Siege of Terra (The Mavrik Woods Series, Book 1) (20 page)

I find an empty rack by the far side of the armoury, I begin to take off my armour plating and set it on the rack.

My intercom earpiece chirps.

“Woods here.”

“Colonel, you need to get to the briefing room now,” T-Raves voice comes over the intercom.

“Yeah, I’m just in the armoury now.”

“No, I mean now, we have a situation, you need to get here as soon as possible”

“What kind of situation?”

“It's the General.”

“I’ll be up there in a minute, Woods out.” Scenarios are rushing through my mind: assassination, heart attack, vanished. Not all of them end so well.

I don’t bother taking off the rest of my armour, instead I just turn tail and rush out the entrance and back into the lift. The lift doors chime as they open, “welcome, where can I take you?” The female voice says, “briefing room level, room six,” I respond. The doors shut and the lift starts going up.

The ride’s only ten seconds long; with inertial dampeners the lift could go as fast as it could possibly go, making trips as fast as possible to different levels.

The door  opens, “have a nice day.”

I step out and find my way to briefing room 6. The door is already open; people surround the entrance.

“Out of the way,” I spread my arms out and push away the crowd to get to the door, “please move people; go back to your work cubicles or something.” making my way through the mob of people.

The door comes into sight; T-Rave’s standing over a person who’s on their knees and facing the wall.

“Captain, what's going on? Who is that?” I exclaim.

“That would be the General Sir,” he says simply.

“What happened? What did you do?” I say.

“What did I do? No, you got it all wrong, it's what he did, it's what he
is
doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“You two have misunderstood this, this is what it-” the General tries to say.

“Shut up!” T-Rave shouts at him.

“You little bastard, do you have any idea what the penalties are for assaulting a superior officer?” The General shouts back at him.

“I don’t think you’re my superior officer anymore Anders, not after what you’ve been involved in,” T-Rave states.

“Can someone please explain to me what the hell is going on?” I shout out to everyone around me.

“He’s a traitor to the human race!”

“Murderer!”

“He should be court martialed and executed!” Several people yell at once.

“Wait, wait, wait, slow down. Captain, can you explain this?” I direct my gaze to T-Rave.

“I’ll do my best Sir. When we departed from the flight deck I came down here to give a quick report on the mission. When I entered the room the General was on a Holo-intercom with a Hakorian, the Hakorian was saying something about making a deal and thanking him for his cooperation. That’s when it cut off and the General turned around, he looked terrified. I guess he thought he wouldn’t be caught.”

“I tried to tell him that I don’t know how that got in there!”

“How come the security cameras were offline at the exact moment?”

The Generals mouth is just hanging open, “I…I…”

“That’s what I thought.”  

Voices come from outside the briefing room.

“Ah good, security is here,” T-Rave breathes out in relief.

The burly men in security uniforms push their way through the crowd, one’s carrying a shock stick, the other one has stun cuffs in his hand.

“Get him out of here; lock his ass up in a very small dark room.”

“I’m telling you, you’re making a very big mistake. I’m not the one responsible for this!” The General says, he yelps as the stun cuffs latch onto his wrists.

“The evidence is against you General, you will just have to get a lawyer and explain everything to him and a judge.” T-Rave says.

“This is preposterous!” He shouts back at us as he’s dragged out of the briefing room.

“Now, can you explain in full what the hell happened?” I say to T-Rave.

“That was pretty much everything. Oh, yeah, there was something else in the communique about the destruction of the city, and Terra. So, I’m not sure if that was an actual plan or if it was just talk.”

“Is that it?” I’m surprised; you’d think the General and the Hakorians would have a lot more to talk about.

“Yeah that’s it,” he says, lowering himself into one of the arm chairs by the table.

“Who are we going to report to now?” I ask, it’s probably a question that’s floating on T-Raves mind as well.

“I have no clue, I’m sure we’ll get another military General to take his place soon enough. For now though all we can do is go and take all this smelly gear off. A nice hot shower would be nice as well.”

It surprises me how fast T-Rave switched from being serious and then seconds later sarcastic and completely unaware of what just happened, like he’d forgotten already.

****

After me and T-Rave departed the briefing room we’d gone down to the Armoury, we stripped ourselves of our gear and then headed up to the showers. The hot water felt nice against my bruised and battered body. After we had relaxed a little bit and cleaned ourselves up we’d received a message saying to meet General Weber up in briefing room 11. I guess the military didn’t screw around that much, they most likely assigned a General at random just to finish up the mission.

We open the briefing room door. At the head of the table is a short pudgy man, he doesn’t have the neatly cropped hair like most Generals do. Instead, It’s ragged and uneven all over his wrinkly head.

“Ah gentlemen, you’re finally here, sit,” he wheezes out, motioning with his arm to two seats beside him.

We sit without question. The man sitting beside me looks ancient, his appearance suggests he’s around a hundred years old.

“Now, let’s begin shall we?” He says.

“Yes Sir,” I say through force of habit.

“Now, it has come to my understanding that your previous mission was you two following the orders of General Anders, is that correct?”

“Yes Sir. Sir, if I may speak freely?”

“Be my guest.”

“I thought this debriefing was about the mission, not who was issuing orders at the time.”

“It is about both; we need to know if Anders was sending you out there for the purposes of the military, or his own.”

