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  A counter ticked down. “Splash.”

  Jean took his eyes off the instruments for a moment, his helmet projecting in image that let him look down through the hull of his ship to the ground below. An uncontrolled, ever-expanding explosion followed the detonation of the warhead.

  “Thanks much Cobra, good effects. Repeat.” The team leader may as well have thanked them for handing him a glass of water, even though heavy gunfire coming through the radio nearly drowned out his voice.

  “Cobra Four’s on it.” Sasha maneuvered behind Dauod and Quinn, giving them just enough space for their attack run. A second missile shot out towards the ground. Two more came up. Alarms sounded before Jean could say a word. Sasha snap-rolled away from his wingman, letting the incoming projectiles flash between them and detonate above and behind the fighters.

  A much larger detonation occurred on the ground, so bright that, with the fighter nearly inverted, the canopy automatically darkened and the pilot cursed as he lost visual for an instant.

  “Got it, Cobra. Thanks again. Can you do a run... break.” The team leader’s voice dropped suddenly, but his microphone remained on. “Hey! Kill that guy. That fucker right there. Fucking kill him.” He shouted at one of his teammates, clearly not realizing he still transmitted. “Cobra, Beast One-Five,” he resumed his even-keeled demeanor as though nothing had happened. “Can you do a couple of gun runs along that northeast ridge?”

  “Copy that, Beast One-Five.”

  The anti-air fire in their immediate vicinity had nearly ceased completely after the second strike. They came in, hugging the red-orange terrain. Jean glanced out the window just long enough to see the Hetarek encampments and fortifications. To his surprise, although his knowledge of history shouldn’t have let him be surprised, he recognized what was left of a generations ship that broken apart and crashed on both planets nearly a hundred and fifty years before. He couldn’t let his mind linger. The firefight on the ground intensified, and assault craft had started their comet-like descent to the ground.

  “Guns guns guns.” Sasha announced. The ship vibrated intensely in atmosphere as solid rounds poured towards the planet’s surface. Geysers of dirt and rock shot up in two long lines along the Hetarek positions. Sasha took them so close to the ground Jean could make out both the Special Forces team and their recruited insurgents charging across the plateau towards the trenches left by their gun run. Sasha then pulled back on the stick, shooting them on a near-vertical trajectory.

  “Cobra, Beast One-Five.” The team leader was forcing himself to sound calm even through his heavy breathing. “Thanks. We’re in position on that corner of the mesa you just hit, break.” There was silence for a few seconds. “I see assault ships coming down on the LZ behind us, but I’ve got Komodos and other vehicles heading from the Hetarek compound to the east. Feel free to hit those.”

  “Cobra copies free to engage vehicles.” Jean said flatly, keeping to communications protocols. For the next ten minutes, both Cobras systematically destroyed Hetarek armored personnel carriers. Occasionally, they had to change their flight pattern to make way for assault ships or when the warships in orbit decided to launch their own ordinance at the struggling Hetarek. With each bomb run, Costeaux saw more and more humans floLokig the area. The pilots restricted their fire to keep from hitting friendly forces as the pockets of enemy resistance shrank.

  Jean released his last weapon, a heavy bomb that struck between two Komodos. Each eight-wheeled vehicle weighed several tons and held up to six Hetarek, but the impact tossed them into the air like plastic toys. His computer screen flashed red, telling him he was out of ordinance. “Beast One-Five, Cobra is Winchester.” He announced that they were out of ammunition.

  “One-Five copies. Thanks much. Have a good one.”

  Sasha punched the engines, and the fighter climbed back to space. As Jean watched his sensor screen, with the diminishing number of Hetarek contacts, and saw the tight formations of the Free Human fleet, he sighed a breath of relief. They’d liberated two more planets from the Hetarek. But they were still a long way from home.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Alpha, Bravo, over.”

  Bryan adjusted himself as he lay flat in the brush, shifting his torso so he could better access the mic switch on the front of his body armor.

  “Jess, you and I are the only two people on the planet on the radio right now. What’ve you got?”

  “Nothing. I’ve had no movement at all since we got here.” The voice sounded small yet clear through the headphones.

  Bryan checked his watch. “It’s been more than three hours since we’ve touched down and we’re not that far from Seattle. If they saw us, they’d be here by now.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Start unpacking. We’re coming to you.”

  “Roger. Out.”

  Bryan whistled, not loudly enough to echo off the hills around him, but loud enough for his people to hear him. Eight other figures lifted themselves off the dirt, stretching and cracking their backs for the first time since the jump. “We’re headed for the supply drop.”

  The leather in his boots creaked like the real thing when he stood. The straps for his body armor dug into his shoulders. The feel of real gravity, familiar and just the right strength, reminded him of a more complicated time where there was more to life than mere survival. Someone who still had emotional peaks and troughs would have felt exhilarated.

  They crossed over the ridge and headed downhill.

