The Cross of Mithras Vol. 1: EOD Operation Welcome to Hell

by Douglas Howell

  The Plasma Shields & Damage Analyzer detected that the ship was hit by either micro-meteorites or space junk. Whichever it was, Galactic Prime was hit near the bow and mid-section on the top part of the ship, going from top to bottom. Although Galactic Prime sustained marginal damage, the area that handles the communicational array, which lies on the top part of the ship near the mid-section (it looks like a T shape office building) was heavily peppered.

  “Sir the last thing that we need to do is the sensors and the PSDA said that the communicational array is damaged.” Second Lieutenant Murphy informed Mad Dawg.

  “Understood. Get up there and check it out.”

  “Yes sir.”

  When Murphy returned the look on his face said it all. It was the look that he had terrible news. The look of someone who just been shot and realize that they are going to die.

  “Sir the communicational array is badly damaged.” Murphy said with a knot in his throat.

  “How badly?” Mad Dawg asked.

  “We have a choice sir. We can choose to sacrifice either our long distance, or our short range, or our internal communications. We have to sacrifice one in order to save another one.”

  Mad Dawg with the weight of the world crushing him, made his decision. “Alright. Sacrifice our long range communications.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Murphy than had the engineers to try to save both the short range and the internal communications. When they were done they began work upon the sensors. When the sensors were up and running, that is when all hell broke loose. And a new nightmare began for the crew.

  “Intruder alert! Intruder alert! EOD Elite Commando drop-ship has docked! Ship is located in stern section deck 15!” The male computer voice said.

  Murphy and his security team would later confirm that such a drop-ship has indeed dock and that it was not a computer glitch as they thought. They would later learn that one single Dragon Clone was on board. And they would very quickly realize what hell Task Force ZH-3C must be going through.

  Let’s Rock

  (1)

  Vaistll, Taylor, Ramirez, Sanchez, Hayes, Nakada and Liebowitz sat down at a table in the captain’s conference room on the cargo ship. The ship had just left and was headed over to the harbor. It was 20:38 hours and was dark, raining and cold. Nobody wanted to be outside on the deck of the ship. Blue Team was asleep, Red Team was acting as the crew of the ship, and everybody else was passing time away in their own way.

  “Ma’am, I think that this is ridiculous.” Hayes mentioned after everybody sat down.

  “What is?” Vaistll said in a demanding tone of voice. She thought for a brief moment that he might be questioning the debriefing.

  “That we sit up base camp, do some exploring, move the base camp to a new location and then repeat the process.” Hayes said.

  “Then what do you suppose we do then? Walk into an ambush when we could have seen it coming.” Sanchez asked Hayes.

  “I’m not saying that.” Hayes responded.

  “Then what are you saying? It sounds to me like that is actually what you are saying.”

  “All I am saying is that we are moving a little too fast and…”

  “Oh… I see. We should just stand still and wait for them to find us and then kill us.”

  “If you would let me finish.”

  “Hey… If we let you run things than we would be finished.” Sanchez said in a sarcastic manner.

  “What I’m trying to say is…”

  “I think we know what you were trying to say.”

  “Goddamn it let me finish!” Hayes yelled out. He was getting upset with Sanchez.

  “Sanchez, let him finish.” Ramirez said to her. He was tired and sleepy and didn’t feel like hearing them arguing over it. Sanchez then motion with her right hand for Hayes to continue.

  “We’re moving too fast. If we slow down and wait for Galactic Prime to contact us, then we can tell them of our situation.” Hayes mentioned.

  “And like I said, we can’t wait for them forever.” Sanchez said.

  “Nobody said that we have to wait for here forever. But we can’t go around looking for weapons and ammo. That would get us all killed.”

  “Well if you didn’t lose our weapons and ammo…”

  “Hey!” Hayes yelled. What Sanchez said hurt him. He truly was sorry for losing their weapons and ammo and he didn’t know how he could make it up to them.

