Chapter 29

Battle Carrier Hermes – Secure Briefing Room – Alliance Task Force

"All the signs point to the unfortunate conclusion that the Sakqua aren't paper tigers and our war with them is heating up," Amato said. "Our scouts have tracked their fleet to an inhabited planet 72 light years coreward from your task force's current position. They're gathering hundreds of ships, some of them major combatants at what we believe is a staging area. Although their presence there is significant, surveillance shows it most definitely is not their homeworld. We believe they're preparing for a major and sustained assault on this sector."

"So in light of this information, as well as the entry into the sector of the Colonial refugees and, we presume, the Cylons, the President and the Joint Chiefs directed me to negotiate with Sector Administrator Schlein to have Xanadu become the new home port for the entire Seventh Fleet. I am happy to report that the Sector Administrator and I have reached an understanding, so as of this moment, Xanadu is our permanent base of operations."

Jackson glanced at his fiancée then and, in response, she turned to face him, simply graced him with a Mona-Lisa smile, and refocused her attention on Dennis Amato.

"Soon," Amato continued, "all of the fleet's elements will be on station. The 101st Battlegroup shall now be a division of the reconstituted Third Fleet based at Tau Ceti. However, for the foreseeable future, the battlegroup will be on detached assignment to the Seventh Fleet."

"Operationally, the fleet's leadership and organizational structures must undergo the following changes effective immediately. At the pleasure of the President and the Joint Chiefs, ratified by the Alliance Senate, Vice Admiral Dennis Amato is hereby promoted to the rank of Admiral and is appointed as the Commander in Chief of the Seventh Fleet and Gamma Quadrant Defense Command."

A pleased Malcolm smiled at his old friend. It's about damn time! he mused inwardly.

"Taking my place as the Seventh's Battle Fleet Commander, at the pleasure of the President and the Joint Chiefs, ratified by the Alliance Senate, Rear Admiral Upper Half Jantienne de Ruyter is hereby promoted to the rank of Vice Admiral. Jantienne," he said to the task force commander, "although you'll have your pick of battle carriers to choose from, I expect you'll want to have your flag remain aboard the Hermes, right?"

A stunned de Ruyter merely nodded numbly to Amato. "Y-yes, Admiral."

"Splendid!" Amato exclaimed, a tiny grin on his face. "When you accompany the Colonial refugees to Xanadu, you are to reform your strike group with its other elements that have arrived on station. Then you are ordered to take command of Strike Groups 3, 9, and 12, as well."

Jackson almost shook his head in disbelief. Wow! he thought. Dennis wasn't fooling around if he was giving Jantienne that much firepower to tackle the lizards!

Along with the Hermes' strike group sister ship, the Illustrious, the newly-minted vice admiral was also getting the Enterprise, the Independence, the Seydlitz, the Kuznetsov, the Ise, and the Charles de Gaulle battle carriers along with the same number of escort carriers. Additionally, her fleet would consist of sixteen battleships, thirty-two cruisers, one hundred twenty non-capital ships, and four thousand aerospace fighters.

"Jantienne," Amato continued, "I want you to develop a battle plan after Katerina provides you the information her people have acquired on the disposition of Sakqua forces in that system. The plan should focus on forcing the enemy's warships to withdraw from the system long enough for our Marines to perform a massive smash and grab on the planet's orbital facilities and its surface. We hope such an assault will produce badly needed intelligence on the aliens and help us ferret out how their society works so we can find a way to force them to enter into a peace treaty with us."

"Ted," the Admiral said to the Brigadier, "as Gamma Quadrant CinC, I'm promoting you to the rank of Major General. Your new command is the reconstituted Third Marine Corps. Its elements are aboard the warships and troopships of Battle Fleet. First Marine Corps will be based here on Xanadu except for some elements assigned to the Joint Services Task Force."

"Aye, aye, sir," Roosevelt acknowledged.

