by Greg Dragon
“It’s getting dark. We need to set up camp,” Cilas said, stopping them in front of a large, oblong boulder. “This place is good, since the only way in is between those two trees and the line of sight is open on all three sides.”
“That tree has branches accessible from the rock. We can set up a nest to watch for anything approaching the campsite,” Quentin said.
They chopped up branches and dragged logs to the boulder to create a lean-to shelter of sorts. It was big enough for three of them to sleep side by side, and at the mouth of it, Helga dug a hole and placed a radiator in the dirt.
This little device would emanate heat and was a necessity in positions like this where a fire would betray their location. She covered it with rocks, stacking them into a pile but leaving a hole facing their camp so that the warmth would flow inside.
Once they had their beds and shelter, Cilas and Raileo went around their perimeter setting up booby traps. Helga knelt by the radiator watching it glow, and as the two men walked around, the whole thing brought her back to the moon of Dyn.
They had set a camp just like they were doing now, but with no oxygen on that surface they had been forced to set up a small dome for atmosphere. It was Lamia Brafa, the Jumper spy, who set up the traps back then, and she was one of eight, the rookie on her first mission out with the hardened Nighthawk operators.
I was such a naive mouse back then, she thought, recalling how everything she tried would end up wrong somehow, earning her a scolding. Raileo was ahead of her in that light. The rookie had proved to have a dead-eye aim and was a useful teammate despite his inexperience.
Without men like Cilas and Cage Hem, she would be rotting away on that moon, or frozen in the prison of that Geralos camp with a hole in her skull for them to feed through. Yet she was here and Cage was gone, his body still somewhere on that surface. It was a painful memory, yet impossible to shake, especially here in this hostile land where none of them knew what to expect.
“Dare I ask what’s on your mind?” Cilas said as he emerged from the shelter. He had two carcasses of a strange animal that she didn’t recall seeing him catch.
“Is that dinner?” she said, making a face when she couldn’t figure out what they were.
“Yes, it is, and they are fresh.”
“May I ask what they are?” she said, ready to reject the meal.
“C’prea … they’re a sort of rodent, but they grow big and are quite meaty. Odam told me that they are plentiful in this area of the land. When I went in just now, these two were, y’know … making babies.”
“Cilas, you didn’t,” she started, slapping a hand over her mouth. “What sort of monster kills lovers in the middle of … you didn’t.” She stared up at him with disbelief as he held the two carcasses in each of his hands.
“I did, so you’re going to eat them, Ate. The worst thing that we can do is let their deaths be for nothing. Now, none of us have eaten since leaving the village and we’ve lost a ton of calories getting to this spot. The MREs won’t be enough, trust me, and when is the last time you actually ate real meat?”
Helga felt sick to her stomach. She was used to making do on the MRE “Meals Ready-to-Eat” but Cilas seemed beyond serious about her having to eat the dead meat. “What if I tell you that I don’t eat animals? It’s a part of, um, my Casanian heritage.” She cleared her throat. “And my religion.”
“I would say you’re full of schtill, because the last meal at BLAST is a thyping feast, and I know that you planted that skinny bum of yours in front of that table and ate. Now, if you aren’t going to help with the cleaning and preparation, then get away from the heater and let me do it. I swear, Helga Ate, nothing’s ever easy with you, is it? There’s no Casanian religion you follow. You’re a boomer and a survivor, just like the rest of us. So stow that noise about your heritage, because it’s not going to work.”
She had to smile at him calling her out, but she was still upset with his actions. “You know, you’re vicious Lieutenant, but everything deserves a chance in this world, including the little c’preas.”
Cilas rolled his eyes. He dropped the carcasses in front of her and began to cut the limbs from a branch. Dutifully, Helga pulled out her own knife and worked at skinning the two small creatures. It was bloody work, and she felt guilty, but by the time they were impaled and resting on top of the heated stones, she had gotten over it and had busied herself with cleaning up.
