Without Shawul to slow them down and the thought of a four-armed bear with a taste for human flesh tracking them, Sheridan’s group made good time. They arrived at the base of the tall mountain range a day earlier than anticipated. When Sheridan couldn’t spot an easy way around, they slowly began to walk up a narrow rocky path that led between two tall jagged peaks. Agnar named them Freyr and Freyja, after a pair of twins from Norse mythology.
The snow had been coming down continuously for the past day. Everyone was cold and tired, but they still kept their heads up and didn’t complain, all except Tartov, who looked like a drowned rat.
“Okay, we’ll rest here for the night,” announced Sheridan, pointing to some overhanging rocks.
“I’ll get a fire going,” said Agnar.
After supper, Cole insisted on checking everyone’s feet. Days of marching over some of the worst terrain the sergeant had ever seen had taken its toll on the inexperienced soldiers’ feet. Agnar had a blister the size of a gold coin on the back of his right heel. If it bothered him, he didn’t let it show. Garcia just needed to dry her feet and change her socks. The worst was Tartov. The bottom of his feet looked like raw hamburger. Garcia shook her head and admonished the PO before getting to work cleaning and bandaging up the wounds.
“Sir, would you like me to check your feet?” asked Cole.
Sheridan didn’t answer.
Cole looked over and saw Sheridan staring out into the dark. His eyes fixed on something.
“What is it?” asked Cole as he reached for his rifle.
“We’re not alone.”
Cole stood up and joined Sheridan.
“What did you see, sir?”
“I didn’t see anything, I heard it,” replied Sheridan as he moved his thumb over and changed the safety on his weapon from safe to fire.
“What did you hear?”
“It sounded like someone moving about out there.”
A shot rang out.
Sheridan and Cole instinctively dropped to one knee and brought their weapons up.
A voice called out. “Drop your weapons and stand up with your hands on top of your heads.”
“Obermman, it’s you, isn’t it, you dumb ass!” yelled out Agnar. “I know it’s you. Only you could miss a target standing out in the open less than twenty meters away.”
“Agnar, is that you?” replied Obermman.
“No, you idiot, it’s his ghost.”
A second later, a disheveled-looking Marine walked next to the fire. Sheridan recognized the man as the tall, black-haired soldier who had lost his cool when the Churchill was fired upon.
“Marine, are there any more people with you?” asked Sheridan.
“Yes, sir,” replied Obermman. “I’ve got Andrews with me and three other crewmen. We had two more, but a couple of them saber-toothed cat things got ‘em the first night we landed.”
“Don’t be shy, people. Step forward,” said Cole.
Andrews led a couple of dirty and exhausted-looking men carrying an injured woman on a stretcher made from a blanket and a couple of long sturdy branches over beside the fire.
“What happened to her?” asked Garcia as she moved over to examine the woman’s injuries.
“She broke her leg two days ago,” explained Andrews, his accent had an Australian twang to it.
“Lay her down on the ground and let me take a look at what you’ve done,” ordered Garcia.
Obermman looked over at Sheridan. “Sir, do you know if anyone else from the platoon made it?”
Sheridan shook his head. “I think we’re it. Where were you and Andrews when the ship was hit?”
“We were on duty guarding the engine room. When the order to abandon ship was given, Andrews and I ran for the nearest pod.”
Sheridan asked, “How did you find us?”
“Purely by accident, sir. When we saw your fire, we knew we had stumbled across more survivors, or perhaps some refugees fleeing the Kurgans.”
“You all look like crap. When was the last time you ate?” asked Cole.
“Two days ago, Sergeant. After the cats attacked us, we ran for our lives. We left most of our rations back with the pod.”
Cole snapped his fingers to get everyone’s attention. “Okay, folks, listen up. Give me all of your rations and pile them up here at my feet. If I find you’ve kept so much as a stick of gum from me, you’ll wish you were never born.”
Sheridan was the first to drop all of his food. “I take it we’re going to start rationing our food.”
“Yes, sir, with four more hungry mouths to feed, we’re gonna have to stretch out our rations until we can find some more.”