"Jantienne and Ted," Amato said, "the lizards have more than thirty large vessels we believe are equivalent to our battleships or battlecruisers. There are about a hundred fifty cruiser class ships there and approximately a thousand light elements. However, based on the information we've gleaned from the Battle at Dead Star 81, the Sakqua fare poorly against aerospace fighter attacks. Apparently, they've never developed point defense systems to speak of. Obviously, Jantienne, your plan should take that into account because it's a significant weakness we must exploit."

"Understood, sir," de Ruyter said.

Now, with an impish smile on his face, Amato announced, "Considering all the challenges the Gamma Quadrant has thrown at us, I'm pleased that an officer, who was my X.O. during my first command, the best X.O. who's ever served by my side, has, hopefully, found a home here with the Seventh Fleet. Malcolm," the man said, his eyes shining with long-held affection, "at the pleasure of the President and the Joint Chiefs, ratified by the Alliance Senate, you are hereby promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral Upper Half."

Jackson blinked twice. Stunned, he simply couldn't believe his ears. The brass couldn't have bumped him two grades up, passing over one star and handing him two! Things like that occurred quite infrequently, perhaps only once in a blue moon!

His friend, though, didn't miss a beat. "Admiral Jackson, you've been appointed as the Commander in Chief of the Seventh Fleet's new Communications, Computer and Intelligence Command. You're also assigned as the Commander of the Joint Services Task Force, a flotilla of the most advanced warships in the Fleet. During task force operations, your flag will be aboard the C4I ship, the Hecate Tholus. Malcolm, you should know the Cat needs a new skipper. Her former captain has been assigned as the new master of the super carrier Queen Victoria; he was Vicky's last captain before she was mothballed. She's been put back into service to function as the primary aerospace fighter platform in support of your task force. As for the Cat, I believe you may have a young officer who's worked closely with you for the last few years who just might fit the bill to be her new mistress," Amato teased.

The Admiral's mood then turned serious. "In addition to the supervision of your departments, you shall provide military support to Undersecretary Alfano for the integration and resettlement of the Colonial refugees and the engagement of the Cylons in line with the recommendations you provided during your briefing."

"Also," the Admiral added, "to provide you with a key subordinate to fill the role of commander for your intelligence section, I'm pleased to announce that at the pleasure of the President and the Joint Chiefs, ratified by the Alliance Senate, Senior Captain Katerina Czmbor is hereby promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral Lower Half."

Jackson almost smirked at the gobsmacked expression on the normally unflappable woman's face until he recalled how his own face must have looked to everyone else in the room moments ago.

"Admiral Czmbor will report to Admiral Jackson even though her work station will be aboard the Alcubierre. I'm certain you both will meet on a weekly basis with each other. Katerina, I'd like you to chair a weekly intelligence committee meeting where Malcolm, Jantienne, and I are members of your committee. Of course, you both are free to meet with me, any time, whenever the need arises in your discretion."

"Understood, sir," she said. Then her hologram turned to Jackson and said, "Admiral-"

"Malcolm, please, Katerina."

"All right, Malcolm," she said. "I need to brief you regarding several special warfare units we've inserted inside the system where the Sakqua staging planet is located. May I go over their covert missions with you at the conclusion of this meeting?"

"Of course, Katerina. I'm looking forward to it."

After the exchange between Czmbor and him, Amato's hologram sat at the head of the table, the expression on its face like that of the cat that had eaten the canary. "Well, that's all, folks," the Admiral said. "With the challenges facing us, I don't know whether I should congratulate you or feel sorry for you. If there's nothing else, I'd like to adjourn the meeting."

"Actually," Alex said, "I would like to ask your new two star admiral a question."

"Well...by all means, please do, Sector Administrator," Amato said graciously.

"Thank you, Admiral." Then she regarded Amato then Jackson with a mischievous gleam in her eye. "Malcolm, darling," she drawled, "after we're married, must I call you 'admiral?'"

