by Joel Babbitt
As the last drone struck true, secondary explosions from packs of plastic explosives they had not had time to evacuate started lighting off one after another, though the grand finale dwarfed them all. They had left a crate of explosives on one side of the deck, and when that lit off the resulting explosion cracked the MCS Glenda in two.
Huddling behind a crate of survival packs, Captain Washington waited until the shrapnel stopped falling around their boat before she dared to look up. Doc Pastore’s frantic screaming could still be heard across the water, but it soon subsided into sobbing. Washington was happy to not be on the same boat with her. “Sir, it looks like you were right. SKAD drones can sink a hover ferry.”
Beside her on the boat, Colonel Alexander shook his head. “Wow. Been a while since I’ve seen such a fireworks display.”
“Yes, sir,” Washington answered as she looked around to assess the damage. “Sir, it looks like Thompson’s boat is sinking.”
Sergeant Thompson and the yazri warriors called Gunner and Priest were all in the same boat together. Priest, a typically tall, thin-muscled yazri who had been raised in part by human missionaries, was already in the water. The kiz’zit was floating face down despite his life jacket and Priest had jumped in to save him. Using a combination of arms, legs, and skin flaps to swim a few strokes away from the boat, Priest turned Specialist Krrrz over in the water and started towing his still form toward Alphabet and Triplets’ boat. As he was being towed Krrrz started coughing and sputtering, then flailing about his two arms and four legs before he realized he was being towed.
Back in their boat, Sergeant Thompson was looking the most worried Colonel Alexander had ever seen him. He knew Thompson didn’t like water, and he’d never seen the muscle-bound man swim, but he was beginning to wonder by the look on Thompson’s face if he even knew how to swim.
“Shannon, bring the boat around. Let’s see if we can’t offload some of the folks onto our boat,” Alexander said.
Deftly, Captain Washington turned the small outboard propeller and guided their life raft over to Thompson’s boat. Without hesitation, Thompson jumped onto the boat first, not even thinking of the yazri with him.
“Why Sergeant Thompson, you look a little concerned,” Alexander chided him subtly.
Thompson looked up wide-eyed but said nothing. Turning back around he started yelling at Gunner to pass over the various munitions and supplies they had stowed in their sinking life raft, while Alphabet and Triplets arrived in the third life raft.
The raft was sinking faster than they could offload equipment, however, so when the last two yazri, Sergeant Hobbs and the new warrior Soar, arrived with Ryker and Doc Pastore in the last boat, Gunner abandoned the swamped crate of perimeter wards and waded then swam awkwardly to Sergeant Hobbs’ boat as the crate and the sinking raft disappeared into the depths of the sea below him.
Colonel Alexander had skipped the last bits of drama, looking around instead. He had now spotted what he was looking for, and in fact it was drifting generally toward their huddle of rafts. Standing up, he waved his arms then whistled loudly.
Above them in the air, and gliding down toward the water not far from the rafts, was a large, neon yellow paraglider. Its billowy wings had a number of holes in them, and it was obvious that Jack Wolf, who was dangling from the assemblage, was having a hard time steering it.
“Sergeant Hobbs!” the colonel called out, “go get Mister Wolf, please.”
Hobbs nodded grimly, then turned his boat toward where the colonel was pointing. In a few moments he’d brought his life raft around next to the large yellow wings that were rocking gently, flat on the water.
Without hesitation, Soar dove into the water. Several moments passed with no sign of either Soar or Wolfman, then suddenly both of them appeared above water, the skinny yazri coughing and sputtering while Wolfman seemed unconscious. Dragging him back to the boat, Soar and Hobbs doubled Wolf over and thumped on him until a great gush of water and vomit came out and Wolf started coughing and heaving air in great gasps. Soon, his eyes seemed to clear and he sat up, looking more like a drowned rat than the team’s hairy survivalist.
“Mister Wolf,” Alexander called as Washington brought their boat up next to his. “Did you see what happened to Lieutenant Flanagan?”
