The Shadow of Mitrak

  Flesh Eaters

  By Rachel Ford, Sarah Ford, and Judah Ford

  Chapter One

  D’vyed stared through the one-way glass, down the long gallery. It was bustling with the activity of those who had come to pay their respects to Ashia, and some who had come just to see him. Through the tinted window, he could see the finely dressed gentry in the crowd below. They were conversing excitedly and enjoying copious amounts of hrothka, as if it was a feast day rather than a funeral. He saw very little respect in this way of mourning. Everyone who actually knew Ashia waited in the rear chamber behind him.

  They had come to give their condolences, but he found himself unable to face them. He’d retreated into this side room.

  He was a national hero to the Antellian people, and he knew that he needed to represent himself, his unit, and the Empire with dignity. But right now, he was doing everything he could just to stop from breaking down again.

  When he first heard of her death, at the hands of the savage Mitraki so many lightyears away, his rage had kept him together. Rage could only burn white hot for long, though. And as he started to comprehend that he was truly alone, it began to overwhelm him.

  It seemed unreal to learn about the death of his wife from his CO. To not to be able to see her body. To never say goodbye.

  He was alone now, and the emptiness of his existence gutted him.

  He stared into the glass and saw her face looking back at him. He saw it everywhere and there was always a tear in her eye. He could almost hear her voice reproaching him. “Why weren’t you there, D’vyed? Why did you let me die alone?”

  He knew that was unfair to her, though. Ashia was far too good a woman and wife for such reproaches. She had worked so hard to be on that assignment, and she would not have let anything stop her. Those reproaches were his guilty thoughts, not hers. But he could not shake them.

  “D’vyed?” A door opened behind him.

  “Captain Gril.” D’vyed barely choked out through the lump that had been forming in the back of his throat. “It must be time for the procession then?”

  “No, there is a little time yet.” His CO walked forward slowly, his eyes fixed on the ground, as if that gray tiling was the most fascinating thing this side of the daystar. A long moment of silence followed before he spoke again. “D’vyed, I am not just here to pay my respects to Ashia. I am afraid I am here officially.” He straightened up and looked him in the eyes. “I have brought you orders for your next deployment.”

  D’vyed regarded him in disbelieving silence before swallowing back the lump in his throat and confirming, “My next deployment, Sir?”

  “Yes, and I am sorry I have to deliver this to you now. But I have been told that a situation has developed, and you leave at oh-three-hundred tomorrow.”

  “Oh-three-hundred?” D’vyed fought to focus on this new intel. “Where is this situation, sir?”

  “That’s classified. I don’t even know. This one is straight from High Command, and they requested you specifically for this op.” Captain Gril locked eyes with him for an awkward moment before adding, “I can tell you only this, D’vyed. I was informed that you will not be returned to my command for eight months.

  “Wherever they are sending you, it must be on the outskirts of explored space. I’ve heard rumors, but we both know what good they are.”

  D’vyed stood and stared blankly at the wall before returning his eyes back to his CO, “Yes, sir. Oh-three-hundred.”

  Captain Gril offered his condolences to D’vyed again for his loss before leaving him alone to read his orders.

  The orders had to wait, though. As soon as the captain left, another figure approached. This was a large Itark; a familiar sight, and as welcome as any visitor could be in the moment: Hrobran. The Itark – Sunshine, to his unit – was D’vyed’s right hand in the field, and his closest friend out.

  “Knight”, he used D’vyed’s callsign. “Grilly give you orders too?”

  “You’re being deployed?” D’vyed was surprised.

  “Yeah. Can’t say anything about it…it is classified, you know?” Hrobran rolled his eyes, drawled sarcastically.

  “Same here. When are you shipping out?”

  “Oh-three-hundred tomorrow. You?”

  “Same.”

  “Something tells me we’ll be spending some time together then. How you holding up, Knight?”

  “I’m good, Hro. I’m alright...” D’vyed met his gaze with a small, crooked smile. “To be honest, I’ll be glad for the distraction after tonight. Ashia wouldn’t want me to sit around and mope.” He did his best to maintain the smile he had managed.

  “She’ll be smiling tonight, when you carry the torch for her.” Hrobran clasped his oversized hand on D’vyed’s shoulder. “Now get out there and talk to people. You know how she hated when you hid in corners.”

  “At ease, Captain. please, take a seat.”

  Captain Tal Ilver, of the celebrated Antellian Intelligence and Special Operations Unit Seven (or Kr’gva Kos, as it was more commonly known), had received an urgent dispatch from Antellian High Command earlier that morning. It was a summons to the Intelligence and Planning headquarters in Antel City for a briefing, but it contained no other information. Tal grew up on military bases. Her father and mother who served with distinction, and she’d spent her entire career in service. But the command building she arrived at this morning looked anything but a military base. The polished stone walls and ceilings were adorned with tapestries and exotic rugs, and an imposing chandelier of Rantigian volcanic crystal loomed over it all. The deep crimson crystals illuminated the room with a rusty red hue.

  At the general’s command, she sat on an ornate seat. It was but a foot and a half from the ground, like a typical Antellian couch, and was crowned with a plush, red velvet cushion. “My dispatch was short on details, sir.” She got right to the point.

