Interlude: Hunters

Less than five kilometers from Sendin’s tent blind, the ground was clear and dry.

Specifically, five kilometers west .

But she wasn’t so lucky. Or maybe her whelps weren’t so stupid.

Extreme environment training was pointless if you didn’t put yourself in any extreme conditions. On the west side of the mountains, the slopes were still a bit chilly with plenty of loose gravel to upset someone’s footing. Some people had probably even died on those slopes. But they enjoyed exposure to those long evening suns, so the ice and snow didn’t cling so fiercely to those slopes. And while those dryer, warmer (by comparison only) slopes surely claimed multiple lives per year, few amateur explorers slipping and tumbling down a mountain to their death was not the level of challenge she envisioned.

She would never admit it to them any time in the next decade, or sober, but Sendin felt the faintest flicker of pride when they’d plead for a more rigorous scenario to learn in. What truly amazed her about their request was that it didn’t seem to be rooted in pride.

They were not an overconfident group of Rak sneering at ‘lesser challenges’. If anything, they had recognized their own… passivity about rigorous self-improvement. They had asked themselves what obstacles they wanted to beat, and what they would need to put themselves through to ready themselves for those obstacles.

And they’d found themselves wanting .

Six weeks surviving on limited equipment in an alien biosphere, restricting themselves to the coldest regions of the mountain range, and at altitudes that were prohibitively thin even to Voraki physiology— that had been quite the catalyst.

Sendin hadn’t even been positive that it would be possible for anyone to last the whole term. But three and a half weeks in, they were surviving.

All of them were still lacking in areas, but Sendin was more than satisfied with their performance so far. The plan for the remainder of their excursion had been to build endurance with an unplanned (and largely improvised) trek to the highest peak in the region.

It would have taken about two weeks.

But even in these harsh conditions, Sendin had allowed herself to be a little lax. She simply hadn’t expected to be given an assignment for an active military scenario.

She scowled at the handheld console in her hands. The data stick she’d been delivered fed blocks of text onto the console screen. Each additional paragraph made her fight the urge to shout the worst swears she knew of at the top of her lungs.

It could have been a prank. There were at least three Rak who could give her orders that would think this was hilarious . But the orders had been approved by the Adjunct-Marshal.

It wasn’t impossible that the Adjunct-Marshal would tacitly endorse a prank on her; they weren’t friends. But Sendin doubted Tox would be that unprofessional. No, the orders and intel were almost certainly genuine. Besides, even if someone was trying to have some fun at her expense, orders were ironclad. There weren’t many faster ways to end up before a tribunal.

Since it seemed she was taking the orders seriously, she’d need to muster her troops.

All three of them.

·····

Two, Three, and Four all had real names though Sendin did not, in fact, know them. She was privy to real enough sounding aliases that would go in their ‘official’ records, but she didn’t know their true names. They didn’t know hers or each other’s names either.

Until very recently, they hadn’t even been ‘Two’, ‘Three’, and ‘Four’. They’d been ‘Seven’, ‘Eight’, and ‘Nine’.

The first four days had them grumbling over whose number was highest. Two days of calling them all ‘Hundred’ had settled that petty rivalry. Sendin had been truly satisfied when they no longer cared if she shuffled the labels between them. ‘Four’ becoming ‘Two’, ‘Two’ becoming ‘Three’, and ‘Three’ becoming ‘Kelp’ had put her expectations in perspective for them.

Now, she was fairly confident she could change, shuffle, and otherwise butcher their ‘names’ however she wanted, and they would adapt anyway and keep track of who was called what.

She glanced at Three. He’d been closest when she’d given the signal to regroup, but still. It had taken him less than two minutes to reach their base point. A few weeks ago, it would have taken him six. He had learned, not just to observe and react on instinct, but to better deduce what options were most beneficial.

At the four-minute mark, Four bound into view with his own three subordinates in tow: a trio of mean looking uyakars; each one dutifully keeping pace. He’d trained them well. Four’s specialty with beasts was arguably the most esoteric, but his results were nonetheless promising.

Where was Two?

