The Vixen War Bride

by Thomas Doscher

“Uh huh,” he said. “So how come Yasuren and all the other Va’Shen call me ‘Aridesho?’” he asked.

  Patricia didn’t answer immediately. Finally, she cleared her throat nervously. “I suppose it could be a difference in dialect or that they haven’t settled on a title for you or…”

  “Or you just don’t know,” he finished for her.

  “Or I just don’t know,” she finished. “Want me to ask her?”

  He shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t matter in the end. As long as one word or the other doesn’t mean ‘asshole.’” He shrugged again. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Before the conversation could go any further, Shinzato appeared up ahead on the path and waved to them. “Sir! You’re gonna want to see this!”

  “Damn,” Ben hissed. “Hold them here!” he shot to Patricia before darting down the path toward the other Ranger.

  Patricia turned and held her hands up to the Va’Shen. she called to them.

  Ben joined Shinzato and found the other man grinning, making Ben want to punch the Ranger in the mouth for scaring him.

  “What’ve you got?” he demanded.

  “You’re gonna love this,” Shinzato told him, turning and hustling back down the path. Ben followed, and a few minutes later broke out of the tree-line into the clearing where they had left the trucks and Saber Team.

  The captain stopped and blinked, convinced he was seeing double. Instead of the eight trucks he had left there, he was now staring at at least twenty.

  “What the…”

  Ramirez, speaking to the Saber Team leader and another man wearing a uniform like his but with a few slight differences, caught sight of him and waved, motioning the other two men to follow him as he made his way to Ben.

  As they approached, Ben sized up the new addition, seeing that the camouflage pattern on his uniform was identical to his, but that the patches and lettering were colored a spice brown instead of black, and his stripes looked to him as if they were upside down. The Ranger did a double take, wondering what a U.S. Air Force NCO was doing out here.

  The Saber Team lead, Sergeant MacDonald, and the airman saluted Ben, and he quickly returned it.

  “Good to see you, Sir,” MacDonald told him.

  “You too, Jed,” Ben returned. He reached out to shake the airman’s hand and introduce himself. “Long way from the nearest runway, aren’t you, Sergeant?”

  The airman, perhaps about thirty years old and rail thin, shook his hand and smiled under his patrol cap. “Tech Sergeant Ballard, Sir. Seven-Forty-Fifth Expeditionary Logistics Readiness Squadron.”

  Ramirez broke in, seeing that his commander wasn’t going to last much longer without a proper explanation. “Chief Warren thought we could use a little help, and Sergeant Ballard’s convoy had stopped in for a refuel, so he arranged for a little extra ground transportation.”

  Ben smiled. “No kidding. Got Shanghai’d, huh?” he asked the airman. “Won’t that throw off your schedule?”

  Ballard rolled his eyes. “Sir, we’re Air Force. It’s not like we’re in a hurry to go back to work,” he joked. “Besides, the trucks were empty and we’re not due back at Jamieson for another couple of days. Senior Chief said you might be in trouble, so me and the guys thought we’d lend you a hand.”

  “Well, it’s appreciated,” Ben said, shaking the man’s hand again.

  “Gonna make moving them all a lot easier,” Ramirez said.

  “No joke,” Ben replied. Even with twenty trucks, it would still take a few trips, but it was still a lot better than trying to move them all with just eight. Remembering the Va’Shen, he turned back to Shinzato. “Head back up the path and let LT know they can come down.” Shinzato nodded and took off down the path again.

  He turned back to the three NCOs. “How did things go here?” he asked MacDonald.

  “Quiet,” he said. “Just camping and worried about you. You?”

  Ben didn’t answer. He just patted the man on the back and let out a breath.

  Like Ben, Alacea was surprised when she walked from the mouth of the path and saw the new trucks and people. She didn’t dwell on it long before Kastia appeared next to her, taking in the sight of the vehicles herself. Several Rangers were waving to the Va’Shen as they exited the forest, signaling them to come to the trucks.

  Kastia asked her.

  Alacea explained.

  Kastia’s ears flattened at the warning. she pointed out.

  The healer stepped away, toward the closest truck, and Alacea followed. Looking at the vehicles side-by-side she sensed they were different somehow, but couldn’t immediately place how. Her ears stood straight as it finally dawned on her. The new trucks had an extra wooden board running along the side where the benches met the seatbacks. The trucks they had brought with them had had those boards removed, leaving ample room for Va’Shen passengers’ tails. She turned and caught sight of Ramirez directing Va’Shen onto the old trucks and having them load their bags on the new ones.

  Her ears twitched at the gesture, but it troubled her at the same time and not for the first time either. How could a race reviled by her people for four thousand years as being the utter height of cruelty, evil and viciousness be capable of thinking of such things? Could Hestean be right? Could four thousand years really change a race that much?

  She had been certain that her first encounter with the Dark Ones would end with her death.

  She had been wrong.

  She had been certain that her new Tesho would assert his control of her community through the cruel violation of her virtue.

  That had never happened.

  She had been certain she would be caged like an animal.

  They had treated her with respect and dignity.

  Nothing… literally nothing… she had been told had come to pass.

