Bloch had actually expected that condition. Special Force 01 was a very close community—they watched out for each other. The term “brother soldier” wasn’t just a phrase to them. The Council had been a little shocked that he considered it prudent the Captains have veto power over family selection. But then, that Council had not personally seen these teenaged soldiers destroy battleships and decimate entire battle groups.
“Agreed.”
Savar visibly relaxed as he exchanged a quick look with his brother Captains. Bloch was sure that words were being exchanged as well, he just couldn’t hear them. The consensus must have gone in his favor as Savar finally nodded firmly. “Admiral Bloch, we are yours to command.”
Chapter One
Rys walked into the base’s main conference room to discover that he was, as usual, the first to arrive. It had become something of an inside joke among the 01—Rys was always ten minutes early. Everyone else was usually ten minutes late. Ah, well. Giving a mental shrug, he took a look around the room and let the glass door close behind him. It looked like every other conference room in the galaxy — long, rectangular table in the middle surrounded by cushy chairs, a projector’s screen dominating one wall, with a small tech’s booth lurking in a back corner. Nothing pretentious.
He instinctively chose a back corner chair so that he could see the whole room. Since he had ten minutes anyway, he mentally called up the computer sitting on the tech table and started uploading maps and data sheets into the system. The task was one he’d done a hundred times before and so it didn’t demand his full attention. A part of his mind started to drift.
Two weeks he’d been on Bijordan and still it felt…alien. The vastness of the horizon alone always surprised him. Despite this being his “home” planet, no one from Fourth Colony had set foot here in well over two hundred years. Rys couldn’t help but wonder what it would have been like to grow up with so much open space. Heaven knew, Fourth Colony was many things but spacious didn’t even make the list.
Two hundred years ago, it had started as a mining facility. Claiming a small moon outside of the Kaelberer planet, the miners had found a rich deposit of various metals. The facility had been built by a wealthy conglomerate and some bureaucratic paper-pusher had imaginatively named the five facilities by the order in which they’d been built. Fourth Colony was the only one that had a rich enough supply of material to actually expand and become a proper colony. The population started growing as the miners, doctors, merchants, and other colonists started families. There’d been talk of even more expansion to accommodate the rising generations until Nova had struck.
In retrospect, Rys couldn’t help but wonder why no one had seen the war coming. Nova had always been a restless neighbor, more demanding than anyone else on Fourth’s resources. Half the metals that Fourth mined were used solely to build spaceships. Hadn’t anyone thought that Nova couldn’t be using that material solely for merchant or pleasure ships?
Well, it was a moot point now. Nova had done its damage. They’d just charged in and tried to snatch Fourth Colony without warning ten years ago. If not for the brilliance of a few techs and their quick work rigging an impenetrable shield, Nova likely would have succeeded. At that point, Fourth had possessed no military to speak of. What use would miners have for a military? The most they had at that time was a squadron of ship guards and a local police garrison.
The Fourth leaders had frantically sent out a call for help. Only Bijordan had responded. Bijordan, unfortunately, had been caught off-guard like everyone else by the viciousness and persistence of Nova’s attack. Their military didn’t have the resources to be deployed on an intergalactic war and it had taken precious time to build up a space fleet large enough to subdue Nova’s forces.
In fact, it had taken ten long years and too many battles for Bijordan and Fourth’s forces to beat Nova back into their own territory. As of a month ago, Nova had officially lost the war, but Rys didn’t have any confidence it would hold. In fact, no one in the Fourth or Bijordan governments believed Nova’s now peaceful attitude.
Negotiations on space jurisdictions and boundaries had been going on since the mid-part of last week. Rys had watched most of it, in between being shipped from one place to another, and he frankly didn’t like what he saw. Nova’s Ambassador was deploying some very sophisticated delaying tactics in the talks. Rys didn’t see any sign that Nova had changed their minds about having Fourth Colony.
