Night Mission into the Primitive Village

We pushed forward anyway. Once the last traces of sunlight disappeared, the planet became a completely different place. The canopy swallowed what little moonlight reached the surface, leaving us dependent on the lamps mounted to our equipment. Every beam of light revealed another vine curling toward our ankles, another flower opening as we passed, or another pair of eyes watching from somewhere beyond the trees.

Something tried to eat me, twice. Something tried to eat Eleni three times. She really wasn’t happy about that. By the time Eleni’s scanner said we’d reached the village, my uniform was torn at one shoulder, both of us were covered in mud, and my pistol battery had dropped another three percent. Eleni had stopped reminding me that sheltering until morning had been the logical decision sometime around the point where we’d been chased through a swamp by a plant with six legs and entirely too many teeth.

To her credit, she never suggested turning back. Lily was still out there. That was enough. We reached the outskirts of the settlement sometime in the middle of the night. The jungle thinned unexpectedly, and Eleni immediately killed her light before grabbing my shoulder and pulling me down with her.

“Lieutenant.”

“I see it.”

Through the leaves below us, firelight flickered. We crawled the final twenty meters on our stomachs until the ground dropped away beneath a rocky ridge. From there, the entire village spread out below us.

A crude wall of sharpened timber surrounded clusters of huts built from logs, hides and enormous leaves. Rope bridges connected platforms high in the trees, while watch fires burned throughout the settlement, sending greasy columns of smoke into the canopy. Against the absolute darkness of the jungle, the place looked like an island of orange firelight.

The inhabitants were somehow worse up close than they had looked earlier. Every one we’d seen was male, enormous and muscular, with bluish-grey skin and wild white hair. Some had tusks. Others painted their bodies with crude symbols. Spears, stone axes and clubs appeared to represent the pinnacle of local technological achievement.

I counted twenty before giving up.

“Thirty-seven visible,” Eleni whispered.

“Of course you counted.”

“There are likely more inside the structures.”

“Of course there are.”

Then I found Lily.

Every other thought fell away. She was alive.

My trainee sat beside the largest fire in the center of the village, surrounded by ogres.

Whatever dignity the Federation uniform had afforded her was gone. Her sky-blue minidress and black thigh-high boots had all been taken. The primitives had redressed her in clothing of their own manufacture, if manufacture wasn’t too generous a word for it. Her top consisted of little more than two crudely cut pieces of brown animal hide stitched together with thick leather cord. The edges were uneven and ragged, without decoration or any attempt at proper tailoring. A similarly primitive leather skirt hung around her hips, roughly cut to mid-thigh and held together by a knotted hide belt. It looked like something produced by people whose entire textile industry consisted of killing an animal and deciding which pieces of it could be tied together.

She was barefoot. Her long blonde hair was tangled and dirty from being dragged through the jungle, falling messily around her shoulders instead of its usual carefully maintained waves. Mud streaked her legs and arms. There were scratches along one knee and dried leaves tangled in her hair.

Her halo still floated above her head. Perfectly pristine, that little glowing ring was the most reassuring thing I’d seen today.

Lily herself looked absolutely furious. She sat with her arms folded, glaring at her captors with enough concentrated hatred that the fact she was completely at their mercy appeared to be more of an inconvenience than a source of fear. One ogre placed a wooden bowl at her feet. Something inside moved.

Lily looked at the bowl. Then at him. Then kicked it over. The ogre roared. Lily shouted something back. I couldn’t hear the words from this distance, but I recognized the body language for go fuck yourself.

“That’s my girl.”

Eleni slowly looked at me. “What?” She returned her attention to the village. Two more ogres approached Lily. My hand immediately found my pistol. Eleni caught my wrist. “Don’t.”

“They’re surrounding her.”

“They have been surrounding her since we arrived.”

“They stripped off her uniform.”

“And provided indigenous clothing.”

“That’s a very Federation way of describing what I’m looking at.”

“We don’t know their intentions.”

“Exactly.”

One of the ogres reached toward Lily. She slapped his hand away, hard. The nearby conversations stopped. For several seconds, the ogre stared down at her. Lily glared straight back, jaw clenched, blue eyes burning beneath her tangled blonde bangs. Her halo almost seemed brighter.

My finger lingered on my pistol’s trigger. Finally the ogre grunted and walked away. I breathed again. Whatever these things wanted with her, Lily hadn’t been seriously harmed. Yet. I lowered myself behind the ridge. “What are we working with?”

Eleni checked her belt. “My pistol.”

“I’ve got forty-three percent charge.”

“You previously said forty-six.”

“I fired at something when we crossed the swamp.”

Eleni produced four compact cylinders.

I smiled. “Grenades.”

“Photon concussion devices.”

“Flashbangs.”

She hesitated. “Essentially.”

Two pistols. Four flashbangs. Thirty-seven visible ogres.

Fantastic.

Eleni activated her scanner, projecting a small holographic map between us. “The eastern wall is poorly monitored. Vegetation has compromised this section. We can enter here, move behind these structures, reach Lilith and withdraw without engaging the majority of the settlement.”

“Stealth.”

“The rational approach.”

I looked over the ridge again.

There was another option.

Eleni noticed where I was looking. “No.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You don’t need to.”

“Four flashbangs into the center of the village. They’ve probably never seen advanced technology. Light, noise, panic. We hit them while they’re disoriented, grab Lily and run.”

“No.”

“Shock and awe.”

“Giving an irrational plan a dramatic name does not make it rational.”

“It makes it sound better.”

Below us, Lily kicked the bowl farther away when an ogre tried returning it.

I checked my pistol.

Forty-three percent.

Thirty-seven ogres.

Four flashbangs.

One extremely pissed-off Angelite.