Kara Discovered: Episode 11, Walking into an Ambush
Jeffries and his men go for round two with the aliens.
Seventeen steps later, Jeffries could see brown blobs on his right side. Three steps further on, he saw them on his left. Cho was correct. They were entering an ambush. His blood chilled, and a cold shiver when down his spine despite the forty-degree C temperature.
They were entering combat, and every single man was green. What did he, or any other legionnaire, know about real combat? Sure, they had training and war-games, but mankind hadn’t had a real war in three thousand years.
But there was no one else that could do this. If he and these outcast of society that study violence couldn’t do this, those people in the hands of the aliens were doomed.
Where was that little one? Could he really order a volley of javelins on his own men? Could the rest of the platoon possibly survive if he didn’t?
A distorted voice came from the distance. “We took out the small one!”
Relief flooded him. The voice had been Corporal Wes. But that relief was short-lived. As if those words were the signal, both sides charged his men.
“Hand to hand!” he screamed at the top of his voice. Not that he needed to; his men were already moving on the bears, screaming their lungs out. They never did that in training. Why now? He shoved that thought aside and looked for who needed help.
The answer was none. Creature after creature fell to his men, and he could hear bones being broken with each strike. And this time, his troops outnumbered their ambushers from the looks of things.
“Damn it,” the private on his right side yelled, stepping back with a blood-soaked fist, having punched entirely through the creature’s ribcage.
Jeffries stepped up and grabbed the staff as it was falling from the hands of the creature as it crumpled to the ground, blood now squirting from its open wound. With staff in hand, he went on guard, guarding himself and his injured legionnaire.
“What happened?” Jeffries asked the bloody fist private.
In a pain filled voice the private said, “Hand. Pretty sure I broke it when I punched through the thing’s chest. Maybe my wrist too.”
“He isn’t the only one,” said another legionnaire, stepping into Jefferies vision, holding a staff with one hand and cradling his other arm close to his body.
It wasn’t a theory anymore. Bones did break far easier here than any of the other universes man lived in.
He could hear no more fighting.
“Squad leaders, report!”
“Squad one, enemy down or fled, three injured, none in serious condition!” yelled Cho from the front of the line.
The next report came, then the next and next. Every squad had two to four people with broken bones.
But the battle was over.
Then Corporal Wes’s voice called out, his voice weaker and blurred by the distance. “Squad five, one dead, four injured, three civilians, and three legionnaires missing.”
Elation that no more of his men had died was quashed by finding out that none of the civilians were here and three of his men were missing.
“Top, Cho, look for the trail of our missing people,” he yelled out and then ran for where that voice had come from, his staff ready to defend.
He wasn’t the only one, nor the first to arrive. Two of Cho’s privates were already cutting the ropes holding them down when he got there. And there were a lot of rope tied to a lot of stakes. Bruises on all the nude bodies testified that they had been battered into submission during that last escape.
“If anyone would come for us, I knew you would, Sir,” said Wes. “But I need water.”
