Chapter 12: Missing in Action

When Xipa and Fletcher returned to their makeshift quarters, they found Gustave asleep, and Bluejay was sitting on his bedroll. He was fiddling with his wrist-mounted computer, and he glanced up at them as they entered, pleased to see them.

“You two still smell like that plant,” he said, his antennae waving. “Did you hear from Ruza yet?”

“We didn’t see him,” Fletcher replied, flopping down onto his sleeping bag. He coughed into a prosthetic hand, then waved it in front of his face as though the smell displeased him. “I assume he’s still helping out in the infirmary. I’ll send him a message if he stays away for too long. You know how he gets when it comes to medical matters.”

“You should really get out there and interact with the people,” Xipa said, glancing at Bluejay. “It won’t do for you to just sit here and hide.”

“This guy will go toe to toe with Drones, but he’s scared of some dirty looks,” Fletcher added as he interlocked his fingers behind his head. “Fuck what these people think of you, man.”

“I’d rather just not deal with it anymore,” the Jarilan sighed. “At least for today. There are only so many dirty looks that I can take...”

Xipa had only just sat down when Miqi appeared at their door. She seemed out of breath, her chest rising and falling quickly beneath her tunic.

“Xipa,” she said, fluttering her feathers in a hurried greeting. “Might I speak with you?”

“Of course,” she replied, rising from her seat. She joined Miqi in the corridor outside, even though nobody else in the room could understand the language that they were speaking.

“We have ... a bit of a situation,” she began, the purple hue of her feathers conveying her worry. “When I left you earlier, it was because I was called away to the operations room – the room where you met the Ensis when you first arrived. It’s where we monitor the city and coordinate our teams on the surface. We routinely send patrols to keep an eye on our territory and to track enemy movements. It’s not unusual for them to go dark for long periods of time, as we try not to use our radios unless absolutely necessary so as not to draw any unwanted attention, but one of the patrols failed to check in multiple times. We sent up a second team to look for them, and they’ve vanished too.”

“Has anything like this happened before?” Xipa asked.

“We’ve had our share of casualties, of course, but I’ve never seen two entire patrols vanish off the face of the moon. It has to be related to the increased insect activity.”

“What do you need me to do?” Xipa asked, cocking her head skeptically. “I’ve made it clear that my fleet can’t provide any ground support inside the city without attracting even more attention.”

“Some of our best fighters were in that second team,” Miqi added, lowering her voice as she glanced at the two guards who were still posted at the far end of the hallway. “My flock was among them. Whatever happened to them, it must be serious. We’re going to mount another expedition into the district that they were sent to, but we could use some help. It’s not that we’re short on people,” she added hurriedly. “Everyone old enough to hold a gun knows how to use one, but something’s wrong, and we could use someone with your experience.”

“I’ve been told that your people know the layout of the city like their own scale patterns,” Xipa replied. “I’m not sure why you need us there.”

“You would be part of a larger team,” Miqi added, growing impatient. “Our people would guide you. I’m not stupid,” she added with a flash of annoyed crimson. “There are a hundred ships in orbit with crews that must number in the thousands, and if they only sent you five, it means that you’re the best this Coalition of yours has to offer. You made it here alive, after all. Even our most experienced scouts don’t stray beyond the wall.”

“We’ll help, of course,” Xipa conceded. “Fletcher – the Earth’nay – can’t come, though,” she added. “He’s injured.”

“Injured how?” Miqi asked. “I don’t know anything about aliens, but he seems fine to me.”

“He damaged his prosthetic arms while aiding a flockmate,” she explained.

“No matter, we’ll take what we can get,” Miqi continued. “How long until you can be ready? You can help yourselves to anything in our armory.”

“Give me five minutes to explain what’s happened and ten to get geared up. We’ll meet you back here.”

Miqi gave her a grateful feather salute, then hurried away down the corridor. Xipa returned to the storeroom, where her companions were waiting for her, and began to relay what Miqi had told her.

“So, they need our help to find some lost teams?” Fletcher asked. “They sure changed their tune quickly, but I suppose it’s a good way to win some brownie points with our hosts.”

“I can’t believe they actually want our help,” Bluejay added. “They’re not desperate – they have a whole army of people down here.”

“They were impressed by our ability to make it through the jungle and get inside the city,” Xipa explained. “Even if it took this long for them to actually admit it.”

“I wish they’d fucking decide if they want our help or not,” Fletcher grumbled.

“I think they have tried to appear stronger than they really are in the hope that we would agree to help them retake the city,” Xipa said. “Perhaps this mission will help persuade the Ensis that we know what we’re talking about.”

“I’m up for a jaunt into the city,” Fletcher said as he rose to his feet, rolling his shoulders. “I’ve been going crazy sitting around twiddling my thumbs.”