While the other men grinned broadly, a stunned expression dawned on Czmbor's face, and Jantienne and Lena shared surprised yet pleased gasps, Malcolm Jackson merely regarded his betrothed with a bemused smirk.

"That's Rear Admiral to you, Alexandra!" he quipped.

Apparently catching on to his wordplay, her lovely lips curled into a delicious smile. "I suppose that will have to do for now, Malcolm, although I am certain it will all work out in the end!"

#

Cylon Tylium Expedition – On the Surface of One of the Emerald Gas Giant's Moons – Gamma Quadrant

"You couldn't have landed the Heavy Raider closer to the frakking deposit?"

Tamara smirked at her companion through her helmet's face plate. "Aaron, is your cognitive processor broken or something?" she teased. "I distinctly recall telling you I changed the plan based on the fact that the two Tylium sources are almost equal in the amount of ore present at both sites. That's why I chose to land equidistantly between them. Once we've established the first site with six of our Centurions, we'll take the others to work the other location."

As their party of Centurions, some loaded down with mining equipment, continued its trek across the moon's regolith, he grumbled, "I don't see why we had to accompany them."

She rolled her eyes at him in response and snapped, "Oh, quit griping!"

He swiveled his helmet toward her and she noticed the sly smile on his face. "But I like griping!" he quipped.

She laughed at his little joke. Tamara had to admit it; although Aaron was still a bit too stiff at times, he was beginning to loosen up for her sake. It touched her deeply that he cared enough to move beyond his programming.

Smiling now, she asked, "Do you want in on a little secret of mine?"

"Certainly."

"I'm fond of your griping, too."

"Well, in that case, I think I'll gripe more often!"

#

Soon, their party broke into a column of twos to pass through a narrow stretch of regolith located beside a tall hill on one side and a shallow crater on the other. As the group rounded the base of the great mound, Tamara gasped at the sight of the emerald gas giant suspended in the black sky right above a mountain ridge in the distance.

She was just about to express how lovely the scene was to her when Aaron asked, "What in the frak is that over there?"

Sighting along his outstretched arm, she spied a pair of boxy, six-sided metallic objects moving away from the base of the mountains.

She squinted and her engineered eyes could now make out that the objects appeared to be wheeled vehicles of some kind. "I...I don't know," she admitted.

Aaron was silent for several moments as the objects appeared to be moving toward them. Then he stated in a definitive tone of voice, "Those must be Colonial vehicles."

She shot a questioning look at her Cylon brother. "What in the frak makes you say that?"

"Well...that has to be the only possible explanation. God created man; man created the Cylons. We're the only two sentient species in creation," he reasoned. "Therefore, since we know those aren't Cylon vehicles, they must belong to the Colonials."

"Really?" she drawled. She took another look at the approaching vehicles and compared them to the databank she maintained inside her head regarding Colonial equipment.

Her search couldn't come up with anything that was a match.

"Aaron," she said, "perhaps your premise would be true if we knew for certain that our entire database contained all the knowledge in the universe. However, every Cylon, with the highly likely exception of the Ones, know that is certainly not the case," she added with a sarcastic smirk.

She watched his eyes blink numerous times while he processed what she'd posed to him. Then a gobsmacked expression flashed onto his face. "Those vehicles could belong to alien sentient life forms!"

She nodded and mused, as the humans might say, 'give the man a gold star!'

"Yes," she agreed. "The vehicles may be probes of some kind. Or perhaps they're actually transporting the alien life forms themselves! Either way, we've stumbled upon an amazing discovery!"

For years after the Cylon War, her people had explored outer space. However, their exploration had been quite limited. Rather than search for signs of extra-Colonial life forms, their focus had been on finding Kobol.

Now, Aaron and she were faced with the strong possibility that these new machines were the product of life forms no Cylon or Colonial had encountered before.

"Are you as excited about this as I am, Aaron?"

"I'm not certain," he said. "Tamara...do the domes on the top of those machines remind you of...gun turrets?"