“Two, this is the wrong time to try and show off.” Sendin addressed their seemingly empty surroundings. Loose snow blasted against every inch of the eastern face of the mountains at this altitude. Footprints were inevitable, but they filled in fast.

Two was not in earshot, because he didn’t simply melt into existence out of a seemingly innocuous boulder off to the side. Which was good, because it meant he wasn’t just wasting her time on purpose while they guessed his hiding spot.

It was bad because he was still wasting their time, just incidentally.

“Four, send him a guide.”

Four nodded and knelt next to one of his uyakars . She’d never let Four know that she’d bothered to learn each of their names, but the faint blue tinge to the tips of its white mane reminded her its name was Gan.

Four gave the animal a short series of clicks and hisses and held up a short metal tag that Two had worn for a few weeks. When he stood, he waved Gan off and the animal went bounding into the frigid snow.

A minute later, Gan returned with Two scurrying through the snow, looking awkward in comparison. Two was the most agile of them, but even he fell behind the pace of a uyakar bolting freely through the snow.

Gan stopped behind Four once again, and Two fell into their meeting circle without a word. He made no apologies and no excuses.

They knew better by now. They’d learned.

But there was no time to lose.

“We’re heading back and breaking camp. I’ll explain on the way, and we’ll go over a plan once we’re really ready to move.”

There was a reason mountainous snowy terrain was so extreme for Vorak. What little landmass on Kraknor poked above the oceans didn’t rise this far. In her species’ evolutionary history, there just hadn’t been that many tall mountains to climb. Snow wasn’t the easiest to traverse either. Vorak limbs just weren’t long enough to poke all the way through to whatever surface was underneath, and they couldn’t distribute their weight to try and move atop the snow layer either.

The result was four Rak flailing through the snow like madmen. Occasionally, the powder thinned enough for all fours to feel right, but it never lasted. But there was a method to their awkward motions. In fact, while the motion might look and feel awkward, the four of them had carefully refined the set of motions through trial and error to be as optimal as possible.

She was the oldest and strongest of them, so Sendin was at the front of their little chain. They traveled single file, each one of them benefitting from the path carved into the snow by the ones in front. Four’s uyakars trotted along at an easy pace. They didn’t weigh so much and didn’t sink through the snow.

“We have orders .” Sendin huffed, wasting no more time. “There was an attack on Korbanok station a little less than thirty hours ago. Coalition teams hit all facilities on the station and multiple of them used Korbanok pods to escape to the surface.”

“One such team has secured a vehicle and is known to be moving east out of Rasi borough.” Sendin continued, “Forty minutes ago, that team collapsed both the Sojourn and Whistling tunnels. They are believed to be continuing east on mountain roads. We’ve been assigned to track and intercept them.”

Sendin took a deep breath and continued, “No confirmed headcount, but likely between two and four hostiles. One confirmed Adept among them—Farnata obviously.”

She didn’t add anything for a few seconds. She knew they were all thinking the same thing. She might as well give one of them a chance to ask.

It took a few seconds of silent trek through the snow, but Three asked, “Is this a joke—I mean, a drill?”

“No,” she said. She could only pray that they took this seriously.

·····

“Korbanok got attacked?” Three asked once they were all stuffed into the vehicle. It was cramped, four Rak plus three uyakars . But as far as troop transports went, there could be a lot worse.

Sendin nodded without looking back. “Biggest move in the system since our last Bore offensive. The orders didn’t give an estimate, but to attack the whole of Korbanok, all at once? The Coalition would need to send a thousand void troops, at least.”

In modern, space concerned, warfare, there were two types of soldier. Ground soldiers, or infantry, fought battles on planets, colonies, and other ‘typical’ warfronts. They were ‘traditional’ soldiers to fight traditional terrestrial wars. Void soldiers were not.

They were trained for space travel. It took time and resources to train even ordinary astronauts, just to travel into the void. But soldiers capable of fighting on moons, free-floating space stations, and even ships in motion? Those were much more of an investment. But even if void soldiers had been easier to produce, the reality was, no one needed too many void soldiers. Wars over the fates of entire planets could be fought by just a handful of people shooting at each other in orbit. Whoever controlled the skies, could control the ground. Whoever controlled the void above the sky? They controlled whatever they wanted.