  “I can’t believe it’s not raining.” Kendrick walked beside Bryan, his long rifle hanging nearly uselessly in front of him. The way the senior intel sergeant got a little too close to his officer bothered Bryan only slightly less than the headaches he’d caused over the past year. First, it was the drunk on duty charge. Then it was his verbal altercation with one of the naval officers on the command ship because he wore a sweatshirt into the mess hall. The only reason he remained on the team was because his assignment to become a team sergeant elsewhere fell apart after his last reprimand and because he had the rare, singled-minded talent needed to precisely kill Hetarek. Bryan tried to sever himself from the officership that dominated his job when they were with the fleet from the tactical leadership he needed on the ground doing his real job. He could deal with Steve Kendrick being an entitled douchebag as long as the man continued to kill Heterak with the skill for which he had become renown.

  “It’s almost like we specifically infilled on a day when it wasn’t overcast and raining.” It was just going to take a little longer for Bryan to forget all the long nights with paperwork and being yelled at by senior officers because of Kendrick.

  “I always heard the weather was terrible out here year-round.”

  “It’s actually gorgeous in the summer.” Bryan kept his eyes ahead, scanning around for anything that would have been out of the ordinary. He had no idea what “out of the ordinary” meant after more than twenty years of occupation, but he trusted himself enough to now when to be nervous.

  “Coming in, I can see why they picked this place. You’ve got the sound you can spot from orbit, then you come down and you’ve got those four mountain peaks you can identify. The valley leads right to where the LZ’s going to be and the city. You could easily land a ship here without much navigation.”

  “I think that was the point.”

  Kendrick must have taken the hint that his sucking up wasn’t doing much good. Bryan had yet to take his eyes off his surroundings, and the NCO wandered further forward in the extremely loose formation to the position he was supposed to be holding.

  Bryan’s lead communications sergeant, Omobolanle Siskind, stayed close as he was supposed to. The tall man, black as night, stayed within arms reach in case a call came in through the radio. Bryan had joked he spent more time close to Siskind in the last year than he had his wife. In truth, it wasn’t a joke.

  “How far are we from where you grew up?”<
br />
  Bryan, more relaxed without Kendrick next to him, actually looked over his left shoulder. “It’s about thirty miles southwest of here. We could actually see it coming it, or you could have if it wasn’t so dark. Tacoma’s a port about twenty miles south of Seattle. I grew up on a hill on the north side overlooking the water to the south and west.”

  “You think we’ll head that way?”

  Bryan shook his head. “No need. No desire to, really. Don’t really want to know what they did with the place. The last time I was there I was in the refugee camps on the military base further south.”

  “The follow-on site?”

  “That’s the one. The primary LZ is actually where my dad used to work.”

  They crested on of the last finger of land and could make out a handful of crates sitting in an open field a few hundred meters down the slope. No one who didn’t know what they were looking at would have thought they were anything more than detritus.

  Bryan keyed his headset. “Jess, we’re coming down to your east.”

  There was a pause before she responded. “Okay, yeah, I’ve got you.” Bryan had long ago learned to ignore his discomfort at the knowledge that she was probably staring at him through the scope on her sniper rifle.

  As they got closer, he saw figures clad in green and brown going through the contents of the crates. One of the figures turned around and waved, and the one next to him slapped the first one on the shoulder in rebuke. They kept appearing and disappearing as they moved between the trees until a woman with Jess’s distinctive rifle at the low ready approached them from the left. He told his guys to take up security positions.

  “How was your jump?” The Warrant Officer asked.

  “One of my nicer ones, actually. How are you doing?”

  Jess shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t complain. Evan, on the other hand, keeps bitching about his knee.”

  “Did Bridget take a look at it?”

  Jess nodded and frowned in the shadow cast by her helmet. “Yeah. It looks like he’s got some tendinitis.”

  “Fuck. Is he going to be able to walk?”

  “Maybe, but I’m not a medic so what do I know?”

  “Anyone else get hurt?”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  Bryan walked over to where his team sergeant, a man more than twelve years his senior and almost twice his size, sat in the shade by one of the crates where he oversaw/criticized the young man unpacking it. Bryan stood over him, shaking his head. “You hurt yourself, Evan?”

  The man kept clutching his left knee, massaging the muscles like he could magically repair any underlying damage. “Fuckin’ landed funny.”

  “You were trying to stick the landing, weren’t you?”

  The team sergeant smiled. “I couldn’t let these assholes show me up.”

  Bryan looked down at the man clearly in pain, then looked up towards the mountains. “You going to be able to make it up the mountain?”

  “Sir, I started here at Lewis. I was making it up those mountains thirty years ago.”

  “That was thirty years ago.” Bryan turned to the soldier half buried in the crate. “Smythstyne, is OTIS okay?”

  The youngest member of the team, only twenty-three, looked up from the bundle of gears and wires. His beard already started to come in patchy. “Yes, sir, he looks that way. I’m booting him up now. All the diagnostics look good.”

  “Awesome, because he’s probably going to have to carry Master Sergeant Raghnal up the mountain.”

  “Bullshit.” Raghnal pulled himself up in visible pain. “I’ll make it up the mountain without the robot.” The team sergeant said beneath him.

