But Autumn—Last of Autumn—I was forcing myself to use her proper name given the discomfort and embarrassment my familiarizing of it had caused her—Last of Autumn moved without a sound. None. She made the quiet scouts sound like elephants trampling through dead grass. And she was wearing armor to boot. That silvery fine mesh tunic beneath her forest-green cloak. There were times when I moved forward, following Sergeant Hardt’s form in the gray-green glow of our precious night vision—the scouts carried rechargeable and solar chargers, but there was still a shortage—when I couldn’t hear her at all and I had to look back to see if we’d somehow left her behind. Instead I would find she’d moved ahead of me without me even noticing her. She could move incredibly fast. And her cloak… at times in the night vision it was like some type of active camouflage system that adjusted to the viewer’s conditions to blend her into the background and make her near invisible. You had to look hard to find her. At one halt, while Sergeant Hardt and the point man were checking the top of a hill and the gully below we were about to descend into, I took off my NVGs to let my eyes acclimatize to human night vision, and I tried to find her where I’d just seen her with electronic-assisted night vision.
Nothing.
She was flat-out invisible in the dark night under the stars in the shadows along the silent hills.
And then she was right next to me and whispering in Shadow Cant.
“Tell… Sergeant Hardt… circle. Close… to me.”
She was carrying a dark ashwood bow and a quiver full of silver-feathered arrows she’d taken off her horse from the bare equipment she’d packed.
“Defensive?” I wanted to clarify what she needed so I could relay to Hard, who was forward and coming back now, alerting us we’d be ready to move shortly. Sergeant Thor was near the top of the hill on overwatch with his rifle.
“To… to…” She was searching for the right word and not finding it. “To… inform. No… to illuminate your… fellowship.”
Ah. She wanted to tell us something. Explain something. But even as I connected with Sergeant Hardt I thought to myself that she could just tell me and then I could relay to everyone. Maybe she didn’t understand the concept of our radio communication.
I relayed, and Hardt came in to link up with her. Shrinking the scouts into a tight patrol circle and getting close. A moment later they were all there with Sergeant Thor, hunching his way down through the bracken and dead tall grass along the side of the hill. Rifle upright and squatting down next to Hardt, me, and Autumn.
I nodded to her that we were all here and she could proceed with what she needed to tell us.
And then I translated what she told us. Short version: She’d figured out that our “magic” for seeing in the dark wasn’t that good. According to her. Also, she could tell by our whispers that we were communicating in what she called some kind of magic “shadow speech” all our own. Like hers, but different. Apparently, there were correlations in this world. Not radio. But something. She understood we were communicating.
Then she said, “Can… make better with… I can.” She stopped and found the right words she needed. “Hunters’ Fellowship.”
She asked us to take off our night vision and if she might proceed with what she called, “make better.”
Sergeant Hardt sighed audibly, clearly annoyed by the superstitious indig jibber-jabber he would now be forced to endure. He knew she was a VIP and that Captain Knife Hand had given her some level of authority. So, best to play along.
She was kneeling as we flipped up our NVGs to show we were complying.
“Okay, Talker… what next?” spat Hardt bitterly with no small amount of impatience. “Clock’s burning and we need to stay ahead of the follow-on teams.”
“They’re ready,” I told Autumn. “Make better now.”
I had no idea what make better meant and I was pretty sure my elf-pidgin-patois sounded stupid to the Rangers. And… also I had a feeling it was all about to get very weird.
She closed her eyes and I could see her full lips mumbling something in the moonlight under the stars. Did I mention she was exotically beautiful like nothing and no one I had ever seen before? Not in a while, at least, right? She just whispered for a long moment, swaying in a circle, and then raised up her hands, which… started to glow a soft blue.
Yup.
Magic stuff.
The Rangers watched in amazemed disbelief as she opened her clenched fists and little ghostly blue fireflies fled from her palms and began to circle around all of us, raining down…
I could feel Sergeant Hardt dying inside as he was forced to have…
Fairy dust.
Rain down on him.
Never have I seen someone look so utterly miserable. To him this was a violation of noise and light discipline of the highest order. Under normal, non-magical circumstances, something like this would be punishable by having the rest of the scout team beat me into unconsciousness.
I mean… what else do you want me to call it? It was Tinkerbell-type fairy dust. It was crazy. And hauntingly beautiful at the same time. Of all the things I’d lived to see in my very short life, which probably wasn’t going to last much longer, it was one of the coolest things that had ever happened to me. That was the real magic. The wonder of it. It was like gossamer moonlight made real, and it was something special. Something we never would have experienced when the world wasn’t ruined. Something wonderful found in the ashes of all that was lost to us. Ghostly blue fairy dust that floated over and around all of us. Bippity boppity boo.
And the crescent moon resting in the inky sky suddenly spiked its luminary output to that of straight-up noon on the brightest day of the year.
We. Could. See. Like. Never. Before.
Everything.
As clear as day and far better than our regular unassisted or even assisted eyes ever could.
