by Jay Korza
As they got out of the skimmer, Nitaha ran straight for the tree line but stopped short of entering the forest jungle. She howled for Fang, letting him know his team was coming. Her voice would carry through the trees and reach him in the way Shirkas have been communicating since long before artificial communication devices were invented.
Seth came alongside his cub and looked at her, his question understood without being asked.
“Uncle Fang answered. He is hurt. I don’t know how badly. He wants us to hurry up.”
“Of course he does.” Seth smirked as he waved his men forward.
The forward team moved through the undercanopy as quickly as they could. They were bypassing so many possible threats that Seth had to stop thinking about it before he overwhelmed himself.
There was no reason to believe the enemy had made it past Fang’s position, so there was no need to move slowly up to that point. But there were still plenty of indigenous threats on this planet, especially in these forest jungles.
Scan was on point with Nitaha close behind. She had been training with the standard Coalition rifle but she still wasn’t comfortable with it. She shot and handled it well, but she still didn’t like using it. She was still in a development stage that was more feral than not and she preferred her own claws and teeth to any other weapons.
Nitaha slid to a stop and then quickly dove for cover as the first rounds from the enemy soldiers found their new targets. Although she didn’t like her rifle, she did have a lot of fun with grenades. She took one from her chest harness and lobbed it out over the log she dove behind for cover.
As the explosion rocked the log with overpressure, she saw Seth and four other operators take up fighting positions behind trees to her right. Two more operators moved to her left.
She inched forward and saw that she could get her rifle muzzle through a crack in the log, allowing her to fire from a good position of cover. As soon as she got into position, an enemy head popped up directly in front of her sights. She didn’t even have to aim, just pull the trigger; he went down.
Nitaha had helped kill multiple warriors on her birthing planet, and several since on missions with her Father’s team. She had killed and eaten many prey animals also. But this was the first time she had killed with a rifle, with a weapon that was not of her own flesh. She felt something horrible but couldn’t put words to her feelings. Unclean? Dishonorable? Weak? All of those and more. A whimper escaped her mouth.
“Are you okay, Nitaha?” Scan asked from beside her.
“I do not know.”
Scan could feel her conflicting emotions, though he didn’t know what to make of them or why she was having them. He did know that now, in the heat of battle, was not the time to be conflicted.
“Nitaha, you must focus. You cannot explore your feelings right now. You must save that for later. In this moment, you must fight.”
“Yes, Uncle.” Nitaha thought of everyone on the team other than Seth as Aunt or Uncle. Emily was somewhere between Aunt and Mother because of how she doted on Nitaha and was in a relationship with Father.
Nitaha peered out again and fired three more rounds in quick succession. She missed her target but was close enough to put him back behind cover and halt his advance.
That gave Fang enough time to move from his position, slash that soldier’s throat, and then dive past the offensive line his team had set up. Fang was now behind a rock and panted loudly. Some blood matted his fur in several areas, but none of the wounds were actively bleeding.
“Next time you take my daughter somewhere, you take a commlink,” Seth called over to Fang.
“Yes, Father,” he answered. “Would you like to know more about the enemy or are you not done berating me yet?”
“I’m done. For now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Fang saw Blaze carried an extra rifle and chest harness and knew they were for him. He waved to Blaze, who tossed Fang the gear.
“They started with twenty-eight men and were down to twenty-one when you showed up. I don’t know how many you’ve taken out so far, but I think we are probably about done with them.”
“Joker is bringing a squad in from our left flank. My visor shows him one hundred meters out. Once they join in, we can finish this up. Do you have any idea of who they are?”
“Nortes Special Forces.”
“You can’t be serious.” Surgeon swore.
“I couldn’t tell until I engaged the first one. I grabbed him from the rear of their formation. I tried to take him alive but ended up having to kill him to keep him quiet. I recognized the smell as soon as I slashed through his combat vest. Then I took off his helmet and saw his face. No doubt about it.”
“Could they be mercenaries? Maybe that was the only Nortes soldier in the group.” Seth reloaded.
“No. I’ve killed everyone with my bare hands, so I know that all of them were Nortes. Their equipment and uniforms are all military issue.” Fang moved from cover towards Nitaha and fired several rounds at the same time.
“What is wrong, cub?”
“I do not like this—thing.” Nitaha spat at her rifle.
“Ah, you have killed with it.”
She nodded.
“I, too, felt like a slime worm the first time I killed with a mechanical weapon. Never feel dishonored to fight with the same weapons your enemy uses against you. If they only had knives and we slaughtered them with rifles, then we would be without honor. If they choose to not fight with their hands, then that is their choice. We will meet our foes as they meet us.”
“Yes, Uncle.”
“Good. Now kill more of them until you get over it.”
“Yes, Uncle.”
A moment later, Cueball crashed through the foliage, rifles in all four hands. Two were plasma rifles and two were standard Coalition slug throwers. The Nortes soldiers were shocked to see a warrior fighting alongside the Coalition soldiers. Shocked enough that it gave several of them pause. That pause was their death sentence. Plasma bolts and metal slugs tore through their line and quickly dropped another six of their men.
