"Julie? We need you up here," Rose whispered into her comm unit.

"Sure, Boss. I'll be there in a second." Julie wasn't sure if she would be able to help. Even though she had learnt the most important trade languages of this planet, whatever these people were speaking sounded a lot different.

"Maybe we should have landed somewhere else," she said under her breath, mostly to herself, when she slowly walked out of the brush behind Rose and Joana.

"Well?" Rose looked at her expectantly. Julie decided to try and use the language that was most prevalent on this continent, according to the survey team: Lerwikian Trade Language.

Julie began: "Good morning! We don't want to fight! We are just traveling traders!" She looked at the soldiers expectantly. The tall man, with a sword in a scabbard by his side, she suspected that he was the leader, looked surprised and then answered with a heavy accent.

"You are Lerwikian? You have illegally crossed the border of the Free State of Andona!" Julie had a hard time understanding the officers accent, but she was relatively sure that that was what he had said.

"What do you want me to answer?" Julie whispered to Rose.

"Whatever, just tell them to let us through. You are the PsyOps person," Rose answered, while still surveying the Andonans like a predator waiting for her time to strike.

Julie was about to make a few steps towards the Andonan to defuse the situation and to better hear him, when she heard a horse neighing. Everyone suddenly started moving around and she had only a few seconds to realize that a horde of cavalrymen was thundering up towards them through the stream. She was run over by a horse and the world around her went black instantly.

Kiomuts was still surprised that a bunch of Lerwikians would dare to travel through Andona. And why were they on the southern border? The southern border of Andona was at least 200 miles from the southernmost part of Lerwik.

He was still pondering what to make of these people, when the one that had spoken perfect Lerwikian stepped forward into the stream. He couldn't see a gun on her, so he was quite confident that these people weren't out for a fight. "Plus, there are only a handful of them. I wouldn't want to fight against us with these numbers either," he chuckled to himself as he watched her.

His thoughts were suddenly interrupted when the soldiers to his right started yelling and turning further right. "What the.." He thought while turning right.

The shallow stream was full of horses carrying Ossetian soldiers in their blue uniforms with metallic glinting breast plates.

"Soldiers! Take position to my right," he ordered immediately while drawing his sword again and pulling his pistol from the holster on his left side. His soldiers came flowing out of the forest behind him, took positions around him and raised their muskets to aim at the oncoming cavalry charge.

Before he could give the order to open fire, the cavalry charge crashed into his positions. He fired his pistol at the rider of the first horse that jumped over the soldiers kneeling in front of him. His entire body felt the shock of his shot reverberating through his bones as the enemy was ripped off the horse. He could hear the dry cracks of the muskets firing around him as the forest's peacefulness erupted into a murderous melee. His world went dark when a riderless horse crashed into him and he was thrown to the ground.

Joana was astonished by what she was seeing. The silent staring contest had turned into sudden chaos, when the horsemen appeared out of nowhere and crashed their talks. She had seen Julie disappear into the melee right in front of her so fast, the only thing she was able to do, was to stop herself from being ripped into it alongside her.

She didn't even really bother to aim, when she started shooting into the chaos, her assault rifle's 6mm caseless ammunition taking down Andonans and, what she presumed to be, Ossetians alike. She took a kneel without stopping her rifle from picking off one local after another. Even though the chaos in front of her was complete, the shallow water filled with the bodies of the dead and dying, she meticulously picked off one enemy after another. She didn't really care if her victims were Andonan or Ossetian.

While the water filled with corpses and slowly changed its color to red, Rose moved forward next to her, her shooting almost as deadly as Joana's, and grabbed Julie, who had been trampled down into the water. She pulled her out of the water and up behind the shrubs growing at its edge. While Rose resumed picking off natives, Terry jumped to Julie's side and began treating her.

She had been injured so badly that Terry couldn't tell if she would make it. In a modern hospital, her injuries wouldn't have been live-threatening, but in a forest, surrounded by people with muskets, swords and other weapons, he was seriously worried.

The fight was over almost faster than it had started. The deafening cracks of the various guns used in the short engagement stopped and the clanging and shouting stopped. Joana Austin looked over the killing field in front of her over the sight of her rifle and stood up slowly, satisfied by the silence in front of her. The danger had been eliminated and her team was safe.

The peaceful stream in front of her had turned into something out of a horror show. The water had turned blood red, its stream crimson red as far as she could see downstream. Some of the bodies were floating away slowly, but most were trapped under gear, dead horses or were simply in very shallow water. The other side of the creek was covered with the bodies of the, apparently Andonan, soldiers.

"I'll secure the area," Austin said, while glancing back at Rose, who was just bending over Julie's apparently badly injured form. Rose looked up, nodded and turned back to her old friend.

Austin carefully walked through the water, doing her best to avoid stepping onto any corpses. "Looks like we were very thorough," she whispered to herself while she wandered between the bodies and checked, if any of them were alive. A prisoner would maybe make this entire shit-show worth it, she thought. While she checked body after body, it didn't escape her that almost all of the bodies she saw had been killed by her team's modern rifles. "Looks like the locals won't have much fun with us," she said under her breath, when she climbed up the sloped bank on the opposite side.

She froze in her steps when she came up to its crest, and looked right down the barrel of a muzzle loading pistol pointed at her by the tall man Julie had talked to earlier.

"Whoa," Joana said, while slowly raising her hands. As she looked him over she noticed that he wasn't lying on the ground because he was hiding, but because he had the broken remains of a bayonet sticking out of his side. His face was bloodied and he looked like he was closer to death than life.

Before Joana could say anything, the man passed out and she quickly jumped forward and ripped the pistol out of his hands.

"Rose? You're gonna want to see this!" She stood on top of the small hills crest and looked back to Rose and the others. They were quietly talking to Julie, who appeared to have regained consciousness.

"Hey! Rose! Terry!" She repeated louder. "I found a survivor!"

—

Julie had turned out to be in better shape than expected. A combination of her plate carrier and the soft muddy ground had stopped the horse from smashing her lungs. And even though she felt a bit out of breath, she could walk and talk, if slowly, which would get important, once the man Harry and Freddie were carrying on a stretcher woke up.

"What's the plan now?" Terry asked, while walking next to the stretcher.

"Plan hasn't changed," Rose replied, while looking at the local map projected on her smartpad. She wouldn't let them walk into a situation like that again. "We'll follow the fastest way to the settlement north of here and avoid running into any more locals," she waved at her smartpad, "on the way."

"And what do we do with him," he asked, while nodding towards the stranger's unconscious body.

"Well, we'll stop somewhere along the way and find out what he has to say, and trust me, when I say that I have a lot of questions!"