I’ve never done psychotropic drugs or any other hallucinogenic, but I’m willing to bet the experience was similar. Our eyes were pinned wide open and relaxed at the same time. When I looked at Hardt and Thor, their pupils were huge. As in yuuuuge. Everyone was staring about in amazement. Every detail, texture, surface… all of it was revealed in layers we’d never thought possible. Our gray-green night vision was now replaced by something the US Army and DARPA would’ve classified as sixth-generation night vision in white phosphorescence.
The kind of boot-strapped alien tech only Delta got to use, if you believed the crazier conspiracy theories.
But way trippier.
I looked downslope past the horse and was stunned to find my vision telescoping way down toward the river, which was completely out of sight with normal vision. I found myself looking at the faces of the Rangers coming up from the river and felt as though I could reach out and touch them.
Great distances could suddenly be focused up close and personal.
It took a moment to figure it all out. A real freak-out, fall-off-the-edge-of-the-universe moment when none of it felt comfortable. But then it settled down, and a supreme sense of calm came out of nowhere and washed over us. I’d been sweating all through the hump up the hill and then freezing cold as the sweat dried and we waited for Hard and the point man to recon our next movement. It was gonna be like that all night. Now? Now I felt warm. Comfortable. Blissed out. But still completely aware of every sound for miles around us. My brain was processing it all like I was one with the Force or something. That Matrix moment where he suddenly knows kung fu.
Pretty cool, huh?
Then everyone in the scout team could hear everyone else’s thoughts.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Yeah. It was pretty freaky at first to hear everyone in the scout team’s thoughts. But quickly we got it sorted and then it was kind of cool after that. It wasn’t like hearing each other’s exact thoughts. But you could tell whose gear was rubbing them raw or who needed to
piss. Sergeant Hardt found out about his nickname and was none too pleased with that. He also found out who hated him. Which was pretty much everyone. Big surprise. He replied with, “I hate all of you twice as much as what you think you call hate.”
The promise of severe retribution at a later date was unspoken, but understood. Thankfully I was just a guest in the scout section. Hopefully I would avoid the doom of white line drills whenever we got the next break from running for our lives and shooting everything.
Hardt did hear me snort. It just escaped as I marveled at the Kurtz levels of contempt he was able to muster. So even if I did escape retribution, I was pretty sure Sergeant Kurtz would be informed and asked to PT me appropriately and extensively once we didn’t need to fight, or run, for our lives again. But that was all down the road. We might all get killed before that. So I had that going for me.
Once we got it all settled on how to communicate with our new Elven Mind Meld Last of Autumn whammied us with, we got back underway with our new incredible night-vision toy. The elf called it “Moon Vision.”
Hearing each other’s thoughts quickly demonstrated its tactical benefit in that you received a weird sort of background noise of the senses of anyone you were communicating with via thoughts. In other words, you could see in your mind’s eye, while still using your new regular awesome vision, exactly what the other person you were thinking at was seeing. And hearing. And of course thinking. For scouts working with subvocal throat mikes, this was awesome.
And it came in handy pretty quickly.
During their route recon, Sergeant Hardt and the point spotted a patrol of orcs who’d been following the crevices between the hills. They’d come up the gully we were just about to make a linear crossing of. We had company, and we all saw it ourselves as we watched a kind of fantastic replay of Sergeant Hardt’s memory. There were eight orcs filing along the gully, trying to get ahead of us and cut us off with an ambush. Skirmisher types. Leather armor, horns, hunting bows. Small daggers. They ran like a pack of wolves, loping after unseen prey. There was something tribal and primal about them, and it was both fascinating and disturbing to watch. At least it was for me. Instantly every other Ranger’s thoughts, via Elven Mind Meld, centered on killing them. Badly.
These orcs were even uglier in the awesomeness of Moon Vision. There was a tall stand of willowy trees down there in the gully between the two foothills, and the orcs had gone into its dark clutch and hadn’t come out. So most likely they were still down there waiting for some escaping squad to come wandering through their ambush.
“Captain says not to engage,” Sergeant Hardt spoke in our minds, quickly getting the hang of the Elven Mind Meld’s mental communication features. “But as I see it, we have to cross on to the next section of the ridgeline over there.”
I translated for Autumn. She didn’t need it. Somehow the Hunters’ Fellowship Mind Meld thing made it clear to her the parameters of our mission and what Hardt was trying to express. It seemed to transcend language for the time being. In return her thoughts came back as pictures, not so much as words. Kinda makes me wonder why she didn’t just start with this back at the camp instead of us fumbling to find some common language. Maybe the Moon Vision only comes after they decide you’re all right.
At any rate, I could see her thoughts now. Unfortunately, they didn’t involve me in any romantically thrilling way. In short, she was up for killing the orcs with her bow.
We saw the picture of her firing the weapon. Putting arrows right through the throats of the awful orcs as she advanced downslope and stormed their ambush from the flank. Then, in her version of how she wanted us to conduct the assault, she identified a specific caution for us. The skirmisher-hunter types we’d seen in Hardt’s communication of events, each of them carried a crude ram’s horn on their belts. Through pictures she clearly indicated that if we attacked, it was crucial we hit them all at once as a group before they could sound their horns to alert nearby enemy units.
