A Show of Force (12 page)

Commander Telles paused, thinking back to his first days as a Ghatazhak. He had been but a teenager, with barely a whisker on his face, when he had stood in such a formation for the first time. He remembered feeling scared. He remembered doubting himself, and his ability to survive the training he was about to embark upon. He was afraid of bringing shame to his parents, and to the family name. Most of all, he had felt the pressure that had been placed upon his young shoulders, for his successes would bring his family out of the ranks of commoners. They would never be of truly noble lineage, at least not by traditional Takaran standards, but they would be respected nonetheless. For their son would be Ghatazhak, or he would be dead.

The commander turned to his right and began to slowly pace along parallel to the line of volunteers as he spoke. “Contrary to popular belief, the Ghatazhak are not mindless killing machines. We do not enjoy killing others. We kill to accomplish an end, whatever that end may be. It is not ours to decide what those ends are. However, it is ours to decide how best to achieve them.
That
, above all else, is what it means to be a Ghatazhak soldier. You shall be taught how to fight. You shall be taught how to shoot. You shall be taught how to follow orders, and you shall be taught how to work as a team. Above all else, you shall be taught how to think… and in ways you never considered. When you choose to end a life, you shall do so with reason and due consideration, knowing full well the consequences of that act… and you shall make those judgments in the blink of an eye. Any creature, big or small, can be taught how to kill. Killing is the easy part, for life is fragile… possibly the most fragile thing known. Killing with a reason is harder. Harder still, is accepting that you killed for a reason, and living with the knowledge that you have killed… again, and again, and again.”

The commander turned around and continued to pace back in the other direction. “You are about to begin the most difficult training ever conceived. Because of this, you
should
be afraid. If you are not, then you are a fool, and you will discover quite soon that the Ghatazhak do not suffer fools very well. Embrace your fear, use it to motivate you. Learn to conquer it, and you will find that you have the strength of ten men, and the lethality of a hundred.”

Commander Telles stopped in the center once more. “Your training will last ten weeks. You will end each day in a state of complete exhaustion, both physically and mentally. You will suffer more than you can possibly imagine. Commit yourselves completely, and you shall graduate. You shall not be Ghatazhak. However, you will be the second most deadly fighting force on Earth.”

Commander Telles paused, looking over the faces of the men before him, their eyes all pointed straight ahead, just as they should be. “The fact that you have volunteered to even attempt this training is enough to gain my respect. From this point forward, I only require three things from you. First, you always give one hundred percent. Second, you always follow orders. Fail at either one of those, and you will be dropped from this program. And finally, if at any time, you feel that you are not capable of continuing to do the first two items, then be here at any sunrise to catch the outbound shuttle. Do not risk the lives of the men around you because you are too embarrassed to quit.”

Commander Telles looked both right and left down the front row of faces. “That is all.” He turned and walked toward the master sergeant, who turned and walked beside his commander as he passed.

“I’m betting we need more than one shuttle tomorrow morning,” Master Sergeant Jahal commented as they walked.

“We shall see.”

* * *

Jessica’s eyes darted left and right as her head slowly pierced the surface of the water. Directly in front of her, perhaps a kilometer distant, was the shoreline. She could make out a few homes back from the water, and a few more further up the slope, but they were few and far between. As she had hoped, this part of the lake’s shoreline was only sparsely populated.

She turned her head to look back over her left shoulder. She could barely make out the location where they had originally gone down, and only because there were at least a dozen boats of varying sizes trolling the area, including one larger vessel. Shuttles circled over the site, their spotlights illuminating the water below as they searched for signs of debris.

As she had calculated, the relatively short period of time that passed between their arrival and the detonation had led the locals to believe that if the craft that crashed into their lake had been crewed, the crew undoubtedly died when their ship exploded. It would take them several days, at the least, to find cause to suspect otherwise. By then, she hoped to be long gone.