“That’s for Ruza to decide,” Xipa warned, the Earth’nay scowling at her.

“I know I’m technically injured, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna let you guys go out there and risk your necks on your own,” he replied indignantly. “Vos appointed me to lead the team – you’re my responsibility.”

“And Ruza has seniority when it comes to medical matters,” Xipa shot back. “I know how you feel, trust me, but you’re walking wounded. If you exert yourself again, you could destroy your implants and cripple yourself. We’ll have a team of Valbara’nay backing us up, so we won’t be out there alone. They’ll be watching our backs.”

“She’s right,” Bluejay said, Fletcher turning to look back at him. “I hate to say it, but you busting your arms in the middle of a firefight doesn’t help us. You know we’d take you with us if we could.”

“We haven’t even asked Ruza yet, so we’ll see what he says,” Fletcher replied as he raised his wrist display. “I’ll send him a message and tell him to get his tail back up here.”

He remained defiant, but the tone of his voice told Xipa that he already knew what Ruza was going to say. As terrible as being left behind when your friends were marching into danger felt, there was an extra layer of disappointment for Fletcher that she understood all too well. He saw war as his purpose in life, and he had confided in her the feelings of hopelessness and frustration that he was already experiencing due to his injuries. Sitting alone in the storeroom with only his dark thoughts to keep him company while his friends went off on a mission was perhaps a form of torture for him, but it was still marginally better than becoming crippled or worse. He wasn’t just a danger to himself, but to the entire team, and potentially the people they had been tasked with saving. As a career soldier, he must understand that, but it might take an order from Ruza for him to accept it.

They waited a tense few minutes for the feline to arrive, and he showed up at the door still wearing his surgical gloves with the rubber tips.

“I returned as quickly as I was able,” he panted, out of breath.

“What’s the situation in the infirmary?” Bluejay asked. “Were you able to lend a hand?”

“The Valbaran doctors were not always as cooperative as I would have liked, but I was able to treat several infections with the immunostimulants I was given for Xipa, and the medical scanner helped diagnose several injuries that had been missed by the attendants. I wish I had the equipment on hand to create bacteriophage cultures, but it will have to do until they can be moved to a proper facility for treatment. Save for that, merely a lot of routine trauma work. Burns, broken bones, abrasions.”

He removed his gloves as Xipa explained the situation, his yellow eyes turning on Fletcher when she got to the part about their predicament.

“Fletcher,” he began, his gravelly voice as gentle as Xipa had ever heard it. “This is ... a complicated decision for me. I consider you my Alpha, and I would follow you even to certain death, but duty must come first. My contract with Admiral Vos and the oaths that I took bind my hands, even if my heart burns with the desire to do otherwise. I must order you to stay behind, as much as it pains me to do so. I am sorry...”

“Eh, it’s not your fault,” Fletcher said with a dismissive wave of his prosthetic hand. “I suppose I’d only be a liability right now. Just do me a favor and don’t fucking die, alright? I’d consider it a personal slight.”

He knew that Ruza’s word was final, and he must have expected this answer, but he seemed to visibly deflate all the same as he sat back down on his sleeping bag. As much as Xipa wanted to console him, there was no time for that right now.

“With your permission, I will take command of the team,” Xipa said. She waited for a reaction from Fletcher, which came in the form of a subdued nod. “Come,” she demanded, marching out into the corridor. “Fetch any weapons and gear that you need, then meet back here as soon as possible.”

“Here’s the situation,” Miqi said as the team crowded around the old conference table. They were standing in what Xipa had come to know as the operations room, banks of servers lining the wall to their left, and a window looking out over the converted aquaponic farms to their right. Miqi had brought a team of six of her cloaked scouts, and the three Ensis were present too.

Despite all of the old technology that filled the room, they were poring over a large map that had been printed on a huge sheet of paper, likely some old blueprint used by city planners. It had been edited over and over to catalog the slow decay of the city. Where streets or buildings had collapsed, or forests had overrun the old structures, colored additions had been made to the map. There were hundreds of little notes left in looping Valbara’nay script that detailed whatever the scouts in question had discovered at that time, pointing out blocked alleys and untapped resources all over the city’s circular bands.

“Scout team Indigo was dispatched to this district here,” Miqi continued as she reached across the table to point at the map, gesturing to an area in the city’s industrial band with her feather sheath. “Their mission was to investigate insect activity in the area and earmark anything useful that they came across for pickup by a salvage team. All of our people have standing orders to report in every ten hours, but they’ve been dark for two days. Yesterday, we sent scout team Cyan to look for them, and they’ve missed two check-ins so far.”

“What kind of activity were they investigating?” Xipa asked after pausing to translate for her companions.

