#icewar

A thousand glass shards are sputtering across the Jovian moon's surface, Forcibly deployed to an unfathomable moral cause, a team of strangers shadow your movements, the agonizing equipment sealing away any humanity, jabbing into your bones and tendons. The worst is not being able to have any meaningful conversation with the people around you, just alien gargling radio crackles of a damaged suit. The damaged gloves and shoulder joints restricted complicated gestures. A sickening loneliness infiltrated everything you did.

You'd stay out in your make-shift parapets and shabby trenches for a deathly amount of time. The only thing that helps track time is seeing Jupiter's face warp every three or so days; its gaseous eyes piercing into the back of your skull, the uncanny shivers breaking up the immutable numbness of it all, no embracing the suck on this one, no familiar faces at the mess hall, no shitty steak dinner to have a good laugh over. The only so-called nutrients you'd get would be some half-melted paste, your suit would dispense from time to time, faint clot-like textures mixed with an outputting copper taste. I didn't want to think about it.

Almost no real fighting either. Sometimes you'd find some poor pro-Jupiter fanatic forcibly jammed into an icy pillbox, so many of these sickening defense positions doted the caverns and surface. It kept all real offensives entirely static; the magnetic fields of the neighboring moons mangled any communication to any friendly positions. The misfortunes eventually caught up; people with limbs sheered off from crevices, improper implementation of heating fluids melting a comrade's lungs, male nutritional delirium causing people to gnaw their lips off, skin-peeling, sheering off from continuous contact with your suit. No one felt like trying to find a way to talk to each other, or make some facsimile of music or contact with each other, nothing, total creeping oblivion.

The frostbite and gangrene eventually rot away any spirit you have left. Seeing the shambling blind and mad, voluntarily walking out into storms. Slowly, the realization sinks deeply into your thoughts. You've been denied the embrace of open air indefinitely, you've been wearing your own coffin this entire time. It was probably better to wander off, leaving the universe behind. Those jagged spires watching like stalwart sentinels, that angry gas world looming over your head, the final warmth of a tomorrow you'll never have slipping away forever.

Most seasoned snappers won’t even bring the rad detection wand out in the field anymore. They know already if you’ve had critical rad exposure and there’s only so much they can do. Better to let you have some hope you’ll survive, especially if people have to carry you back to base. Heard talk about one squad shooting a guy after a heavy exposure. Too far from base, zone was too hot, too much of a risk to tow him back just so he could die an ugly painful death.

I mean sure, they got the anti rads, the rad flusher, re-marrow, the gel packs, the foam, the blood thinners the nerve stabilisers, the melt packs, the meat lockers, the oxy strips. We got all this shit, but at the end of the day, unless they get to you fast enough, there’s just too much radiation exposure.

In a firefight or taking cover from a sniper, anyone tagged and not treated immediately is cookin like a microwave meal set to low, from the inside out.