The gateway was whirring so violently that Octavia guessed they had maybe a few heartbeats left. Pushing aside her doubts, she held up one of the pilfered assault rifles and walked into the pulsing violet portal. She understood without visually confirming it that Jackson and Bellamy were on her heels. They might have thought she’d gone crazy, but they’d never defy a direct order.
A fierce wave of nausea overwhelmed Octavia as a kaleidoscope of colors zipped her body into the unknown. She could hear Jackson’s roar of pain, could sense Bellamy panting for air beside her, yet she saw nothing but whirling, jarring, vivid colors sucking them into some type of maelstrom.
The dizzying vortex lasted maybe twenty seconds, yet passed like an eternity. The three of them landed with a thud, hard, onto an unforgiving ground. Jackson was instantly impaled through the head by a jutting tree branch, his lifeless body twisted in an unnatural position. Blood gushed out, spraying the two survivors.
Octavia closed her eyes, guilt consuming her. She had ordered Ensign Jackson to follow her and said order had gotten him killed. “Marcus is dead,” she murmured. “Because of me.”
* * * * *
”Where are we, Commander?” Lieutenant James Bellamy whispered.
Octavia said nothing. She continued to lie on the grassy embankment, her eyes unblinking.
Bellamy sighed. “It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known.”
She knew he spoke the truth, yet the guilt remained. Pulling herself up into a sitting position, she wrapped her arms around her knees. “I don’t know where we are,” she said truthfully. Octavia quickly recapped her last conversation with Admiral McAdams. “All I know is I was given a direct command.”
She glanced around, her sharp gaze taking in their near idyllic surroundings. They were in the middle of a dense forest, trees surrounding them for as far as the eye could see. Her acute hearing picked up the vague sound of trickling water, telling her the rare stuff was close by. She blinked, unwrapping her arms from around her legs, and let her hands come to rest on the grass around them.
Grass. It had been over a year since she’d seen a single blade of it, much less felt the soft, fragrant stuff with her own hands. There were rumors that grass and trees could still be found within the compounds where human collaborators dwelled, but she’d never been outside of an internment camp to see if it was true. But this… this was different. It was as if she was in a naturally wooded forest rather than a carefully constructed compound.
“This place looks like a feeder’s worst nightmare,” Bellamy said. “And that makes it my best case scenario.”
Octavia agreed, but said nothing. She was too busy assessing their surroundings. Still, Bellamy was right. For whatever reason, Xenocanns preferred their environments to consist of rocks, dirt, and heat. In areas not given to high temperatures, the aliens set up towering heat lamp contraptions to warm themselves. She supposed it had something to do with the reptilian part of their DNA.
“One of the feeders got through the porthole, James.” She told him about the doctor, the ten military traitors, and the three Xenocanns. “We only killed two of those alien fucks.” She sighed. “I guess where we are doesn’t matter so long as the final feeder remains alive. We have to track it and kill it. And we need to find that doctor.”
“Maybe the doctor knows wherehereis,” Bellamy agreed. He ran a hand over his unshaven jaw. He had developed a thick, black beard since she’d last seen him. “But before we do anything else…”
Octavia nodded. They had to bury their dead. Jackson hadn’t deserved his fate any more than the millions of innocent people who’d already been turned into Xenocann food. The least she and Bellamy could do was give him a befitting send-off.
“Gather all our supplies, Lieutenant,” Octavia ordered as she hoisted herself up from the ground. “I want a weapons and ammo count by the time I find a suitable burial place.”
“Yes, Commander.”
It took them over an hour to dig the grave, but they eventually laid Ensign Jackson to rest. As luck would have it, the ground was damp—even muddy in parts—signaling a recent downpour of rain. It had made the digging go so much faster. Burying Marcus in no way tempered Octavia’s guilt, but at least the young SEAL’s body had been shown proper respect.
It was another hour before they had four skinned rabbits cooking over a makeshift fire. Knowing she would soon eat caused Octavia to experience intense hunger pangs, but she ignored them as she and Bellamy made their way to the nearby river. They filled their canteens first, thirstily drank them down, and refilled them again before setting them on the grassy embankment for later. Neither said a word as both stripped down to nothing before silently entering the water.
They found their first small smiles as they cleaned their long neglected bodies of filth, caked dirt, and blood. Octavia’s hair, once as red as the blood that had saturated it, gleamed a golden brown again under the rising moon. She took the time to wash her hair and body twice before throwing the bar of soap at a now fully smiling James Bellamy. She’d found the small bar in one of the human collaborators’ IFAK pouches and certainly didn’t mind sharing it.
She smiled back at James, dimples popping out, understanding his childlike enthusiasm for she felt it herself. Once just another common chore, a real cleansing had become something in the realm of decadent over the past few years. Next, they took the time to wash their clothing and felt almost as giddy doing that. They pounded their black pants and sleeveless t-shirts against nearby rocks before washing the items again. After wringing them out, they hung them on branches to dry, donned two of the cloaks, put their boots back on, and returned to camp.
“What’s with these hooded cloaks?” Bellamy asked as they feasted on the cooked rabbits.
“Don’t know,” Octavia admitted between bites. “I saw the traitors force the doctor into one then put them on themselves before they tried to enter the portal.” She shrugged. “I didn’t know why they were thinking to take them so I had you grab them just as a precaution.”
He nodded. “Can’t complain. It’s keeping me warm while my clothes dry.”
“Same.”
They were silent for a long while, both of them wolfing down their meat. They each devoured two whole rabbits, not wasting so much as a solitary bite. It gave Octavia time to think, but no matter how much brain power she used she continued to arrive at the same conclusion:
She had no idea where they were, no scientific understanding of how they’d even gotten here, and there was perhaps only one man who could answer her questions. Assuming the doctor was still alive.
“Commander Benatti—”
“Octavia,” she corrected. At Bellamy’s raised eyebrow, she explained, “We don’t know where we are or who we’re up against besides one feeder. Let’s not give away whoweare, including our ranks, so long as we’re in the dark.”