After he'd pointed those features out to her, she felt a heavy weight sink into the deepest pit of her stomach. "Frak me..." she muttered.

"Centurions!" Aaron commanded over the platoon's frequency. "Establish a defensive position behind the crater's wall!" he exclaimed and pointed to the nearby caldera.

While the Centurions prepared to make their stand, the pair of humaniform Cylons raced for cover behind their mechanical defenders.

#

Alliance Scout Boat 217 – Hidden inside a Crater on one of the Emerald Gas Giant's Moons – Gamma Quadrant

"Look at that, Chief!" cried Krenar'a, the boat's Tripean pilot.

Chief Pettus, the ranking member of Special Warfare Black Squadron's Scout Boat 217, stared at his display in the boat's Tactical Operations Center. While the upper half remained focused on the dingy gray, hexagon shaped Sakqua Early Warning Bunker nestled into the base of a small mountain range, the lower half showed a pair of armored moon mobiles exiting through a massive door in the building's exterior wall. With a movement of his hand, he raised the boat's stealth probes five meters higher and zeroed in on the vehicles as they began their journey across the moonscape.

"Well, what do you know," he muttered lowly. "Fortune does favor fools!"

Two days ago, Pettus, Krenar'a, Earls, and Johns had approached the moon surreptitiously, using a narrow window through the Sakqua detection grid for their insertion. Senior Captain Czmbor, a Fleet brass hat spook, had sent them to this God-forsaken place to bring back a live prisoner. After the target was snatched, Czmbor wanted his team to take out the bunker and any potential witnesses. For the past two days, they'd waited for one of the lizards to go on an EVA onto the moon's surface. However, none of the Sakqua had decided to come out and play in all that time.

Until now.

Minutes before, Earls, with Johns' silent support (no surprise there!), had been campaigning to scrub the mission for the tenth fricking time. "Can't we just take out that bunker and get the hell out of Dodge?" Earls had said in that whiny voice Pettus had grown to despise.

Now the chief rubbed his jaw and studied the mobiles as they continued on a course to the left of the scout boat's hidden position. The Sakqua aesthetic was certainly different from the Alliance's, he mused to himself. Instead of a globular passenger compartment at the front of their vehicles, the Sakqua used a hexagon shape, albeit, more compact than the dimensions of their bunker. At the top of the compartments on both mobiles, he spied turrets with two barrels protruding from slots cut in each hemisphere. "I wonder…what in the hell smoked them out?" he muttered lowly.

Continuing to speak, more loudly now, he noted, "There's a mound alongside a fairly shallow crater where those mobiles are headed about five klicks away." Then when he noticed the pointed glares both Johns and Earls shot at him, he turned away, ignoring them. He was in command and was determined to complete the mission so he didn't care what they thought about the situation. "We'll use the skimmers and ambush 'em."

"Shouldn't we take the boat," Johns noted, his calm voice in stark contrast with the nervous twitching of his hands. "We need her firepower."

Pettus shook his head and began to suit up. "She'd get noticed," he explained. "Besides, we need the boat here so Krenar'a can launch the bunker buster and take the building out before the lizards inside have the chance to contact the whole gang at the staging area planet. If those bastards aren't dealt with, all the lizards in the quadrant will show up and rain on our parade. Look, you'll be in hard suits with A-Pot weapons. That's more than enough firepower for this job."

When the pair of disgruntled men turned away to put on their gear, he sighed resignedly. While Krenar'a and he were old hats on SB 217, Earls and Johns were newbies fresh out of Special Warfare Tactical School. Apparently they'd gotten pretty damn close during that time and had come on board as 'shipmates with benefits.' Although intimate relationships between teammates certainly weren't encouraged by most skippers, boat chiefs often looked the other way so long as those relationships didn't interfere with how the boat functioned.

During the past two days, though, it had become quite evident to him that he had to address the situation with Earls and Johns. Both men were too terrified about what could happen to the other to keep their minds on the mission.