No military entity among the stars needed the same number of troops in the void as it might need to fight on the ground.

One thousand for a ground battle was a large number of soldiers for the scale of most modern conflicts, but not unheard of.

One thousand void soldiers attacking an orbital station was obscene . This attack on Korbanok would undoubtedly prove to be in the top three largest military conflicts in the void of space. Even as she said it, Sendin boggled at the sheer logistics of landing that number of troops on a station as small as Korbanok. The whole rock was less than twenty square kilometers.

At the same time, it made her blood boil. A battle like that would be bloody and people who wore her uniform would die. People who’d been under her command in the past.

It was pathetic. Vile. The Coalition wasn’t even from this star system. They were fighting so bitterly over colonies . The Casti homeworld wasn’t even in an adjacent system. It was senseless. She had a niece on Korbanok. How long would it be before Sendin would learn if her niece had been gunned down by an enemy?

She shook her head rigorously. It was time to focus. Intel said there weren’t more than four enemies, but intel had been wrong before. Even if it wasn’t wrong, smarter soldiers than her had been caught off guard by lesser forces.

“To confirm, they’re just in a regular truck?” Two asked.

“They were last seen in a truck,” Sendin corrected, “It’s not impossible for them to have switched vehicles. But don’t make assumptions. Our intel is filmy thin, and several hours old.”

“How thin?” Four asked at the same moment Three asked, “How old?”

Sendin gave a sigh and threw a duffel of supplies into the vehicle. “I got these orders via drone, Whelp.” It hadn’t managed to fly all the way; it had crashed a few hundred meters short of Sendin’s snowblind. “I have exactly the information it delivered, and exactly nothing more.”

Three flinched a bit at being called ‘Whelp’, but it didn’t show long. Sendin had called him much worse. Still, she didn’t like answering dumb questions. The clock was ticking. Every minute delay made it more likely that their quarry would escape.

Her three soldiers were in the back rows of the vehicle looking at a map of the region, but Sendin didn’t need to look at it while she talked. She’d memorized several maps to prepare for their excursion. Of course, even if she’d needed to look at the maps, she wouldn’t have let them drive anyway, but this way they were still preparing themselves with valuable information.

“Our only advantage is that they’re coming toward us. Look at the highway, it’s a straight shot with no detours until the town called ‘Hatch’. I’m asking you now, do you think it’s feasible for us to beat them to that town?”

“…No.” Three said, “If they collapsed the tunnel… an hour and a half ago, then they’ll be there within the next hour. We can’t get there for at least that long too. At best, we get there at the same time.”

“Their vehicle might be slow.” Two suggested, “It’s not impossible.”

“I’d rather not take the risk.” Sendin said. “I’m concerned with knowing which way they go after they pass through the town.”

“Unless they go back the way they came, there’s three roads out of Hatch. North, south, or east?”

Each of the three roads leading away from the town all eventually went east anyway, and even ran into the same highway that ran longitudinally through the mountains, the same road that Sendin and her team were currently traveling south on. But their quarry’s options split significantly enough that they should be considered different routes.

“…Three possibilities, three of you.” Sendin said.

“We’re splitting up?” Three asked.

“Yes. Even if we can’t beat them to the town, the highways they can take out of that town don’t have any outlet branches either. If we drop the three of you on the ends of all three roads, we guarantee ourselves some contact and even if we can’t stop them, we can at least know where they’re going.” Sendin said.

“We’re coming from the north, if they turn south and make good time, we might not get in position quick enough to catch them.” Two observed.

“But the south route is also longest, and look,” she heard Three shuffle the map around to look at a specific section. “If they go south, our route coming from the north is actually shorter to reach the same endpoint. Look how much the valley twists around. Whoever covers the south route will have to hurry, but it’s possible to cover the outlet.”

“How are we deploying, ma’am?” Four spoke up from the backseat with his animals.

“Two is covering the north route, Three and I are going to be dropped off and cover the east, and Four, you’re driving all the way down to cover the south route. You’ll stay there for…” Sendin paused to do some quick math in her head, “fifteen minutes, and if they haven’t shown up, drive back north and regroup with us.”

