Lykos Read online

  She also wanted to punch her brother, well, half-brother, but he’d get a whole punch.

  She made a beeline for the science lab and found Anath in deep conversation with one of the science officers. He looked up when the doors swished open, smiling when he saw her. At least until he noticed her expression and that smile pursed slightly. Excusing himself, he walked up to her.

  “Why do you look like you swallowed a lemon?” he asked. His ice blue eyes were intent as they stared into her dark ones.

  “How could you not tell me that things were so far ahead of schedule?” she asked pointedly.

  He made a face. “You don’t always listen when I talk,” he replied simply. “I did tell you. Apparently it didn’t sink in.”

  Andy glared at Anath. He stared back, unflinching.

  It wasn’t until one of the others in the room cleared their throat that the little stalemate broke, and Andy chastised herself for her lack of professionalism. She rolled her shoulders and straightened up. “How about you tell me about this new weapon of ours. I am apparently going to be using it during a rescue op, and I need to know my new dance partner.”

  “You dance?” Anath asked.

  “Turn of phrase,” she replied.

  Although, unknown to most, she did dance. It was one of the few happy things she retained from her youth.

  Anath gestured for her to walk over to the long, grey table in the center of the lab. She saw several weapons laid out, and while they all looked like the weaponry she was familiar with, she knew they weren’t standard issue.

  “As you know, I’ve been spending a lot of time combing through the ESS database on alien races to see which ones are likely unknown to the Arkana. I found a few, but it’s a narrow field. A couple had viable abilities. We were working on one for a while, but that didn’t pan out. Then we landed on the Ullura.”

  Apparently enjoying slideshows as much as the captain, Anath turned back to a monitor behind him and pulled up a picture of the Ullura. It was a race that Andy didn’t have any personal experience with, because she would definitely remember if she had.

  The being looked tall but very skinny, almost like a plant with a long stalk. They had a head with no discernable features, and apparent…goo of some sort dripping from the assorted protrusions that were some sorts of limbs. She guessed.

  “Since the Arkana have not encountered the Ullura, there will be no resistance engineered into their DNA,” Anath went on. “This race secretes a gelatinous substance that we’ve named DZ5.” He gestured at the picture. “You can even see it hanging there.”

  “Indeed,” Andy said flatly. “This substance is useful?”

  “Quiet,” Anath said. “It is like the venom of the snakes on Earth. It attacks the nervous system.” He gestured at the other officers in the lab, who had let Anath handle his sister and do all the explanation. “We’ve managed to recreate the substance as well as weaponize it.”

  Andy was losing her annoyance in the face of something that might actually work against their enemy. While the old-fashioned weapons had been doing well, the lack of viable energy weapons continued to be a hindrance.

  “We have put it into a form that can be shot as a projectile from one of our old-fashioned weapons, and also convert it to a gaseous form to make a sort of…” He paused and looked at the woman beside him. “What did you call them?”

  She looked up from her datapad, blinking. “Oh, a smoke bomb.”

  “Right. Smoke bomb.” Anath nodded, pointing at the small spherical items sitting beside the magazines full of odd-looking bullets.

  Andy looked closely at the bullets and the grenades. She didn’t need to ask if they functioned properly in testing, because she knew that they wouldn’t send them out to be tested during a mission unless they did. Andy would, of course, have “regular” weaponry outfitted to all her people right alongside these, but the chances of them not working as advertised was low. She knew the scientists—and her brother—were thorough, and she knew her brother wouldn’t risk her life, or his own, on something untrustworthy.

  “There is a limitation, though,” Anath intruded on her thoughts. “This substance does not distinguish between races, and the Arkana are so close to their human ancestors that what affects one can easily affect the other.” He paused. “I’m going off on a tangent. I just mean to say that our people, at least the humans, can be just as hurt by this substance as the Arkana can. So we need to be very cautious when launching the smoke bombs, because they can hinder us just as much.”