She collected the skin and guts inside of a bag and walked it out to where Raileo stood. He showed her the safe spots to walk between the traps and she worked her way through, back to the path they’d taken earlier. She recalled seeing a ditch so she kept walking until she found it, but it was getting so dark that she was tempted to give up.
When she finally found it, she threw the bloody bag inside, hoping that any would-be predators would take the free meal over their sleeping bodies. She pulled out her pistol and walked the path back up to their camp, retracing her steps as best she could so as to not set off the traps.
She took her place around the heated rocks and tried some of the meat. Cilas had seasoned it with crumbled up salted crackers from an MRE, and it was strangely delicious. Helga, not wanting to be seen enjoying it, took her share into the shelter where she scarfed it down quickly. Quentin, on the other hand, had no reservations about eating cute animals. He tore into his portion savagely and spoke in hushed tones to Raileo about eating animals during his tours.
They made tea from wild mushrooms, and Helga didn’t know what to think. Here they were out in the wild and she had eaten better than all the days on the Rendron following the nightmare on Dyn. She uncapped her canteen and washed her hands, letting it run off to the corner of the tent. “Who has first watch?” she said quietly, crawling out to sit in front of the radiator.
“That would be me,” Cilas said.
Helga wasn’t surprised that he was the one to answer, but then she saw that Raileo was starting to doze off. “What? You didn’t get enough sleep on the dropship coming down?” she said, throwing a stone that bounced off his forehead.
“He’s a growing lad, this one,” Quentin added with a grunt, still tugging on the meat from a sinewy leg.
Raileo, now awake, seemed surprised by her actions, and blushed as he grinned at her, shrugging ever so slightly. “Didn’t have a choice, ma’am. The lieutenant gave us our assignments when you went off on your walk. He’s first, and you are second, and then it will be me.”
“Oh, so I get the wee hours of the morning then?” she said.
“No, that would be me,” Quentin said.
“Ate, you need a full night’s sleep,” Cilas said. “You were stung, and your body is still fighting it. Without rest, I don’t know how you’ll fare on our hike. Tomorrow is going to be a long one. Walking, fighting, sweating, and watching for ambushes. I will need you at your best, so don’t argue with me on this. Odam said that it will be the best thing. You really need this rest.”
Helga did want to argue, She thought that it was absurd, but Cilas was team leader so she kept her feelings to herself and stared down at the glowing stones. She pulled back her sleeve and looked at the marks from where the brovila had stuck its fangs. The sight of it angered her, it was so stupid and random. The only thing that she had done to earn the attack was to leave the river first to stand by the rocks.
Rotten luck had followed her since she first accepted the Nighthawks invitation. Things had been good before then – surviving BLAST to become one of the top ten, graduating second-class as a cadet, and surviving every attempt at assault that came with being an orphan on a ship full of men.
She, Helga Ate, was a survivor, and she was once convinced that her mother’s spirit kept her safe from harm. But Dyn dismantled all of that luck, and her mother moved on to the other world. She was alone, constantly in trouble, and nothing went her way, not even … love. The thought of that little word was what finally broke her, and she bent her head
down and bit into her knee. Don’t you dare cry, you thyping baby, she thought, forcing back the self-pity that threatened to blacken her world.
“You alright, ma’am?” Quentin said, and she was annoyed to hear him address her in such a formal manner. She was an officer, with rights to the bridge, which meant that she ranked him several times over, but he was an older Marine who had been fighting since she was struggling with puberty. Not to mention he was an ESO and teams were teams, where rank was a mere formality.
She liked Quentin but she didn’t know why. There was something primitive and fatherly about his manner. Though she wanted to tell him to call her, Helga, or Ate, she choked out the words, “I’m alright.”
13
Cilas Mec perched atop the boulder, scanning the darkness for any movement that would betray an enemy creeping to their location. He didn’t like this mission. It was rushed and barely researched. It seemed to him that this op didn’t require them but was a favor being leveraged to the Meluvian government.