“We have sentries posted all around the city,” Miqi explained. “Usually at choke points where insect patrols are likely to pass through, or at paths that lead to entrances to our underground tunnels and safehouses. How do you think we detected you when you breached the wall? If we spot a patrol that’s getting too nosy, we usually dispatch a team to deal with them. For the most part, we have a live and let live policy. As long as they aren’t interfering with a salvage op and they don’t look like they’re going to stumble across a supply cache, we let them pass through unchallenged. This time, they were dangerously close to both a stash and a safehouse.”

“So, you sent Indigo to take them out,” Xipa mused as she leaned over the map. “How many Bugs were there?”

“The sentry said six,” she replied. “One squad of Drones with no heavy armor shouldn’t be an issue for one of our teams, but whatever happened, it can’t have gone well. The absolute best-case scenario is that they were driven to ground and had to hole up somewhere. The worst-case ... well, you know what the insects are capable of as well as anyone here.”

“If you were able to make it here alive, then you already know that discretion is of the utmost importance on these kinds of operations,” the scarred Ensi added. “The more of a fuss we cause, the larger the insect response may be. You will need to move to the last known coordinates of Indigo and Cyan undetected, ascertain their situation, and respond accordingly. Returning them home is the priority.”

Doubly so for Miqi, Xipa thought, giving her a sideways glance. Cyan was her flock, based on what she had told her earlier. If Xipa and her team hadn’t arrived when they had, Miqi would probably have been with them when this had all gone down.

“Where is the alien with the robot arms?” another of the Ensis asked, searching for Fletcher in the small crowd.

“He’s injured,” Xipa explained. “He won’t be accompanying us on the mission, but rest assured, my team remains effective.”

“Do we really want to bring the big one?” one of the cloaked scouts asked, craning her neck to glance up at Gustave. “When I think discretion, I don’t imagine whatever the fuck that is.”

“You’ll be glad to have him if we end up in a shootout,” Xipa replied. “He’s practically impervious to small arms fire, and I’ve seen him walk straight through a carbcrete wall. That cannon he carries is usually mounted on battle tanks.”

“We may need a tank if there’s something out there that took out two teams,” another muttered.

“What’s a tank?” another whispered.

“Commit the route as well as the locations of all nearby caches and shelters to memory,” Miqi added, stepping away from the table. “Unless there are any questions, we need to get moving. If there was a firefight, there could be injured, so every minute counts.”

“Ruza is a trained medic, and he has equipment hundreds of rotations more advanced than anything your people possess,” Xipa added with a gesture to the towering feline. “He can tend to any wounded that we find.”

“He could probably carry them back, too,” one of the women said as she appraised him. “So, is the whole Galaxy bigger than we are, or are all the smaller species piloting the ships?”

“There will be time for idle chatter when our people are safe,” Miqi said with a terse flutter of red. “We need to get moving.”

The team traveled below ground for as long as they could, using the network of dingy, damp sewer tunnels as cover. Red mosses and clusters of mushrooms had colonized the glistening stonework, and the water was knee-deep in places, but whatever effluence had once flowed through here had left little evidence. There was no foul smell, no trace of waste after so many decades of fresh water flushing them out. There were small mammals and amphibians, too, the occasional splash of water announcing their presence as they slipped away before the flashlight beams could reach them.

Even for a Valbara’nay, memorizing the layout of these sewers would be a tall order, but Xipa noticed that there were color-coded markings painted onto the stone at each junction to help the survivors navigate. There were certainly more covert exits, but they eventually made their way to street level through a collapsed portion of road that had broken open one of the tunnels, as it was large enough for Gustave to make it through. The asphalt formed a sagging ramp that was easy enough to climb without the need for ropes or other equipment.

Miqi and her scouts hurried up first, fanning out to secure a perimeter while Xipa’s team followed behind. She still felt kind of strange without Fletcher around – they had relied on him so much during their journey to the city – but she had to show the survivors that she could command. Why would they trust her to organize an evacuation if she couldn’t even organize a rescue party?

She felt the suns shine on her scales through her open visor as she emerged into the light, looking up to see the auroras raging above the tall, white buildings that surrounded her. They had surfaced in the middle of a street in the industrial district. Those carbcrete structures with their weathered, white facades had once contained the city’s indoor farms, factories, and offices, keeping them hidden from outside view.

Like the other areas of the city that they had explored on their way in, the elements had taken their toll on this place. There was nary an intact window in sight, water damage had streaked the pale facades with trails of grey, and all manner of flora had overrun the street. Tree roots broke up the sidewalk, exposing soil where smaller plants and shrubs sprouted, their autumn leaves creating a sparse canopy in shades of red and brown overhead. Clusters of mushrooms filled every dark, damp corner, and many of the alleys were crowded with tall spires of fungi. Where the asphalt had been cratered by old plasma fire or had eroded due to neglect, it had filled in with rainwater to create shallow ponds that played host to aquatic weeds. No matter how many times she saw it, it never got any less surreal.