Chapter Eight
1900 Hours, July 21, 2555 (Military Calendar)
Marine Camp Rory
Tabah Region, Planet Leka, Katami System
'Well, it's a Jackal,' Maher said. 'I'm certain of that.'
He was stood in front of Cobb, Chavez and Garza after conducting his examination of the two Jackal bodies bagged by the Spartan, hands on his hips and staring back at the rudimentary shelter that served as his surgical suite.
'Any irregularities with them?' Cobb asked.
'More than the humans we've encountered,' Maher said, turning to look at him. 'From what I can tell, these Jackals are adapting to a subterranean lifestyle. Their eyesight is weak, their posture is more hunched and callus formations on their hands suggest a tendency towards quadrupedal movements.
'Give enough time, they would become yet another sub-species of Jackals.'
'How much time?' Cobb asked.
'A few hundred years, maybe,' Maher said with a shrug. 'A thousand at a push. I guess, technically, you can already call these two part of a new sub-species given the already present physiological differences. Xenobiology isn't my strength, though.
'As for when they started to split, or devolve, I'd say roughly the same time period. Jackals have a quicker reproductive cycle than us. You'd start to see these changes quicker.'
Cobb nodded and turned to Garza who had spent the day looking at the artefacts the Jackals had with them, namely the crude implements and an assortment of random junk that looked to be stolen from other sources.
'I don't know what you expect me to have for you,' Garza said. 'I specialise in xenolinguistics rather than xenoanthropology, and all you brought me was a collection of simple stone and bone tools. That suggests some intelligence but not a lot, otherwise they'd have some written records somewhere.'
'Primitive man had cave paintings,' Maher said.
'Didn't find any of those,' Cobb said. 'Just some assorted rags and the like to serve as beddings.'
'Then perhaps they only just moved in,' Maher said. 'Societies tend towards making note of their history when they've established a central place to live.'
'I don't like that explanation a whole lot,' Cobb said. 'We've been here three weeks by now and nobody remembers seeing a bunch of Jackals waltzing past to set up a nest in the mines. Either they were already in there, which a lack of supplies suggests otherwise, or they found another way in.'
'Which someone might know about,' Chavez said. 'Which would be bad.'
All of the Marines' defences were centred around the idea the enemy would come at them from a single, narrow path where massed fire would shred them. If their opponents came up from behind and got in close, negating the advantage offered by modern firearms, casualties would mount.
'So let's change that,' Cobb said. 'We can spare some C7 and C12 to seal the tunnels.'
'Not a whole lot,' Chavez said. 'Our little Dambuster operation used up the bulk of our explosives, so if you're planning on blowing something else up...'
He let that hang in the air for a moment before spinning about on his heel and making for the camp's armoury, waving for a nearby group of Marines to follow him. Cobb watched him go for a second then shifted his gaze to a break in the rocks and dirt, where there was a vista of the nearby scenery. Some distance away was a thick forest composed of pine like trees that averaged twenty metres in height, a series of well used roads and trails running between them.
The forest ended abruptly half a klick from the mountain's base and gave way to rocks and boulders, leftovers from whatever geographical event had created this range, with numerous trails winding in and out between all of those as well. The Marines had already scouted out those which would accept a Mongoose, plus a cave to hide them in a few hundred metres up. Any higher and the trails became too treacherous for the ATVs to handle.
Cobb took a few steps closer to the outlook, mindful of the standing order to avoid the edges as much as possible during daylight, and fixed his attention towards Camelot. The people there had to know that sooner or later, someone would be coming to look for the kidnapped civilians. Why else had they stationed troops to the east of Murphy's ruins? And yet, outside of that massive caravan of wagons heading north, there hadn't been any major deployment of forces to conduct a search for them.
It wasn't as though Cobb had been subtle in his actions, what with blowing up a bridge and dam with high explosives. He had announced his presence on Leka in fine fashion despite his earlier desire to remain unnoticed, but the enemy wasn't responding as they should have. Why?
