Authors: Evan Currie
Something flashed out of the field, cracking hard across his shin, and he went down in a sprawl as something moved above him. He tried to cry out, but his head and face were pushed down into the ground, filling his mouth with dirt and plant material. He spat the mess out as he went for the pistol on his hip and tried to turn, but a weight dropped on his back and he was pinned.
“Move, and I’ll break your legs.”
The voice was a woman’s, whispered softly enough that he almost didn’t understand, but the tone cut through him and left no room for misinterpretation. He froze, his mind racing as he tried to spit the soil out of his mouth.
“What’s your name?”
He spit out the dirt, turning his head to the side, “D-Dean.”
She was looming over him, her weight laying hard into his arms, pinning them up and off the ground. He couldn’t get any leverage to move, the slightest effort drew sharp stabbing pains in his arms. He felt her hands patting him down, her knee in his back, and his pistol was pulled from its holster on his hip. She found his knife a few seconds later and that too was tugged away.
When she was finished, her weight lifted off him and Dean felt himself tugged over onto his back.
“Well Dean,” she said, “Sorry about treating you so roughly, but I’m not wearing my battle armor, and you looked twitchy enough to shoot first and let someone else ask the questions.”
“W-Who the hell are you??” Dean stammered out, blinking as he looked up at the woman above him.
The sun was above her, the dark blue of the Hayden sky faded out by the brilliance, shadowing her face into obscurity. She placed a hand on his chest as she knelt over him, turning to look over the fields for a moment.
“Sergeant Aida, US Army Special Forces, currently assigned to Solari Unified Fleet SOCOM,” She said.
“You’re with the Fleet?” He gasped, trying to sit up, only to have her shove him back down.
“Stay down,” She hissed, “and yes.”
“Well where the hell are they??” He demanded from the ground.
“Gone.” She replied, “Halfway back to Earth space by now, if we’re lucky. Are you alone?”
“Earth?? Why Earth!? We need them here!”
“Are you alone!?” She hissed, glaring down at him, her eyes suddenly glowing green.
He gulped, swallowing hard, and nodded. “Y-yeah...”
“Bullshit.” She lifted her hand over her head, fist clenched. “Where are the others?”
“W-what others?” Dean asked, trying to bluff the woman.
She wasn’t biting, however. “Don’t screw with me, kid, I am not in the mood.”
A rustle in the fields around them drew both their attentions, and Dean gasped softly as he saw the first figure appear through the plants. Dean jolted in the grip of the woman as he saw the darkened faces appear, a thrill of shock singing through him.
“Dean?”
He knew that voice, and he stared at the speaker, looking through the face paint that covered the man’s features.
“Jerry!”
“Jesus, Kid, what are you doing out here?” Reed demanded as he and the other three Pathfinders came in closer and crouched around them in a semi-circle. “I figured your Dad would have you over in the North Lakes area?”
Dean hesitated, glancing at Sorilla, then looked back over to Jerry. “Dad didn’t make it out of the Capital that night.”
Jerry winced, looking away for a moment. “Damn, son, I’m sorry.”
Dead shrugged from his position on the ground, “Yeah, well, me too. I’m staying with Silver and his bunch.”
Jerry nodded, “Old coot got some of you together then, huh?”
Dean smiled.
Reed patted Sorilla on the shoulder, “You can let him up, I’ll vouch for him. Dean’s a delinquent, but he’s not stupid.”
Sorilla cast a slight smile at him and moved off the kid, passing the gun and knife back, though, to Bethany and Sloan, two of the other Pathfinders. Dean followed the weapons with his eyes, but didn’t say anything as he got up to his knees and dusted himself off.
“Knew I heard something out here,” he bitched, “didn’t figure on G.I. Jane though.”
Sorilla just smirked at him, having heard all the jokes before, but the others chuckled quietly.
“Take us back to the Old Coot, Dean.” Jerry said, glancing around. “We’ve got some business to talk with him.”
Dean looked around at the five faces, all serious as they stared at him from behind the face paint they all wore. He swallowed, and nodded though.
“Yeah, sure Jerry... I’ll take you.”