A long look to the right revealed more and more lights along the shore and the subsequent hills, indicating that the population grew more dense further down the shoreline. She looked at the interface panel attached to her left wrist. They had been swimming for more than an hour, and at their current rate of consumption, little more than forty minutes of breathable air could be produced by their compact dive systems. Furthermore, her legs were aching from the pace they had been forced to maintain to get as much distance between them and the search parties before they ran out of air, and if she felt like she was nearing her limits, Naralena had to be as well. This location would have to suffice.

Jessica descended again, slipping back below the surface and down a few meters. She looked at Naralena, who was waiting for her five meters down. “I think we can slip ashore here,” she told her over the underwater comms. “There are only a few houses scattered along the shore, and it’s still about a click away. We’ll move in closer and take another look to find our exit point.”

Naralena nodded her understanding without saying a word. In fact, the only words she had spoken since Jessica had detonated the jump sub with Sergeant Weatherly trapped inside had been either ‘yes, sir’ or ‘understood.’

Jessica expected that Naralena would be angry at her. She knew that Naralena could not dismiss the loss of a crewmate out of necessity in the same manner as she could. Naralena did not have the training. She hoped that the Volonese linguist was just dealing with it the best way she knew how. Eventually, she would speak of the incident, perhaps hurling accusations of callousness at her. That would be expected, and Jessica knew she could handle that. What she couldn’t tell Naralena was that she mourned the loss of the sergeant just as much… perhaps even more. The difference was, she couldn’t allow herself the luxury of getting all worked up over it. She had a mission to perform. She would mourn the loss of the good sergeant in her own way, once they returned to the Aurora.

They moved along the lake bed, swimming another twenty minutes. Another peek at the surface from about three hundred meters away had revealed a pier protruding from the shore, with a half dozen small boats tied alongside. After taking a bearing, they continued along the bottom until they reached the end of the pier.

Jessica ceased her rhythmic kicks as she passed under the end of the pier. “End of the road,” she told Naralena over the underwater comms. “We ditch the gear here and tie it to the bottom of the pilings.”

Naralena did not respond, only began to remove her swim fins.

Jessica did the same, looping them over her right arm. She released the buckle on her waist belt and then slipped the straps off her shoulders, swinging the small, compact, rebreather unit forward. After stringing the belt through the swim fin straps, she secured the entire unit to the bottom of one of the pilings. The mask still on her face, and still breathing from the rebreather, she turned to look at Naralena, who was securing her gear to the next piling. “You ready?”

“Yes, sir,” Naralena responded.

“Remember, slow and quiet.” Jessica took one last breath and then removed her mask. After closing the valve on the rebreather, she slowly ascended along the piling toward the surface.

Jessica’s face broke the surface of the water with practiced precision, making not a ripple in the water. They were under the pier, just a few meters inland from its far end. After glancing about, she tapped Naralena, who was still submerged, on the top of her head, signaling her to surface as well. She leaned out slightly, looking overhead along the pier, both listening and looking for any signs of movement. She turned back to her right, handing her gear bag to Naralena. “Hold this,” she whispered.

Jessica moved between the edge of the pier and a small boat, working her way around the front of the boat and then back aft along the far side of the boat.

She paused at the end of the boat, peering carefully around the stern at the pier, scanning its length back to the shore. She also scanned along the shore to the left of the pier. As best she could tell, there was no one around. The events on the lake had not yet aroused the curiosity of the few who lived in this area.

She moved across the stern of the boat, back under the pier to rejoin Naralena. “I don’t see anyone on the pier, or the shore,” she whispered. “We should be able to walk right up onto the beach and disappear.”

Naralena nodded her understanding as she handed Jessica’s gear bag back to her.

Jessica moved quietly through the water from piling to piling, working her way toward the shore. Within a few minutes, her feet touched the soft bottom, and she began to walk up out of the water. Still waste deep, she paused, checking that Naralena was still close behind. She peaked out from under the edge of the pier, again scanning the small beach as well as the road higher up. She carefully checked the front of each building along the road, most of which were residences. Again, she saw no one. Despite the commotion elsewhere on the lake, the late hour had worked in their favor. This part of the lake appeared asleep.

