Joined In Battle

by Toby Neighbors

  The man’s body was naked, and there were large bruises on his sides, hips, and thighs. Dean was shocked to see that he recognized the man. It was Lieutenant Harding from the Spartan.

  “Harding,” Dean said, stepping close to the man. “What happened?”

  “Do I know you, sir?” the man on the table asked.

  Dean activated his armor’s civilian mode so that the tortured Lieutenant could see his face. “It’s Dean Blaze, we met in the Alrakis system.”

  “It’s good to see you again, sir,” Harding said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “I heard you’d been sent out on an escort ship to keep you out of RA Chancy’s crosshairs.”

  “I was—until the Kroll invaded. What happened?”

  “We took the shuttles into the system and got picked up by their tug ships. It was all by the numbers until we hit their gravity well. RA Chancy wanted us to go in guns blazing. He ordered every Recon platoon to be prepared for immediate egress from the shuttles.”

  “So you weren’t in your harnesses,” Dean said, as understanding began to dawn on him regarding how the other Recon platoons faired against the Kroll.

  “No, we were in line for quick deployment, using the handrail down the center of the shuttle for stability.”

  “And the Kroll dumped you on your heads?”

  “It was chaos from the moment we hit their gravity well. We were thrown off our feet by the sudden change in gravity. Then our shuttles slammed into their ships. I had three injuries before we even had a chance to get off the shuttle. When they ripped the door open, my platoon charged ahead—but we weren’t prepared. They had big, monkey creatures that ran right through us.”

  Dean knew exactly what the injured lieutenant was talking about.

  “We took a few with us, but not enough. Those of us who survived were taken down here. They stripped us of our armor and tortured us.”

  “The Kroll did this to you? Did they speak, ask questions?”

  “It wasn’t the Kroll. We never saw the birds. The Grays did this to us.”

  “You’re sure?” Dean asked.

  “Positive. They screw with your mind, make you think things that aren’t true. But I saw them. Nasty, three-fingered bastards. They wanted to know about the armor, about how it was used, its capabilities. I don’t know what all I told them, Captain. But I talked—we all talked.”

  “Anyone would under these conditions.”

  Dean could tell the man was losing strength. It took a lot of courage to admit how poorly they had fared against the Kroll. Dean didn’t want Harding to die, but he didn’t think he could stop it from happening, either.

  “You should rest,” Dean said. “We’re taking you home.”

  “One more thing,” Harding said. Dean had to lean down to hear the man. “Chancy was down here.”

  “He was tortured too?” Dean asked.

  “No… not tortured… but he was… answering questions.”

  Harding’s eyes fluttered. Dean wanted to know what the lieutenant meant, but he could see they wouldn’t get much more out of him. Perhaps, Dean thought, if Harding was able to rest, he might have the strength to finish his story before it was too late.

  “You think that’s true, sir?” Chavez said. “About the Rear Admiral?”

  “We found him in the nest,” Dean said. “There are rumors among the colonists that someone was helping the Kroll. I heard people talking about hearing a human voice over a loudspeaker when the harvester ship entered their atmosphere. I think someone was used to tell the colonists that the Kroll wouldn’t hurt them if they surrendered peacefully.”

  The look on Chavez’s face said everything. There was a fury there that no explanation could placate. Someone had betrayed the people of Cymru, and Dean was guessing Rear Admiral Chancy was to blame.

  Chapter 40

  “Captain Blaze, this is Corporal Landin. Do you read, over?”

  “I’ve got you,” Dean said in surprise.

  He was back in the main passageway that encircled the ship. Water had been found but no food. Many of the captives were still in need of medical care, and a group of engineers were studying the nest but had yet to report any progress on learning to pilot the huge harvester ship.

  “Where are you, Corporal, over?”

  “I’m in the shuttle,” Landin replied. “I have good news, sir. We have control of the Kroll ship, over.”

  “You mean you can fly the Kroll longship, over?” Dean asked in surprise.