For two more miserably long and cold days, Sheridan led his party through the mountain pass. Everyone took turns carrying the stretcher. Garcia had re-splinted the woman’s leg, but the injured crewman would require surgery to fix her shattered bones. With their thermal blankets draped over their shoulders to keep them warm, they looked more like a rag-tag mob than a group of fighting soldiers.
Agnar walked with his eyes glued to the rocks. He hoped to kill something they could eat. An expert shot, Agnar had grown up hunting in the woods of northern Europe with his father. If it walked on four or six legs, Agnar figured he could bring it down and cook it.
Andrews looked over at Sheridan. “Sir, why haven’t we been able to communicate with the forces in the capital? My communicator is fully charged, but I haven’t heard a thing since we landed. We don’t need a satellite to use these comms devices. Do you think the city has already fallen?”
Sheridan slowed down so he could talk with the Marine. “Andrews, the Kurgans will have established an electronic bubble around the capital, isolating it. Nothing our people send can get in or out of the bubble. As for the city, who knows? It could have been taken the first day the enemy arrived, or it still could be in our hands. I suspect we’ll find out in the next couple of days.”
That night, they took refuge in a cave. Out of the cold and with a roaring fire to keep them warm, their troubles were forgotten for a few hours. Down to two meager meals a day, everyone was always hungry.
Garcia checked on Hollande, the crewman with a broken leg, and then cleaned Tartov’s blister-covered feet.
Sheridan was at the cave entrance looking toward the heavens. For a moment, he thought about Tarina and wondered where she was and if she was safe. Sheridan knew that she had a couple of months of advanced flight training to complete before joining a squadron, but with the war going so badly, anything was possible. She could already be on the front line serving on a fighter carrier for all he knew.
An unpleasant odor wafted through the night air. Instantly, Sheridan’s heart began to race. He looked out into the dark. His hands clenched his rifle tight.
Cole walked over and was about to say something when he saw the tense look on Sheridan’s face.
“What’s wrong, sir?”
“I think the bear’s back.”
“Crap, not again. Where is it?” asked Cole as he brought his rifle from his shoulder.
“I don’t know, but there’s something moving around in the dark. I can smell it.”
Cole slowly flipped his weapon’s safety off. “How far away would you say it is?”
“I don’t know,” replied Sheridan.
Cole looked over his shoulder and calmly said, “Garcia, bring Tartov’s bloody socks to me.”
Garcia thought the order was odd, but did as she was told.
“When I tell you to, throw them just outside of the cave,” Cole said to Garcia.
“Yes, Sergeant,” answered Garcia nervously.
“Now!” said Cole.
The socks flew out and fell to the ground. A split second later, a loud blood-curdling roar tore through the night as the bear leaped down from a tall rock overlooking the fire. Its eyes glowed red in the light of the bonfire. It bent down to smell one of the bloodied socks.
Without hesitating, Sheridan depressed the trigger on his rifle and emptied
a one-hundred round magazine into the beast. He might as well have fired his weapon up into the air. Not a single bullet penetrated the animal’s thick fur and skin.
With an enraged roar, the bear looked over at Sheridan and got up on its hind legs, towering above the people huddled near the fire.
It was Cole who finished off the animal. At point-blank range, he fired a high-explosive grenade into its exposed stomach. The deadly projectile detonated, tearing the bear’s midsection apart. It staggered backward. Its eyes rolled back up into its skull and with a bloody froth coming out of its mouth, it fell over to the ground, dead.
Agnar was up on his feet. He drew his knife, ran out of the cave to the dead bear’s carcass and began to cut at the exposed meat. With a smile on his face, he looked back at everyone staring at him and said, “Fresh meat for supper.”
Cooked over an open fire, the bear meat was greasy, but after eating rations for days on end, the food tasted better than any served in a five-star restaurant back on Earth. Everyone ate until they could eat no more.
Agnar wiped his bloodstained hands on his clothes and smiled over at Garcia. Sheridan saw her smile back. Fraternization was heavily frowned upon in the combat units, but he was a realist and decided to ignore their growing friendship. They could all be dead tomorrow; who was he to put an end to their attachment?
“My beard is driving me crazy,” observed Obermman as he scratched at his whiskers.
Sheridan grinned and then found himself scratching at his as well. He had never tried to grow a beard before. He doubted that it was coming off anytime soon.
