I make a mental note. This is Kublar, koobs are savage, KTF. If it was a brain-glitch. It ain’t happening again.
Owens chuckles over the comm. My HUD tells me it’s on our four-person private channel, so Andien can hear it, too. “Chhun, kindly hand over your nuts to the woman sitting directly behind you. Because she just out-leejed you.”
Wraith doesn’t say anything, but then, he’s not much of a talker. There’s still that by-the-book officer vibe. Of course, he’s not solely a legionnaire captain. There’s a man in that armor. But I’ve got no good idea of who the man is when I think about it. Wraith doesn’t let his personal side show through his commission. Captain Owens, on the other hand, seems to allow his personality to carry over entirely. Maybe it’s because he’s taken me on as Lieutenant Chhun instead of as a sergeant. There’s never been that NCO-CO divide with him.
I tell the captain where he can shove his suggestion. With all due respect, of course. We move on and I don’t give it a second thought. Exo would have given it to me a lot worse. He still brings up the time I lost my footing going down a sand dune on Renoy and slid, unable to stop myself, three hundred feet to the bottom like a kid on a playground. I had to hear about it from Exo and the entire squad as I lumbered back up, picking up stray pieces of equipment on the way. That was over a standard rotation ago and I’m still not convinced that I cleaned out all the sand.
As the kilometers pass, a soft glow appears ahead—a few still-smoldering fires burning inside the Chiasm. We’re about there. As the superstructure of the battleship grows, we begin to speed past obstacles that dispersed from the point of impact with the planet. Charred and twisted blaster battery cannons. Comm dishes. Twisted impervisteel. And thousands of tiny pieces of who-knows-what, all waiting to be buried by time. Because the koobs won’t care.
We’re moving too quickly for me to fully grasp what I’m seeing. To get my mind around a ship this size exploding from dual MARO blasts and burning down onto the planet.
All these little pieces were people, Chhun. They’re your shipmates. And they’re all dead.
I shake the thought away, look past this nightmarish landscape of burnt-up bones and body parts, skulls and buckets, all lying exposed beneath the sweltering Kublaren sun.
Focus on the op.
Most of the ship is half-buried at the bottom of a huge impact crater. The bikes allow us to get closer than I would have imagined possible—maybe two hundred and fifty meters. We stop behind the remains of a massive HK-PP mech—or at least, its upper torso; no idea where the rest of it is. It serves as an excellent shield for our speeders. Anyone looking in the direction of our parked bikes would have a hard time picking them out from the other mechanical detritus.
Crouching in the shadows, I listen while scanning for koobs. A few sentries mill about, old automatic-fire slug throwers from the Savage Wars resting lazily in their arms. Whatever tribe this is, they care more about lookouts than Moona did.
“Time to earn that Dark Ops pay,” Owens says over the joint comm. “I need one leej with me to find and secure the nearest terminal port so Miss Nether Ops can do her thing. The other is on overwatch.”
“I’ll go with you,” Wraith says. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s hated overwatch. Not the type of guy who can stand much watching and waiting if he doesn’t absolutely have to.
“Good. Settled.” Owens creeps to the edge of the shadow enveloping us. “Chhun, start painting hostiles for the HUD.”
I pull out my field macros and begin tagging all the koobs I can see. My visor’s HUD adds a red dot for each koob I spot. Mostly I’m finding pockets of sleeping koobs, but there’s also the occasional sentry. I tag the sentries as high priority, which makes a miniature exclamation mark appear above their dot on the HUD.
While I’m doing this, Owens continues edging his way out of our cover. “This is knife work. Don’t discharge your N-4, suppressed or not, unless you have to.”
N-4s have the ability to fire suppressed rounds through a toggle near the charge pack. This holds the blaster bolt in a chamber, vents the blaster bolt’s gases in a low hiss, and then releases a slowed-down shot. It won’t do as much damage, and it’s a much slower rate of fire, and despite all this, you can still hear the distinct noise of the thing. But still, the hiss is better than the usual report of blaster rifle fired full-on, and it’s enough to kill an unarmored foe at medium range.