Her mind made it clear this was a real possibility. The orcs had crossed onto the island and found their prey gone. Now this dark force was fanning out in every direction, trying to hunt us down and destroy us. First one to find us would sound the alert. Then the rest would swarm en masse from every direction of the compass toward it and we’d be caught out in the open with no defenses to get behind. In her mind I saw the wide sweep of the whole river valley with the island at the center, with something akin to sonic pulses overlaid to indicate the alerting horns calling to one another. I saw a version of the sand table we’d been working on, but of a type only in her mind. Her fantasy version laid out like some ancient general’s maps on a campaign table. Something from the age of Roman legions and Alexander the Great. With all kinds of symbols and runes that indicated different types of enemy units to her.
Orc Heavy Infantry.
Scout Infantry.
Goblin Army.
Orc Archers.
Trolls and giants forming a kind of heavy artillery force that also had the capability to transform to assaulters.
The symbiosis she had created with her mind and ours translated these things for us to understand. And there were other things she was trying to tell us that our minds could not comprehend. Not as a whole. But I sensed there were other wizards, witches, and dark sorcerers in play for the other side. Brought in to annihilate us once we were pinned.
They were all to our west on the other side of the river, hunting in the dark under the thin moonlight. Crazy, huh?
If any one enemy unit alerted the rest of the hunting horde, then those Uroo Uroo pulses would erupt all along the twisting river valley in the night. They would triangulate and eliminate us quickly.
“Okay, so if we’re gonna do this,” I heard Hardt say, as if in a trance, “then we’re gonna have to do this silent and violent. Because if I read you right, Last of Autumn, there’s no way around this group down there hiding in the trees in the gully.”
We heard her message in our minds a second later. It was a message without words, but somehow it was still her voice, and it was crystal calm and clear in our heads.
“True.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
In the night under the stars, the wedge of Rangers moved low and slow through the tall dead grass on the far side of the hill. A breeze had picked up, and thankfully it was coming across the ridge, shifting the tall grass gently and turning the hills into liquid silver by moonlight. The orc ambush was upwind.
Five scouts were running suppressed MK18s, and the elf was at the tip of their spear, leading them forward to the hit. Sergeant Hardt was tracking right behind her and off to her left, running the team with hand signals despite the Elven Mind Meld. Some habits die hard. But Autumn’s mind magic was also doing its thing and identifying target positions as they got close enough to penetrate the canopy of trees down there in the gully where the ambush was set up.
Every member of the Ranger detachment had been issued high-speed gear and suppressors for their rifles, because who knew what the world was going to be like two to five in the future according to original mission parameters? If they’d known it was gonna be ten thousand years ahead, they might’ve issued us high-tensile carbon-edged tactical axes and crossbows. But everyone was surprised by that. Including the people whose job it was to not be. The mission planners. They live in a world of dreams and terrors and if they’re right less than forty-five percent of the time they’re hailed as brilliant tacticians, never mind the body count.
If you tried that math at Starbucks you’d be fired after your first shift as a barista.
Great. And now I’m thinking about coffee.
Anyway. I’d remained on the hill in the overwatch position with Sergeant Thor, who’d brought his MK11 sniper rifle set up for close engagement. We’d try to hit any squirters from the overwatch that survived the impending raid by the scout team with murder in their hearts and min
ds. Me acting as spotter, Thor engaging.
I got the details of how it all went down from one of the scouts later on during a halt for Sergeant Hardt to comm with the captain and deliver a sitrep on the takedown.
The scouts had just made it into the thicket when she began firing her bow.
There were eight orcs in there, all in ambush positions watching the animal trail that ran along the gully and right through the small clump of trees that nestled between the two hills. The tangos hadn’t been watching the hillsides and had planned only to jump anyone coming down the trail. They were completely surprised when they got hit from the side.
“Went down like this,” the scout told me. “She had the targets all marked out in our minds with that crazy Moon Watch or whatevs. It was clear the ones we were each supposed to hit because it was like the moon was shining down real special on our assigned targets. Like the way a game hints you about who to talk to. And…” he continued incredulously, “we knew, Talker. We could like sense it, bro, that we each had a priority target to do. Five of us, eight of them.
“We’re going in, and I’m wonderin’ who’s gonna pick up the slack on the remaining three. I mean, I can tell they’re someone’s assigned targets, I just can’t tell who gonna do the splatter. Anyway, we’re just violating our way in real quiet-like when she lets her first arrow go, and as fast as that one’s away, she already got another one out of her quiver with barely a sound. That one whistles off just as fast to catch the other. She nails two, and Hard gives the go-ahead for us to engage. Five seconds and they’re all dead just like that. Each of us got one and she got three. I shit you not, that was the best shooting I ever done, and I qual’d expert last time at the range. You think she moon-juiced our accuracy or something, Talk? One even had an arrow stickin’ straight out of its eye. That was sick as in sick is slick, Talker-man.”
Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller Page 27