Rys blew out a breath and sat back in his chair, the faux leather making a soft whooshing sound as he did so. He had mixed feelings about this whole business. The trigger happy part of him really wanted to just go destroy a few hundred Novan warships so that they wouldn’t have the resources to cause any more trouble. Hmm. Not a bad thought, that.
I wonder how well that would fly with everyone else…?
The door made a soft click as it was pushed open. Rys waved his fingers in greeting as Aaron and Steve walked in. “Where’s the other two?”
“Late,” Aaron responded with a roll of the eyes.
“Cute receptionist,” Steve explained with a shake of the head as he sat toward the head of the table.
“Ah.” Rys didn’t need further explanation. For some reason, Fourth had a lower female population than male, which made it hard to find a girl to flirt with that wasn’t already taken in some way. The military men had it harder as they were deployed most of the time, and the few women in the military with them were strictly off-limits. To find an attractive girl near their ages that they were allowed to hit on was a novelty. From what Rys had seen, most of the women on Bijordan were rather attractive, so he’d thought that the novelty would have worn off some by now. Apparently not.
Aaron sank into the chair directly across from Rys. “So you two have been watching the negotiations, right?”
“Yes,” Steve confirmed with a sour expression on his face. “That Nova Ambassador is making up whole new delaying techniques.”
“But
why
?” Rys groaned, lifting both hands to rub at his temples. “That’s what I want to know.”
“Bro, that’s what we
all
want to know,” Aaron pointed out. “Even our superior officers have no clue. Hence why we got this assignment.”
“We got the assignment because we’re good at infiltration and intelligence gathering,” Rys corrected dryly.
“I thought we got the assignment because we’re trying to prove we can play nice planetside so that Bijordan will offer us full citizenship,” Steve drawled.
“Yeah, that too.” Aaron shook his head, eyes tight and a forced smile on his face. “It’s not like we can go home, right? That last battle basically blew the place to smithereens.”
Rys flinched at the reminder. The last battle had started just as they’d been evacuating Fourth Colony’s citizens to Bijordan. It had taken every trick the 01 could pull to prevent Nova from simply blasting the place silly while they still had shuttles on the ground. Even with all they could do, they’d lost four shuttles.
Their officers had sensibly chosen to protect the people and not the colony, and so all of the fleet had followed the civilian shuttles in retreat. From the holovid screen on board Admiral Bloch’s flagship, Rys had watched as his home had been blown into little bits of shrapnel.
Rumor had it that they were going to rebuild the colony, but with Nova acting the way they were now…Rys simply couldn’t see it happening.
Miles and Duane managed to tear themselves away from true love somehow and chose to join their fellow captains at that point. Rys took one look at the glum expression on Duane’s face and the smug one on Miles’s and didn’t bother to ask who’d managed to get the girl’s number.
“Alright, now that we’re all here, how should we tackle this?”
Someone mentally tapped into the computer and brought up the scaled version of Bijordan’s map. Duane and Miles took a seat, swiveling around to face the projection screen. Aaron pointed a finger at it. “Right now, we simply don’t know enough to even make educated guesses. Nova came at us with brute force and only the barest attempt to gather intel first. This time, they’re clearly being sneakier about it.”
“Even an old spacehand will learn new tricks,” Steve sighed. “But you’re right. I’ve been seeing a lot of Novan merchantmen, tourists, and diplomats ever since I came planetside. They could be covers for intel ops, but then again…they could be just normal citizens. I don’t know what sort of traffic is normal and what isn’t.”
“Bijordan and Nova have always done trade and such, at least before the war,” Duane pointed out. “But even that’s not a good baseline. With the war over, the amount of traffic we’re seeing could just be a reaction to a ten year trade moratorium.”
“So, in other words, we’re going to have to spend a few weeks, possibly even months, gathering intel before we can properly analyze it,” Rys concluded. Bloch’s insistence that they become foster children as part of their cover suddenly made much more sense. Not that Rys doubted for a moment that the Admiral had ulterior motives for their cover story.
Miles gave him a glum nod. “That’s about the size of it. We’re going to have to be smart about dividing this up. Otherwise it will be too much information for any one team to process. So what should we focus on? Any government facilities?”
