Chapter 1
“I know you wanna bust out your bikini, Flow, but mind telling me if you see any hostiles yet?” Magnus asked over a private channel on TACNET.
“Negative, LT,” Flow replied. “A city of fifteen million Jujari, and we ain’t seen splick.”
“Your mama raise you to talk like that, Sergeant? Or are you just pissed you can’t go swimming?”
“I’m pissed I can’t see anything to shoot yet.”
“Copy that.” Magnus touched his MAR30’s safety out of habit.
Magnus and his Charlie Platoon of fifteen operators had set security on what was one of the worst danger areas he’d ever been assigned to. The landing platform they stood on was forty stories up the side of a composite sandstone skyscraper in the center of Oosafar, and it jutted out like a waiter’s silver platter. The sun’s heat was punishing, pushing their armor-cooling capabilities to the limit and threatening to cook the men before any objectives were reached. While his platoon controlled the perimeter of the pad, a sea of buildings surrounded them, each rife with potential sniper nests or heavy blaster emplacements. Magnus couldn’t shake the feeling that his unit was being served up as some Jujari chief’s main course. They were, to put it in Marine speak, hanging out like dogs’ balls.
“You don’t really think this is about peacekeeping, do you, LT?” Flow asked.
“Not any more than you do. Since when has Recon been tasked with security? Plus, these dogs have alliances with five other systems and a fleet to match. No way they asked the Repub here to surrender all that after three hundred years of resisting us. Something smells off.”
“Copy that,” Flow said with a sniff.
The higher-ups had tried to assure Magnus that this mission was critical to Republic progress. And maybe it was. But Magnus and his platoon were stuck babysitting sycophants in a chemical reaction of politics and cults waiting to go nova. It was just a matter of time before one of his Marines got killed in the name of progress, and that was not what he’d signed up for.
“You know, I hear they bleed their prisoners for weeks,” Flow said. “Some ancient ritual sacrifice or some splick. ‘Living blood’ they call it. You think that’s true?”
“Don’t know, don’t care, Flow.” Magnus looked over the platform’s edge. It was a long way down. “If we don’t accomplish the objective, we’re dead anyway.”
“How’s that?”
“The Jujari drain us of our blood or the major drains us of our stripes. Either way, we’re done. But I’ll take my chances with the hyenas.”
“Copy that, LT,” Flow replied with a chuckle.
“Just own the field and keep your eyes peeled for our bird.”
A gust of wind blew up from within the city and buffeted Magnus’s men. He turned to see them covering their respective fields of fire with their MAR30s. The sooner they could get off this platform the better.
“Heads up, LT,” Flow said. “I’m picking up an inbound Regent-class cruiser.”
Magnus looked skyward and flicked his eyes through menus in his heads-up display. A blue targeting reticle latched onto a square of empty sky and showed Repub designations fed from the orbital convoy overhead, including the shuttle’s code name, Falcon One. He let his eyes focus on the marker until his helmet’s artificial intelligence zoomed in. The AI’s neural-sensor suite was responding quicker than before. Nice update. Magnus reminded himself to thank the battalion’s coders when he got back.
The sky expanded in his HUD, filling his field of view with a static-laden image of a diplomatic shuttle. Even from this distance, Magnus could make out the Order of the Luma’s insignia on the ship’s large vertical stabilizer: a single maroon flame within an unbroken circle. Magnus cringed. Blasted peacemongers.
“Those are our assets,” Magnus said, wondering if Flow could hear the disdain in his voice.
“Roger that,” Flow replied. “Don’t act too happy about it, LT.”
Magnus switched off the private channel with Flow and opened a direct line to Alpha Platoon’s leader and CO for the op.
“Go ahead, Lieutenant,” came Captain Wainwright’s baritone voice.
“We’ve got eyes on Falcon One, Captain.”
There was a pause. Magnus knew Wainwright was reviewing the HUD data. The captain was a legend in the Recon and one Magnus was proud to serve under. Alpha Platoon was charged with security for the Republic ambassador and his envoy, while Charlie was tasked with the Luma emissary. According to the mission plan, Wainwright was fifteen minutes ahead of Magnus’s platoon and already topside at the meeting location.
“Copy that,” said the captain. “You’re all green.”
“Roger, Captain.” Magnus signed out. He surveyed the landing platform again and brought up a unit channel. “Look alive, Hunters. Shuttle inbound, ETA is three.” Magnus watched his HUD as each platoon member confirmed unit readiness with green affirmation icons.
The private channel chirped. Flow was calling again.
“Go, Flow,” Magnus ordered.
“LT, I don’t wanna beat this to death, but this is splick. We’re three-sixtied. Hell, they’re probably covering our undercarriage too, and we can’t do a damn thing about it. The way I see it, the only thing good about this place is that we don’t have the squirts like we did in Caledonia.”
“Wait, you mean that time we were crapping our brains out in a honeymooner’s paradise?” Magnus replied. “Nah, don’t remember anything about that.”