  “That’s what I’m told, Captain. Several of the operators here are using the tug vessels in an effort to reattach our ship to yours, over.”

  “Excellent, Corporal. This ship is secure. Proceed with maneuvers. Blaze out.”

  It took an hour, but when the longship was close enough, the gooey membranes spontaneously connected and formed a tunnel. Esma had used the teardrop-shaped tug vessels to discover how the Kroll were piloting the larger ships. They were still figuring the controls out, but they had made tremendous progress.

  Dean, on the other hand, was merely trying to keep the thousands of people in the harvester ship from tearing the place apart. He couldn’t reveal Colonel Davis’s plan to use the Kroll ships like a Trojan horse, but he was constantly finding small groups of colonists who were ripping into the ship as if it were to blame for their troubles.

  Once the longship was reattached to the harvester, Dean went immediately to the shuttle, where he was able to contact the communication center on Cymru. The colonists eschewed technology, but they still needed to keep in touch with people on other worlds. The regular space buoy was down, taken as technological plunder by the Kroll when they entered the system, but the long-range sensors the Hannibal had dropped on the edge of the heliosphere would send Dean’s message. He guessed it would take perhaps three days to reach Earth, but reestablishing communications was his highest priority.

  He dictated a report to EsDef, then requested immediate assistance. When he was finished, Dean walked slowly back toward the harvester ship. He didn’t want to return to the administrative duties that were in such demand on the massive ship; in fact, he thought he would rather return to a combat zone than try to wrangle the thousands of colonists, but it was his responsibility. There were higher-ranking officers among the captives, but they had all endured a traumatic ordeal while in custody. Dean was the only officer on mission and he was determined to see things through.

  “Where are you headed?” Esma said. She was slightly out of breath, and when Dean turned around he could see that she had been running to catch up with him.

  “Back to work,” Dean said.

  “You can’t spare a minute?” she asked with a frown.

  “A minute? What do you say we sneak off down to Cymru and get lost for the rest of our lives?”

  “I could live with that,” she said. “Dean, I’m so glad you’re safe.”

  “I’m glad you are,” he replied. “I spent a week talking to you on the way back to Sol from the Alrakis system. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to hear your sweet voice again.”

  “You saved my life, cowboy,” she said, stepping close and making Dean wish he could pull off his battle helmet and kiss her.

  “Just doing my job, ma’am,” he replied.

  “Dean, has anyone ever told you that you’re really good at your job?”

  “No,” Dean said. “But I wouldn’t mind if you shared your insights with the brass.”

  “So what’s next?” she asked.

  “Well, since you think you can fly this rig, we have a lot of displaced colonists we need to get back on Cymru.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “You know, you are really good at your job, too,” he said.

  “Oh, I know, people tell me all the time.”

  She was flirting, which Dean loved. He still couldn’t believe anyone as beautiful as Esma would flirt with him. But he was also glad because it gave him hope. She wasn’t terrified, or even worried. That meant the Kroll
ships could be used to teach the predatory empire a lesson.

  “I just sent word to Sol, but we need food and medical care for the captives,” Dean told her. “If you can focus on flying the harvester ship back to the planet, that would solve a ton of problems.”

  “I guess I owe you that much,” she said, taking hold of his arm as they moved through the tunnel from the longship to the harvester.

  Dean couldn’t help but groan a little as pain erupted in his broken arm like water smashing through a failing dam.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, concern etched on her face.

  “It’s nothing, just a broken bone or two. I’m fine,” Dean said, trying not to let the pain get the best of him.

  He needed medical attention himself, not to mention food and rest, but all that would have to wait until he saw to the colonists. And there were a few other matters that needed his attention on the Kroll ship.

  “Dean, you can’t be serious,” she said. “A broken arm?”

  “My armor’s keeping it under control. I’ll have it seen soon.”

  “You need a medical tech.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, this isn’t an EsDef ship.”

  “Well, there’s bound to be med facilities on the planet.”