“That,” Aaron agreed with a judicious look at the map, “and trading centers.”
“Hospitals,” Steve added.
Rys winced at the idea. Actually, taking the hospitals out of commission and sending the population into mass panic sounded
exactly
like something Nova would do. “Ship ports.”
“Those too,” Aaron agreed. “Alright, for now, let’s focus on those. If we see something else that strikes us as a good target, we’ll add it onto the watch list. Let’s see…we’ve got seven major cities…”
“But two of those cities are within a short distance from each other,” Miles observed. “You could actually base one team at a midpoint and have them cover both cities.”
“I volunteer Rys’s team to be one of those~!” Miles gave him a feral smile of evil pleasure.
“Why me?!” Rys objected.
“Because you have Gremlin.”
Rys opened his mouth to protest and found that he couldn’t think of a good excuse. Gremlin was a monster when it came to processing information and hacking computers. He probably could handle the data stream of two cities. Rys gave a forlorn sigh.
There are obviously some major cons to having a computer genius on my team…
“Alright, we’ll take it. But that still leaves the other two.”
“Miles gets it,” Duane assured him easily.
Miles let out an indignant squawk and snapped around to give Duane an evil glare.
“He who volunteers others
is
volunteered,” Duane countered, shaking his finger playfully. “Weren’t you paying attention when Sarge taught you that?”
“Obviously not,” Aaron observed, already marking the map with the team’s designated territories. “Alright, moving on…Anyone care about which cities they get? No? Good, I’ll arbitrarily decide.”
While Aaron marked the map, Rys thought of a good way to coordinate all the information gathering they would be doing. “I vote that once a month we all get together and share what intel we’re gathering. A larger, more overall pattern might develop that way.”
“Good plan,” Miles approved. “Say, the first weekend of every month?”
Everyone either nodded or shrugged in assent. Rys pulled up a mental calendar and set an alarm for that.
With the assignments doled out and the schedule set, Rys should have been out of his chair and moving, but he found himself oddly reluctant to do so. It took a moment for him to realize why: mission parameters he understood. But this cover of being a ‘normal high school student’ could not have been more foreign to him if his superior had ordered him to blend in with dancing bears. Finding good foster homes for himself and his team didn’t seem like that easy of a task either.
Rys had this depressing notion that figuring out what Nova had planned was going to be the
easy
part of this mission.
Chapter Two
Rys stood by the car for a moment and took a long, appraising look at the two story house belonging to Admiral Bloch. He did a mental slap on the back of his head.
Jeremy
, blast it, he
had
to start thinking more like a civilian now! The home was located in a quiet, upper-middle class neighborhood, with white siding and used brick. The yard was well landscaped, although a little cluttered at present with all sorts of toys, ranging from bikes to toy guns. It was a clear pronouncement that this was a home with children, lots of children. Rys had expected that. Jeremy and his wife Sara were the parents of five children, ranging in ages from eight to sixteen. In that age category, toys and bicycles were simply a fact of life.
Or so other soldiers, who were also parents, had informed him.
It had taken three days of tedious work and enough reading to put some serious strain on his eyes, but Rys had finally managed to match up his men with good families and homes. It shouldn’t have been so difficult to find the right homes for his three lieutenants, but he wanted the absolute best for them. The best took considerable more digging and effort to find, but after all they had been through together, they were well worth it.
At the end of those three days, he had been caught off-guard and a little humbled when Admiral Bloch—
Jeremy
—had personally suggested that Rys come live with him. The man had been so persuasive in his genuine desire to host Rys that Rys had agreed without really thinking about it.
He still wasn’t certain this was a good idea.
For Guardian’s sake, there were multiple
children
in there! He had no clue how to interact with children. Drawing on his own childhood for examples as a guideline would be of absolutely no use to him. He’d been raised in a military academy since he was eight years old. The Academy had accepted him when his parents died in an accident, leaving him orphaned. He was an only child, so the thought of siblings, outside of the military team, was a foreign concept and frankly a little unsettling.