"Chief, look at that!" Krenar'a cried as the index finger on one of her three hands pointed to Pettus's display. "Look!"

A pair of humanoid figures in dark vacuum suits appeared to be out for a stroll with a platoon of robots on the regolith between the large mound and the edge of the shallow crater.

A grimace formed on Pettus's badly-in-a-need-of-a-shave face. Robots, in the Alliance, were almost never seen outside of a factory floor. Since the confederation's population was so massive, there was little need for robots to take the place of people in the field. However, on the worlds which had belonged to the Syndicate before the war, robots had been used as soldiers against Alliance troops. Although he'd been only ten years old at the war's end and had never seen a Syndicate combat robot face-to-face, he'd read about them, read about what the men who'd faced them had felt about the machines, and had taken those feelings to heart.

Now, just as he began to wonder how some people from a former Families' world, along with their machine escorts, had found their way onto the surface of a moon in enemy territory, he watched as the small Sakqua column maneuvered in the direction of those people.

Pettus, his sense of urgency screaming at him, raced to close up his suit just when the turret on top of the lead mobile swiveled toward the robots and their masters…

#

Cylon Tylium Expedition – On the Surface of One of the Emerald Gas Giant's Moons – Gamma Quadrant

"Tamara, keep your head down!" Aaron shouted.

The female Cylon didn't need to be told twice. Her face plate was planted firmly and deeply into the silt-like regolith of the crater wall.

"Frak!" she heard him curse. "The aliens have cut down another Centurion!"

She pulled her head out of the sand, turned her helmet to her left and stared at the shattered remains of another of their defenders as it littered the crater floor. Meanwhile, the remaining Centurions continued to return fire. To Tamara, the whole scene was surreal due to absence of the normally Caprica-shattering chatter of the guns thanks to the airless void that surrounded them.

Frightened out of her wits, she felt no shame as her bladder emptied its contents inside her vacuum suit. Why the frak were these creatures trying to kill them? she wondered. There had been no attempt at communication by them. These things had simply wheeled up and opened fire with armament far more powerful than the small arms fire wielded by their Centurions.

Now, chancing a peek over the rim, she observed that their defenders' hail of bullets had seemed to strike against some kind of barrier that stopped each round short of the machines' hulls. These barriers, though, certainly did nothing to hamper the aliens' withering cannon fire...

At that moment, an idea flashed through her mind. If the aliens can fire through an opening, the Centurions can fire through the same window!

"Centurions," she commanded. "Target the turrets, the turrets! They're unshielded!"

Heeding her directive, the Cylon foot soldiers redirected their fire toward the enemy cannons. As expanding spheres of smoke from the tips of their defenders' guns billowed out into the void, a hailstorm of rounds struck one of the alien cannons and caused it to erupt in a shower of sparks.

Momentarily, her spirits soared until she turned to see only four of the original twelve Centurions were still in the fight.

Yet the aliens had three of those devastating cannons still operational.

"Tamara, run!" Aaron yelled.

She swiveled her helmet around to face him. Then she shook her head. "N-no," she stammered. "They'll shoot me—I'll die!"

There it was, the cold hard truth. The new Resurrection Ship was still more than a thousand light years away from their fleet. If these aliens killed them on this One-God-forsaken moon, Aaron and she would die the final, permanent death.

They'd be gone forever.

"Frak it, I told you to run!" he screamed, dragging her from the depths of her morbid thoughts. "Run as fast as you can and don't look back." He gave her a resigned yet determined look. "I'll stay here, surrender myself..."

"No!" she shouted fiercely. "I'm not leaving you! No one should die alone!"

He shook his head sullenly. "You can't stay, Tamara. You have to escape; you have to warn the others."

"Please," she sobbed. "Please don't make me do this!"

He smiled sadly. "Go. I'll…I'll be fine. If these aliens are intelligent enough to travel through space and design weapons like these, they won't kill me and waste the opportunity to interrogate me. Now go!"

