Chapter 6

[Author’s Note: Jax is a shape shifter, so I will refer to her-him by the gender she-he is in when Jax has changed gender.]

The staff car nearly ran Jax over as she walked down the road after the planes had left.

The car came to a screeching halt a good 10m past her after she dived off the road. She was glad she was wearing her mining shirt and pants.

The driver backed up to beside where her body lay. She realised the vehicle had three men in it and decided it might appear more prudent to change to her male form, so she did.

The man in the back of the auto and on her side of the road leaned over the windowsill and said, “What the fuck are you doing up here, Private? What regiment are you with?”

Jax looked at the man with the strange badges and pips on his shirt. Confusion showed on her face. It took her magic with the help of the entity she had gained in her head when she had put her medallion on to decipher the words he used.

It was the man in the front seat that noticed Jax was having trouble standing and said, “Sir, I think he might be hurt and concussed.”

“Go help him, David,” the man in the back seat told the one in the seat in front of him.

The man, David, got out of the auto, and Jax found himself being steadied as he got back to his feet. He was somewhat surprised to be looking up into the green eyes of a Genteli. Then Jax realised his mistake.

The man was taller than a Genteli, and his skin tone was a light milky-brown more like his, and most significantly, the man didn’t have pointy-tips on his ears. He did have lovely green eyes and not purple ones. They were also slightly smaller in his very pleasant-looking face.

This man’s hair was an odd mixture of dark brown with red highlights brought out by the sun shining on it. It was a lot like her brothers’ hair. Yet, he wasn’t a man of the Burgis race either as his ears were more prominent and had lobes more like a Prol’s, but he didn’t have the big nose similar to a Prol male.

Jax’s skin tingled as the man helped him up.

Jax heard the first man speak again.

“Stick him in with me, David. We will drop him off at the hospital later, and they can sort out where he belongs.”

“Yes, Sir,” the man helping Jax answered as he helped Jax around to the back of the vehicle.

The lid on the back compartment opened, and David tugged Jax’s backpack off of him and tossed it into the deep boot of the car, on top of several boxes. David slammed the lid closed, making Jax flinch and put his hand to his pounding head.

Jax had no idea how he was going to get his pack back. It seemed that these men were abducting him, but they weren’t being nasty about it, so he didn’t fight off this tall man. If he wanted his pack back, he would have to go with them.

David then helped Jax around to the driver’s side of the vehicle. (The right side). This time Jax watched as the man pushed in a button on the shiny metal handle before pulling the door back.

He helped Jax into the car and didn’t slam the door this time. The Captain got pissed if they did that. David went back around the car to get back in the front on the passenger side.

The car started moving again.

Captain Ian Thornton looked Jax over.

He wondered what the young man was doing up on the hill and without a hat. Ian didn’t think the lad was a deserter, as Stokes Hill wasn’t exactly the place they headed for; unless the lad had planned to get on a ship and got lost along the way.

Ian also had a hard time placing where the man, or more precisely, the boy, since he looked barely fifteen, came from. He also needed a haircut. Pony-tails were not in the regulations. He could see the boy’s red hair was tucked down inside the back of his shirt.

With the push on to provide more troops, they must be scraping the bottom of the barrel to find bodies to put in a uniform. Even the uniform looked odd, and Ian now wondered if the kid had come off one of the ships.

They had been sent new uniforms to equip the soldiers being sent up here from down south. Some idiot had been giving the boys woollens for Europe and not the cotton-drill tropical kit.

While Ian was Australian born, his father had sent him to Oxford in England to finish his education and study International Shipping Law. He had only been working for his father’s shipping office in Darwin for two years when he got his notice to serve in early 1939. He had been just twenty-three years of age.

Ian’s father had wangled a deal with a Major who was an old friend of his, and Ian found himself in officer training after he did basic training. They were desperate for officer material. He was surprised to learn that he rather liked being in the Army, to some extent.

He had agreed to be posted back to the NT (Northern Territory) if they bumped him up to the rank of Captain. He had gotten a mixed bag of men put under his command. They included a couple of Artillery Battery squads with a section of Sappers’ - Engineers and a couple of platoons of regular troops.

His biggest problems were that he kept getting conflicting commands from his Colonel and the Colonels back in Sydney, and substandard or useless equipment sent to him. They were so busy building up troop numbers to ship to Europe and the Philippines that they weren’t caring so much about defending the home soil.

With things hotting up in the Pacific, he had complained on several occasions that they didn’t have the firepower or men to defend Darwin. Unfortunately, his whinging had fallen on deaf ears, and now his home was being bombed out of existence.

Ian was glad that his father had talked his mother, his older sister, and her two small kids into leaving on the HMAHS Manunda the month before. The ship had taken a lot of the women and children from Darwin to Fremantle in Western Australia.

Ian just wished his father had also left and now hoped that he hadn’t been hurt in the bombing.

“What’s your name, Son?” Ian asked in the clipped, British accent that he had adopted.

Jax looked at the young officer and then the two men in front. Jax was pretty quick on the uptake and realised the man sitting beside him was some type of leader among these very strange and tall people.