It didn’t take long for the ambush to assault through the enemy position. When it was all done, Fang took Nitaha to look for survivors, someone they could question back at the camp. Scan, Snake, Joker, and Cueball set out to make sure none of the soldiers had escaped to retreat or complete their mission, whatever it was.
At the onset of their mission so many months ago, Telfer, Stroth, Jenarah, and Kuruk were all told that although they were officers in their own services outside the Coalition, they were only observers on the team and not in command positions. Since that time, each of them had proved their worth in training, battle, and the day-to-day minutia that makes up a military unit. Seth had come to trust and rely on them and the other team members even looked to them as the officers they were.
But now as Seth looked at the dead Nortes commandos all around him, he was having second thoughts about Major Telfer’s loyalties.
Seth turned to Surgeon. “Get Telfer back to camp and keep her isolated for now. Put her under guard and disarm her. Let’s be as gentle with this as we can, but we will not let our guard down either.”
“Yes, Father.” Surgeon had started the call sign for Seth as a joke but he was really starting to like it.
Almost on cue, Telfer walked up to Seth and Surgeon. “I’m sure you will want my weapons and to secure my movements until we have an answer as to what all of this is about.” She motioned to her dead countrymen around her.
“Yes, we will. I’m glad you understand.”
“Of course I do. I am loyal to my people and my empress, but I have no idea what this attack was about. I was not aware of any operation against our team.” She finished her sentence as she laid down her last weapon.
Telfer looked to one of the corpses and then back to Seth. “I would like to get my knife to check something on the soldier’s body. With your permission, sir.”
Seth nodded and she slowly
bent down and took the knife from her chest harness that she had already removed. She walked over to the Nortes soldier and removed his helmet. Taking hold of a tuft of hair from the back of his head, she cut the hair off close to the skull.
“Come look at this, Father.”
Seth and Surgeon came over. “Have you ever seen that mark before, Surgeon?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Telfer let go of the hair and then wiped her hands on the dead soldier’s uniform. “It’s a cabal tattoo.”
“A cabal? Whose cabal?” In all of the intelligence reports he had, Seth hadn’t run across any information on a Nortes cabal.
Telfer didn’t answer right away and Seth didn’t push her. “For a couple of years, there have been rumors of a cabal within the empire. No one knows what they want or who they work for; the rumors are anywhere from destroying the Nortes people to taking over the Coalition, and a lot more crazy ones in between.”
“Have you had any direct interaction with any of the cabal’s members?” Surgeon asked.
“No.”
“Then why did you look for their mark? Better yet, how would you know where it was at?” Surgeon pushed.
Telfer looked both men in the eyes, her face showing a new sense of resolve. “You must have known, or at the very least have guessed, that part of my mission with your team is to spy on you and report back to my military everything that the Coalition is trying to keep secret from the Nortes people.”
“I assumed as much,” Seth admitted.
“As a spy, I have a very high level of security clearance. I am told things that very few people in the military know. And anything they don’t tell me, I have ways of finding out on my own.” She paused and looked around at the dead soldiers. “And I didn’t know about this. At all.”
“So that made you think it was the cabal?”
“It made me wonder. And since I had heard rumors of the tattoo, I decided it was worth a look.”
“Interesting.”
“What’s really interesting is, this man also has the empress’s private guard insignia on his left wrist.” Telfer held up the man’s hand. “I suggest, sir, that we gather every soldier here and check them for both marks. It is possible that this is the only cabal member in the group.”
“That would be pretty coincidental that you checked only one soldier and he happened to be the only cabal member.”
“Agreed. But we can’t take anything for granted, not anymore.”
It didn’t take long to gather up all of the bodies and get them on the transports back to camp. Fang begrudgingly rode a transport while Reaper tended to his wounds. He would need minor surgery back at camp to get a few slugs out of him, but he would be fine after a few weeks of rest.
Major Telfer remained disarmed, with Cueball and Jenson as escorts. She wasn’t offended by the arrangement, though she would rather have had Wilks assigned to her detail. But she wasn’t about to make that information public with a formal request.
Once they were back at the base, Telfer examined all of the bodies. With her was Emily, Daria, and Shar’tuk. Shar’tuk had lived most of his life on the new Nortes home world and he had an intelligence background that Wilks only knew a little about, so he was asked to help with the examinations. Jenson was half Nortes but he had grown up on a Coalition planet with more of a human influence than Nortes, so he wasn’t helping the group.
When they were done, the entire team came together for a debrief of the fight and the postmortems.
Telfer began. “We found the cabal tattoo and the empress’s private guard marking on every soldier. As I told Father and Surgeon before, there are too many theories and rumors as to what the cabal’s endgame is for me to even guess at what their mission here might have been. The only rumor that seems to hold up at this point is the cabal is being led by the empress herself.”