  “That’s pretty much true of every weapon,” Andy pointed out.

  “True,” Anath agreed, “but this is being…sold, so to speak, as an anti-Arkana weapon. I feel the need to make it clear that we’ve made it to use against them, but it doesn’t mean it is selective. I don’t want the weapon we created here to hurt us too.”

  Andy smiled slightly. “I appreciate your concern for the crew,” she said, thinking that her full-blooded Arkana brother could end up with even less trust for the ESS people around him than she had. Although, he hadn’t been abducted, held captive, drugged, and beaten like she had…

  But he could have. She knew it. He knew it.

  “It’s my crew too now,” Anath said quietly.

  To Andy, the crew was her family. He was too. “We’ll make sure everyone knows so they keep themselves safe from it,” she assured him. “Otherwise, it’s a risk we need to take. We need to do something to give us an advantage in this fight.”

  Anath smiled slightly back at her. “Let’s hope this does it.”

  4

  “Major, with all due respect…” Sergeant Calhoun, the new leader of Theta Squad, began hesitantly. “Are we honestly about to field test a weapon during a mission that was deemed an unacceptable risk two weeks ago?”

  The doubt in his voice was echoed in the eyes of everyone standing around the table for the tactical meeting of the 33rd.

  Andy understood their feelings. The thought had passed through her mind as well, but it all boiled down to one thing…

  “These are our orders,” she said simply. “We’re paid to figure out how to make it happen, which is what we’re going to do today. We will be field testing these weapons, but don’t think it’s all we’re going down there with.”

  There were nods all around. They trusted her, and she trusted them. That was the only way this worked. It felt like a millennium ago now, after all that had happened, but it had really only been a few months since she was standing in their shoes. Sergeant Dolan, Gamma Squad Leader.

  It was amazing how fast war could change things.

  There was a screen in the middle of the table, taking up most of it, which came to life with images of the colony. Andy leaned forward, swiping on the screen to change angles and viewpoints. “This is Lykos Colony. It previously belonged to the ESS Alliance, but now it belongs to the Arkana. It has been one of our causalities of war. It doesn’t provide a great deal for the Arkana, except that it was ours and now it’s theirs.”

  “Captured to make a point?” Roxanna, her sergeant and second in command of Alpha Squad, asked wryly.

  “It would be like them,” Anath chimed in. He was somewhat of an adjunct to Alpha Squad, but being full-blooded Arkana, he had invaluable insight. “Consider them a race of people akin to adolescents, but with a lot of power and the ability to wield it.”

  The leader of Beta shuddered. “I’m just thinking about my little sister having the ability to wage interstellar war.”

  There was a dull chuckle around the table.

  Andy smiled slightly but moved right on with business. “The upside is that we know a lot about Lykos. We aren’t going in blind. We have maps, schematics, pictures, and so forth. That’s a big step up from most of our assignments. That doesn’t mean there won’t be changes to the place. I’m sure the Arkana have done some things to the place, but they haven’t been there that long. There’s only so much they could have done.”

  “I’m go
ing to try to provide some…educated guesses as to what may have changed,” Anath said to the assembled Marines. “I obviously can’t promise I’m right, but I hope I am.”

  “As do we all, Anath,” Roxanna said with a considerate smile.

  As a Selerid, she was empathic and thus tended to understand emotions and what people needed at given times. Of course, she was also a Marine. It made for a seeming conflict at times, but she had always handled it with grace. Andy had come to rely on her a great deal over the years they had been working together.

  “This will be a big op,” Andy went on. “Five squads are going down. One squad will remain on the ship to aid security in case the Arkana launch a space offensive and attempt to board.”

  “What about the Galaxy, sir?” Roxanna asked.

  Andy nodded. “The ESS Galaxy will be accompanying us. They have a small Marine detachment, a very green squad. They wouldn’t be much of an asset on Lykos. I won’t let an operation this uncertain rely on a group so green. They’ll protect their ship and perhaps provide support for the squad on ours. What the Galaxy does bring that will be helpful is a squadron of space fighters.”