Cole walked in from outside. “Okay, I’ve booby trapped the bear’s remains. If another one comes sniffing around tonight, it’s going to get an awful surprise. Agnar, you’re on sentry.”
Agnar acknowledged the order and moved to the entrance of the cave.
With a deep sigh, Cole sat down on the dirt floor. He looked over at Sheridan. “Sir, it’s quiet out there . . . way too quiet. I’d expected to hear the Kurgan’s big guns pounding the capital by now.”
“I was thinking the same thing. The answer, I believe, is the same here as it was on Illum Prime. They didn’t nuke the city from orbit because they want it intact. Kurgans hate the cold; a winter campaign is the exact opposite of what they want. During the last war, the Kurgans conducted a lightning-fast campaign through our space to seize as many habitable planets as they could. I suspect that they’re going to surround the capital and then try to force it to surrender.”
“I take it that history was your favorite subject at the academy.”
“Correct. My major was history, and my minor was in Kurgan studies. I had a great-grandfather who fought in the first war. For generations stretching back to the first colonies, there has always been a Sheridan in uniform.”
“I don’t know my family history that well,” said Cole. “My father was in the service, but my grandfather was a teacher, and as for his father, I don’t know. My dad didn’t talk about our family tree too much.”
“In a way, you’re lucky. Tradition runs deep in both my father’s and my mother’s families.”
“Sir, Kurgan, can you speak it?”
Sheridan chuckled. “Yeah, I’m actually not too bad with it.”
“Sir, I’ve never asked this before, but is your father Admiral Sheridan?”
“Yes, he is. Why do you ask?”
“I suspect he’s wondering where you are. When the Churchill fails to report in, he’s going to be told that you’re MIA.”
Sheridan had been so focused on keeping himself and the people with him alive that he hadn’t thought about what would happen after they were reported missing. “Well, Sergeant, he and a lot of other parents, unfortunately, are in the same boat. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers have already been lost, and this war has barely begun.”
The next day, they came to the end of the pass through the mountains. As they stood on a tall hill, they looked out across a vast snow-covered plain. In the distance stood another small mountain range; nestled at the base of it was the capital city of Derra-5. However, between them and their destination was the Kurgan invasion force. It looked like a great horde spread out waiting to attack the city. They could see transport ships busily coming and going from a makeshift landing strip. Soldiers and equipment streamed from the airstrip and made their way to join the forces already in place.
Sheridan ordered them to hold up for the night. With the enemy only kilometers away, there would be no fire tonight.
As soon as it got dark, Sheridan and Cole grabbed their night vision gear, crawled up onto a rocky outcropping, and began to study the Kurgan force. Nearest to them were the enemy’s rear-echelon forces. Fuel and supply dumps ringed the airstrip. They quickly spotted an air defense regiment of guns and missiles guarding the depots. Further out were camouflaged sprung shelters that Cole guessed were being used as maintenance hangars and possibly hospitals. What caught their attention were the thousands of fires burning to the west of the Kurgans in a forest bordering a wide river that ran toward the blackened-out capital.
“What do you make of those fires?” Sheridan asked Cole.
“I don’t know, but I doubt the Kurgans built them.”
Sheridan thought back to the briefing he had read on the planet. His stomach turned at the thought of what lay before them. “Sergeant, there are three major settlements on Derra-5. The capital has about one hundred thousand inhabitants, the other two about fifty thousand each. I bet that before the Kurgans began to land, people fled the other cities seeking refuge in the capital. Those fires are probably from the people who never made it and are trapped outside of the city.”
“Jesus,” muttered Cole. “They’ll never last a winter out in the open.”
“There’s nothing our forces can do to help them and the Kurgans will ignore them and let them die. I doubt that they have the food or the inclination to feed all those people.”
“I hate to sound ghoulish, sir, but those fires light the way into the city if you ask me,” observed Cole.
Sheridan adjusted his position and studied the ground between them and the forest. Cole was right, if they were going to find a safe way to the capital, it would be there. He quickly outlined his plan for the following night. Together they crawled back off the hill to brief the rest of the survivors. Whatever happened now, they were going to have to trust in their training and hope that they didn’t run into any enemy patrols before they reached the safety of the woods. If they did, they would be cut to pieces, and they all knew it.
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