She struggled to hold back the flood of tears that threatened to breach her composure. Then gently, tenderly, she clasped his larger hand in hers.

Her gaze locked onto his. She saw his devotion to her and was so lost inside his eyes that she almost missed seeing one of the last Centurion's waist shattered by an alien cannon shell. Now as the twisted wreckage of one of their defenders careened toward her, Tamara barely had the time to twist her torso in a feeble attempt to dodge the impact.

Suddenly, hard, unforgiving metal slammed into her ribs, sending a flood of searing and relentless pain cascading throughout her entire body.

A red flare exploded behind her eyes and Tamara swooned. She tried to move something, anything, yet none of her appendages responded at all to her mental commands. It was almost as if she was a marionette whose strings had been ruthlessly severed by an angry child.

Moments later, the brightness dulled to a crimson haze centered inside her addled mind. Meanwhile, a part of her faintly registered the sound of a man's dying scream at the edge of her awareness.

Soon, crimson faded to black and her consciousness surrendered to oblivion.

#

Black Squadron of SB 217 – On the Surface of One of the Emerald Gas Giant's Moons – Gamma Quadrant

The scout boat's artificial intelligence had planned Pettus's ambush with preternatural skill. It had considered the targets, the victims, the terrain, distance, and the scouts' armament to compute an 82% probability that some or all of the scout team would survive the engagement. The AI thought their chance of capturing a live Sakqua was, at best, 25%, yet that factor wasn't even a consideration on any of the scouts' minds.

When the last of the robots had fallen to the deadly coil guns of the mobiles and a space-suited lizard had dismounted to either capture the vacuum-suited humans or to finish them off, Pettus said to his distant crewmen, "Team...go!"

Johns fired from the top of the regolith mound while Earls simultaneously fired from the top of the crater wall on the far-side of the fallen robots' position. Their weapons drew energy from the Dirac Sea underlying the real-time universe, so the range—less than several hundreds of meters in any event—wasn't a problem.

The beams from the A-Potential weapons were invisible, but at their touch the magnetic shielding of the moon mobiles flared brilliantly. Pettus's helmet visor filtered the fireworks as he watched the vehicles struggle against the incredible energies pouring into their shields.

"Drones," the chief barked into the microphone in his helmet, "execute!"

Suddenly, high-explosive mini-missiles lashed out from the scouts' skimmers and rained down on the enemy mobiles. There were numerous white flashes as the tiny antimatter-laced warheads hammered their magnetic shields, propagating at high sub-luminal speeds. The blast flattened the two vehicles from above before the unforgiving regolith below forced the mobiles to recoil upwards, their wreckage cartwheeling slowly before the tiny planetoid's gravity regained its hold on the ruined mobiles.

Then, a small ship, something about the size of an Alliance armed scout, arced over the compact horizon of the moon.

"Damn it!" Pettus cursed under his breath. The lizards in the bunker must have contacted that ship! Snarling, he barked on the team frequency, "Krenar'a, take out that bunker right damn now!"

While Earls and Johns turned their weapons on the rapidly closing ship, Pettus saw the bunker explode after their scout boat's missile had penetrated the building's reinforced wall.

Then Johns, bulky and immobile in the hard suit which was an integral part of the A-Pot system, stood on his ridge and, with the obvious assist of his suit's AI, fired at the Sakqua ship while Earls' beam tore at its shield.

While the chief guided his skimmer toward the Sakqua soldier, the small vessel fired a plasma beam at Johns.

The rock beneath the crewman blurred into high-temperature gas and if Johns hadn't been firing, his hard suit might have saved him—

Yet, where there was an opening for fire to exit, there was an aperture for fire to enter. The electronics inside Johns' A-Pot suit fused and his shell went off in an explosion so bright Pettus thought that was what it was like to look into the heart of a star.

"Boat!" he shouted into his helmet mike. "Engage!"

