“That’s where we’re going. Be careful,” I added, shooting him a serious look. “I’ve lost two friends today already. I don’t want to lose a third.”
“Yes, Master.” Fuck, didn’t he ever say anything else? If that was the extent of our conversation, we were going to have a very boring life together.
The scramble up the hillside took longer than I would have liked. But when we arrived at the other team’s hiding place, they were all still there, dirty, but uninjured. “Sir,” I said to Kent, though we were technically the same rank. Kent was a Denzogal, eight feet tall and covered in short, mottled brown fur. In my teenage years, I’d been amused to learn that human mythology contained a creature called a sasquatch, and the Denzogals largely fitted the description. They’d been the species to initiate the Alliance, and the first to colonise this region of space, hence the official title of our political agreement being the Denzogal Alliance.
Kent looked uncomfortable as he tried to squish his large frame behind the available cover. I nodded to Vosh and Nichols, the two other soldiers in his team. “Good to see you,” Kent said, glancing around the barrier towards the ship, then reloading his rifle. “They’ve been holed up in there for a good half an hour. We can’t get them to come out, and they won’t let us in.” He spared a glance Kade’s way. “Hey,” he said, by way of greeting.
“This is Kade,” I introduced him. “He’s a combat specialist.”
Kent sent me a dubious look. “Is that why he’s holding your gun?”
Technically, having my side arm unsecured was a breach of regulations. “Yes, it is,” I replied blithely. “Have you thought about lobbing a grenade at them?”
“I thought about it,” Kent replied. “But the fact that they’re here suggests there’s something valuable inside, and a grenade would destroy whatever it is. I was hoping we might come up with another way to end this standoff.”
“Master,” Kade’s soft voice breathed into my ear. He was hunkered down in the dirt right beside me. “I can see the edge of one of the Culrad’s shoulders. If you would allow me to use your rifle, I could probably hit him.”
Kent glared at me. “Are you fucking insane?” he hissed, and it wasn’t entirely clear whether he was talking to me or to Kade. But given that he was at least passingly familiar with the way dimari worked, I decided to assume he was talking to me. Since Kade was bonded to me, and we hadn’t yet established any clear order of rank, there was little chance he was going to listen to anything Kent said.
“Yes,” I replied, handing my rifle over to Kade and accepting the pistol in return. “But wait ‘til you see this.” Should it have surprised me that I had absolute faith that Kade could do what he said he could?
Kade flipped down the inbuilt stabiliser to rest it on the edge of the metal frame we were hiding behind and lined up the shot. His eyesight was apparently also on the list of things that were better on him than on me. His hands were rock steady, and his finger squeezed the trigger, the shot cracking through the silence. A startled yelp followed, and I caught a glimmer of movement as the Culrad who’d been hit jerked away from the doorway.
“You sure there are only three of them?” I asked Kent. He nodded.
“We have you outnumbered,” I announced loudly to the Culrads. They didn’t speak Alliance Common, but it was a solid bet that they, like the rest of us, had been fitted with translators.
A garbled reply was spat out of the ship’s entrance, and my own translator took only a second or two to identify the language. “Fuck you,” the Culrad had said, and the venomous reply came as no surprise.
“Is whatever’s in that ship worth dying for?” I asked. The Culrads still had the option to surrender, and the Alliance was pretty good about relocating prisoners to neutral planets outside of Alliance space.
The Culrad scoffed. “You don’t even know what it is, and you’re willing to die for it?”
“He has a point,” I muttered to Kent. “I mean, I know this is our mission, and all, but this is way past what Henderson would have had in mind when he sent us out here.”
“So we’re just supposed to walk away?” Nichols snapped, from Kent’s other side. He was the only other human on this mission, while Vosh was a Wasop, like Revier had been. Nichols, though, was young, still completing the last of his training in the Academy, and he had yet to learn when discretion became the better part of valour.
“So what are we going to tell Henderson?” Kent asked. “The Culrads said some rude words to us, so we let them walk away with our cargo?”
I sighed. Kent was a solid soldier, but this was one of the things I didn’t like about him. The Culrads hadn’t just said some rude words. They’d killed two of our men and had at least three solid attempts at killing more of us. And we still didn’t know what was inside that ship.
I glanced at Kade. “Any ideas?”
“No, Master,” he said. “I have not been briefed sufficiently on this mission to be making suggestions as to how to complete it.”
It was a valid point and I didn’t blame him for his reluctance to voice an opinion. There was a good chance that whatever was in the ship could make valued improvements to our city; electrical components could be stripped down and repurposed, medical supplies could save lives, terraforming equipment could boost our efforts to stabilise the sometimes erratic climate on Rendol 4. But without knowing what the goods were, we couldn’t make an assessment on whether it might be worth risking our own lives to collect it.
The silence continued, both from our side of the fence, and theirs.
“Okay, so listen up,” I called to the Culrads, hoping they were inclined to be reasonable today. “I really want to go home in one piece at the end of today. And I’m pretty sure you want that too. So how about we split whatever this magical cargo is, and everyone walks away alive?”
“It belongs to us,” the Culrad called back. “The Eumadians stole it from us.”
“And now it’s sitting on our planet, cleanly within Alliance space,” I replied. “So I figure that makes at least half of it ours.”
“This will save many of our people’s lives,” the man insisted.
“Right back at you, buddy. If it’ll save your people, it’ll save ours as well.”
