocks, lit with the red light of the sky, gave the impression of a landscape awash in blood as if he stood on the palm of a massive creature waiting to curl its fingers around him and crush the life from his body.

He couldn't see anyone. A sob escaped him at the thought of his dead comrades, but he bit it back and swallowed it down. He would not break down here, he would not die here. He pushed himself back to his feet and rushed pat the rocks, and pools of viscus green sludge. He stepped over the chest of a massive body. The creature would have been nine feet tall standing. In form, it walked on two legs and had four arms similar to those of a human, but its legs mirrored those of a dog standing on two legs. A mass of armor carapace covered its thick body. The carapace continued over its head, almost like that of a jackal, but with a snout that split into for articulating segments.

The Drev were destroying them. Humans knew war, but the Drev were unlike anything they had ever fought.

They had massive weapons surgically attached to their arms, and even without that they were ten times stronger, and that much faster than humans.

Distant gunfire broke through the smoke, as he moved around another boulder. The body of a Rundi lay sprawled in the dirt in a pool of its own fluids. Next to it, lay a dismembered arm.

Lieutenant Vir turned to the side trying not to wretch as he passed the spot and continued on, towards the gunfire.

Getting closer, he was suddenly aware of a sound echoing upwards from his left. It didn't sound like a Drev, so he moved in that direction belly-crawling over the rise weapon aimed downward into the shallow indentation.

He found a Rundi soldier and a Moor huddled in the lea of a rock. One of them was badly wounded, and the other was attempting to urge them to rise. Vir was just rising to help, when a massive shape loomed from the fog. It walked with a thud, thud thud, on plated feet, three toes at the front, one massive claw at the back.

This creature wasn't nearly as big as its counterparts, at only seven feet tall, but its armor glittered a metallic purple-blue. They had learned in the last months that the more colorful meant the higher ranking.

The Rundi shrieked and the Moor grew still.

Vir was on his feet as the creature raised a weapon. He ran a few steps forward, and without thinking leaped into the air, suspended against the bloody sky for a long moment, he came down slamming into the creature's shoulders. It rocked violently.

The world around him exploded into a sudden whirling mass of limbs. The sky flew above and around him in red streaks of fire and blood. At some point, he ripped a knife from his boot and buried it in the neck of the creature wrenching back and forth, hunting, searching for something to sever. The creature bellowed in agony. He hit the ground hard knife wrenched from the creator's neck. A foot came down towards his exposed face, and he rolled to the side cutting at the back of the creature's leg with his blade. He caught it just behind the heel, and it buckled. Orange tinted blood sprayed into the sky. The Rundi dragged the Moor away, and Vir saw them vanish behind a rock, just as the creature reached down to grab him.

He cut at its hand and rolled to the side. His heart hammered, his body was on fire. Sweat rolled down his face, down his back. Gunfire erupted around him. Human voices shouted from above. The creature bellowed. Inside his oversized boot, his foot slipped, and he buckled to the ground ankle smarting, right into the path of one of the creature's sweeping claws.

He was jerked into the air by its immense power. One claw locked around his shoulder, another around his ankle.

And then.... Immense, world shattering pain.

It roared through his body like burning magma ripping his consciousness in half and cauterizing it back together. The scream that ripped from his throat rent the sky and tore through his chest. It tore and burned, something snapped. The sky rolled, darkened,

He was on fire.

The pain of hitting the rock was nothing.... Nothing compared to this. His body grew cold as his brain desperately did its best to numb the maddening horror, to block the realization.

He lay under the bloody sky a spreading pool beginning to warm his cold body. He remembered warm tears of pain and shock rolling down his cheeks through the dust and blood. He remembered the voices the lights, cold field operating tables feeling as the life slowly began to leach from his body. He was so cold.

***

"You have a choice, men. You can go home, no one will blame you, no one will judge you. You have done service enough for your planet and for your allies. You may return to your families, to your beds. You may guarantee your lives... but if any of you men wish to stay, there is more you can do, and together we may win the war.

***

They swept through the landscape like death incarnate. Metal rattled and thundered around them. Eyes glowed a false red. They parted through the mist, a single line..... enhanced.

Under his body, the new exo-leg moved with pure power carrying him and his massive weapon as they parted through the smoke. The red haze of anger wafted over his vison. Around him, his comrades ore through the Drev line. Armor piercing pullets tore open carapace, ripped limbs from bodies. In exchange their weapons feebly rattled against metal limbs, metal legs. Targeting systems wired directly into the brain, cut through the lines like a warm knife through butter.

A Drev charged from the darkness and Vir cut him down with a spray of gunfire.

Another made contact.

With the powerful push of a hydraulic spring, he was in the air, flying against the sky.

The bayonet of his weapon took the creature though the eye forcing it to the ground. Orange sludge sprayed upwards. He stood on its chest pressing downward with his foot. Cracking carapace with an immense pressure.

The Drev line faltered, then broke.

They kept cutting, chasing forward. Metallic blue carapace blinked at him from the fog. He roared and raced forward.

And then the creatures just, fell to their knees, all at once, the gunfire had stopped. Their weapons were discarded, torn from their bodies if they must. Smoke rolled around them. A head of blue metallic carapace turned to look up at him revealing a pair of surprisingly human eyes.

All at once the red was gone, the fire was extinguished. He couldn't..... he couldn't bring himself to do it.

Not even the creature that had taken his leg from him.

***

Captain Vir shivered absently eyes closed against the phantom pain, "I sometimes wonder where that Drev is. What is it doing, does it regret taking my leg from me.

A wide green eye turned to face Krill, "The anger I felt, the anger we all felt. That's not something I want to experience again. It scares me, what I'm capable of. What we did during the war was.... Barbaric, and no matter how an enemy treats you.... I never want to lose my humanity again."

Krill stood frozen in shock, as the human closed his eye.

"I lost the anger a long time ago, but I never lose the fear. Sometimes it feels like I'm going to be smothered by it, like I can't breathe, and you just have to keep on and hope no one notices.... Some days it an accomplishment just to move." He paused eye snapping pen to look at Krill

"Don't think for one moment that I'm faking it though. I love my job, this crew, and I spend more of my time having fun and doing stupid sh*t BECAUSE I'm afraid. If I don't live, than what will be the point when I die. I don't want to die angry or scared. What no one will ever understand about us is that pain and happiness aren't mutually exclusive."

No matter the agony, the humans may still find joy.