Dean led them back out of the fields to a small hillside that looked to Sorilla like it had been built up during the planting of the fields. Probably from the dirt and rocks they’d plowed up to level the grounds. When he moved in behind one large chunk of granite and disappeared, she reevaluated that impression however. There was more to the hill than it would appear, and as the group followed in single file she could see the entrance to a tunnel cleverly hidden there.
As she was ducking into the dark hole, a sudden feral hiss startled her slightly, causing her to twist back from the sound. Her implants shifted to light gathering mode automatically, the HUD flickering to life on her corneas as it isolated the source of the sound and motion.
A shiver passed down her spine as she recognized the form viscerally, even if it didn’t quite match anything she’d ever seen before.
Spider.
Alright, it had twelve legs and was easily the size of a grown man’s head, but it was still a damned spider and it was holding up four of its legs as it hissed at her in warning. She shifted her heels in the dirt, muzzle of her rifle twitching as she began to lift it up.
Jerry moved before she could, though, sliding his knife from its sheath and digging it under the spider thing from behind, flicking the beast out of the tunnel and away from them both.
“Racknian,” He told her with a twist of his lips, “Nasty little bastard.”
“Poisonous?” She asked as they continued into the tunnel.
“Lethal to locals, doesn’t technically affect humans.”
Sorilla raised an eyebrow in the darkness, “Technically?”
Reed shrugged, “The venom doesn’t break down in our system. Depending on how much it pumps into you, you could basically smother because it blocks the oxygen in your blood from reaching your brain.”
A pleasant thought, Sorilla thought dryly as they continued on. “Treatment?”
“Transfusion or application of local enzymes,” he shrugged, “Transfusion is easier, though.”
Sorilla noted that, cataloging the Racknian to her internal memory storage, along with Reed’s description, then moved on. “Who’s this Silver person?”
Reed chuckled, “He’s first Gen, been around here as long as anyone can remember. Something of a local legend.”
“Influential?”
“Yeah,” Reed nodded in the dark as the continued to move along, “He can bend a few ears... or he could, if we had contact with most of the ears.”
Sorilla nodded in return, and they went the rest of the way in silence. The tunnel broke out into the open after a few twists and turns, back in the jungle beyond the fields. Sorilla nodded to herself, recognizing that the Hayden jungle was the safest place to hide. The thick overlay of flora and fauna would scramble any sensors one might use, forcing an enemy to take a personal hand and come in themselves.
Or send the Golems, of course.
“Dean!” A sharp voice snapped through the air, refocusing Sorilla’s attention. “Who are these... Jerry?”
“Hey Silver.”
The man Jerry called Silver looked to be maybe in his fiftieth percentile, roughly in his middle years, to Sorilla’s eyes. Her implants gave him slightly higher, but again that was likely because of the effect of the weathering on his face skewing the results. She had to remind herself that as a first generation Hayden man he had to be in the area of a hundred and fifty standard years old, probably more. Some people, though, were just like that. Youth was in their genes if they took even a modicum of care with their lives.
He looked past Dean and Jerry, noting the others briefly, then promptly ignored them as he and Jerry shook hands. “Didn’t think you made it out of the city, Son.”
“I helped shepherd Samuel and his bunch deeper into the jungle,” Jerry replied, smiling.
“How many?”
“Just short of five hundred.”
The silver haired man nodded grimly, shaking his head as he clasped Jerry on the back and led him away. “Bad times, boy. Bad times.”
Jerry nodded as he and the group followed the older man and Dean down a jungle path until they reached a small clearing. Sorilla’s eyes flickered around, noting the people and the shelters built mostly of pre-fabricated materials that had apparently been scavenged from colonial buildings. Her implants quickly tallied up a rough count of about a hundred and fifty people, a sizeable portion of them being rather young, like Dean was.
“You got most of your kids out, huh, you old coot?” Jerry asked, smiling genuinely.
“I’d have gotten you out too, if you hadn’t been so busy running for the hills with Sam’s academics.” Silver replied dryly.
“I am one of his Academics, Sil.” Jerry reminded the older man.
“I taught you everything you know about Hayden life, kid, you’ll always be one of mine.”
Jerry chuckled, “No law says I can’t be both.”
Sorilla noted the older man’s expression wasn’t exactly in agreement, but he seemed to let it go as he eyes flicked back to take in Sorilla herself in a brief glance. Jerry glanced back at the same time, and apparently guessed the question before it was asked.