“Well, in my opinion Sir, I think it was for the good of the planet, we took down a serious threat, that compound was harvesting Thopium to use against us, and we took it out.” I say.

“Did Anders ask you to do anything that seemed odd at the time? As if the orders that he was giving you didn’t make any sense?” Weber asks.

“No Sir, the orders that we received made perfect sense,” I reply.

T-Rave cuts in, “Sir, what exactly happened to Anders?”

“He is locked up for the time being, we are having some of our best interrogators coming here to question him.”

“Isn’t that taking it a little too far Sir?” I say.

“We have no idea what kind of information was exchanged between the two parties, and we won’t know for sure until we get some answers from him.”

“Understood Sir.”

“Now that we have gotten that out of the way I need to know the details of your previous mission.”

“Yes Sir, we got our briefing by General Anders, then we departed and met up with Krystil Aakia and Jayon Cofield on the flight deck, we then departed for the Kelownial Rain forest. We almost got to our destination unnoticed, however we weren’t so lucky, myself and the Captain took one of Cofield’s escape ships and entered combat with the oncoming scout ships. We took a few of them out before getting shot down and crashing almost two dozen clicks away from our original drop point.”

“And the good Captain didn’t think it would be good for the sake of the mission to mount a rescue and take you to the actual destination?” Weber cuts in.

“He was being chased himself at the time from the scout ships that we didn’t manage to destroy before being hit.”

“Continue please.”

“After we crashed we made a camp somewhere near the mountains. We took shifts to watch over the perimeter, there was only one disturbance but it turned out to be nothing. We continued to make camp for a few hours, just to get some rest after the long trek, we left when it was still dark out. We got to the facility some time later; we got inside thanks to some new military ordinance -that stuff works really well-”

“Yes, I have heard of some of the new explosives that are being engineered. Our provider is working on ways to have nuclear weapons constructed to be the size of your hand,” Weber adds.

“Wow, really? The size of your fist? That’s quite small for a nuke.”

What would be the point of making these things smaller? We’re supposedly trying to have peace with the other nations spread across the planet; instead we’re trying to build super weapons that are meant to destroy them. We should be focusing our efforts on more of those collapsible huts.

“Yes, that’s correct, now please continue.”

“Right, we got inside using the explosives, where we encountered a different kind of species, wait no…a different variation of the Hakorians that we had previously encountered.”

“What do you mean?” Weber asks.

“Well Sir, this particular Hakorian could manipulate the elements of the Earth; I have no idea how though.”

“I’ve heard some myths that people could be ‘in touch’ with nature and everything else around them, they sound highly exaggerated though.” He points out.

“Why do you think that? Just because you don’t know how it works?” T-Rave interjects. So, maybe this General is as bad as the last one, by the looks of it he his opinion is the right way to do something.

“That’s not what I said, I would need proof right in front of my eyes.” There it is, seeing is believing for him, quite the opposite for me. You have to be able to believe in something regardless if you have proof. All you need is a little faith.

“Anyways, this Hakorian was female, I’m not sure how she did what she did, but she did; and we have to assume that most of the females will be able to do it. Just as a precaution.”

“And a good one at that, we need to use every edge we can get if are wanting to come out of this in one piece,” Weber says.

“Captain Ravenson took her out, he said that she posed a threat, and I’m sure that he was right, it just didn’t feel right killing a female though,” I say, remembering the feeling when T-Rave shot the wounded alien.

“You made the right call son; she did pose a threat, a threat that needed to be eliminated.”

So that’s how the he thinks, the stakes of the mission will always come first over any other matter. The military’s replaced a corrupt General with a incorruptible one. Typical.

“After that we planted more explosives in key locations that helped us escape later on. So after we did that we took a lift to the deepest level that it could go, that level contained a large cavern where they were extracting the Thopium by the container load. We got captured after we tagged only a handful of Thopium tanks, before we got captured though we hid more explosives underneath the tanks.” I pause to let the information sink into his head, also giving him the opportunity to cut in and ask questions.

“What exactly happened when you were captured?”

“Not a whole lot, they asked me a few questions, which I didn’t answer of course, I followed General Anders orders and talked about possible peace treaties, the outcome was as I expected though. The leader that I was talking to scoffed at the offer, and then pulled The Captain into a separate room to interrogate him further.”

“And what information did they try to get out of you Captain?” Weber turns to T-Rave.

“Basically the same questions that they asked the Colonel. I didn’t crack though, once they realized that they took me back out into the other room where they were going to kill us.”

“How did you manage to escape?”

“Well, I was counting on the fact that the explosives that we planted would explode. Lucky for us they did. It provided a good distraction for me to take control of the situation.”

“So you made a gamble?”

“Yeah, we did. We had set the timers for ten minutes; even though I knew that we were unconscious when they captured us it wouldn’t have been that long.”

“In the future try not to gamble. Remember, you are gambling with your lives,” Weber points out.

“Yes Sir. I wasn’t aware at the time that they were coming out to kill us. When they came out, I was in the middle of figuring out how I could get to my helmet, because if I got to my helmet then I could detonate the explosives. Luckily though the Captain had a plan of his own and got us out.”

“You should be able to function by yourself though,” Weber says.

My jaw clenches from the frustration, Weber’s only finding the negative things in this debriefing that he can easily pick apart.