Jokes aside, Magnus was just as frustrated as Flow. Their position was begging for an ambush. Oosafar’s urban environment was perfectly suited for veiled attacks from nearly every angle. Where any other world would have had solid windows in its buildings, the Jujari hung white curtains and had a low-level force field to keep out the elements. The fabric billowed in the late afternoon wind, moving like ghosts in and out of a thousand cave entrances, and the constant motion provided the ideal concealment for an enemy on the move.
“Which desk jockey you think approved this op without reading the fine print?” Flow asked. “Feels like they’re playing Terberian roulette with us, ya know? The problem is—”
“The house always wins,” Magnus finished.
“Yeah, exactly. Only this house wants to kill us.”
Flow was just talking splick. It was how they all processed the tension before a fight. But there was some truth to his words too.
“A neutral planet certainly would have been a smarter choice,” Magnus said. “But no one expects jockeys to have street smarts.”
“Copy that, LT.” Flow looked at his MS900 sniper blaster. “So, that request for overwatch never went through?”
Magnus knew Flow would much rather be in a perch somewhere, picking out targets with his weapon. Command had asked for overwatch positions but was refused access since the Jujari would not permit outsiders to tread in ceremonially clean parts of the city. As a compromise, they provided “unrestricted access” to building files, which, as it turned out, were a joke. They have every known descendant of the first mwadim inked in blood on tanned gorangi skin, Magnus thought wryly, but they can’t keep track of how many floors are in their structures. Perfect.
“Negative,” Magnus said. “Brass said the Jujari wouldn’t allow us access. Something about us desecrating sacred ground with our unclean feet.”
“I’ll have you know that I wash my feet daily, LT,” Flow said.
“And that’s exactly what I told Colonel Caldwell.” The idiom telling Colonel Caldwell had become a joke around the unit, inspired by Magnus’s familial and combat connections with the famed commander. It was Colonel Caldwell who’d gotten Magnus and his three best noncommissioned officers, dubbed the Fearsome Four, a shot at Recon Indoctrination School. “Clean feet, I said. None cleaner. Pretty sure that’s the only reason he let you attend RIP with me.”
“And what were Cheeks’s and Mouth’s excuses?”
“Good looks and muscle,” Magnus replied. “The Four have to stay well-rounded, but don’t tell them I said that.”
“And what does that make you, LT?”
“I’m the brains, Flow. Always the brains.”
Magnus’s pulse quickened as his armor’s cooling system suddenly increased power consumption. It was fighting to keep its occupant comfortable under the sun’s oppressive heat. Magnus was sweating enough to fill his reclamation bladders every few minutes. He could even feel his short beard soaking up sweat. He’d maintained a beard since he graduated from RIP, taking full advantage of the elite unit’s more permissive grooming allowances, but now it was annoying him. If it hadn’t been for his helmet’s air-treatment capabilities, he wasn’t sure which would smell worse, his body or the capital city.
While the men in his unit continued to scan every building with their helmets’ thermal imaging, tagging occupants with yellow indicators, Magnus cycled through the icons, checking floors and rooms against shoddy city records gifted to the Republic because of the “momentous exchange.”
“Let’s just keep the emissary safe, let all the jockeys have their fun, and then get off this desert rock. Keep your eyes open and call it in. Own the mission, own the field.”
“OTF. Copy that, LT.”
Magnus closed the channel and turned from observing the buildings to see the Luma shuttle on final approach, matte gray and resembling a ferret—its slender crew module the animal’s neck and the command bridge cantilevering up and away like a head. The shuttle had a single vertical stabilizer in the aft and a narrow bridge window above the nose. Its engines vectored toward them to bleed off speed in a hotter-than-usual landing. Apparently, the pilots were as apprehensive as the Hunters.
“SITREP,” Magnus called over TACNET to his team leads, asking for a situation report.
“Good here,” Mouth said.
“You know,” Corporal Miguel Chico said, “normally, I’m good for rolling in the sheets, but I don’t care if I ever see another set again.”
“Can it, Cheeks,” Flow ordered.
“Copy.”
As one, the Marines braced themselves against the sand that blasted their helmets. The stuff had found its way into every crease in their armor, and they’d been on planet fewer than thirty minutes. The armor’s mag boots engaged, sensing slippage, as the shuttle’s thrust threatened to push each Marine off the platform. Magnus’s body vibrated, absorbing the ship’s ferocious energy. As soon as the landing gear touched down, however, the pilots killed the engines. It felt as though someone had shut off a midsummer Dustoovian cyclone just by flicking a switch.
The Hunters in the platoon scanned their respective fields of fire with their MAR30s. This was the time for an ambush. Magnus looked to the ship’s hydraulic ramp as it lowered to the platform, awash in a swirl of white steam. The blue-uniformed flight steward came down the walkway at somewhere between a run and a walk, betraying just how nervous he was. He spotted Magnus, tapped the top of his head, then waited for the reply.
“We good, Flow?” Magnus asked.
“Still green, LT.”
“Copy. Bringing out the assets. Eyes up, Hunters.” Magnus took a deep breath. Professional. Be professional. For as much as the Jujari repulsed him and as much as the Republic’s bureaucracy annoyed him, neither compared to how much he loathed the emissaries about to walk down this ramp. They’d cost him lives, lives of Marines who’d never be able to argue their case against the Luma’s methods. Careless leadership.