Wraith and Owens creep slowly forward. They disappear from my view, but my bucket continues to predict the movement as green dots on my HUD.
“Hey, Chhun.” It’s Wraith. “We’re seeing a few more koobs down this way, beneath the lip of the crater. Think you can get someplace higher and spot them for us?”
I look up to the broken peak of the ruined HK-PP. “Yeah, sure thing.”
Andien is alert, her small holdout blaster pistol at the ready. “Hey,” I tell her, “I’m climbing up for a better view. You good down here?”
She nods.
I make my way up, finding hand and footholds in the battered and pockmarked remains of the mech’s armor. I find a nice little nook to sink into, cradled by the giant war machine like a baby in the crook of its arm, the only one still attached. My HUD guides my field macros right to the last known position of Wraith and Cap Owens. They stand at the ready, vibroknives in hand, with a pair of dead koobs at their feet.
“Okay, I have visual. Nice work.” I begin to scan from my higher vantage point. Red dots show up. A lot of them. “You guys seeing this?”
“Yeah,” answers Wraith, his tone not defeated, but clearly indicating that this isn’t the Kublar getaway vacation he’d been dreaming of. “Most of those asleep?”
“A lot of them,” I answer, tagging the sentries as I scroll through my feed. “Just about done tagging. Your best bet is to weave your way around the wreckage of your current position. It looks like you’ll come to a section of the ship that was blown wide open. Maybe the leisure deck. It’s hard to tell because everything looks so busted up.”
“Copy,” Owens acknowledges. “Nether Ops, can you pull what you need from a leisure deck?”
“I should be able to, yes.”
“Good,” Owens replies. “Chhun, how’s her path to join us?”
I shift my position, look down to Andien, and follow the path in front of her. “All clear. She should have an uneventful walk.”
“On my way,” Andien says. I think I detect a flutter in her voice. Nerves.
She moves with her blaster pistol at the low ready, scurrying from cover to cover as she crosses ground and moves down into the impact crater. She ducks beneath some sort of structural beam and then hops up over a meter-high object—maybe a hangar barge. I can’t tell. I’m impressed with the way she moves. Cool, smooth, almost elegant. She knows what she’s doing. Hardly the awkward and angry scientist who gave Wraith and me an earful on our combat sled.
I wonder if that other scientist, the guy whose wife died… I wonder if he made it. I start to think of him. And then I realize I’m not aware of my situation.
Focus, Chhun.
I take everything in at once. Andien is still in position. Wraith and Owens are waiting for her arrival. The koobs pretty much haven’t left their positions.
And I’m lying down, feeling warm. My legs and arms are heavy.
Sleep. I need sleep. Much as I’m loath to admit it, the past few days’ events have caught up with me. Legionnaire training takes you to your ultimate limits. We spend weeks barely sleeping, an hour here or there before a drill instructor douses us with water in phase one, or kicks us as hard as he can in our buckets in phase two. We sleep while marching. While crawling. I can operate without sleep. But not optimally. If this keeps up, my bucket is going to detect my slowing pulse and alert my CO. I’m assuming that’s Captain Owens instead of Captain Ford, but I suppose I don’t really know. Either way, I’m not keen on my first day in Dark Ops being the day I fall asleep on the job. I bite down on my tongue, focusing on t
he pain and hoping it drives away the drowsiness.
It doesn’t. I’m having to force my eyes open, like I’m trying to stare at the sun and have to resist the natural urge to squint. To shut my eyes. I decide to call it in. “Hey,” I announce over the L-comm. “I’ve barely slept in days and it’s awfully comfy up here. I’m just talkin’ to keep from dozing off. Ooah?”
“Ooah,” Wraith replies.
But Owens takes a different approach. “Nah, it’s cool, Chhun. Go ahead and grab some Z’s. We’re good.”
What? No… just, no.
“No thanks, Cap,” I reply. Is this guy serious?
“No, really. Shut your eyes for a while and see. That’s an order.”