Five klicks away, SB 217 lifted from her camouflaged crater. The AI executed the flight plan that Krenar'a and it had developed. It would take five minutes for the craft to make it to his position. Pettus hoped he might be alive in the time it would take for the boat to reach him.

Earls screamed like a madman on the team frequency as he lashed the Sakqua ship with his weapon. Soon, the tiny enemy ship, its meager shields designed solely to protect it from interstellar matter and low energy lasers, failed completely. Its hull went molten; then froze and shattered into a fine powder. Fortunately, Earls' A-Potential energy beam continued through the hull of the disintegrating ship and overwhelmed the vessel's matter/antimatter containment unit, causing the catastrophic release of energy to be shunted into the Dirac Sea rather than rain hard radiation down upon Pettus's and Earls' heads.

"I'll kill you lizard bastards!" Earls cried.

Pettus, though, couldn't deal with his crazed crewman at the moment because he was busy lining up his shot on the dismounted Sakqua that hadn't seen the deadly results of their ambush on the mobiles. Then Pettus drew a deep breath, held it, and squeezed the trigger of his coil rifle.

The weapon fired a specially engineered dart straight through the Sakqua's space suit into the creature's flank. While it injected a sedative that the exobiologists back on the Alcubierre had cooked up to immediately put the aliens down for the count, the dart also released a sealant to instantly close the entry hole it had made in the alien's suit to keep Pettus's prisoner alive.

SB 217 drifted over the chief's head like a ghost to land in the center of the crater as the lizard struggled to get back on its feet momentarily before collapsing in a dead heap, sprawled out in an ungainly tangle of appendages.

He stared at the downed alien for a heartbeat or two. Then he snapped, "Earls!" over the team frequency.

"What in the hell do you want?" the man responded in a cold and frightening tone of voice.

Pettus narrowed his eyes at his crewman. After losing Johns the way Earls had, he realized he didn't want the man anywhere near their prisoner. "I need you back on the clock, Earls. I need you frosty and alert. Do you read me?" he demanded, the tone of command cast in his voice.

He heard the man draw several deep breaths before he chose to respond. "I'm with you," Earls said, his voice almost back to normal.

"Good. Check the people who were with the robots."

"Okay…I'm on it."

As the other man went about his assigned task, Pettus moved his skimmer right beside the fallen Sakqua soldier. In the moon's light gravity, it wasn't too difficult for him to roll the creature onto the vehicle's platform. Once he'd strapped the alien down and prepared to transport it to the boat, Earls called out, "Chief, one of 'em is dead. The lizards' coil guns must have shattered a robot near this poor bastard and the debris speared right through the guy's suit into his gut. The other one, though, is still breathing but she looks to be in a bad way."

Now as his adrenaline spike began to wear off, a drained Pettus panted, "Tell me what you see."

"Well, one of the robots toppled over and smashed into her chest. Looking into her face plate, I see a woman of Asian stock with traces of frothy blood on her lips."

Pettus grimaced at that. If she had internal bleeding, they needed to get her aboard and have the autodoc work on her pronto. "Earls, can you shove the wreckage off her by yourself or do you need some help?"

He heard the man grunt over his comm system. "I got it to roll! She's free!"

"Good work, Earls. Now, gently, very gently, lift her up and carry her onto the boat."

"Right."

"I'll bring our prisoner on board and place it into stasis. After we set the autodoc to work on her, we'll retrieve her dead friend's body, sanitize the site, and get the hell out of Dodge!"

"Okay."

"Oh, and Earls?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry about Johns."

Earls didn't speak. The man didn't say a single word. The only sound Pettus heard over the team's frequency was a mournful groan shortly before Earls cradled the unconscious woman in his arms and trudged toward SB 217.

#

The action is heating up! Also, thank you all for sticking with this story and if you would be so kind, please submit a review. Your reviews have done a fabulous job of helping me improve the story and to keep it on track. They...as well as you...are greatly appreciated!