“There,” Jessica whispered. “Between those two buildings. The white one, and the brown one. They both look like shops, so there shouldn’t be anyone around to wake right now. We head up the beach, cross the road, and duck between them.”

“Understood,” Naralena whispered back.

Jessica took one last look, then stepped out from under the pier and headed up the beach at a brisk jog, staying crouched down low as she ran. She reached the edge of the beach, ducking down low along the elevated road bed. She looked right and left, then signaled Naralena to follow.

Jessica popped her head up just enough to see over the roadway. As soon as Naralena arrived, she climbed up onto the road. “Stay with me,” she ordered in hushed tones.

Jessica reached down and grabbed Naralena’s hand, pulling her up onto the roadway, then ran across to the other side, moving quickly across the small parking lot and disappearing between the two buildings. Now in the darkness again, she paused long enough to listen for any sign that someone had seen them. After several moments, they continued carefully down the alleyway between the buildings until they reached the back lot.

Jessica looked about. The lot was just big enough for two or three vehicles to park. There was a fence along the back, but there was no separation between this lot and the next two lots down, other than a knee-high rail. “This will do,” she said. She unsealed the front of her dry suit, splitting it down the middle enough to slip it off her shoulders.

Underneath their dry suits, they were both wearing non-descript black T-shirts and shorts. Jessica opened her gear bag and pulled out a pair of black pants which she slipped on. After putting on the shoes contained in her gear bag, she donned the jacket as well, and then the cap. Although the black attire might in itself draw suspicion, the style was in accordance to the signals intelligence they had gathered from this world during the last Falcon cold-coast through the Tau Ceti system. If spotted, they might be suspected of being up to nefarious acts, but they would at least appear to be natives of this world.

Once dressed, Jessica stuffed her dry suit into her gear bag and closed it again. She then took out the remote for the jump sub, punched in a code, and then pressed a button that would completely disable the device, and fry all of its circuits. She clutched it for a moment, making sure that it heated up as expected, then set it on the ground in front of them. “Okay, we find a place to hide out for the night. Preferably someplace where we can watch people come and go for work in the morning. Then we break in and steal some clothes to better blend in, before we head into the city.”

“I know the mission plan,” Naralena replied.

Jessica could feel the tone in Naralena’s voice. “Look, if there…”

“You don’t have to say it, Jess,” Naralena replied. “I know. It sucks, but I know why it had to be done. So, I’m good.”

Jessica looked at Naralena. “Good to know, Avakian,” she replied. “Let’s move out.”

* * *

Sergeant Torwell sat in his jump seat just behind the cargo shuttle’s flight crew, facing aft through the narrow central corridor that connected the shuttle’s flight deck with its cargo deck. He stared at the ten Ghatazhak soldiers sitting in the cargo section, five along each side. They were as they had been since departure… unmoving. “Thirty-seven hours and it’s still creepin’ me out.”

“You’ve said that every hour, on the hour, since we jumped into the system,” the shuttle’s copilot stated as he stretched and yawned. “You would think cold-coasting so close to a Jung fleet would be what bothered you.”

“How can you sleep with those zombies sitting back there?” the sergeant wondered.

Ensign Latfee turned and looked at the sergeant as he finished yawning. “Those what?”

“Zombies,” the sergeant replied. “You know, the walking dead. They eat flesh…”

“You’ve been reading too many old Terran novels,” the ensign replied. “Those things will rot your brain. Try moving forward a few centuries in the literature database… before you turn into one yourself.”

“You know,” the pilot chimed in, “I was seriously considering not warning you that we were coming up on the deploy point.”

Sergeant Torwell rotated his seat to his right, looking over his shoulder at the lieutenant piloting the shuttle. “You suck… sir.”