“We first encountered the Raak’Shee on a dry world with about one and a half times the gravity of Earth. Based on our research, they evolved from some sort of theropod with an incredibly dense epidermis. Their long limbs and wide body structure provide further proof that the Raak'Shee homeworld has always been a desolate rock.” – From ‘The Universe and you; an in-depth look at known intelligence,’ by DR. Theresa Kos

  Warren and Cecile lay under the snow on top of the mountain. As much as it sucked, neither would dream of refusing this duty, especially since they both understood the most strategic location for a pair of long-range fighters was in the open where they could best use their reach.

  But knowing why you were on a specific part of the battlefield didn’t make it any less boring. Sure, there was the occasional check-in to confirm everyone was still alive, but the rest of the time was nothing more than staring at the same mountain for hours on end.

  Neither particularly wanted to be on the ground. Laying in the deepening snow while the cold slowly crept in wasn’t the definition of a good time for anyone.

  “How long do you think they’ll be in there?” Warren asked for the third time that hour. He didn’t physically move, but the plethora of drones scattered around the valley twitched in nervous energy every time he started getting antsy.

  “As long as it takes,” she replied, “If you’re that bored, you can pull the thumb out your ass and try to hunt down a few more Raak.”

  “No thanks, you’re doing a wonderful job of killing our enemies. If I joined in, you would lose out on the incredible amount of fun you’re having in that category.”

  She really was doing a fantastic job of picking off any enemy that dared show its face. They only needed his drones to act as an early warning system and to help pinpoint her exact shot. In the few brief hours they’d been up there, the Breaker had killed at least twenty Raak’Shee of various sizes.

  Could that number be higher if he was actively searching for the enemy with his vixens? Probably, but their mission wasn’t to hunt down aliens. It was to make sure Jack and the rest of the squad didn’t have to deal with any surprises from behind.

  “Fine… Could you at least send a drone to check on the status of the other squads?”

  “Why? I have a better solution,” he said, switching from the local comm to the platoon channel. “Sergeant Smith, this is Alexander. Requesting an update on the other squads? We would like to know how things are going and if we should redirect to help them.”

  Breaking her almost statuesque position of cheek to rifle stock, Cecile glared at him with a look that would shrivel the testicles of most men. He supposed he would be on that list too, if he cared that much about what she thought.

  “Alexander, this is Smith. Do not break location for any reason. The other squads are veterans. You don’t need to worry about them,” Smith said, closing the line and leaving the pair in silence.

  Warren’s smug grin faltered when he saw that her resolute stare hadn’t faded in the slightest.

  “Fiiiine, I’ll send out a Vixen and see what I can find, happy?” he said, rolling his eyes.

  Dropping his mind fully into a drone, he pulled away from a remote corner of the valley and into a search pattern of the surrounding area. Idly, he wondered if the enemy had sensors that could detect the small aircraft through the heavy snow.

  As long as nothing could pin down their location, whether or they could see his drones didn’t matter.

  “The drone is searching in a spiral pattern from our supposedly secret factory door,” he said, increasing flight speed by powering down the weapons. “I love how the secret door was so easy to find. I mean, think about it… we knew about it because of the blueprints, but how long did it really take for these giant rhinos to find it? A week? A month? There is no way they spend more than a month inside the building with no clue it was there.”

  “I hear you. It makes me glad we are out here pushing our environmental controllers to their max instead of walking into the obvious deathtrap… See anything?”

  “No human squads, but I see a small trail of Raak to the west. Best case, they are out for a little camping in the snow, worst case… they are about to find our newly modified door.”

  “Heading?”

  “West-Northwest, 310 degrees. Elevation minus thirty-eight. Wind speed four miles per hour.”

  “ETA?”

  “At current travel speed, you will see them through the clearing at 312 degrees in five minutes. Total time till arrival, ten minutes.”

  She snorted. “Even they take longer than the guy last night.”

  “Do tell?”

  “Maybe later. Right now, we have to lie on our bellies and be good.”

  Warren’s laugh died in his throat as he got a better look at the group’s leader. “CC… It’s one of them.”

  “Yeah, I know. I didn’t think you would warn me about humans.”

  “No… One of THEM. The things that killed Diego.”

  “Oh shit,” fumbling through menus, she swapped back to squad comm. “Jack, Jack! No, shut up. We don’t have time for the formality crap. One of those things is closing in on the entrance.”

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  “Can you distract it?” Jack asked.

  “Do you remember what it did to the last human soldier that tried?”

  “Yeah, we killed it.”

  “Not without losing Diego!” Warren shouted, tired of his friend missing the point. “I don’t know how you plan to get out of there, but you better hurry the hell up. This one has taken the shape of a Raak and it looks like it’s ready to kick ass.”

  “You have two mountaintops between you and it. Do your best to take it out by burying it in the terrain. If it sees you, run. Look for somewhere to hide where it can’t find you. Neither of you is dying today.” Jack promised, racking his mind for a plan.

  “That’s a lot of promise from someone who isn’t here,” Warren said, bringing the drone closer to the small group of enemy soldiers to better mark them on Neilson’s HUD.

  “If you can’t kill it with the snow, you need to distract it by any means necessary. It can’t reach us; we need more time. We’ve found some… disturbing things.”

  Warren switched back to their local channel and dug into the task at hand, “Ok CC, no more playtime. I’ve taken over your HUD and outlined the enemies. There are six just about to crest the ridge, not counting the big bad. I’m going to take one, two, and three. Hopefully, killing its entourage will convince it to retreat.”

  “You really think that?”

  “No, but I can sure as shit hope.”