“Ma’am,” Two said, “If we’re splitting in three, how are we dividing the radios?”

Sendin almost swerved their vehicle on the road. She hadn’t thought of that. They only had a pair of radios. Up until now, it had been all they needed. The whelps had shared the one radio between them, and she’d always carried the second one. The whelps had never needed to be in remote contact with each other because they’d never been that remote.

No matter what though, one of the possible routes would have to be manned by someone without a radio. She cursed to herself under her breath. She was never going anywhere without a surplus of radios ever again. She might have been a bit harsh on herself. When she’d requisitioned the equipment for their excursion, she’d been planning on survival exercises, not actual strategic maneuvers. Nothing they’d planned had been that time sensitive.

But timing was everything now. The prey was flushed from its hole, and it was making a break for open sea—freedom. Except… traditional Vorak sea-hunting wasn’t a good parallel for their situation. Catching this Casti team could come down to seconds , but it was impossible to know which seconds would matter. Only two radios, gods help them, she could never let herself be caught unprepared like this again.

“…Two and Four will take them.” She decided. “That way, worst case scenario is that Four encounters them. If that happens, he radios Two who reverses direction and comes back, picking me and Three up on the way. And we can try and head them off.”

“But what if they pass Four and turn north?” Two asked.

“Then they’re very shortsighted.” Four said, “North means going toward Vorak controlled spaceports. The four of us might not catch them if they head north, but if they head that way, then they’re heading right into hostile territory.”

“It might help if we knew where they were ultimately trying to go.” Three said.

“Well Naggard is on the other side of the planet so that’s probably off the table, so I’d have to guess they want to make it to Sassik.”

“They might attempt to go south instead of further east. It would be suicide, but they might try to hop continents crossing the ice.” Sendin didn’t believe anyone sane would try that. In fact, if they were going to do that, they would have fled south directly instead of diving east into the mountains. But still, she wanted to be looking at every possible angle.

“They have to go through us regardless.” Four observed, “All four of us are Adept. They won’t get past us.”

“We’re splitting up, Four,” she warned, “If you encounter them, you—” She cut herself off. She’d been about to say ‘you are not to engage’. But their orders actually did include apprehension.

Someone high on the chain of command must have been rabid over this.

“…don’t engage recklessly. Even if you’re Adept, it still just takes one lucky shot. If either of you, run into them, observe first and radio the other; coordinate with him. Combat should be a last resort.”

Four looked taken aback for a second, but he nodded.

His mistake was proving to be something of a trend in the war. Whenever inexperienced Vorak Adepts fought their Casti enemies, they got hung up on what advantages they held. Adepts could simply do more than non-Adepts. It wasn’t even cockiness, Sendin had noticed. Even Rak paranoid about being caught off guard were still surprised when Casti managed to fight off Adepts. It was, she thought, because of some instincts inherent to the Adept powers. Something about knowing your enemy didn’t have the same options, the same powers, as you made it hard to predict them. It was a fundamental difference in perspective, almost like becoming an Adept prevented you from being aware how non-Adepts approached problem solving.

She should say something more to Four. But how much was too much? He was probably the calmest and most skilled of those in her charge. His attitude was reflected in his animals, she found. The uyakars deferred to his leadership, not unlike the way Two, Three, and Four deferred to hers. But even so, he was not invulnerable.

They dropped Four, Gan, and his other two uyakar , Tino and Sceppi, off where the north route intercepted their highway. “Make sure you have a view of the highway intersection.” Sendin reminded Four, “If they come this way, we need to know which way they go.”

Sendin got back in the car and kept driving south.

“They’re not going to go north.” Three guessed after a minute.

“Probably not.” Sendin agreed. Of all the routes, north was the least likely despite technically being the shortest. If this Coalition team was trying to escape whatever wrath the Red Sails void fleet was looking to visit on them, the north route only had two branches that sent them anywhere desirable, and one of those just sent them south, only slower than the east route would get them there.

“East is the most likely route.” Three guessed, “That’s why you’re covering there.”

“I’ll make sure to keep you in front of me to catch any bullets that might hit me.” Sendin chastised.

“If Four isn’t supposed to engage, I take it I shouldn’t either?” Two asked.