“Sergeant Aida,” He said, “She came in with a Fleet team... the others didn’t make it all the way down.”
Silver grimaced, shaking his head, “The explosions in the sky a couple weeks back?”
Jerry nodded.
“Sorry to hear that, Ma’am,” Silver said simply, then he ignored her again in favor of Jerry. “I take it this isn’t a rescue operation?”
“I’m afraid not, Sil.”
“Alright,” He sighed, “You’d better come on into my ‘office’, Son... Bring the gal with ya.”
Sorilla raised her eyebrows, but didn’t say anything as the older man led Jerry and herself into one of the larger shelters, waving the curious onlookers back to their jobs or whatever they had been doing. He closed the door behind them and set about pulling a couple chairs and such into place while Sorilla examined the interior.
It was better built than what the people in the first camp used, the pre-fabricated materials had been scrounged from other areas, but they had been professionally reassembled here and well-sealed. She could see wire leads heading out from a battery array, presumably to a solar charger, but there was no sign of any power usage inside.
“So how badly are we screwed?” Silver asked as he settled into a chair and waved to a pair of others.
Jerry laughed dryly, “Pretty badly screwed, Sil.”
“I figured as much,” He said, glancing over at Sorilla, “Care to add some clarity to the kid’s opinion?”
“We’re on our own,” She said flatly, deciding to forgo any attempts to soften the blow. The man didn’t look like he either needed them, nor like he would appreciate them. “Fleet came out here with a task force, but after I landed they started picking up... unidentified contacts in the system.”
“You mean aliens.”
Sorilla had actually been avoiding that conclusion, keeping her adversaries labeled as enemies in her head. Having the word out in the open was conflicting actually. Part of her was actually relieved to have someone else say it, but the rational section of her mind rebelled against the very idea.
Aloud, all she said was, “If you want to call them that.”
He snorted, lips twitching wryly, but didn’t pursue it. “What did the Task Force decide?”
“Return to Earth, deliver intel and gather reinforcements.” She replied.
He nodded, unsurprised, “How long before they can be back?”
Sorrilla shook her head, shrugging slightly. “Don’t know.”
*****
Unified Solari Fleet HQ
Third Tier, New Mexican Tether Counterweight
The conference room was huge, but it was filled just the same. Members of the Fleet’s representative nations had been summoned, and after the brief delivered by Captain Petronov of the Socrates a dark silence filled the room.
The American chairman of the Fleet’s Civilian Oversight Committee looked sick to his stomach as images of the interior of the Majesty were shown, and the shock on the faces of the rest of the room filled in the rest of the picture. A few moments later the room erupted into a wave of rumblings and alarmed murmurs as the facts sank in.
Someone in the central row of seats cursed loudly, and a wave of louder yelling started up from there, causing the Chairman to bring his hand down hard on the pressure pad that sounded a chime through the room.
“Please! This is getting us nowhere!”
“Mr. Chairman!”
The Chairman glanced over and sighed, “The board recognizes the representative of the European Union.”
“What is the status of our current fleet capacity?”
“You know the numbers Mister Arsenault, with the loss of Task Force Two we’re down by over fifty percent of our combat capacity.”
The gathered representatives grumbled again, the noise once more threatening to flood out the room. The Chairman slapped the pad again, sending chimes ringing down the aisles. The room slowly calmed down as the sounds continued, until finally the Chairman sighed.
“If we could please continue this without the unnecessary side tracks?”
“What are our options, Mr. Chairman?”
He glanced over at the curved table that housed the military heads of the Fleet departments, “Admiral?”
Admiral Shepard, on detached assignment from His Majesty’s Royal Navy, rose from behind the desk and cleared his throat. The sound of his voice easily carried through the room, aided by the acoustics, as well as the implants resting in his throat, cheeks, and jaw.
“We have a tentative plan to increase the size of our Fleet forces by tenfold within two years,” He said, “However it will require a substantial increase in both logistics, and manpower budget. Additionally, by refitting approximately sixty percent of the Fleet’s transport hulls, we can increase our overall weight of fire by more than a hundred and fifty percent of previous fleet levels within three months.”