Wolf nodded wordlessly then, after another spasm of coughs, said “He was dead afore we went down, boss. There was blood aplenty and his neck was lolling. There be no saving him now.”
Colonel Alexander grimaced then nodded. They all knew the dangers of this profession, and none of them had signed on expecting anything less—except perhaps the doctor—but dying was always a significant event, and when it occurred in such a public way there was no hiding it from the uninitiated, as he knew both Doctor Pastore and Mister Wolf were.
“Captain Washington,” Alexander said as he turned away from Hobbs’ boat where Wolfman had gone into another coughing fit, “please put a requisition in to our special friend. Let him know we’re heading toward the Terra Alta Colony, and would like the package delivered there if at all possible. Also, please let Mister Marik know that we may need to initiate Mister Wolf. You know what I mean.”
“Sir, what about the yazri?” Captain Washington asked.
“The solkin never talk to the yazri. They consider them to be semi-intelligent brutes—tools to be used in their wars and nothing more. I’ll explain to our yazri friends that the ancestors didn’t want him yet.”
Washington nodded as Colonel Alexander turned to those in the boats around him. Though he trusted Wolfman, he doubted the doctor could handle any such initiation. No, she would have to be wiped after the mission.
“Alright now, Marik’s Marauders. It seems we live to fight another day.” Alexander checked the compass in his situence glasses, then pointed due east. “The charges on our outboard propellers should last us several hours, and we can cross-level power packs between boats to make them last several hours longer than that. So, Specialist Krrrz, see if you can’t get us a good connection to the Dewa Drone down at the wreck. Once we get a chance to interrogate that faulty Sea Skimmer drone down there, I believe we’ll likely be heading toward the eastern shore.”
Sitting with her legs up to her chest between Ryker and Wolfman, Doctor Sandra Pastore was beginning to feel the effects of a second pill she had taken, but was still quite shell shocked. Even more than that, as she began to let her cares slip away with the onset of the pills’ calming influence, she still struggled with how Colonel Alexander could be so dismissive of Lieutenant Flanagan’s death. Being a doctor she had seen people deal with death before, and her own losses in Primus Colony had made such pain very real to her, but Alexander seemed almost immune to it. Looking around her, she noticed that all the rest of Marik’s military personnel seemed unphased by Pete Flanagan’s death as well.
Sobbing as she surrendered the last of her mental anguish to her pills, she began to think she had signed up with a unit of psychopaths.
* * *
As Captain Washington soon discovered, Sea Skimmer drones were never made to resist military-grade interrogation software. Only moments after the Dewa Drone had arrived on station the faulty Sea Skimmer had given up all its data; its place and date of manufacture, mandatory purchaser information, and coordinates of its last launch, to include the biometric stamps of the person who had authorized the launch. The group had already begun their journey east, following a zig-zag pattern in an attempt to throw off whatever surveillance mechanism their attacker had.
Washington’s brow was knit in concentration as she poured through the cryptic data fields the Dewa had extracted from the Sea Skimmer’s control matrix. “It looks like they spoofed the purchaser data, and the dates of manufacture and such are all clearly false. We’ll have to run the biometric scan through tracking channels to see if we get anything there. Ah, wait, here we are,” she said, pointing at a string of numbers. “These are the launch coordinates. That can’t be spoofed—they’re gene
rated by the system.”
Colonel Alexander nodded. “Well, let’s run them. My bet is on Principay.”
“Yes, sir. After trade negotiations with Commander Brutian and his cadre broke down last year I’d say that’s a safe bet,” Washington replied.
“Who is Brutian?” Gunner, who had been silently drying out the conc-gun he carried over his back, asked in the typically curt speech of the yazri.
Colonel Alexander turned to the morose warrior. “Gunner, isn’t it?” he asked, though Gunner’s name was clearly stamped below his face in Alexander’s situence display.
The yazri simply nodded. The streaks of blood down his snout were freshly smeared by sea water, making it appear as if he cried tears of blood. The affect could be unsettling, but Colonel Alexander had a long history with the ways of the yazri.
