#20 by Carnifex

The pay was good, that was for sure. And the pilots he was ‘training’ were already professional soldiers in their own right, all he had to do was make sure they didn’t go walking into trouble in unfamiliar situations. A sweet deal all things considered. But these were far from the best of times.
The tone everywhere Carnifex went within Bretonia, and most places he went without, was one of uneasiness. It were as though the weight of the events on Kyushu and Honshu was hanging on the hearts of everyone who had family, friends or any sort of life linked with the planets in their own house. All it would take for everything so many held dear to vanish was for good men to fail to act, and even if they did there were no assurances. Carnifex had heard stories of the bravery of men, and the consequences of the designs made by those whom they fought against, in his disenchanted youth before he’d been sent to Manhattan to be educated. He’d not had enough experience with the world to understand them then. He was beginning to think that that was changing.
Carnifex and many others were starting to wonder when the fighting would really take off, the longer the Outcasts remained in control of the effected planets the more men would die forcing them out. It had been a number of weeks since the initial acts of Outcast retribution against a Kusari government already tearing itself apart. In those weeks millions of people had died or suffered horribly. Almost as many people had died, it was calculated, as a result of the cardiforming as had died rebelling against the Outcasts in an attempt to stop them, a shining example of the strength of the average citizen which was something that Carni suspected the Outcasts didn’t appreciate. Outcasts fought out of drug induced hatred. Without cardimine every single one of the Outcasts would be nothing. They would die. Those citizens he had seen fighting and dying when he’d been in orbit of Honshu had been fighting for their right to life despite the fact that almost all of them would end up losing their lives in the process. Carnifex couldn’t tell if that was honour or stupidity.
All these thoughts ran threw his mind as he held up the now empty cardimine vial he had used while seated in his fighter all alone on the distant edge of a Leeds smog cloud.
“So much trouble over a chemical... strange...” he mused to himself out loud as the cardimine worked its way into his system like so many times before and with each passing minute he became less aware of the conflictions inherent in his own situation.