Not for the first time, Cobb found himself despairing at the low technological level the enemy had. Against the Insurrection, the various Covenant remnants, even isolated Forerunner constructs, there was always some level of radio communication they could glean intelligence from. If not what the actual messages were then a command and control centre, a communications hub, even units in the field, something that gave him an idea of what to strike out against.
But here on Leka there was none of that. Any messages were sent across the region by horse, making them impossible to intercept from afar, and even if they did manage to acquire such an item it was encoded in a language none of them could read, not even Garza. They had a serious intelligence deficit that Cobb didn't like one bit.
It left him unable to know what the enemy's intentions were or how close they might be to finding him, and able only to lash out at the obvious points of interest. In a way it made him feel like the barbarians of old, lashing out blindly and not caring who or what they hit, which was at odds with the more precise, more refined soldier Cobb saw himself as.
His eyes then swung northward, in the direction those eighty-four wagons had trundled, to the lands hidden behind the mountain as it rose up. Perhaps the locals were responding to the attacks, but thinking someone else was responsible. That might explain why so few had been deployed this deep into their territory.
'Sergeant Sato, do we still have the data for those wagons?' Cobb asked over the COM.
'Yes, sir,' Sato said. 'Victoria finished up her analysis the other day. We have a rough estimate for where they went. Why?'
'I have a theory I want to test,' Cobb said. 'About why we're so alone up here, despite everything.'
'Understood, sir,' Sato said. 'I'll tell the civvies to warm up the Pelican.'
2200 Hours, July 22, 2555 (Military Calendar)
Unknown forest region
Tabah Region, Planet Leka, Katami System
The Pelican only lingered in the forest clearing long enough to deposit Cobb into the area, and as soon as he was out the pilot fed power to the engines and took off back towards the south. As it did, Cobb hurried into the tree line and took a knee, scanning the world around him with a practised eye for anything of note or concern.
There was nothing so he stood and orientated himself in a southwest direction, moving towards it.
He was currently almost 150 klicks away from the Marines' base and outside the visual footprint of Primo Victoria and, lacking a working satellite uplink relay, outside of communications range, too. Cobb had such a device stowed in his pack but setting it up took time and required a clear line of sight to the orbiting corvette.
Effectively it meant he was on his own, but Cobb had been in this kind of situation plenty of times before. Working far from a base of operation, deep within enemy lines, was part and parcel of what it meant to be a paratrooper. Part of him relished the notion, even if his mission was simply to learn what he could from the region without being discovered or engaging with the enemy.
The analysts aboard Primo Victoria had made a rough estimation of where the caravan of wagons could have reached based on their direction of travel and speed, though the resultant locations they projected sat outside the areas they had observed. Cobb's first view of the region came from when the Pelican approached, a seemingly endless expanse of darkened land with dotted specks of light here and there from small towns and hamlets.
His first order of business was to find a vantage point and figure out where he needed to go next which was easy enough to do, given the presence of numerous hills and rocky outcroppings filling the region. Cobb already had one in mind after spotting it during the flight in, located just five kilometres from his current position.
0547 Hours, July 23, 2555 (Military Calendar)
Unknown forest region
Tabah Region, Planet Leka, Katami System
Dawn revealed many of the finer details that night hid, and allowed Cobb his first real look at the region he now found himself in. Like the lands to the south, a lush forest covered most of it with the occasional breaks for lakes or ponds, even settlements, and Cobb could see various trails of smoke reaching up into the early morning sky as people woke up.
Close to the northern horizon, around thirty kilometres away, the colour of the forest turned from a deep emerald green to a turquoise colour, and peering through some binoculars showed the trees there were wilder looking, untamed even, with gnarled trunks and crooked branches. Southeast, a great chasm ran through the land that looked to be half a klick wide, maybe more, and carried on for as far as Cobb could see. The trees on the western side seemed to be part of the forest Cobb was in, while on the eastern half they began thinning out before giving way to another plain.
It was somewhere in here that the caravan of wagons had arrived at, spent around a week doing something, and then made the return journey back to Camelot seemingly no worse for wear. Cobb recalled the troop estimations for the caravan was somewhere north of 1,500, which made for a full battalion, plus two or three spare companies, which was no small amount of people.