“I don’t know what Marik’s people told you and your brothers before you came here, and with the attack on Taysom Island I’ve not gotten to know you and your brothers better. I’ve not had the opportunity to tell you who our enemies are here, and why they are our enemies,” Alexander said. “There are many potential enemies here on Camallay, but now that we know the drones came from the east, it is almost certain that our enemy is Commander Titus Brutian from Principay Colony.”
“Why?” Gunner asked.
Alexander thought for a moment. There were obvious reasons, and some that weren’t so straight forward, but to understand them he had to explain a bit of history to the morose, black-furred warrior. “There were six original colonies established almost twenty standard years ago now on the eastern continent. The first colony was called Primus, and it lay in the tropical zone, but those poor people all died very suddenly from some mysterious disease a few years back and the place is permanently quarantined. The three northernmost colonies banded together into a quasi-state named Far Point. The fifth colony, which lies in the southern mountains, is called Terra Alta. The last colony was originally sponsored by the Camallay Unity Government, but was taken over by some of our corporate rivals, Stellar Corp being in the lead there. It is named Principay and it lies in the most fertile temperate areas of the eastern continent. There are other colonies out there, but Principay has grown, expanded, mostly thrown off its corporate masters, and established several outposts and two new colonies near itself. And in charge of it all is Commander Titus Brutian, the self-styled dictator of the so-called Nation of Principay.”
Alexander could see that this was a lot of talk for the normally very terse yazri, so he cut to the chase. “Far Point Colony has rich mines, and in fact they’re Principay’s primary competitors in the mining business. Marik buys rare metals from Far Point that come from those mines. Principay wants to take those mines and deny us those rare metals. So, Marik sold a lot of military vehicles and weapons to Far Point so they could protect themselves against Principay’s threats. Most of those vehicles and weapons were on the MCS Venture, the ship that was sunk out here in the North Sea.”
Gunner considered Alexander’s words for a few moments before speaking. “There will be war among the colonies,” he spoke as his face hardened.
“Yes, my friend,” Alexander admitted. “You’re right. If Principay did this thing, then it is a sure sign that there will be war.”
“Sir,” Washington said, refocusing on the colonel after examining her linker’s and glasses’ search results, “the launch coordinates are from Principay’s coastal colony, and the biometric stamp comes from Stellar Corp’s site lead—your old friend Josh Langdon.”
Alexander shook his head at the mention of the name. “Then it is so,” Alexander said with a note of finality.
“Who is this Josh Langdon?” Gunner asked, his furry brow shading dark eyes and a fierce look. The yazri had heard the name of his attacker, and blood was in his eyes.
Colonel Alexander was on a Renova contract, and other than his full head and neatly trimmed beard of salt and pepper hair, the body renovating treatment had essentially reset his biological age to a comfortable thirty-five, yet as he met the yazri’s eyes his eyes looked suddenly very old.
“You were his clan lord,” Gunner perceived.
“You see much, my friend,” Alexander said, his lips pursed tight. He pointed at Captain Washington. “Josh was my deputy before Shannon, until he left us to go work for Stellar Corp.”
Behind him, Washington interjected. “Sir, you’re being too nice. He betrayed us. There’s really no other way to say what he did.”
Alexander looked off into the distance, then slowly nodded. “Yes… yes, that he did.” Then, looking squarely at Gunner he continued. “Captain Josh Langdon stole industrial secrets from our employer and sold them to Stellar Corp. He then went even farther and, as site lead for the Stellar Corp folks Principay hires to do their dirty work, he gave Brutian the time and route of a convoy carrying industrial replicators meant for the local human government. When Brutian’s thugs took out our convoy and stole those replicators Principay Colony gained the ability to make a whole array of mining vehicles, weapons, even flyers. Of course, Josh Langdon disappeared just as all this was happening, and the next time we heard from him he was at Principay.”
“Nest of vipers,” Washington muttered. “We should have gone after Josh and his new employer long ago.”