This wouldn’t be the first time that he had been used for an admiral’s personal agenda; or if not an admiral, then one of the councilors that sat with the Anstractor Alliance.
He could picture the meeting that had spawned this detail: a representative from Meluvia was probably complaining, “Someone needs to get this Wolf character off of my planet.”
He’d genuflect to the council, imploring them to help, and he probably said, “He’s bringing in weapons that are making the rebels impossible to deal with.” Someone on the board would mention Special Forces, and then it would have been a battle of egos. Each arm of the Navy would want to send their own crew, but somehow, this time, it ended up being the Rendron.
“Use the Nighthawks,” someone would’ve said. “Yes, they have a stellar track record for accomplishing the impossible.” There would be more discussions, none on the finer details of the mission, and then one of those old men would get on the comms and make a call to Retzo Sho.
The captain, wanting to appease his masters, would have agreed without question to send the Nighthawks in. The rest was what they’d already experienced, a rushed transport to the Aqnaqak for barely a brief. Now they were down here on the ground, looking for an ESO within his own domain. It was stupid, all of it, and he cursed himself for going along without so much as an objection.
The night before he’d assembled the Nighthawks, he had vented his frustrations to his girlfriend, Joy Valance. She was a lieutenant for the Inginus, an old infiltrator-class strike ship that was now destroyed. She had since been transferred to the Rendron to resume her duty as flight commander.
It was the greatest gift to have her there, although it made leaving even harder. Still, Joy was the best person to vent his frustrations to, and while she wasn’t an ESO like them, she was routinely used as a political tool.
“Why do you stay?” she had asked him as he drew her in close and placed his lips on her forehead. “You could get a job on the bridge, or train units full time on Rendron,” she had said. It was a funny suggestion, and at the time, he wondered if she’d forgotten who she was sleeping with. “I worry about you, Cilas,” she surrendered when he couldn’t answer her questions.
Why do I stay? he wondered as he picked up a small stone and chucked it into the bushes. The clouds had dissipated to reveal a moon, which shone light down onto their little encampment. He could see all around him, and he knew that anyone coming up would see him plainly too, so he slid down to the ground to patrol the area, staying to the shadows as he walked.
Cilas stayed because his captain relied on him. The Nighthawks had been developed for him to lead. Cooking up the urge to go before Captain Retzo Sho, to tell him that he wanted a transfer … the whole thing seemed absurd. Plus, the captain would never allow him to do it. He would offer him anything to keep him at the helm of his most coveted group of fighters.
No, Joy couldn’t understand. The Nighthawks were a lifelong duty. Plus, he owed it to Helga, to help her grow into leadership, so that the day he did choose to move on the Nighthawks would have a competent operator at its helm.
In the distance he heard something snap, and he stopped in his tracks and crouched. He was behind a fallen tree whose trunk was so thick that it provided an ideal hiding place. Sucking in his breath and then letting it out slowly, he eyed the gauge on his auto rifle and placed his index finger near the trigger.
Now he closed his eyes and listened, hoping his heightened senses would reveal what it was. Please be an animal, he thought as he waited patiently for something more. Then it came again, a step, revealed from the dry leaves crackling beneath the weight.
That’s no animal, he thought, and then risked a peek above the log. Someone whispered something in a language he didn’t recognize, and several more steps came from his right as more dead leaves got crushed.
There was a branch sticking up from the fallen tree, thick enough to hide Cilas’s head, and he stood behind it watching a half-dozen men gesture towards their campground as they slowly approached his location.
Cilas realized then that in his walk around the perimeter, he had stopped in an area that placed him between the camp and where they had been heading. These are Wolf’s men, he thought as he backed away slowly, trying to gauge where the dirt path was.
He stepped on a twig that snapped loudly, and the whispers became shouts as he heard weapons being engaged. Weapons, he thought, definitely not villagers on a stroll. He heard the familiar sound of the safety being released on a pulse rifle.