  “It had to be, Captain. I’m afraid you won’t like what I have to tell you today any better.” General Truvall sat down behind his desk and offered Tal a sugar pepper from the large bowl in front of him. She politely declined. “Captain, we are scrambling a team for a priority one mission, and you have been selected to lead it.”

  “Priority one, sir?” That took Tal by surprise. There hadn’t been any whispers of a priority one; there’d been none of the usual scuttlebutt. “Where are we deploying?”

  “This is the part you won’t like. Your mission objectives and location are classified. This entire op is being handled with the upmost secrecy. I have not even been briefed on most of the details. Command will give your pilot coordinates, and we will send you encrypted orders. They’ll unlock when you reach the coordinates. You cannot know your objective or final location until then. All I can tell you is that it will be Search and Destroy.”

  Her years in the field had taught her many things, but subtlety was not among them. So at this news, Captain Ilver’s jaw flexed in an annoyed fashion. The idea of keeping the commanding officer of a priority one mission in the dark until go-time seemed ludicrous to her. It wasn’t the lack of trust. This was the military, and secrets went with the territory. But the more she knew about the mission, the better prepared she’d be. The better able to lead her team to victory she’d be.

  All of this, though, she kept to herself, with her expression being the outlet for her frustration. She said, “Yes, sir. When do we ship out?”

  “Tomorrow at oh-three-hundred, Captain. You won’t be deploying with your unit, either. Command has put together a multi-branch team of operatives you will be leading, including civilian specialists and a war correspondent.”

  “A war correspondent, sir?”

  “Yes, a reporter.”

  Of course she knew what he meant by a war correspondent, but she had a hard time believing her ears. “We will be deploying with a reporter on a priority one mission, sir?”

  “Those are your orders, Captain.” General Truvall straightened out his back and handed her a data vault with the details on her command. “You team will be assembled at Launch Command by oh-two-hundred tomorrow morning. I recommend you familiarize yourself with the personnel report before then. Any questions?”

  “No, sir.” She was still trying to make sense of her orders.

  “Dismissed, Captain.”

  Kleera breathed a sigh of relief. After nearly forty straight hours of work, she had just finished decrypting the last file on a confiscated data vault, and translating it into standard Antellian. At one time she had supposed the life of a civilian military contractor would be full of heart pounding excitement. The three years she had spent since graduating had been anything but.

  She was the youngest Rantigian to graduate from the Imperial Academy, and she’d done it with a triple emphasis in Linguistics, Computer Science, and Organic Electronics. That not being challenge enough for her, she’d even managed to receive the highest academic honors and a position in Command Intelligence upon graduation. Right now, though, as she slumped in her chair, exhausted, she was seriously reflecting on whether it would not have been a better decision to follow her father’s advice and study gaming as he had.

  “Kleera Bali?” A sharp voice behind her jarred her frazzled mind back to reality.

  “Yes?” She spun around in her chair and surveyed the short, stout Antellian officer standing beside her. He wore a command medallion around his neck and an intelligence insignia on his sleeve. “I just finished decrypting th e files, sir.”

  He looked puzzled at first, then shook his head. “I am not briefed on your current assignment, Miss Bali. I have come to brief you on your next.”

  Chapter Two

  “Entering Mitraki system now,” the pilot said.

  “Good.” Captain Tal Ilver stood, looming tall over the young officer’s seatback to stare into the black expanse before them.

  “Orders, ma’am?”

  “Put us in orbit over the home world, Ichek. Remain in orbit, until I give you the go-ahead to take us down. Alert me if you see anything out here.” This was restricted space after the incident, but her orders suggested there might still exist pockets of strong rebel presence in the sector. Strategically, it made sense: no one else would set foot on these irradiated hellscapes. Still, it was hard to shake the feeling that some species just didn’t learn.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Ilver locked her workstation, switching off the classified maps and charts she’d been reviewing. Then she pressed a smooth palm onto the biometric sensor that governed access to the ship’s common area. The doors parted before her. The team looked up as she entered.

  “Captain on deck!” one of the younger crewmen, a normally quiet and reserved Ra’Dir youth, alerted. Everyone was on their feet, rigid, and at attention.

  “At ease.” Their postures relaxed to military ease – all but the newsman, whose clumsy imitation of the gesture was something between a slouch and a wide stance. “Gentlemen, ladies, we’ll be arriving at our coordinates in about forty-five minutes.” This provoked a smile from lieutenant Hrobran – a hulking Itark that had been assigned to her from one of the Empires most elite Search and Destroy units for this mission. “You may want to curb your enthusiasm, Sunshine,” she cautioned, addressing him by his callsign. “I haven’t told you where we’re going yet.”

  He snapped to attention, doing his best to wipe the smirk off his bovid features. “Yes Captain!”

  So far, the mission had operated on a need-to-know basis only. The navigator had been given the coordinates and she’d been given sealed orders, with a general, advanced understanding of their purpose. The orders were set on a timer that had released about twenty minutes ago. Other than herself and the flight crew, the only other member of the team with any knowledge of where they were headed or why was the reporter; and she wasn’t sure how much he actually knew, and how much was bluster.