  “Well then, sunshine, let’s get to work.”

  Waiting for the aliens to walk into her line of sight, Cecile topped off the charge on several Light batteries. She knew each creature would take a significantly charged shot to take down. The only way to be fast enough between rounds was to ensure the power was already waiting for her. While molding large quantities of Light wasn’t half the chore it was a year ago, she knew channeling that much power in a short time would really take it out of her.

  She watched Warren’s drone through her scope as it flew from point to point, attempting to find the best firing angle. As much as they poked fun at each other for being in the rear of the battlefield, this man had taken his craft to the next level. He was so fully immersed in his equipment, impossible maneuvers were nearly commonplace.

  If she could spare the glance to look at his face, she knew it would be completely blank-–a wall of nothingness. There was no part of his conscious mind inside his body, and the way he flew his drones proved that theory beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  “They will be visible in thirty seconds,” he said, the robotic cadence suggesting he was synthesizing a voice rather than using his mouth, “I have two more Vixens enroute. Targets selected, I’m prepared to use every ounce of power I have to take them out.”

  “We’ve got this. If we think the creature knows where we are after we kill the guards, we will move.”

  Numbers appeared over each of the alien’s heads as they reached the clearing in the far-off distance. The moment the last of the seven figures broke the tree line, Cecile fired.

  Count your breaths, she thought to herself, falling into harmony with her rifle. With the first target squarely in her sights, she shaped the round and squeezed the trigger.

  An incredibly dense explosive round flew from her rifle at a speed that regular weapons could only hope to achieve. But the sharpshooter didn’t have time to ponder her weapon or admire her handiwork. She simply had to know that both she and the rifle were one, and the first enemy was dead.

  Changing targets, she drained the remaining power from her first battery and part of a second, funneling it into the chamber of her rifle. Across the valley, enemy troops panicked and ducked for cover. Apparently, having your squad mate explode mid conversation was cause for alarm.

  Wimps.

  She loved the thrill of catching a moving target. Back home, she’d been responsible for protecting her family’s government-mandated farm from the things living in the wastes, and she’d been damned good at her job.

  Having never broken her cycle of breathing, she squeezed the trigger once more.

  Before the second creature even hit the ground, she was sighting her third target.

  “How are yours looking?” She asked in a tone she rarely allowed others to hear. Its flat, dead cadence expressed no emotion, and it was something the Breaker prided herself on. Unfortunately, the utter lack of passion scared the shit out of people.

  “One down, two to go. The other Vixens missed their shot and need a moment to recharge.”

  Of course. The thought wasn’t intentional, but when she pushed emotions from her mind, her tolerance for failure all but disappeared. It was part of the reason she tried not to talk when she was like this, but when faced with seven beings with a tendency to shake off damage, it was necessary.

  She wouldn’t have any more fully charged batteries after the next shot, but a quick inventory of her remaining Light showed her last two cells were each at about half capacity. It sucked that she had used so much energy in those first two shots, but the idea of making her power stretch was worse.

  Should she reduce the power of the next round or use it all and be sure to punch through the enemy?

  Focused entirely on her targets, she didn’t see how the shapeshifter reacted to the attacks. As she swung her muzzle in search of another target, she glimpsed the inky creature.

  Her blood ran as cold as the snow she lay on.

  It was staring at her.

  Lining up one last shot, she pumped as much power as she could into the round and squeezed the trigger. Knowing Warren’s drones were more than capable of eliminating the last guard, she pulled her armored face from the weapon stock. Getting to her feet, she shook off a thick layer of snow and clipped her rifle to the mag-holster on her back.

  Sergeant Smith had nearly shit a kitten when she’d asked for these toys. The number of times he repeated that ‘a sniper had no use for landmines’ was almost funny now that she thought back to it. Initially, he was right. She’d only requested the instruments of destruction because she could.

  Unfortunately for her, he’d been wrong.

  “Take out that last rhino and let’s get moving,” she said, unclipping the first mine from her armor, “The big bad saw us. It knows where we are.”

  “What are you about to do?”

  “Set a trap.”

  Minutes later, the pair hiked along a game trail that led away from the valley. In total, Cecile laid four mines, strategically placing them with the help of her AI so the mountainside would drop when they detonated. If the creature got anywhere near their original nest, there was no way it could get to safety before being lost in the snow.

  For a second, she considered that she’d gone a hair overboard. Then she remembered what happened to Ortiz and wondered if four were enough.

  “There is a cave about two clicks away,” Warren said dreamily, his voice giving away the lack of attention he paid to the world around him.

  “What about our tracks? Surely this thing is smart enough to follow some marks in the snow.”

  “It will be a few hours before it gets here. Hopefully, our tracks will have faded by then. Smith says we should have more than enough snowfall for that.”

  She listened to his comforting bullshit and chose to go along with them. There was no way he felt as confident as he was trying to let on, but if it helped them escape… it was worth it.

  “Perfect,” she said cheerily. Now that the fighting was over, it was time to put away the murderer that lived in her head and bring back the girl that just wanted to survive. “How deep is the cave? Can we actually get away from the cold and raise our visors, or is it basically a hole in the ground?”

  “Big enough that someone could obsess over a ring for a while. I have wasps exploring it now, but the first chamber opens up to a much larger complex beneath.”

  “We’ll have to take it,” she said, falling quiet while Warren explained the plan to Jack. The squad leader wasn’t happy about them being seen, but it was part of the game, and they knew it. If a sniper ever got discovered and had the chance to escape, that soldier had a responsibility to disappear.

  “Let’s go find our precious,” Warren said, stepping onto the path and beginning their trek to safety.