He’s ordering me to go to sleep on overwatch. This can’t be right. I fight to stay in the battle against slumber, but it’s gaining ground. I feel my eyelids droop and… zap! A jolt of electricity surges through my skull. I feel like someone punched me in the lip. My heart is racing and I’m just glad I didn’t fall off the mech I’m perched on. What was that?
My yelp must have been transmitted on the L-comm, because Owens is stifling a laugh. “That’ll be standard in all buckets soon enough, but we get it first. New tech senses when you’re in danger of dozing, gives you a jolt to keep you awake. It’s actually better not to fight it so the wakeup call comes in sooner. If you know the menus you can call it down on yourself, but it hurts so damn much I’ve never had the guts for it.”
Well that sucked. But it worked. I’m awake.
“So what do you see?” Cap asks.
I scan the field. “Nothing. A few of the sentries have taken seats. No movement around the perimeter or in your sector.”
“All right,” Owens says. “Sounds good.”
Andien closes in on their position. I call out her ETA.
“Copy,” Wraith says, his voice calm. “We have visual on her.”
I swear he was born for Dark Ops. I’m not so sure about Cap. He’s not what I expected. I always figured the Dark Ops guys were the serious, deadly type. Captain Owens seems anything but.
Andien and the leejes disappear from my view, moving together inside the torn-up deck of the Chiasm. It takes thirty minutes for Andien to run whatever program she has in the terminal ports on the recreation deck. I don’t get jolted again during that time. That one zap triggered enough adrenaline to keep me alert.
The trio re-emerges.
“Eyes on anything special?” Owens asks.
“Nothing. Koobs aren’t even moving. Most of the sentries are asleep.”
“Good. We’re coming in.”
They send Andien ahead, moving at an even pace but keeping some separation. I watch Andien dart past a battered blast door that’s sticking straight up out of the Kublaren soil. A moment later three koobs, each armed with a blaster rifle, step between Andien and her leej protection.
“Andien, stop!” I call into the comm.
She freezes. Wraith and Owens don’t move either. I describe the situation. “Three armed koobs got between you all. I don’t think they can see you, but the way they’re holding themselves, I think they know Andien moved by.”
Andien turns slowly. I’m sure she can see the koobs through the darkness thanks to her goggles. She raises her blaster pistol, but unlike the koobs on the road, these have their rifles at the ready.
“Hold up,” I say. “If you dust one, another is going to get a croak or a shot off and alert the whole area.”
“So what do I do?” Andien asks, her voice a little hot. Easy for me to call her to wait while I’m back here and pretty much out of harm’s way. “Just hope they keep on walking?”
“They definitely know something’s out there,” Wraith observes. “You got a shot, Chhun?”
“I do, but same problem. It’ll be heard.” I think up a plan on the fly. “Andien, train your blaster on the middle koob. Wraith, Cap, think you can get close enough behind the other two for knife work?”
“On our way,” whispers Owens.
The two legionnaires creep up behind the shifting koobs like twin ghosts. They could reach out and caress the back of the aliens’ heads if they wanted to.
“Andien, take the shot on three,” I say. “One… two… three.”
A silenced flash from her blaster pistol. Her target falls to the ground in an awkward heap. In the milliseconds of confusion before the other two koobs have a chance to react, the legionnaires bury their knives deep. Air sacs are split and the blades are pulled upward, piercing brain stems. Wraith and Owens slowly lay the koobs, blood pouring from their fatal wounds, to the ground.
Obstacle clear. No one the wiser. At least, not for a while.
As soon as my team gets close enough to the bikes, I climb down. I find that it’s my turn to ride, so I jump behind Andien and we’re gone. Silently speeding through the night.
Sunrise is ninety minutes off, easily. We’ll make our cutoff and keep the featherheads happy.
“Hey,” I say over the comm. “You didn’t really leave a charge in that shuttle, did you?”
“Hell no,” comes Owens’s reply. “If I’ve got extra blast bricks, I want them with me. But if a pilot’s gonna give us crap and threaten to leave us standing at the altar ’cause they got cold feet… I don’t mind making them spend their wait time searching for a bomb that ain’t there.”
We don’t run into any more koobs. The shuttle is waiting for us when we arrive. My first Dark Ops mission is over. I didn’t even dust anybody.