“Correct. There’s a tiny village at the end of the south route, if they stop there, do try and sabotage their vehicle, but other than that avoid any direct fight. You’ll be outnumbered and up against at least one Adept.”

Two nodded, unfazed. Sendin hoped their training hadn’t gotten to their heads. This was territory much friendlier to Casti with their acute eyesight. Not to mention…

Well, actually, she hadn’t mentioned the one piece of intel that she actively doubted. It just wasn’t likely. For the past two years, any time any Rak saw a Coalition Adept, they thought they knew who it was. She was infamous. The Rak blood she’d spilled could stain rivers. But… the same part of her that nagged that the orders weren’t a joke, nagged her again now. It would be better to warn them and be wrong, than to leave them unprepared.

“Two, get Four on the radio.”

He did.

“Four, check in.” Sendin said. When she released the transmit button, a tone beeped to signal she’d stopped.

“Four, here.” The radio crackled, and gave an identical tone to cap his own transmission.

“You need to hear this too. The intel, I think it’s speculative, but you need to know anyway. The Adept they’ve got with them? It could be the Warlock.”

Three gave a sharp breath in the backseat. He sounded like a hissing scared pup. Well, good . He should be scared. The one failing of the Vorak Adept programs was that they rarely fought against superior Adepts.

And if there was one thing that Farnata Adepts tended to be, it was superior . Sendin had never faced the Warlock personally, but she’d been a part of the last Paris moon raid and she’d seen the sheer destruction that Warlock had wrought. It was incomparable to what any three Vorak Adepts could accomplish together.

The only Adept Sendin had fought that even came close was Century, another Farnata. Sendin had obliterated more than forty of Century’s bodies, but there had always been more.

There was no overstating how dangerous these enemies could be.

“ Do not, ” she warned them, “do not, underestimate them even for a moment. You will die. Just one of them is far more deadly than years in these mountains would be. It doesn’t matter how harsh an environment is, it’s not alive. It’s not intelligent. It can’t learn how to kill you. But if you give an Adept like Warlock even a chance to learn? They’ll take it and you won’t even realize you’re dead until its already happened.”

Two and Three did not say a word.

Over the radio, Four only said, “ Understood. ”

·····

A bit less than an hour later, Sendin and Three exited the vehicle and Two took off, driving further south.

The two of them stood at the ‘T’ shaped intersection where the east route split to chase the north and south ones. This one would be overall fastest. It was the one most likely to see combat.

As she watched Two drive the vehicle around a bend, she couldn’t help but feel she’d made a mistake. Deep in her bones, the moment she no longer had the ability to radio a change in the plan, she felt like her read of the situation was wrong somehow.

But it was too late. They were committed.

“Come on, Three.” Sendin said, “See that stretch of road with the gravel shoulder?”

“You and I are going to set up a trap there.”

Three couldn’t stop himself from grinning. They were playing more to his strengths than hers, but Sendin’s strengths as an Adept weren’t suitable to situations like this. She was better on the attack, in a proactive role, not a reactive one.

Ultimately, they were waiting for an enemy to come to them. It didn’t suit her.

But Three? It suited Three.

“How many landmines can you make in thirty minutes?” She asked.

·····

Four was roughly forty kilometers north of Sendin and Three, but Two had almost an hour of driving before he would be in position to monitor the south route. If they came his way, passed him, and went further south, there would be almost no chance of catching this Coalition team.

Two had to really think if Major Sendin would trick them like this. But ultimately, he decided the mission was real. But if he hadn’t been in the middle of the situation unfolding, he would have found it hilarious.

Someone very high up in the Red Sails command structure was scrambling. And while he recognized that the Coalition were his enemies, Two still held a certain antagonism toward his own side’s command ranks.

So he was not above gleaning some satisfaction from the messes of his superiors. And this was quite the mess. Someone was so desperate to catch a tiny Coalition team of just four people, that they tracked down an off-rotation specialist Adept training group, mobilized them with orders delivered via drone , and sent them after what might be the most notorious Coalition Adept in the star system.