Shar’tuk stood up. “I trust you all with my life, you know that. That being said, I cannot tell you how I obtained the information I am about to tell you. The general was aware of it before he died, but I’m not sure how many people he shared the information with.”
The general had been the team’s original benefactor: handpicked its members and diverted military funds, personnel, and equipment to the team. For decades, the general had been given full autonomy by the Coalition to carry out his missions as he saw fit, and that meant that he didn’t always share what he knew with everyone else.
“In the end,” Shar’tuk continued, “it comes down to this. Around thirteen years ago, an operative within the Nortes government passed along this message before he died: ‘The empress is trying to find coordinates. Wants them back. Not really who we think she is.’”
Shar’tuk looked around at his peers as the information sunk in. He knew they were coming to some of the same conclusions he was.
“At the time, we had no idea what it meant. Maybe the general had more of an idea than I did, but if he did, he never let on. Now, with all that we’ve been through, all that we’ve learned, I think we have a pretty good idea of what’s going on.”
Telfer shook her head. “The empress is, has been, looking for the warriors’ birthing planet. She wants to regain control of them. She wants to bring back the old empire.”
Emily added. “I agree that is the most logical conclusion, but let’s not forget that we also now know about the existence of the Cherta. Is it possible she was looking for their coordinates? That she wanted to bring them back from exile?”
“For what purpose?” Seth asked.
“I don’t know,” Emily admitted. “But we can’t ever discount other theories because we like one more than the other. I think we should proceed under the assumption that the empress is going behind the Coalition’s back and trying to gain control of the warriors. But we should also keep in mind that she might be going for something the Chertas have that she wants or at least something she thinks they have.”
“It could all be tied together.” Jeeves rolled forward to give his opinion. “What if she believes the Cherta have what she needs to gain control over the warriors? That is why she sent her soldiers here.
“It is possible that she has been working from a different position of knowledge than we have been, and because of that she has been able to differently interpret what we have found so far. She may believe that we are too close to finding what she wants, or we already have, and she sent her men to keep us from moving forward and understanding for ourselves what she has already figured out.”
Bloom spoke up. “Jeeves and I will go through all of the tech gear these guys had with them. We’ll see if we can back his theory up or find a new one. But I think it’s a good one to start with. Why would she tip her hand and risk getting caught unless the stakes were too high for her to risk not trying?”
“Agreed.” Seth added, “These guys’ handlers will be waiting for them to check in, and probably soon. Telfer, see if you can figure out how to send an ‘all-clear’ code without tipping our hand.”
“Yes sir. Since Bloom and Jeeves are tied up, could I get Wilks’ assistance?” Telfer hoped she wasn’t being obvious.
“Of course.” Seth nodded to Wilks.
As the team split up, Emily stopped Wilks before he reached Telfer. “Don’t let her, um, use anything against you.”
“Ma’am?”
“Look, Wilks, I trust you, and I know you’re a professional, but you’re still a man and she’s still a woman. There is a real connection between you two, and I’d hate for her to exploit that right now if she had any ulterior motives in asking for your help.”
“Then why even let me help her?”
Emily fidgeted. She didn’t much like herself for what she was about to ask Wilks to do. “Because, I’m hoping you can exploit that connection to make sure she’s on our side.”
“Yes ma’am.” He walked off and ended the conversation.
Day rolled into night, night back into morning. Members of the team helped out the specialists when an
d where they could but in the end, no one found anything useful. Everyone was tired and more than just a little bit crabby. The team leaders assembled in the hangar to go over everything.
“So, the commandos didn’t have any information on them that was useful. They had their orders, which simply stated to kill everyone from the Coalition at this camp and bring back everything we had found. Nothing else.” Seth put his hands in the air in defeat.
“We also couldn’t find a way to send back a message to their handlers. By now they will have assumed the mission failed and the commandos’ heritage has been discovered,” Wilks added.
Emily rubbed her eyes and temples alternately. “We really don’t know anything new at this point. Most of what we learned yesterday is supposition. Good supposition, mind you, but still not solid fact.”
Surgeon paced, mostly to stay awake and upright but at times, it also helped him think. “We know the commandos carry the empress’ emblem, which could be faked but we’ll assume it isn’t. The empress and/or the commandos’ handlers believe the mission has failed and will believe we know about the Nortes involvement. They will want to cover that up with the Coalition somehow. Either come up with a cover story or disavow it altogether. I think how they handle it will be a good insight in to what their game is.”
“How about we cover it up for them?” Joker had everyone’s attention now. “We bring the president in on what we’ve found out so far. He contacts the Nortes government to tell them our team was wiped out by a warrior attack and he offers his condolences for the loss of Major Telfer.
“He also thanks the Nortes government for the soldiers who tried to come to our aid when we sent out a distress signal, but unfortunately, those Nortes soldiers were also killed. The local wildlife disposed of most of the bodies from all sides, but we’ll send back what we can find as soon as possible.”
Seth laughed. “You, my friend, are a genius. The empress will have her political escape and on top of that, will think our team is dead and unable to carry on with our mission. Captain?”