Not how I figured it would go.
11
The debrief room seems too nice for the likes of us. The conference table is polished to a mirror shine, enhancing the glow of the overhead lights and showing us warbling, mirage-like reflections of ourselves whenever we stand over it. Carpet is pristine, except for the dusty footprints from all the Kublar dust caked on our boots. The ride back to the shuttle on our bikes managed to dry up the koob blood that had drenched the arms of Wraith and Owens. The yellow blood was pushed farther up their arms in delicate streams from the windy ride, making it look a bit like a couple of badass tattoos.
We’re waiting for the legion commander. If I was under-dressed when I met him the first time, now I just look like hell. We all do. A far cry from the spit-shined, clean-shaven standard that’s usually expected when you meet a leej this important. I’m not kidding. I’ve been in situations where we just rotated in from some week-long fighting, clearing out city blocks of entrenched MCR—armor is dirty, bloody, full of carbon scoring—and my squad is lying around our base, thankful to just be still, when some point officer comes up and demands we shine up, remove our helmets, groom to standard, and prepare to meet General Who-Gives-A-Damn. And the best part is, the whole time everyone’s acting like they’re doing us a favor. “Aren’t you boys proud? You’ll always remember the day you met General I-Got-Here-Because-My-Aunt-Is-On-the-Senate-Council.”
Something to tell my grandkids about. Sweet!
There’s no time to clean up now. Debrief is supposed to start in five. And from what I’ve gathered in my short time with the legion commander, he’s not the type to swear at our appearance. He fought his way to the top. Earned his rank and the respect of his fellow leejes. He’s been where we’ve been. Knows the score.
Cap Owens pulls off his bucket and drops it onto the table. Dirt and grime mar the beautifully maintained surface. More work for the bots—like they care. He flops into a seat. I half expect him to kick up his feet and lay his dirty boots across the table, but he doesn’t.
Following his lead, I remove my helmet and place it down—a bit more gently. Having fought for days without a functioning bucket, I guess I’m a little more appreciative of them now that I’ve got one back. I take a seat. So does Wraith. He doesn’t remove his helmet. I know what Captain Ford looks like when he isn’t Wraith, but at the moment, I can’t remember his face.
I need sleep.
Andien is standing in a corner, wrapping herself in her arms like she f
eels a chill. She hasn’t talked much since we left in the shuttle. But then, none of us have. It was a quiet ride. Probably all she wants to do is analyze the data she has, but she’s seeing the op to its end with us. I appreciate that.
I look over to her, catch her eye, and nod. She smiles faintly, warmly, and nods back. It dawns on me that this is probably the last time I’ll ever see her. She’ll go on and do spy shit, and I’ll KTF. I start to feel… sad about this. Only for a second, though.
The emotion evaporates like sweat beneath the Kublaren sun as the door whooshes open and the legion commander steps in. There’s another leej with him, with a lieutenant colonel’s dragon painted on his armor. We all jump up to salute.
The commander quickly returns our salutes and motions for us to sit back down. “Stay in your seats, men. You’ve earned some time off your feet.” Keller gestures to the lieutenant colonel. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Bergh. He’s here to see if his boys need to take any follow-up action based on your report. Captain Owens?”
I figured Owens would stand to give his report, but he doesn’t. He just sort of swivels in his chair as he relays the basics. Times. Encounters. Enemy killed. The state of the Chiasm.
Legion Commander Keller interrupts. “That crash site looks like an absolute disaster from orbit. You saw it first-hand. The Republic wants us to stay out of Kublar, but if there’s the slightest possibility of survivors…”
“No possibility, sir,” Owens answers, his voice sounding heavy. “It’s a graveyard. The only living things there are koobs and some scavengers picking at bones. They’re all dead.”
Lieutenant Colonel Bergh speaks up for the first time. “I don’t like the idea of koobs or vultures picking over our dead. I’ll see about arranging for an orbital bombardment. Shouldn’t be a problem as long as we have what we need.”
Kill Team (Galaxy's Edge Book 3) Page 9