“Thype this,” he said as he dove behind a tree, hearing the rain of bullets strike the area where he had been crouched listening. The shots sounded muffled, which was a sign that they had come with stealth. More thumps on the ground, loud to Cilas but not loud enough to rouse the Nighthawks in the camp. There was no comms—his idea—which he now regretted even more than this ridiculous mission.
With his back to the huge tree, Cilas raised the rifle up and over his shoulder, blind firing a reply at the men. He pulsed his shots steadily, as if he could see where he was aiming. Between the high-pitch whining of his weapon he could hear the dry leaves snapping as they ducked for cover.
Now he heard a voice from behind him calling his name. It was Raileo Lei, and when he looked up, he saw the rookie crouched behind a rock. Suddenly there was a whistling sound and the camp went up in flames, but Raileo was up on his feet, firing past Cilas’s tree at the attackers who threw the grenade.
Every bit of Cilas wanted to get up and risk looking out past the tree, but then a shadow jumped out of the fire and vanished into the darkness. Where are you, Helga? he thought as his eyes settled on the camp. The fire was spreading, and that shadow was too big for him to assume that it was her.
Was she still in the shelter? Did she survive the flames that consumed the branches draped over the tarp? “Get Ate!” he shouted back to Raileo. “Lei, the fire. Get Ate out!”
Gunshots, short bursts, and a vice-like grip dragging her from the tent. At first Helga thought it was a flashback to BLAST, until she inhaled the smoke and started coughing.
Scrambling away from whomever had grabbed her, she reached down for her pistol and rose up to her knees. She saw that it was Raileo. He was in front of the tent’s entrance, firing off into the distance.
“It’s an ambush, ma’am,” he said between shots. “They have the lieutenant pinned, and he needs help.”
“Cilas?” she said, not wanting to believe it.
There is something to be said about soldiers that show extraordinary heroics on the battlefield. When they are asked, “how did you do it,” they answer with something as simple as saying, “they were killing my friends.” It is not what we imagine they would say. We want the stuff of fiction writing; we want poetry as the answer for why an individual rises to the occasion.
Waking up dazed and confused, Helga wasn’t prepared to hear that Cilas was in trouble. Cilas Mec, the man who she held above all other me
n, a brother, a leader, and something more that she couldn’t admit. Hearing that she was about to lose him, she just wasn’t ready for it, not now in this instance.
Since coming close to death on Dyn, Helga had lost all of her ambitions. Each day was just a day, until it came time to die. Cilas had rescued her, and together they had accomplished great things, but her ambition was gone, along with something else that she couldn’t explain. Life had lost its meaning after the Geralos had robbed her of herself. But there was one thing she held on to and that thing was Cilas, her friend.
Before she could think better of it, she slipped out of the tent, acting on the instinct picked up from a lifetime of service. She saw the flashes from the gunfire and saw Cilas with his back to a tree. They had him suppressed. Any move and he would be shot, and the tree’s trunk was his only means of survival.
The bushes were on fire, so she could make out the shadows in the brush. There were a handful of figures shooting in from a cluster of rocks, and Cilas was in the center, stuck.
Who Helga didn’t see was Quentin Tutt, who she assumed had died in the ambush. It was up to she and Raileo, who had been keeping the lieutenant alive by himself. The marksman rookie was kneeling behind a rock, trading off shots with the enemy in the distance.
“Ma’am, you’re going to want to get down,” he said, reaching and tugging at her leg, but Helga wasn’t hearing him now as she took in the situation and moved to act.
She dashed forward while firing into their midst, adding to Raileo’s already overheated gun. She leaped over the boulder and landed low on all fours as a shot nicked her ear, barely missing her head. She slid down to her stomach, still firing on the enemy. Cilas, seeing that she was the new target, slipped out from the tree with his auto rifle. Now it was their turn to be suppressed as he leveled his fire on the tree line.