  She’d been instructed to brief the crew once they reached Mitraki space - or what was left of it. “I know many of you probably heard the same rumors I did: that command was sending us to Mitrak.” She ascertained the truth of her speculation in their expressions. Rumors had been flying since the mission had even been sanctioned. “Well, for once, the rumors were right.”

  Sunshine’s grin returned wider than before, but she let it pass.

  “You all know about the device, the planet destroyer.” Following the incident, everyone knew about that. It was a Mitraki weapon, a device that could speed up the nuclear fusion of stars to produce incredible amounts of energy – enough to destroy entire systems. The incident was perhaps the most fitting instance of karmic justice that Tal Ilver could recall in the Empire’s long history. Not that it had come without cost. Antel’s entire diplomatic entourage had died in the same fire and hell that eliminated the flesh eater’s home world. “The Mitraki research into the weapon devastated this system. Their experiments killed twelve billion sentient life forms, and laid waste to their home world.” Now, for the bad news. “Our initial intelligence showed the device was lost, along with most of their population. But-” She inadvertantely cast her eyes to the deck before looking up again. “We no longer believe that to be the case.”

  “There’s been an influx of rebel activity, centering around the site of the research facility that produced the bomb. The facility is gone, but our old scans of Mitrak suggested there might have been an underground complex at the site. We believe the rebels are hoping to gain access. Our reports indicate that they believe the weapon still exists.”

  Even Sunshine had gone grim at that news. A weapon like the planet destroyer, falling into enemy hands? Who knew what havoc the insurgents would cause. She tried not to look at D’vyed as she spoke. D’vyed was a Knight of the Red Order, an elite soldier from the same unit as Sunshine, whose uncommon valor had won him the Silver Patriot badge of Honor and three battlefield citations across a young, illustrious career.

  His experience and skill set made him perfect for the mission. It was his personal connection that Tal questioned. His wife, Ashia, had been one of the diplomatic attachés assigned to Mitrak. She’d died with all the rest, swept away in the merciless bombardment of solar flares.

  If it had been Tal’s call, he’d have heard about this long before now. Hell, if it had been her call, he wouldn’t be on this mission at all. Not with that much skin in the game; not with that many raw wounds.

  But it wasn’t her call. High command felt he deserved to be here, deserved a chance to be a part of the end of the Mitraki threat to peace, deserved to have an opportunity to strike a death blow to the terrorists who still challenged the empire. She hoped they were right. She hoped high command wasn’t putting a photo op before the success of the mission.

  If she was brutally honest with herself, this whole mission had the feel of a photo op. The war had been running long, and the rebels were tenacious. The Antel would win in the end – they always did – but the Mitraki had sparked life into the terrorist cause and changed the ways that both sides waged war. Even their self-inflicted destruction had cost her government five-hundred civilians, an embassy, and a small handful of diplomatic ferries. That hit folks back home hard – harder than losing a whole battalion of soldiers would have. It brought it too close to home. It was one thing if soldiers died; soldiers were meant to die. It was war. But civilians? That made it personal. That made it about them.

  The boys in command were too smart to miss the emotive potential of a decorated war hero returning to the planet where his own wife had died, to crush the last glimmer of threat the Mitraki posed beyond the grave.

  Which explained why the reporter was here. Ostensibly, D’blat Valen – callsign Lens, for this op – was assigned to her team as part of the government’s new transparency initiative. That was bullshit, and everyone knew it. Transparency, like anything else, had its limits. There was a reason the news wasn’t allowed to broadcast the raw, uncensored footage of an operation like this one. Assets would be compromised and people would be killed. Whatever footage Lens took back was going to go through the same rigorous editing process as anything else that made it onto the news. Still, it made the civvies back home feel good; it made them feel like they were getting the full story, even when they weren’t and couldn’t. It invested them in the process, seeing the courage and sacrifice of their frontline troops.

  And a grieving war hero, an established national figure like D’vyed, avenging his lost mate on tellies all over the empire? High command wasn’t wrong to see the value in that footage.

  Still, introducing emotional variables of that magnitude would make her job – completing the mission and keeping her team alive as they did so – harder.

  “Our mission,” she continued, “is search and destroy. Gain entrance to the facility, locate the weapon, destroy it and anything that gets in our way.”

  “But…the compound is huge. We don’t know where the weapon is, and we know the surface at the site is crawling in hostiles. We don’t know what’s waiting inside. Presumably the facility has automated security systems, some of which could still be online. And it’s possible that the terrorists will have found a way in by now.”

  She surveyed her crew. Apprehension. Fear. Anger. It was all there, in their faces. “Any questions?”

  Snapping to attention, the military contingent replied, “Ma’am, no ma’am!”

  Lens and the alien language and computer expert, Kleera Bali – a Rantigian codenamed Scribe for this op – seemed taken aback by the sudden explosion of voices around them. The nuclear physicist – Doc – just shook his head to signify that he had no questions. Unlike his civilian peers, Doc had been on military ops before. He was familiar with the formalities and idiosyncrasies that regulated interaction between senior and junior officers.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8