  There was a whir of motors from within the crate, a brown, four-legged machine rose from its delivery system and stepped over the edge of the box. The size of a ram, it moved nimbly without several hundred pounds of equipment loaded onto its two load beds. Bryan clapped the junior engineering sergeant on the shoulder. “Good job, Smythstyne. Start getting him loaded up.”

  “Roger, sir. C’mon, OTIS.” The two trotted over to one of the other supply crates, leaving Bryan alone with Raghnal.

  “Evan, seriously, are you going to be alright?”

  Raghnal frowned, more embarrassed than hurt. “Yeah, you know how bad my knees have been lately. Curse of a lifetime of this bullshit. I’ll get up the mountain okay, but I may need to sit out of a few ops for a while.”

  “That’s fine. You you can keep the camp running.”

  Jess reappeared from the tree-line. “We’ve got all the bags and weapons out. I started telling the guys pulling security to rotate through, grab their stuff, and check it.”

  Bryan nodded. “I just sent Smythstyne to go load ammo and supplies on OTIS.”

  “There’s an abandoned warehouse I spotted about a klick from here. You want to strongpoint there?”

  Bryan looked at the sky. Dawn had begun to break in earnest. “It’s still early. I don’t want to be moving across these valleys during the day. It’s another thirty miles to where we’re going to set up camp, and that’s way the hell up the mountain by one of the passes.”

  “If we spend the day in the warehouse, we can make it to the foot of the mountain tonight, and try to get up the mountain during the day. There should be enough cover we can do it without much risk. We’re just so fucking close to the city here.” Raghnal offered.

  “That’s what I was thinking.” Jess confirmed.

  “Ok, sounds like a plan.” Bryan waved at Siskind, who was attaching his radio to the inside of his backpack. “O, I need to make a call.”

  The big man ran over, extending the wired handset to the QEC. Bryan took it and keyed the transmitter. “Serpent Eight-Two, Beast Two-Two.”

  “Beast Two-Two, Serpent Eight-Two. Go ahead.”

  “Beast Three-Two is game-on, time now.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  No one made seats for his kind. No matter how long he, and others like him, had been a part of the Hetarek Empire, he was destined to remain physically uncomfortable. His back was strong, the muscles built from sitting upright constantly without support, while others, more weak than he, became broken crooks of men, their shoulders slumped forwards and necks jutting forward at an angle. Ironically, those who were not free had more comfort, as they built their own chairs and beds in their ghettos. Physical discomfort seemed a small price to pay to be free.

  Those around him, the non-aliens, reclined forwards, their four rear legs resting on the ground, their front arms tucked between their abdomen and chests, long, reptile faces angled sharply up in body language he had long ago meant relaxation. In the dim red light, which they considered natural, he watched their vocal membranes tremble as the spoke with one-another in the staccato percussion that made up their language.

  I heard that there was a new analysis done, my lord. One said.

  There was. It does not look promising. Our returns here still fall short of the initial estimates. Even after all of these years. The humans require too many resources. For every human working in a mine or in a schleckt field, there are eight working outside of the mine to support them.

  Eight, Khuu Divrack? I though the number was six?

  The census last year came up with eight, Darga Kahil. Does it really make that much of a difference?

  Perhaps, my lord, we should not be discussing this in front of the human. A third, Dund Kamed, suggested. As the governor of the region, and the highest schleckt producing region on the planet, he was permitted to fly with them. One day, he would replace Divrack as Khuu for indigenous affairs. He had long to go, however, and Divrack barely tolerated him.

  My Speaker has been with me for nearly thirty years, long before we landed on this planet. I trust him more than I do you.

  The Speaker nodded, then caught himself and opened his palms wide towards each other in front of his chest in a more Hetarek gesture, embarrassed that he still had to remember his b
ody language. “Besides, Governor.” He said, in English he knew the Hetarek could barely understand. “These are not my people. This first time I arrived here on Earth it was with Khuu Divrack.” Even after all his years translating and interpreting for Divrack, his physiology gave him no more ability to speak their language than theirs did to speak his.

  Darga Kahil, the Minister of Security and commander of the elite Crimson Guard continued his train of thought. When will he make a decision?

  Divrack answered. The next Conclave.

  What happens if they decide to...

  That, Khuu Divrack interrupted. Is not something I would discuss in front of the Dund.

  Dund Kamed knew better than to ask how well his people had done. He would have to wait to find out, as did everyone else under his charge.

  The Scythe began its descent, slow and steady. It barely shuddered when it touched down. The Hetarek closed their eyes as the door opened. The Speaker flinched, the harsh daylight only temporarily blinding him. Those with whom he served took longer to adjust. He pushed himself up from his couch, straddling the cushions that were far too wide for him. He did not stand until Divrack did, and remained respectful enough to stand a few feet behind his superior when the Hetarek plodded down the ramp so that it would not appear as though he towered over the lord.

  Outside, the Crimson Guard, having landed a few minutes before in order to secure the encampment, stood in control.

  Behind the Hetarek, humans waited. Most were dirty, although few looked broken. So many decades into the occupation, those left who remembered anger kept it suppressed. The overall mood, if the Speaker had to give it a name, was apprehension, and deservedly so. They were about to get their annual report card.