  “Sanchez, I think that Hayes is right. We can neither look for weapons and ammo, nor can we stay put for too long. Hayes is right, we should wait for Galactic Prime to contact us.” Taylor mentioned.

  “Sir I need to talk to you in private right now.” Ramirez said to Taylor.

  “Whatever it is, it will have to wait.”

  “No it can’t. Go with him.” Vaistll said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “I said for you to go with him. It’s too important.”

  “Yes ma’am.” Taylor said.

  Both Taylor and Ramirez left the room. Ramirez then told Taylor that both Lenkov and Omori is on board that starbase. Taylor was so shocked and horrified that it turned his face white. When both of them went back inside everybody could see the fear in Taylor’s face.

  “What’s wrong sir?” Hayes asked.

  “Nothing. It’s nothing for you to concern yourself with.” Taylor said.

  “What did he tell you sir?” Hayes asked.

  “And I said that it was nothing. So drop it. Understand?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Something has come up that leads me to believe that Sanchez is right. That despite the loss of our weapons and ammo, we must push ahead.” Taylor mentioned.

  “Sir that would be suicidal.” Hayes mentioned.

  “Hayes, are you still bothered by that fact that you lost our weapons and ammo?” Sanchez asked.

  “Why don’t you just drop it!?” Hayes asked her. He was a bit annoyed by her.

  “What are you talking about? This is the first time that I brought it up.”

  “Bullshit. You keep on mentioning it!”

  “No I didn’t and you know it.”

  “Hayes, she’s right. She only mentioned it once since we sat down at this table.” Taylor mentioned.

  Ramirez turned and looked at Vaistll. He could tell that she has a headache. Everybody else could tell that as well. Ramirez was starting to get annoyed by Hayes and Sanchez bickering like little children. He felt like that might be the reason why Vaistll has a headache – and he’s right.

  “Hayes, I want you to drop it right now.” Ramirez ordered him.

  “Yes sir.” Hayes said in a rude manner.

  “Liebowitz, I want you and your team to set up a defensive position at the bridge that is near the pier.” Vaistll ordered him.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “And Hayes…” Vaistll said.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “I want you to accompanied them.”

  “Why ma’am? Liebowitz is fully capable to handle anything that may arise.”

  “Maybe so, but I still want you to go with them.”

  “Ma’am shouldn’t I be with my team. I don’t want to disrupt my team or White Team.”

  “Oh god! You got to be shittin’ me Hayes!” Sanchez said.

  “You won’t be disrupting my team sir.” Liebowitz said.

  Hayes didn’t say anything. He felt a great deal of anxiety by the position that he was taking. He’s starting to feel like if he keeps on pushing it then he will make it worst. He wants time to think about how he might be able to reach them with reason.

  “Hayes, rather you like it or not, you ARE going with them. Do you understand?” Ramirez said in a demanding tone of voice.

  “Yes sir. What about Red Team?”

  “Red Team is going to get their much needed rest.” Taylor said.

  “Sanchez.” Vaistll called out.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Is your team ready to do more off-loading?”r />
  “Yes ma’am.”

  “What about my team ma’am?” Nakada asked.

  “Your team is going to load our equipment on trucks. And then move it to our new base.” Vaistll said.

  “Where is our new base camp going to be located at ma’am?” Nakada asked.

  “That depends upon what Ellis, Wexler and Moriarty finds over there.”

  “Ma’am, shouldn’t we set up our communicational array to see if Galactic Prime is trying to contact us?” Hayes asked..

  “Good god Hayes! First you want us to move faster. And now when you get what you want, you want us to slow down. Make up your damn mind.” Sanchez said. She was getting annoyed by Hayes acting like a idiot.

  “I wasn’t suggesting that!”

  “It sounds like it to me. You ought know that we would have to set up a tent in order to protect the communication equipment from the weather.”

  “That’s not the whole base camp!”

  “Okay then. Let’s not forget the power for the equipment. By the time all of the support equipment, and their tents have been finished, a full third of the base camp would have been completed.”