Assuming they had stopped here, of course. The wagons had averaged somewhere between eight to ten kilometres an hour, for eight to ten hours a day, and Primo Victoria had only been able to track them for just under two days. At best, they had travelled a hundred or so kilometres from Camelot before stopping, and closer to five-hundred at worst. That gave Cobb 125,000 square kilometres of land to search.
That was the absolute worst case scenario, though. He figured the wagons wouldn't have travelled for more than two days, three at the most, because sending a full battalion deep into the woods for a single day's work was impractical. If they were looking for someone, they'd need several days at least, maybe a week, to carry out their task properly, so Cobb had hedged his bets and said 150 klicks from Camelot.
He was still left with a huge area to cover by himself, but a few hundred kilometres was better than a few hundred-thousand, and it wasn't like the people living here were concealing their presence. If they were then nobody would have lit so many fires to produce so many smoke trails. Cobb counted a dozen within quick walking distance, for a Spartan, and settled on the nearest collection of them to begin his observations.
1100 Hours, July 23, 2555 (Military Calendar)
Outskirts of unknown town
Tabah Region, Planet Leka, Katami System
The town Cobb found didn't look like it was very old, around a year or two since its founding, with only a few permanent structures surrounded by weathered tents of various sizes. Running between them all were hard packed dirt roads on which the citizens of this town walked, a mixture of soldiers in full combat gear and plain looking civilians. The former busied themselves with training and exercise when they weren't manning guard posts or patrolling, many of them casting nervous glances northward, while the latter looked to be hard at work ensuring this town was liveable.
If they weren't building a new structure then they were tending to a small series of fields that looked ready for harvesting, or drawing water from a well, or just chasing off a gaggle of young children that were trailing after some soldiers. There were even pens containing chickens, pigs, cows, though Cobb had long since given up being surprised by the similarities between this world and Earth.
In a way, it was just easier to accept that he and the crew of Primo Victoria had actually travelled back in time to Earth's past rather than trying to figure out exactly how these people came to be here. Nothing they came up with made sense, though it at least gave the Marines another topic of discussion whilst they were resting at Camp Rory.
Cobb mentally shrugged and went back to watching the town, which hadn't changed all that much in the three hours he had been here. It wasn't all that different from the first town he had seen, actually, but he did find the increased military presence a curiosity. They seemed to make up a good third of the town's population, whereas the first few towns he had visited had none beyond a dozen guards.
Perhaps this was less of a town than it was a military base, the civilians filling the role of support staff to keep the soldiers combat ready. It would certainly reduce reliance on supply lines from the larger, more established towns and cities if the soldiers could cover most of their needs, but also left them open to higher civilian casualties if an enemy were to attack.
Maybe that was a deliberate choice as well. The soldiers would fight with extra vigour if they knew that failing would endanger their families directly, rather than indirectly and weeks or months down the line. Or, they would give up more easily if they saw a much larger force rolling in with the hope of lessening reprisals against the citizens. Human nature was often so hard to predict.
Whatever the reason, the heightened military presence told Cobb this region was considered contested territory with whoever or whatever resided to the north being the other party, if the nervous glances of the soldiers were any indications.
As he continued to watch, a caravan of three wagons rolled into the town from the north, a grizzled looking soldier at the reins of the first one. He coaxed his wagon to a stop and began speaking with the soldier standing guard at the town's gates, though the topic of their conversation was still unintelligible to Cobb but he guessed it was the usual small talk between soldiers stationed in an active duty posting.
The guard nodded once then turned towards the town, pursing their lips to utter a shrill whistle that seemed to summon thirty more soldiers, each dressed in armour and carrying swords, spears, bows and shields. They made their way to the wagons and climbed aboard without much fuss and once the last was seated, the lead wagon spurred his horses back into motion.
Cobb watched them make a U-turn and head back the way they had come, to the north, and judging by the grim and dour expressions to troops had the place they were going was much worse. Before they had even finished turning about Cobb was on his feet and following them, curious to see what their next destination would be.