It was the drone part that was so dumbfounding to him. It was a creative, desperate, solution to the problem of Sendin’s training group being out of standard radio contact. They knew the general area she was training in, so someone had both the knowledge of their presence in the region, and the skullduggery to manage to inform them of the crisis.

In the base of his head, the desperation didn’t sit right with him. But it was hard to put into words. Even if the Adept with the team was the Warlock, it was such a desperate measure to take to apprehend one Adept. Sure, the Warlock was infamous, wanted in every star system still part of the Interstellar Assembly. But after a key tunnel in the region was collapsed to cover their escape?

The escape would have been written off as successful after that. But someone was still desperate to catch this team.

It boggled Two trying to imagine what was so important.

He was rambling a bit, inside his own head. It was stressful. He was going alone, and since he was the one with their vehicle now, his decision making would affect how soon they would be able to move as a group.

All in all, he approved of the Major’s plan. It was very like her, a proactive one that made a bold first step with a strong chance to end things quickly.

Even if the Adept was the Warlock, if they picked the east route and met Sendin and Three on their prepared ground? It would be a decisive battle. Three was a nightmare unless you could force him outside territory he prepared, and Sendin was one of the most experienced Adepts in the Red Sails.

But while the best feasible scenario would be an almost sure win, the worst-case scenario was if they went south, and he wasn’t sure Sendin knew how bad it could be.

It was in large part due to the need to cover all three routes. Since they needed to cover all of them, they therefore needed to cover the south route. And since they needed to cover the south route, their vehicle had to go all the way south, no matter who was driving. That meant, if their quarry made it past Two, Two would have to choose between retrieving his allies or chasing the quarry. And if it came down to a chase, this Coalition team would probably get away. They had collapsed a whole tunnel behind them. Whoever they were, they were not incapable of destroying the road behind them.

At first glance, if they picked the south route, it looked like they could escape if they continued south on the longitudinal highway. But Sendin hadn’t thought about what other efforts there were to catch this fleeing team.

This Coalition team had collapsed the tunnels behind them. Any pursuers had to go very far south to even make it through the mountains’ winter conditions. But going that far south put them in a position to intercept the team if it also went further south.

So, ergo, the Coalition team was almost certainly trying to make it as far east as possible. It was their only hope to outrun any larger organized pursuit. So, the team would probably use the eastern route out of the Hatch, then they’d turn south onto the longitudinal highway, and then go further east where the highway branched. That was the most likely scenario. If they did that, they would run right into Major Sendin’s tactical experience wielding Three’s terrifying capacity for unexpectable destruction.

And so, Two was worried. Because if instead, they decided to use the south route, they would be forced to choose between going north or south on the longitudinal highway. South would send them right into other pursuers. But going north would give them that same coveted option to go east at the branch in the longitudinal highway. And unlike if they took the east route, if they got there via the south route instead, they wouldn’t have to go through Sendin and Three’s deathtrap.

They only had to go through Two.

It was a lot of pressure. It might have made him feel better to not have a map. Looking at the map was a bit overwhelming, knowing how easily it could go wrong for him.

He reached for the radio. “Four.” He said.

“You see them?” Four asked.

“No, I’m about thirty seconds out from where the highway meets the south route.” Two heard Four rustle the map on the other end of the radio.

“You’re actually going to be in a tiny little town. I count a whole nine buildings on the map.”

Two pulled off the road just around the bend of the little town, ‘Hatch-south’ it was called. It must have been an off-shoot town of Hatch, an hour to the north.

“You know,” Four said over the radio, “I saw a lot of trails cutting through some of these mountains.”

Two glanced between the south route, watching for the Coalition team, and the map looking at what Four was indicating. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m betting if they don’t come North, we could probably regroup faster if I took one of the trails rather than follow the road.”

Four was likely right, and it didn’t surprise Two that he would notice such a detail. If Three’s strengths lay in holding territory, Four was the opposite: best on the move. His uyakars could run faster and longer than any Rak, but Four himself could keep a blistering pace for hours. In tandem, they made a frighteningly persistent pursuit force.

A new sound pulled Two out of the thought though.

“Four.” Two said suddenly. “A car just rolled in. Two Casti… one Farnata–has to be the Adept, and… by tides, what is that thing? ”