  Another round of nods.

  “Do we know if there are Arkana ships around the colony?”

  “There are,” Andy confirmed. “And you can bet that they will engage our ships. The Galaxy’s fighters will defend the ships and provide cover for us as our shuttles head to the surface. They won’t be able to defend indefinitely so our mission must be efficient. Get in, get out. No delays.”

  That was pretty much true of every operation.

  “Any changes to the colony will be geared toward defending it from assault,” Anath said. His snow-white lips smiled faintly, though there wasn’t any joy to the expression. “They have the colony and don’t plan to give it back, or give anything up.”

  “Sir,” Calhoun spoke up again. He was the newest squad leader in the detachment, having been promoted less than a month before. “Do we believe that the prisoners are still alive and being used as bargaining chips? You just said they won’t want to give anything up.”

  The slender Arkana man didn’t reply right away. His eyes drifted to the side in thought before he sighed. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “It’s possible. No, they don’t like to give anything up, but it’s possible, if they truly think the gain is worth it.”

  Andy nodded. “This gain would be worth it,” she said. “Their whole fighter production would move into ESS territory if they got Baccem. Although I struggle to see how they would actually believe we’d give it up.”

  Anath shrugged. “It is an ESS councilor’s son down there, is it not? That’s a big weapon for them to wield, and judging by this operation, despite the concerns, they aren’t entirely wrong.”

  Of course, everyone was thinking the same thing, but they were disciplined enough to not say anything more on the topic. The military had always been swayed by those with political power. This was no different. It was Andy’s job to make sure that it didn’t cost her Marines their lives, however. That was a big weight to sit on the shoulders of a woman not yet thirty, only commanding a detachment for a few months and thrown into the middle of a war that she was genetically tied to.

  Andy took a deep breath, then blew it out. She focused. She grounded herself. This was not the time to think too much about all of that.

  “Alright, folks. Here’s where we start,” she said, swiping the map again. “We are going to land here, and each team will have a separate ingress point…”

  5

  “One…two…three…oh, shit!”

  The table all laughed as Jade started cursing up a storm. Jade Martin, now Lance Corporal Martin, never swore when she first came into the squad. She had been young and green. She was still young, but no longer a rookie. She had seen as much combat and been in as many harrowing situations as the rest of them. With the rest of them.

  But nothing at all compared to…

  A squad game of Monopoly.

  Some things, time can’t change. Many games survived through decades and even centuries, making classics even more classic, and this was one of them. Alpha Squad made a point to do a “team building, morale exercise” on a regular basis, and this was what had been chosen for this evening. They’d had a long day of training, and there were still two days before they arrived at Lykos and the real work began.

  Jade put her little silver-colored dog onto Park Place, and promptly dropped her head to the table as Anallin took all her money.

  “This is a stupid game,” the blonde technology expert murmured to an invisible person under the table.

  “Come on,” Dan said, nudging her in a friendly way. The relationship between Jade and Corporal Dan Thomas was no longer a secret, but they kept it discreet. No one outside the squad knew of their relationship.

  “I have landed on every single space that someone else owned,” she muttered as she straightened back up, leaning back in her seat and folding her arms. “Whose dumb idea was this game anyway?”

  “Yours,” the other five said in chorus.

  “Damn.”

  Anath was looking around the board with a curious look in his eyes. “This is a strange game,” he commented. “What is the purpose, except to make each other go, what was the term, bankrupt?”

  “That’s really the only purpose,” Andy chuckled quietly and shrugged. “Why? I don’t know. Humans are strange creatures.”

  “That’s hard to deny,” Anath agreed. “But every race has its oddities.”