  “On Cymru they would wrap it in an herbal poultice and tell me to keep it in a sling for eight weeks. That won’t work. I’ve got to get these ships back to Sol.”

  “Then I better learn how to fly that big tub,” she said. “God, I wish I could kiss you.”

  “We’ll find time for that,” he promised. “But when I take this armor off, you probably won’t want to be anywhere near me until I have a shower, or maybe three.”

  She giggled, blew him a kiss, and hurried off down the passageway of the harvester ship. Dean wished he could go with her and watch her pilot the massive ship. She would be in her element, and he thought there was nothing more attractive than seeing Esma do what she did better than anyone else. Unfortunately, Ghost was trying to get his attention.

  “Sir, do you copy?”

  “I read you, Ghost. What’s going on now?”

  “Well, Captain,” the sniper said in his spacey, Texas drawl. “I have some little gray critters I’d like you meet. It seems they have one hell of a story to tell you.”

  Dean sighed but turned around once again, heading back into the Kroll longship. They hadn’t found any of the Grays on the harvester ship, but Dean was convinced they were there. The memory of the torture room on the huge, saucer-shaped alien ship made his blood boil. The Grays had more than a story to tell; they had a lot to answer for. And it was time he got those answers, he thought. And a whole lot more.

  Author’s Note

  Wolfpack Book 5 will be available in January of 2018. If you have enjoyed the Wolfpack series please leave an honest review on Amazon and recommend it to your friends. For more news about my upcoming books, be sure to signup for the mailing list on my website www.TobyNeighbors.com and follow me on social media. Continue reading for a sample of my crime thriller Jack & Roxie

  www.Facebook.com/TobyNeighborsAuthor

  Instagram @TobyTheWriter

  On Twitter @TobyNeighbors

  Jack & Roxie

  Blue police lights were flashing through the half-closed blinds… again. The scene, which is exactly what it was, a scene, like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum in the middle of a busy store, was not new. Jack had watched the drama unfold countless times. His next door neighbor was an abusive ass, not that Jack would ever confront the man. Confrontation wasn’t in his nature. He wasn’t a coward, but he thought of himself as more civil than to resort to violence. He had, however, called the police many times to report the noise, the cars in the street, the loud music, but mostly the fighting. Loud voices, screaming obscenities, shouting and wailing, it was all too common and usually broke into Jack’s much-needed sleep. Why, he wondered, did deadbeats always seem to have their crises in the middle of the night? Why couldn’t they fight during decent hours like everyone else?

  Jack stood in the darkness, watching the policemen in his neighbors’ overgrown yard through the blinds. They couldn’t see him, but he saw everything. It had become his habit, to watch, just an unseen observer spying on the misery of others. He didn’t consider himself a snoop. He was in his own home, after all. He didn’t seek out the insanity that seemed to be a constant state for his neighbors. If they wanted to act like fools, that was their right. If they insisted on doing it on their front lawn, then watching them was Jack’s right. Besides, he couldn’t sleep anyway. He’d been lying in bed, tossing and turning. Sleep was no longer something Jack could count on. He was getting older, his forties were more difficult than he had imagined, not that he could have slept through the screaming, or the radios squawking. Jack couldn’t understand why the police radios seemed so loud at night.

  And there it was, he thought to himself as his neighbor was escorted out of the house in handcuffs. It wasn’t a new sight, Sydney Oliver must have had a criminal record, Jack couldn’t know for sure, but the long-haired, lanky man who never seemed to have a shirt on, had been taken from his home by the police on countless occasions. Unfortunately he always turned up the next day, just as loud and as nasty as ever. It made Jack’s civic duty seem like a waste of time. He would determine not to call the police when the fighting started, but there were times when the wailing seemed as if Sydney were surely killing someone and Jack’s resolve broke. Although on this occasion Jack hadn’t made the call, it must have been one of the other neighbors.

