3476 A.E.

Planet FE-730-74891

Brackett’s World

Rose was a bit annoyed. Freddie had problems dealing with the loss of contact. Which was understandable, of course. But she hadn't intended to start the day by looking for him in the thick brush of this forest or jungle or whatever cruel joke this collection of large plants was.

She walked towards the large clearing they should have landed on, as it was only about a hundred meters from the small, relatively undergrowth-free, space they had spent the night on. She hoped that Freddie went there. Probably wanted to see something other than trees, for a change, she thought humorlessly, when she stepped out of the thick undergrowth and neared the edge of the clearing.

"Ah! There he is," she said to herself, while climbing the small rise Freddie was standing on. He was looking out into the clearing and enjoying the sunrise through half-closed eyes.

—

Freddie took in a deep breath of the fresh morning air. He was standing at the edge of an elongated clearing, cut into the forest like a fjord into a mountainous coastline. The strange trees around him (at least he assumed the strange things were this planets version of the things) were almost a hundred meters high and thick enough to hide an entire assault shuttle behind one of them.

"Freddie? Ah! There you are!", a young woman with bronze colored skin showing the signs of a long time spent under artificial light, walked towards him from under the shadow of the majestic forest canopy. She stopped next to him and looked at the clearing, her eyes moving along the edges of the old forest like a predator looking for her next prey. After a few seconds, without interrupting her eyes from roaming over the clearing, she said "Nice view isn’t it?"

Freddie looked at her, failing miserably at hiding his surprise at the meaningless small talk from her. He had only heard her harsh and demanding over the last months, while they were squeezed into the confines of their ship.

"Uh, I guess so?" He answered tentatively, waiting for the inevitable dressing down he expected for slipping away from the rest of the team. They were deeper into the forest, still busy checking their equipment and preparing it for the forty kilometer march to a, by this planet's standards at least, mid-sized city. The small town, with it’s approximately 3000 inhabitants, would have been barely a village on his world.

"Then how about you turn your fucking livestreamer on? You know we have a contract to honor and the Goldenscars won’t violate a contract on my watch, even if some things didn't go as planned! Besides, you should know as well as me that we need the ad-credits we get from it!"

He quickly clicked the red streaming button on the small smartpad affixed to his forearm and the tiny camera on his shoulder resumed it’s recording.

"Sorry Rose, I know we need the money, I just wanted to enjoy the view for a second."

"Do I look like I care?" She snapped back. Her ice blue eyes stopped patrolling the edges of the forest and locked onto his eyes like life-seeking missiles. "Don’t apologize to me, apologize to the team! You are losing their money too, you know!"

With that she turned around and marched off into the shrubbery. He made to follow her, when his eyes caught a glint at the edge of the clearing, almost 300 meters north-east of him.

"What the hell is that?" He muttered to himself and stopped again. He moved away from the large root he had been standing on, pulling out the palm-sized smartbinos at the same time. He knelt down behind a small rock and pointed his binos at the distant forest diagonally across the clearing from his position. The sun rising behind the trees to his left was just starting to pluck the foot of the mountainous trees to his north-east from the twilight, but he couldn’t see whatever it was that had reflected the rising sun's rays like a mirror or… an old-fashioned black powder cannon and hundreds of men with muskets! Oh crap, he thought as a one kilometer long stretch of forest exploded into fire and smoke.

He crawled back from the rock he had been hiding behind towards the safety of the undergrowth behind him, before he could even see the entire bloom of the musketmens fire. He had only just made it into the relative safety of the forest, when he ran into Rose. She had turned around at the sound of the battle and started running towards Freddie.

"What the hell is going on?" Rose seemed unusually flustered, Freddie thought.

"Lots of guys. Lots of guns. Lots of smoke. I recommend we get the hell out of here," he snapped back at her, while resuming his flight towards their camp. She appeared torn for a second, her curiosity at what was going on tearing at her, before she turned and started running after Freddie.

—

Joana had only hesitated for a few seconds, when she heard the loud explosions in the distance. Her instincts, honed by an entire life spent in combat, kicked in and she crammed her gear into her backpack, grabbed her rifle and was up in a fighting stance with remarkable speed. The others were still staring in the direction of the racket when she raced past them and took up a defensive position next to a giant tree trunk. Julie was only a few seconds behind her, but it was obvious that Joana was the team's combat expert.

"What are you waiting for? Pack your shit and get ready, " she yelled back at the rest of the team, without moving her eyes away from the sight of her assault rifle. Harry and Doc, who were still standing around like rabbits in a headlight, finally unfroze and started frantically packing their gear.

"I hope Freddies alright," Joana whispered, while staring out into the underbrush, waiting for a target to pop up.