Magnus motioned to the shuttle’s steward with a knife-edge hand chop in the air. The steward signaled up the ramp, and a figure emerged in the white mist.
“Splick. That’s your asset, LT?” Cheeks said over TACNET. “Wanna trade?”
Chapter 2
Awen hated atmospheric entry about as much as she hated raw Paglothian sorlakk; both made her vomit. The only difference was that she didn’t have to eat sorlakk on a weekly basis. Her hands scrambled for the small bag stowed in the seatback in front of her, but it was missing.
“I got it,” Matteo said, reaching for his seat’s bag and handing it to her. Just in time too. Awen had purposely skipped lunch for that very reason, and there was still plenty of—whatever breakfast was—to fill the sack.
“Thanks,” she said, wiping her mouth with the enclosed napkin. “Have I ever mentioned—”
“How much you appreciate me?”
“How much I hate entry,” Awen said.
“Only every time we fly. But you could stand to mention the other a little more often.”
Awen pursed her lips and gave him a nod. “Noted.” She stowed the sealed bag, sat back, and took a deep breath, grateful the light civilian cruiser was in calm air again. The passenger cabin was smaller than she liked, which made her motion sickness all the worse. She preferred the larger starships since they had better dampeners. Still, the compartment’s glossy-white walls and ceiling and comfortable chairs were in pristine condition, which she credited to the Luma’s fastidious standards.
Matteo stared out the starboard window, and Awen followed his gaze to the vast expanse of sand below. It reached to the curved horizon, light yellow contrasting with the deep blue of the sky. She’d waited her entire adult life to come to this system, which wasn’t that long, considering she was only twenty-four years common. Still, Jujari culture had been her major at the academy—or was it an obsession?—and she’d become more knowledgeable in the history and affairs of the hyena-like species than any Luma before her.
Far below, the capital city of Oosafar rose like a gleaming white obelisk in the late-afternoon light. It stood in stark contrast to the rust-colored dunes and low-slung mountains that surrounded it. While elegant, the city’s presence also felt defiant, as if the buildings stood as a bulwark against the seductive power of the Republic. Awen’s spirit couldn’t help feeling a strange kinship with the Jujari, though their cultures were light-years apart—physically and metaphorically. Still, she admired their ability to resist countless attempts to bring them into the Republic. Awen was drawn to their insistence that joining the Republic would compromise their heritage and that they would rather fend for themselves than eat lavishly from the Republic’s table.
That said, she knew that the Jujari people suffered at the hands of their leaders. They were a violent species, prone to devouring their own as quickly as any unwelcome visitors—or even welcome visitors, for that matter.
“Feels like we’re coming in pretty fast,” Matteo noted.
Awen leaned over his seat arm. She absentmindedly clutched the Luma medallion around her neck—a flame carved inside a golden oblong disk at the end of a leather cord—and squeezed it between her fingers. “New pilot, maybe?”
“Nah. I just think no one wants to spend more time in this system than they have to.”
Awen let go of the medallion. “Attitudes like that have delayed meetings like this for centuries. You do understand that, right?”
“Sure, sure, and the universe is all black and white, and everything can be solved if we talk it through. I get it. I get it.”
Awen backed away from his seat and crossed her arms. “You know, Matteo, sometimes I wonder why you even joined the Luma.”
He feigned a pain in his chest by clutching his heart. “That hurts, Awen.”
“I’m just saying, if we keep going into these situations looking for a confrontation, then that’s all we’re ever going to find.”
“Then you don’t think it’s the least bit strange that suddenly, after hundreds of years, the Jujari want peace talks? Come on.”
Awen took in and let out a deep breath. “I admit it’s unusual, yes. However, if we don’t give them the benefit of the doubt, then who will?”
Matteo shrugged.
“Precisely,” she said, poking his arm. “This is our job. We can’t expect to find a blaster fight across every peace talk.”
“What if that’s all these outliers want us to find?”
Awen turned away from him, mumbling that he was an ignorant fool.
Matteo pulled his attention from the window and looked at her. “What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on. You know you want to say it.”
Awen shot him a wicked glance and raised her chin ever so slightly. Her words were slow and dripping with sarcasm. “I said that you sound just like an ignorant fool, and I have a Repub blaster for you in my overnight kit.”
Matteo laughed and rubbed his hands together. “I knew you’d come around to my way of seeing things,” he said. He looked out the window again and pointed to something. “Hey, look at that.”
“What?”
“You have excellent timing,” Matteo said. Awen followed his finger to see a handful of troopers lining the perimeter of the approaching landing pad. “There’s my fire team now. Hand me my blaster.”
* * *
The landing was harder than usual. Awen smoothed her maroon and black robes as the engines cut off, hoping her stomach would settle down just as fast. But she wasn’t sure what was airsickness and what was adrenaline. She was finally here. She had dreamed of this moment for the last six years and never really thought she would get the chance to visit Oorajee.
She ordered herself to stay calm. Savor the experience. Every sight, every sound. Take it all in.
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