  “Well see… that’s not the whole camp.”

  “If we’re going to set up a third of the base, why not set up the rest?”

  “We don’t have to set up the whole camp!”

  “Oh… so we don’t have to set up the whole camp, is that right?” Sanchez said in a rude manner.

  “Yes!” Hayes said in rude manner.

  “Don’t the rules says that we have to?” Sanchez asked Hayes. Hayes didn’t responded because he knew the answer – yes they have to.

  “That’s what I thought.” Sanchez said with a smile.

  “Sanchez, go and tell your team what we have decided. Hayes, I want you to go and tell Red Team that as soon as we get to the harbor they can take a break. Liebowitz, Nakada, inform your team of our decision. Go now.” Vaistll ordered them. She finally got to the point where she didn’t feel like hearing both Hayes and Sanchez arguing, it was making her headache worse.

  “Roger.” Sanchez, Nakada and Liebowitz said.

  “Hayes!” Ramirez said when he didn’t hear him say anything.

  “Roger.” Hayes said.

  “All of you get a move on and do as your captain says.” Ramirez ordered them. All four of them got up and left.

  Both Taylor and Ramirez noticed that Vaistll was staring out the window. She had the look of, that she was looking at something, but nothing was there. Whatever it was that she was looking at, it was bothering her.

  “Is something wrong?” Taylor asked her.

  “No… um… it’s nothing.”

  “Is it the way in which Hayes and Sanchez was acting?”

  “What? Oh no. It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it? I can tell that something is bothering you.”

  “Part of it is the fact that it is cold, dark and raining.” Vaistll said after she took a breath and let it out.

  “And the other part?” Taylor asked.

  “I got a strong sense of death.” She said under her breath. When Taylor and Ramirez heard that they looked at each other with a worried look on their face.

  “Do you think that it has anything to do with our mission?” Ramirez asked.

  “No it’s something else.”

  “What is it then?”

  “On my birth planet we had the belief that goodness is warmth and fire is sacred. Something that is to be respected, to be venerated. Something that is truly holy because it represents the life giving force of our home star. After all, life loves the warmth of a star.

  Just as much as the Earth is in the Goldilocks zone of space, not too hot nor cold just right, most of the life upon the Earth lives in the tropical zone. Not in the deserts or the tundra. Yes there is life there, but no where near the percentage that you can find in the tropics.

  So we saw the warmth of our star, and fire, as something sacred and holy. But with evil we saw it as devoid of what our star gives us. And thus we saw evil as cold, dark and it brings death.” Vaistll said.

  “So in other words you sense something evil is out the window.” Taylor said.

  “No. I sense death. A very strong presence of it.”

  “Have you ever got that feeling before? Like on one of our missions.” Ramirez asked. He was afraid that maybe she might be sensing that Task Force ZH-3C will be slaughtered.

  “No. And I can’t explain it. The only time that I ever got that feeling was back on my planet after I got run through with a sword.”

  Neither Taylor nor Ramirez said anything. Both of them left. They knew her well enough not to question her intuition. Although she thought that her feeling of death was related to their mission, in truth it had to do with Double Shock and the rebirth of the Hau’rino Empire. But it had the effect that it got them to think of things that they shouldn’t. That they will all die. The more that they think about it, the more that it will depress them. They need something to pick up their spirits. They need something that will take their minds off of what she said.

  (2)

  “Sir I got some really bad news.” Murphy said to Mad Dawg through the intercom.

  Murphy figured that the first logical place for the EOD Commandos would go is to the engine room. Taking his security team with him, he learned that he was right. Murphy and his team where under a great deal of stress in trying to defeat whatever plans Lenkov has in mind.

  “Go ahead.” Mad Dawg said.

  Mad Dawg’s voice said it all. He was tired of hearing bad news and here come some more. The rest of the crew was no different. Knowing that they are facing both Lenkov and Omori, combined with the fact that there is an EOD Commando unit on Galactic Prime, demoralized the whole crew.