  In her mind that left three possibilities.

  First, that the Dark Ones were deliberately acting like this for some dark purpose unknown to her, but what that purpose could possibly be eluded her. Her world had surrendered. The Great Ones had abandoned them. Their communities were theirs to plunder just as they had thousands of years ago. What would such an act gain them?

  Second, that Hestean’s hypothesis was correct and that through the course of thousands of years, the Dark Ones had mellowed into a gentler, kinder race. But if that were true, why had they invaded the Great Ones’ worlds and occupied them in the first place?

  Third, and possibly the most alarming possibility…

  What if they were not the Dark Ones at all?

  Alacea froze mid-step, her foot still an inch from the ground as that last thought raced through her mind.

  If they are not the Dark Ones… Then why was there a war?

 

  She shook herself from her thoughts as the call pulled her attention. Pavastea was waving to her from the back of one of the modified trucks, Hestean and several other Mikorin sitting with her, their tails hanging from either side of the vehicle.

 

  The priestess took a breath and mentally shelved her thoughts on the Dark Ones for another time. For now, she had to make sure her people arrived back at Pelle safely.

  She could consider the rest of it later.

  Chapter 13

  Without net, radio or even a local newspaper, information flowed through the area of operations at a snail’s pace. It was for that reason that, rather than ride back in the Light Tactical Vehicle had used to drive here, Ben opted to ride in the command seat of Tech Sergeant Ballard’s truck. Unlike most of the other soldiers stationed in Forward Operating Bases and outposts throughout Pelle, Ballard and his airmen travelled frequently and further afield than anyone else and so had picked up on more current events on the continent than anyone. Ben was
determined to leverage this rare news source during the ride back to base.

  “It depends where you are,” Ballard told him as he spun the wheel of his truck, loaded with Va’Shen luggage, to follow the truck ahead of him. “The further north you go, the worse it gets.”

  “Why’s that?” Patricia asked from the back seat, peering out the windshield from around the gunner’s legs.

  Ballard turned his head to answer her. “The nukes. Most places down south like here didn’t see much action, but up there it was Armageddon.” He turned back to pay attention to the road. “Don’t get me wrong,” he continued. “The furries in the south aren’t fans either. Every so often you’ll hear a thunk where they throw rocks at the truck or stop to refuel and find arrows sticking in the sides, but the furries up north…” He shook his head. “Their hate is righteous.”

  “Command said the Koreans and Slovenians were having problems,” Ben supplied.

  “’Problems,’ Sir, is what we in the Air Force refer to as a ‘gentle euphemism,’” Ballard told him. “Guys in the northern Forward Operating Bases don’t dare leave the base in anything smaller than squads. Except for the U.S. sector up there. Run by a Major Keyes. That place is pretty pacified. Everywhere else is the wild west.”

  “Attacks?” Ramirez asked from the other back seat.

  Ballard nodded. “The worst are the ones with the laser guns. ‘Up-armored’ doesn’t mean shit to them. Saw one smash through three inches of steel plate, go through the engine block, and then through another three inches of steel and hit a guy on the other side.”

  “Damn,” Patricia muttered. Warren had told her about the futility of wearing body armor against the Va’Shen, but to hear it described like this was terrifying.

  “Must be why Big Army never sent us any tanks,” Ramirez hypothesized. “Big, slow and there’s no point to them if they can’t stop a round. They’re just big coffins that are super expensive to move.”

  Ben nodded in agreement.

  Ballard continued telling war stories. “Driving out of FOB Bastogne up north, we drive down this road that led between two hills. Corner of my eye, I see a bunch of shiny balls, like baseballs, rolling down the hill at the truck in front of me. Flash of light, I close my eyes for a second, and they hit the truck in front of me. Whole thing shattered into pieces no bigger than my finger. We couldn’t tell what was truck and what was human.”

  “Glassers are a bitch,” Ramirez remarked coldly. The Rangers’ experiences with the Va’Shen hand grenades were the stuff of nightmares, and every soldier who had encountered them once lived in fear of them for the rest of their lives.

  “All we could do was hit the gas and hope they were out,” Ballard said. He trailed off and didn’t say anything else for several minutes.

  The truck’s cab was quiet for awhile, but finally Ballard offered them a smile again. “But driving down south ain’t so bad. You still gotta be careful, though.” He looked over at Ben. “Truth be told, Sir, when the Chief asked us to go give you a hand, I was pretty sure we’d be hauling back bodies, not luggage.”

  “Whose bodies?” Ramirez asked.

  “Yours,” Ballard replied instantly. “No offense.”

  “Well,” Ben said behind an unsteady breath. “We’re hoping it won’t be like all that here,” he said. Despite the reassuring words, Ballard’s report shook him. It sounded like half the continent was facing an insurrection, and he knew for a fact the Army and the U.S. government was not going to be up for fighting a counterinsurgency campaign on a planet-wide scale.

  He could say he was “hoping” it wouldn’t be like that with his area, but hope, as a strategy, sucked. Keeping things under wraps in Sector 13 would take work, hard work, and a willingness to take risks far from the watchful eye of command. Gibson mentally reviewed his actions so far and found them a mix of good and bad. He may have been too short-tempered with Kasshas, for example.