Gunner was silent, taking in the flow of words. Then, as he sat looking squarely at Colonel Alexander, he reached up to his face and ran his thumb along his own cheek, then he leaned forward and smeared a long streak of blood down Alexander’s cheek.
“We hunt the betrayer together,” the yazri growled.
“And his evil master Titus Brutian,” Washington added.
Taking the yazri by the wrist in the traditional oath-grasp, Colonel Alexander looked his companion in the eyes. There was no avoiding dealing with this problem anymore. The time for decisive action had come. “We hunt the betrayer,” he said, a firm determination building in his eyes.
Everyone was listening on their linkers and glasses as Colonel Alexander changed their heading, this time ordering them on the most direct course to a point in the coastal area claimed by Terra Alta Colony. He explained that Principay had much to answer for, but that it was too dangerous to approach them directly. Instead, the company would refit among their friends and trading partners at Terra Alta and warn the eastern colonies that war was coming.
As he spoke, his voice was deep, determined and sharp. He had a quarry, and though in the back of his mind he’d suspected that Commander Titus Brutian, dictator of the ever power-hungry Principay colony, had attacked them, now that he had found the smoking gun with the stamp of his treacherous former deputy on it, his determination was set.
There would be blood.
Chapter Six
The weather-beaten, bedraggled company arrived on the eastern shore late in the afternoon of their second day on Camallay’s North Sea. Nights were short on Camallay, and days similarly brief; a full rotation on Camallay was several hours short of the normal twenty standard hours.
There was no fanfare for their arrival, nor did it seem that anyone or anything had taken notice. Rather, as each boat beached on the black gravel that passed for sand in this particular bay, the various member of Marik’s Marauders jumped awkwardly out and began stumbling on numb legs toward dry land. In a few moments, once he had collected himself, Weapons Sergeant Thompson stood up to his full two meters of height and began bellowing orders at the various dazed members of the company. The water had only damaged his confidence, not broken it, and now that he was on dry land again his dark eyes were ablaze with all his normal fury.
Specialist Krrrz had recovered quickly from almost drowning, and Doctor Pastore had injected Jack Wolf’s broken arm with bone putty and nano-therapeutics once she had gotten control of herself sometime during the short night, so Wolf helped haul the boats up onto the beach with the rest of the company. Jim Ryker seemed none the worse for having bounced up and down on the choppy seas in a life raft for almost twenty h
ours, though his normal intensity was somewhat blunted by the monotony of the journey. Among the scattered yazri only Soar wore a smile; he’d spent most of the journey at the prow of his boat feeling the wind whip over the new, long fur the medical droids had replicated in his regrown skin.
By the time Colonel Alexander stepped onto the beach, both of the other craft were already half-unloaded. Thompson had his three specialists plus the four yazri hopping. There would be no rest for the crew until they had set up a basecamp that the Colonel could be proud of. Alexander smiled as he drug his own kit off the life raft, strapping on his holstered Mk-12 blaster pistol before grabbing his slap plates and walking off toward the thick wall of jungle foliage that ringed the beach. Ever concerned for her boss’s safety, Captain Shannon Washington followed him with a T1 blaster rifle held at the ready.
The pair of leaders had barely reached the eaves of the jungle when Wolf came running up behind them, ruddy skin flushed red under his bald pate and bushy red sideburns. Washington grabbed Colonel Alexander by the arm, pointing to their huffing companion as he approached.
“Boss, don’t be going in there!” he whispered harshly, just loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to alert any nearby wildlife.
Colonel Alexander had brought Jack Wolf along on the expedition because he had gen mods that allowed him to detect things others could not—a feral sense of smell and ears that heard a broader range of sounds than normal humans. And Wolf was the grounded type that wasn’t about to give a false alert either.
Instantly, Captain Washington’s and Colonel Alexander’s senses sharpened. Backing away from the jungle canopy slowly, they both pointed their weapons into the bush and scanned for any sign of what might have alerted Wolfman.