"What about Rose," Julie replied questioningly, taking her eyes from the brush for a split-second to look at Austin.

"I'd be more worried about the natives, than about Commander De Clare," Joana Austin said nonchalantly and winked at Julie, who stifled a laugh and grinned back:

"That's probably true."

Before Julie could say anything else, the undergrowth in front of them parted and Morris and De Clare came bursting through. Without stopping they stormed past them and De Clare ordered, without the slightest sign of her being out of breath or scared:

"That's the signal that's telling us to leave, Ladies and Gentlemen. I intend to circle south and east of the clearing to get around them and then move towards the settlement north of here."

1 km South

3rd Company/ 1st Andonan Infantry Regiment

Lt. Tomos Kiomuts didn't need his scouts to tell him that the two Ossetians they had found weren't alone. The gunfire north of his unit could only mean one thing. The rest of Lieutenant General Tolram's Regiment, the Regiment he and his unit were supposed to be scouting for, had managed to find the remainder of the Ossetians first. And by the sound of it they seemed to be a rather large unit.

He turned to his men, who were marching in a line behind him, because the path wasn't wide enough to do anything else, and ordered them to fall into a comfortable run. Wouldn't do to miss the battle.

He was running right behind the soldier in front of him, when the man suddenly came to a stop and he ran into him, almost pushing him forward into a small stream.

"What are you stopping for?" Kiomuts was about to shove the man into the knee-deep water, when he looked up and over the man's shoulder at the stream's other side.

Three strange looking people were standing on its other side! They wore strange mottled clothes and carried strangely shaped gray guns in their hands. And what was even more strange was that two of them appeared to be young women!

While they were busy staring at each other, a few of his soldiers had come up behind him and taken positions to his left and right. They were pointing their muskets at the strangers and looked more than a bit scared at the strange appearance.

They have to be Ossetians, he thought to himself. But not even the Ossetians would send women to fight their wars!

Joana stared at the natives on the other side of the tiny river. They looked a lot different to the two Julie had killed earlier, she thought. While the two men they had killed had worn blue coats and seemed about as lost as her own team, these new natives wore brown clothing and webbing and looked like they had spent their entire lives in forests. Most of them had beards and they all had grim, determined, looks on their faces as they stared at her. 'And probably also a bit of surprise,' she chuckled silently in her mind.

Rose was standing to her left and Harry to her right and even thought she didn't dare to move and turn her head to look at them, she was pretty sure that they were about as frozen as she and their new friends were.

"Now who is gonna twitch first?" Joana could hear Rose whispering behind her. Joana slowly set her assault rifle to full auto, or instant-peace-mode, as she liked to call it, and mentally prepared to drop to the ground and turn their new friends into fertilizer.

Telds was pretty sure that these people were no Ossetians. They lacked the tell-tale coats and even more importantly, the Ossetians were a very traditional bunch and there was no way that these people would send women to the front lines. Hell, not even their own side would dare to do that, even though there were women serving in Andonan support and medical units.

He was slowly shuffling over to Kiomuts to prevent the young Lieutenant from murdering the strangers. It was pretty obvious to him how an engagement would play out. There were only three of them after all, two of them women at that, and 3rd Company had fifty battle hardened veterans.

He hoped that none of the soldiers would pull the trigger and that everyone would wait for an order, even though they were all on edge as they could hear the fighting in the distance.

"No way these guys are Ossetian," Telds whispered to Kiomuts.

"Why are you so sure about that," Kiomuts asked back quietly, without moving his eyes off the strangers.

Telds gave Kiomuts a careful look.

"There is now way Ossetians would let women to the frontline, much less let them carry guns!"

"I'm not so sure," Kiomuts whispered back.

He was holding his sword with sweaty fingers, while he was staring at the strangers. He had always thought of himself as someone who could see what was going on behind someone's eyes. Unluckily, these people were at least 100 feet away from him and there was no way for him to look into their eyes from that distance.

He stared at them for another minute, then sighed and slowly lowered his sword before putting it back into its scabbard. He looked at Telds nervously, before he took a step forward and yelled.

"Hey! Make yourself known! You are violating the borders of the Free State of Andona!" He nervously licked his lips as he looked at them expectantly and waited for a reply. "Do they even understand us," he remarked, more to himself than to Telds, who had stepped up behind him.

"If I had to guess. No, sir," Telds replied as he looked at them. They appeared to be looking at each other in confusion.

Joana had no idea what the tall local was yelling at her. She glanced at Rose, but her face was as blank as her own. "Fantastic," she mumbled to herself. Although the man, she was pretty sure that he was a soldier, had put down his sword, the other mens guns pointed at her didn't exactly fill her with confidence that this could be resolved without bloodshed.