  “That’s also hard to deny,” Roxanna said. “How would you like skin that advertises your emotional state?” Her purple eyes held humor, though. “You have to wonder why evolution would decide that an empathic race needed that sort of thing, but there it is.”

  “Perhaps it’s just a vent of some sort,” Anallin said thoughtfully. “You are creatures of strong emotions. You read those of others. Have them of your own. Maybe it is an outlet for things when there is excess.”

  Roxanna blinked at the Hanaran. “You’ve spent more time thinking about our biology than I have,” she commented, a little surprised. “I imagine there is a scientific explanation, but I’ve never studied it. I wasn’t keen to the sciences, which is probably clear since I’m here.”

  Anallin went back to counting stacks of old-fashioned paper money. Somehow, the blue-skinned Hanaran was becoming a tycoon.

  “It is a strange game,” Anallin agreed with the rest. “The Hanaran economy does not work anything like this. It is very unfamiliar to me, although living with other races who do operate more like this has given me some insight.”

  “Insight,” Jade said. Apparently, losing a board game brought out her more ‘chatty’ side, since she was usually the quiet one. “You must have more than insight, with all the cash you’ve racked in.”

  Anallin just shrugged. Definitely a human gesture it had picked up.

  The next casualty was Andy, but she took it a lot better than Jade had. She just laughed and held up her hands. “I’m broke. I’m out.”

  It gave her the chance to just lean back and enjoy the camaraderie. Yes, they were Marines. Her squad. She was their commander. Andy knew that there was professionalism, formality, military discipline to be maintained…but they were her friends too, and family, as well.

  When that madman had kidnapped her on Starbase Eclipse, they had all but torn it apart to find her. They had saved her, when she couldn’t save herself.

  They had her back, and she had theirs.

  “I’m grateful that they seem to have accepted me,” Anath commented to Andy once they were alone and walking back to her quarters. It wasn’t a long walk from the rec-room to the marine commander’s quarters.

  “You’ve proven yourself,” she said. “That’s what it takes with us. Deeds, not words. People can say anything, after all, but what you do says a lot more than what you say.”

  “That’s the way it should be,” Anath agreed.

  And
y keyed in her code to unlock her quarters and they both stepped inside. The shoes came off and they sat together on the small two-person couch in her quarters. The room was small, but bigger than what she’d had when she was a sergeant.

  “I’m not feeling great about this mission coming up,” Andy admitted. She wouldn’t say it to anyone but her brother.

  “I’m not either,” he said. “Undoubtedly for all the reasons you feel, but for me, it’s also knowing that it’s my help that made the weapon. If it doesn’t work…” He sighed and shook his head, leaning it against the backrest of the couch. “I hope I keep my head.”

  “They’d have to get through me,” Andy said, leaning back as well and slightly against him. She’d never really had blood family before. She’d never known anything about her father, until his people waged war, and her mother had been in prison for most of her life.

  Now, she had a brother. One who cared about her, and who she cared about. She liked that.

  “We’re going down there armed to the teeth,” she went on. “So even if doesn’t work, then we’ll have backups. I’m sure it’ll work, though. You know your stuff. I just have to hope that I know mine just as well, and that I’ve made the best plan possible.”

  “You have, Andy,” he said, leaning his head against hers. “You have. We’ll make it work. We got this.”

  6

  “We are approaching the boundary of Arkana patrols around Lykos Colony.”

  The announcement poured out of the speakers in the Marine bay, where most of the 33rd was waiting for the word to come down. That was it. Andy looked up from where she was sitting in her tiny office-like space. “Acknowledged, bridge,” she replied, then opened a channel to her detachment.

  “Get your stuff together, folks, and gear up. I want everyone in the shuttle bay, armored and armed, in less than ten minutes. Dolan out.”

  Not one to give an order that she herself wasn’t ready to follow, she got up from behind her desk and double-timed it to the locker room. It had the feel of a hornet’s nest that someone had hit with a metal club. It was an organized chaos, however, so that made it okay.