The factory began shaking violently. Derik grabbed the cold rail of the catwalk and shouted, “Myra! What the fu…” The blast wave of an explosion from behind threw him into the rail and he felt ribs crack around it. The pain dropped him to his knees on the steel grate.
Myra had been spun around by the blast and caught herself on a structural beam; she turned back toward him.
“Derik! Derik, get up! Can you get up?” She shouted.
He spat out blood and replied, yet couldn’t be loud enough for Myra to hear.
“Broken rib…aah…lung puncture…”
She could see he was in pain and sprinted to the lift, to ascend to the catwalk level; as the lift opened, Myra saw Derik on his side. Her instinct was to run on the catwalk, yet years doing crisis-response made her pause to evaluate its structural integrity.
She noticed that a support anchor had broken loose, so she moved slowly and checked every step. Finally, she knelt by Derik’s side and checked for consciousness.
“Derik! Derik! Can you hear me! I’m here!”
He was unconscious and blood streamed from his mouth; drops splashed in a puddle on the lower level. He had lost a lot of blood; Myra estimated a range of two to three liters by the spread of the puddle.
She checked his pulse and found none; his breath was gone too. Chest compressions could worsen the puncture. There was no time; a fire from the explosion choked her breathing. She needed to evacuate the building quickly, as its integrity was shaking from increasingly frequent explosions.
It was a seeming gift of fate that one of those sent her flying into the air, through a hole which had been blasted open in the roof, and onto the snowy ground near the factory footprint. It was a subterranean facility, so she fell around only a meter from the apex of her flight, and rolled into a drift with barely a scratch or bruise to show for it.
Such heavy bombing was very unusual; the factories of Earth had been meticulously hidden from orbital view, and most suborbital drones get destroyed upon entry in the upper atmosphere, when they are picked up with thermal scanners and blasted with plasma cannons in orbit.
Myra caught her breath; shaken, though not broken, she wondered if the drones had fried holes in the Electromagnetic Detection Grid Envelope (EDGE) by directing EMP cannons at the satellites that energize and monitor it; she thought they likely traveled from the Martian war station on the moon Deimos, to deliver destructive power, and somehow they averted detection by Earth’s peripheral sentries and telescopic arrays.
Once again it was time for Myra to survive and regroup; she mentally moved grieving the loss of beloved Derik to the “later list,” for when her survival felt secure. The biting cold of arctic winter was at least as great of a threat as Martian bombs. She headed to where the factory barracks were, hoping for her life that they hadn’t been targeted too.