Legend of Axiatés
J.B. Kleynhans
Legend of Axiatés
Episode 1
Copyright 2016 by J.B. Kleynhans
Amazon Edition
Episode 1
Come the next marshalling there were only thirty-nine of them left. Beluka was carrying the body of his friend already cold. Gesper was the dead lad's name, thought Mestarés, the captain of the group. After numerous attempts to dissuade Beluka, they just let it go. He refused to leave Gesper with the rest of the dead. The fool was going to get himself killed in the process, but he was useless in his mewling state anyway. Mestarés just wished he would shut up - they had invited enough trouble by just coming to this place.
Of course what they called the marshalling was more of a desperately lucky reunion after the monstra had scattered them, Mestarés having arrived here with a squad of eighty men. Confident and self-assured with the sense of security of having won multiple battles against combat dummies, they did not come to these parts expecting much difficulty. After all, they were to capture a convict girl and nothing more.
Airlifted to the borders of the Gardens of Scithea, they had arrived in relative comfort. That was another thing; what was called the Gardens was actually a den of monstra living in a part of the earth so overgrown with trees and vegetation that there was little chance for humanity to ever reclaim this part of the world, that's assuming that men had a footing here once upon a time.
The Imperials as they were called were heavily armoured, the impossibly tough carbon plates protecting their chests and shoulders, while the rest of their combat uniform was an ominous black of military grade cloth. The supposed masterpiece was the headgear, which Mestarés wasn't going to get into right away.
As his men were, they were ideally suited to a quick infiltration that expected a great amount of fire power aimed back at them. Infiltrate... withstand whatever was thrown at them, and overwhelm the enemy in a storm of bullets. That was what the Imperials had been known for. What they were not, was a hunting party. Even so they were not ill-equipped beyond all redemption; every fifth man in the company was ordered to have his helm activated with an infrared heat detection visor. Mestarés pulled his own visor over his eyes occasionally, scanning the undergrowth, startled every now and then by the movement of a bird or the red-haired apes that tentatively followed their movements out of curiosity. He alone was ill at ease. They had yet to come across such then, but in the back of his mind he was hoping that the divide, however great or small, between normal animal life and monstra remained unobserved today.
Despite some earlier observations, there was evidence of mankind here, albeit long gone; old stone ruins rising as high as some of the mightier trees. But who had built these things were anyone's guess. Mestarés didn't like it, not the trees nor the ruins. The ruins reminded him of something and the trees, well... Mother Nature was a cold-hearted bitch when all her children came out to play.
Mestarés had a hard time keeping his mind on the goal. He was actually more preoccupied with leaving here alive. The only real reason he wanted to capture the girl was because if he didn't, then someone else would.
Tracking the girl was only half of it - they would in all probability need to flush her out and then hope she come quietly. Given her supposed powers Mestarés wasn't sure that they could see the girl using the infrareds. They would have to wait and see on that one.
Add to that the military report of this girl had a lot of missing details that were not even under the confidential files of Mestarés's tablet. Mestarés was torn between alerting his men what a threat she potentially posed and keeping the sensitive nature of her origins quiet. The best part of the report was the status indicator saying: Unremarkable. Not even his crew was fooled. If she was unremarkable, why on earth were they chasing her into Scithea? And how did she escape The Hold?
‘She seduced the guard, that's how she escaped,’ said Tony, a short, loud mouthed man by anyone's standards. ‘Heard she has tits like mountains!’ he cried out, gesticulating to the heavens with dramatically clawed hands as though trying to grab something, letting his rifle dangle by its strap.
‘Weapon safety!’ urged Mestarés in a tone as dull as the subject.
‘My gun is as safe as houses, boss,’ said Tony.
Mestarés wasn't even going to go into a lecture into what a gun in the military really is.
‘That's because you don't have no bullets little man,’ said Beluka laughingly to Tony, who was still sensible at the time.
Mestarés didn't mind the banter. Hell, sometimes it made missions like these come to a swift close, albeit for the wrong reasons. But the light heartedness was maybe a little too much; in these men's minds this was just another exercise, involving the amply growing desirability of the girl they couldn't wait to have a look at.
At some point Mestarés thought that they went in too deep. Turn back now! his thoughts kept nagging him. They pressed on. There were places of the forest where the noise increased to deafening heights, the cacophony of birds overpowered by a hum of insects, like they were really in some big hive. Even so they had no problem with insects except for the solitary bug Mestarés had crushed on his own cheek. He alone was helmetless. He didn't allow his men the courtesy he offered himself. A "do as I say, not as I do" kind of thing. They obeyed that command and didn't question it either. Mestarés was by no means a large man, he did however cast a deceivingly large shadow. His years with the military stood at fifteen, most of them served actively. His face was a little too bony to be called fine-chiselled and his blond hair was kept superbly short. Once, not too long ago, a woman said he looked too much like a rodent behind his back. Not the nose or mouth apparently, but the eyes. When he looked in the mirror, he didn't see this rodent she was talking about. The lady in question had been exceptionally pretty, so at times like these Mestarés just shrugged by himself to rid an idle mind of an insult that mattered more than it should, and certainly visited him more than it should.
So he was a little startled when one of the more junior men approached him, breathlessly. Not because he had been running, but because the man was plainly nervous addressing Mestarés. That was down to that surprisingly big shadow; just sometimes, Mestarés enjoyed the fact that he was intimidating.
‘Sir we've spotted her, she's moving through the ravine. She's running, she knows she hasn't lost us yet.’
Mestarés allowed himself to show visible relief and excitement. ‘Take twenty men and follow her every step,’ he told the man who reported the news to him, a very sudden promotion bestowed upon the man. Mestarés reared his voice louder. ‘The rest of you numbskulls, listen up, we'll split up, and keep your damned comm. devices online! Beta team will coordinate our approach so that one of us can blindside the girl and corner her!’
‘Are we Beta team sir?' asked the man who had just been handed twenty men and the task of chasing the girl down.
‘That you are, get moving!’
Truthfully speaking there was no point in trying to deny how ill-conceived this operation had been. They wanted to push amateurish new recruits into a hostile environment, and compensate for it by putting men like Mestarés and Sternroe in charge. Sternroe was the other captain.
Mestarés knew bringing greenhorns here was a recipe for disaster. He would not have had it this way and that is why he always had a little back up. Just in case. Fifteen years of excelling did not come without resorting to outside help. That was one of the reasons Mestarés never insisted on limelight. He downplayed his achievement and avoided major accolades, for the simple reason that should he be audited or news ever make it to the bigheads, that he, Mestarés, used a fore
ign contact to secure almost a fifth of his missions... well, the Imperial pride would never allow for that, no matter how effective it was. What he did do well however was keep his men safe, and keep Doma Arak safe in the process. And that had to happen by any means necessary in Mestarés's book.