  “Our engines have been sabotaged sir. We ain’t going anywhere anytime soon.”

  “How long will it take to get them back up and running?”

  “By the looks of it sir, I have to say roughly seven to ten days.”

  “Shit. Alright. I’ll send somebody down there. Mad Dawg out.”

  “Sergeant.” Mad Dawg said to Staff Sergeant Rebecca Debernardo, the acting security chief on the bridge.

  “Yes sir.”

  “I want you to send a group of engineers and a security team down to the engine room. Tell them that I want those engines up and running yesterday. Have them lock and secure all entrances to the engine room. Then seal and reinforce any doors to the maintenance duct near the engine room.”

  “Yes sir.”

  After thirty-three minutes Mad Dawg got a call from one of the engineers.

  “Sir it looks like they sabotage the engines when we were reinstalling the computer core OS system.” The engineer informed Mad Dawg.

  “Understood. Tell the security team that neither one of them can leave that room until we purge this ship of our uninvited guests. I don’t want that EOD Commando unit to re-sabotage those engines. So each of them are going to have to do double duty.”

  “Copy that. Over and out.”

  Although neither the engineers nor the security team were ever attack by the Dragon Clone they were still deathly afraid of being attack by an elite EOD Commando unit. An elite EOD Commando unit is one of the toughest SOB unit that anyone ever had the misfortune to confront. It took the engineers six days to repair the engines.

  Seven hours into Murphy’s search for their unwelcome guests, it started to become apparent to him that they were using the maintenance ducts to move around. Two hours later he realized that the EOD Commando unit must be traveling in the hallways when nobody was around.

  Murphy started to become confused by the actions of this elite EOD Commando unit. Where are they going? They obviously could do far more damage to the ship but they not. Why? Could there be a spy on board? If so, then who? What is the Commando unit doing, making a map of the maintenance duct? Murphy could and couldn’t wait to have those questions answered.

  Four hours l
ater with Murphy and his team being tired and exhausted, he started to think that maybe he might know why the Commando unit is behaving that way. He then quickly headed to the bridge to tell Mad Dawg of his suspicions in person. Before he got there he received an emergency call from Elizabeth Mitchell, one of the engineers on Galactic Prime.

  “Murphy here. Go ahead.”

  “Sir, I just finished my analysis on the damage to our communications and I have strong reasons to believe that neither space-junk nor micro-meteorites damaged our communications.”

  “What leads you to draw that conclusion?”

  “Well sir, as you are well aware, whenever space junk and/or micro-meteorites hits a ship it can be equated to being shot by a shotgun. Each pellet strikes the target in a random location but they are still close together. When it comes to what struck us it had too much precision for it to have been either space-junk or micro-meteorites. When they hit, they hit the critical parts to our communications and they did not appear to have struck in any random way.”

  “Did you inform the captain?”

  “Yes sir. He told me to tell you.”

  “Alright. Over and out.” Murphy said under his breath. He turned and looked at one of his men with a look of disappointment and then they left.

  When Murphy got to the bridge he could tell that Mad Dawg been drinking again. Mad Dawg could not handle the stress of what he called, ‘a sneaky underhanded nerdy tactic.’ But deep down inside he knew that it was a legitimate form of a tactic. He always was good at solving combat related problems not overcoming a cyber attack. As he would put it, he is a ‘man of action. Not a man that sits in front of a computer all day with a screen tan.’

  “So what’s the status of our guests?” Mad Dawg asked Murphy with slurred speech.

  Mad Dawg was so drunk that he was slightly moving back and forth while he was standing. The odd thing about Mad Dawg is that when he is drunk he is a better officer. While he was sober, back when he was a First Lieutenant, he used a tactic that was too crazy for any good officer to use. But as luck and skill would have it, it paid off big time for him. It earned him a promotion to the rank of captain and it gave him his nickname.