  Under his own critical eye, he concluded that, so far, Alacea had been worth her weight in gold. He tried to imagine what actions he would have taken to find the Va’Shen villagers on his own if the fox priestess had not thrown open that door to Kasshas’s office a week ago. The only actions he could think of ran the full spectrum from bad to worse.

  It was obvious to him that having a liaison like her could make a world of difference. He’d have to work harder to establish a closer working relationship with her.

  Yasuren, too, seemed reasonable or at least practical. When faced with cold reality she hadn’t tried to argue herself into continuing to resist. As an advisor for Kasshas, Ben thought Yasuren could be an agreeable influence on the chieftain.

  Bao Sen appeared to be the closest thing the Va’Shen here had to a militant authority figure. He wondered if every village was guarded or policed by a group of armed vixens or if that had come about for other reasons.

  All in all, Ben thought he had been dealt a decent hand. All he had to do now was continue to draw good cards.

  Easier said than done.

  Alacea tried to keep her hair under control as the wind created by the truck’s movement down the road constantly threatened to whip the villager sitting to her right. Keeping a careful hold of it, she watched the scenery go by and rubbed her nose, made itchy by the foul stench of exhaust that came off the truck in front of them. On the way to the hills, she had ridden in the front vehicle and so did not have to endure the smell before. She wondered how the Dark Ones put up with it.

  she heard from her right. She turned her head and found Pavastea looking down at the floor, her ears drooping in concern.

  The Na’Sha’s ears flattened. They had all asked this question before and had heard the answer numerous times, but here, so near the end of their journey, the concerns came rushing back even more potent than before. It was easy for the Dark Ones to promise they’d let them go back before they had them corralled in their vehicles, and even somewhat easy for the Va’Shen to believe. Now that reality was within a few eben and getting closer by the second, the fear had returned.

  Alacea assured her.

  She felt Pavastea grip her hand tightly. she asked.

  Alacea squeezed her hand.

  The young songstress closed her eyes, but the tips of her ears slowly moved skyward as Alacea’s promise reassured her.

  Closer to the front of the truck, Bao Sen and Yasuren spoke to one another as quietly as the wind would let them, as if there were Dark Ones listening to their every word.

  Bao Sen was telling her.

  Yasuren contemplated the Huntress’s words. Neither of them were soldiers, but it seemed like a sound enough plan to her in the event the vehicles stopped in front of a line of cages.

  she stressed to Bao Sen.

  The Huntress responded with an affirmative, and Yasuren took a breath of stinking air. It was her hope that Alacea’s faith was not misplaced. She wanted nothing more than to climb down from this vehicle and run to her Tesho, to sleep in her own den and eat fresh food and know that her community was safe.

  But these were the Dark Ones. And a Dark One who did not openly display his cruelty might just be a stroke of incredible luck… or he could simply be a Dark One who was much better at subterfuge than the average alien invader.

  Either way, her hope was hers. It was not a strong enough thing on which to base a strategy.

  a Va’Shen cried from down the bench. The rest of the Va’Shen craned their heads around to look.

  a villager near Yasuren noted. She seemed almost disappointed, as if she would have preferred to return to
smoking piles of rubble. In a way, Yasuren sympathized. She had expected smoking piles of rubble. Smoking piles of rubble would make sense to her. The sight of intact buildings and grazing animals just made things seem more suspicious.

  The approaching gate and newly constructed watchtower of Forward Operating Base Leonard gave them something new to look at and digest. As one, the vehicles stopped for a moment as the red and white striped wooden gate raised, and then they were moving again to the center of the collection of pre-fabricated buildings.

  For the others, it was all new and strange, but for Alacea, who had lived in the camp for a short time, it was a relief. The end of the journey was near, and so far there were none of the indications of a last-second trap. Some Dark Ones milled about and watched the vehicles enter the center of camp, but no one raised a weapon or approached them.

  They almost seemed afraid, or at the very least wary of the Va’Shen’s arrival.

  Bao Sen looked about and noted the positions of armed Dark Ones like a hunter looking for the best-looking meat among a herd of datsu. She knew the other huntresses were doing the same. She looked up and found a Dark One looking down at them from the watchtower, leaning casually over the railing, his larger, black weapon pointed outward. It was a gross miscalculation, and Bao Sen promised to make the most of it by shooting him first before he could bring it to bear.

  The doors of the various vehicles opened, and the Dark One’s leader approached their truck.

  Bao Sen quickly amended her plan. She would shoot the leader, then she would shoot the sentry. As close as he was, she might be the best chance they had of decapitating their leadership from the outset.

  The leader waved to some of the Dark One stragglers looking on.

  “Hustle up! Give us a hand here!” he called.

  The order itself was gibberish to the Huntress, but the reaction of the soldiers, their hurrying toward them, prompted Bao Sen to grasp her rifle as inconspicuously as she could.

  Ben pointed at the trucks holding the Va’Shen luggage. “Start offloading the cargo.” He undid the latch of the truck and pulled the gate down. Holding up a hand to the first vixen, he gestured with the other to come down.