  The tattoos on Sydney’s pale skin seemed unnatural in the flashing blue lights from the patrol cars. His long hair looked dirty, and he was looking at the other houses around his own, as if he expected the person who had called the police to be standing at their own front door waving a sign to let him know how to seek his revenge. Jack thought the man was an idiot, and yet he lived in the same neighborhood as Sydney, right next door to the shirtless abuser. What did that say about Jack, he wondered.

  His life was not what he imagined it would be, and that thought taunted him as he returned to his bed. The empty section of the queen-sized bed mocked Jack. His wife was gone, his future was so boring he wondered why he even tried anymore. He was trapped in a mid-life crisis, with too much debt and very few prospects. For forty-two years he had done the right thing expecting that he would be rewarded at some point, but instead of rising to the top he had gotten stuck in the soft middle. He was invisible, a clone, a nameless placeholder in the machine of life, easily replaceable and completely forgettable.

  1

  “Have a seat, Jack,” the doctor said.

  Jack knew the man’s name. They were the same age and he had been a patient at the clinic for a decade, but Jack still thought of him as “the doctor.” It was the first time he had been invited into the doctor’s actual office, with tufted leather chairs and diplomas on the wall behind the big, wooden desk. Jack sat down, knowing intuitively that he was not about to get good news.

  “I’m afraid the prognosis isn’t good,” the doctor said in a soothing voice that Jack found surprisingly comforting. “Your white blood cell count is very high, and the lymphocytes are immature. It’s cancer, acute lymphocytic leukemia.”

  “I thought only kids got leukemia.”

  “No, that isn’t true,” the doctor said, as if he were preparing to tell an exciting story at a dinner party. “ALL is most common in children and the elderly, but it does sometimes occur in middle age, especially in men. Essentially, your bone marrow isn’t making white blood cells correctly anymore. Think of it like an assembly line that is making a very specific apparatus, but something has gone wrong. Your body is making the white blood cells wrong, Jack, and making far too many of them. That’s what cancer is, mis-formed cells that can’t do the jobs they’re designed to do. They end up doing harm instead of doing good, does that make sense? And it can occur anywhere in the body. Your cancer is in your blood, which means the d
isease has access to every part of your body.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Jack said.

  “It’s not good, I’m afraid. You’ll need to see a specialist, a hematologist, to get an accurate diagnosis and find out all your options.”

  Jack felt numb all over. It was as if he were shrinking back from the horror of what the doctor was telling him, receding into his own body for protection. He could still hear and see what was happening, but everything seemed far away and distant somehow.

  “So I need chemo,” Jack said.

  “Chemo therapy is an option,” the doctor said, nodding encouragingly, but something in his eyes told Jack that he was lying.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Look, I’m not an expert. I’m just a general practitioner, not an oncologist. Everything I tell you is generalized information. Every person is unique and every diagnosis needs to be tailored to each individual’s medical needs.”

  “Just tell me the truth,” Jack said. “I can take it.”

  Actually Jack was afraid he couldn’t take it. There was a sound like a siren, echoing in some distant part of his brain, and a feeling of intense fear was seeping into his body as if he were locked outside in the middle of winter storm. He could feel his heart beating in his chest, pounding hard, as if his blood had become glue and didn’t want to flow through his body anymore, but despite all of that he couldn’t turn away. It was like looking at the mangled corpse of some poor animal on the side of the road, its flesh ripped and smashed by a speeding motorist. Jack knew he didn’t want to hear what the doctor was telling him, but he couldn’t look away.

  “Okay, there are a few things you need to know,” the doctor said. He was sitting close to Jack in the second leather chair, not behind his desk like Jack had expected. He was leaning toward Jack, a look of compassion on his face.

  “Acute lymphocytic leukemia is aggressive. It spreads quickly, which means you need to see someone as soon as possible. I won’t lie to you. You’ve been my patient for a long time and I’ll do all I can to see you through this, Jack, but unless we catch ALL early, most people don’t survive it. We’re talking a few months maximum, but we don’t know where you are in the process. We don’t know if the disease has spread.”