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A certain mister Ravis found himself seated in the cargo hold of a Clydesdale freighter, slouching heavily off of a canvas chair that had been hastily bolted to the floor of the vessel. By all accounts, the relatively crude fixture was nothing to write home about: sturdy enough to support his body weight plus all of his equipment and probably cheap enough for use in these makeshift troop transports, but far from comfortable. He’d wished for something more, no matter how badly beggars couldn’t be choosers, and had resorted to contorting his body in all sorts of strange manners in order to reach a comfortable sitting position, but at the behest of the mercenary sitting beside him once he accidentally elbowed their helmet off-center, he’d eventually settled into his current slump, eyes darting about the interior of the vessel in an attempt to find something, anything at all, to help bide his time and occupy his thoughts while en-route to target.

Idly, he pulled the rifle sitting muzzle-down between his legs closer to his body, the same Ageira-made Mark 15 rifle he’d owned for years and carried back on Nauru and Sprague. Or at least, the lower receiver was still the same, a busy-looking machined hunk of spacecraft-grade alloy beset with prominent ambidextrous fire controls jutting every which way and dotted by weight-reducing engraved indentations, finished off with a coat of brown-on-dark-earth spray paint. Over the years and through the elements, much of the paint job and even some of the original finish had begun to chip away, most prominently along the raised fences in the magazine well where bare alloy became visible. At this point, there was probably some form of unhealthy connection drawn between him and this weapon, but he paid it no mind. It was just a tool, made to do just exactly what he needed to do and not much else. What more could he ask for?

The inclusion of Cold Harbor in the ground invasion of Gran Canaria was seen almost an entire mile off by most of the working men and women of the group, what with most of the Bretonian Armed Forces preoccupied with the Gallic front that had begun to encroach upon New London. They’d be tasked with alleviating the pressure, then, the select trusted contractors who’d been allowed to participate in this phase of Bretonian expansion, as for every mercenary in this so-called “lower-intensity” conflict zone, there’d be one more regular standing abreast in defiance of the Gallic advance. Tal himself had the dubious honor of being hand-picked by someone way up in the Bretonian brass, as he’d come to be informed, to be sent to Omega-49, culminating in him joining a different Special Projects team under the callsign Evergreen. As the opening shots in the conflict rang out, the ever-less-than-fortunate freelancer found himself caught once more in an interstellar conflict, one that he knew little about both its origins and potential ramifications, but hey. He appreciated the change in scenery.

Considered on the upper end of the scale for paramilitary forces, Evergreen was tasked with disrupting infrastructure outside of the scope of SIS agents already present planetside, acting as highly-mobile light infantry with support from adjunct forces and the air. Resistance would be minimal for at least the first hour until the opposition could assemble and properly present a defending force, and so to accomplish their objectives on-schedule, they brought little. Side-by-side, they numbered no more than twelve men of varying national origin, equipped with nothing more than light winter gear, body armor, and rifles to minimize their footprint. Despite this, they were still ready for anything, and with time being of the essence, any excess weight or additional numbers would only slow them down.

Tal reached onto his plate carrier and tilted his chest-mounted Neural Net tablet down, turning on the screen just long enough for him to catch a glimpse of the time. It’d been nearly thirty minutes since Admiral Dagon made her announcement to the people of Omega-49, made her intentions clear, and by her own promises, there was less than a minute to landfall. Now wouldn’t be a time for mistakes, they’d said, for Bretonia—and the entire sector—was watching. Or, they would be watching, were they not covered by thick hull plating, as Tal let out an unenthused yawn into the stale cabin air. He hadn’t slept much at all, perhaps due to typical pre-op anxiety, getting only a few hours in aboard their parent vessel before he had to get geared up. Synth Foods, of course, was his best friend in this scenario, providing energy supplements of questionable origin, and he’d undoubtedly come to know them better in the upcoming weeks.

As if on cue, once he folded the mount for his tablet back up, his integrated communications headset crackled to life, breaking the monotony of the muffled humming produced by the Clydesdale’s powerplant and twin engines. It was nothing more than an official notice from the pilots that they were less than a minute out and to prepare for a combat landing, prompting the cabin to come to life with movement as the mercenaries checked their harnesses so they didn’t go flying out of their seats. Reluctantly, Tal sat upright in his chair, grunting as he adjusted his weapon sling upwards and tightened his harness back to uncomfortable levels, feeling the skeletonized frame of the chair dig into his extremities. A deep inhale followed, and after some counting down in his head, he felt his stomach turn as the freighter suddenly entered a steep dive, going from a low cruising altitude to several hundred feet above the ground in a startling amount of time, finally settling down to a landing in the middle of a major roadway. A great start to what would certainly be a great operation, he thought, still churned a little from the maneuver as the green cabin light came on and he unceremoniously removed his harness, taking up his 16-inch-barreled “recce” rifle at a seated low ready and thumbing the fire selector to “semi”.

After a few more seconds, the starboard-side door opened with a sharp hiss, cold morning air and bright sunlight coming in strong, and so Tal winced visibly, being closest to the door and catching the full brunt of the ingress. Squinting through his tinted combat glasses, he reached up and grabbed at the top of the doorway, pulling himself out of the ship outwards, not upwards, to avoid slamming his head into the ceiling or the man across from him. A hop and a skip later and he was on solid ground, bringing his support hand out and up to wrap around the slim handguard of his rifle, depressing the rearmost button on the pressure switch with his thumb and sweeping the area. Once the immediate area was clear, he turned the suppressed muzzle to his right, keeping his sights down the way while the rest of his team dismounted. Through the wash from the Clydesdale’s engines, his weapon-mounted target detector fed his riflescope crystal clear white-on-blue images, showing an empty street devoid of anything except the occasional personal vehicle parked up on the side of the road. A few uneventful seconds later, and he felt a light tap on his shoulder, so he raised his weapon to high ready and peeled away into their formation just as their ride lifted off and began the trip to pick up more soldiers. So far, so good. They were on the ball, cohesive, moving like clockwork, and as long as they kept it up, they’d be home safe in no time.

Quickly, they moved off the street to the relative concealment of the target building, keeping their weapons loosely shouldered and pointed towards opposite directions in their two-column stack as they ascended a short fourteen steps up some stairs to the main entrance. Upon arrival, they fanned out along the outer walls, the pointman wasting no time and moving in front of the door, rearing his leg up to deliver a mighty kick by the lock to send the front door swinging open with a hellish clatter.

Welcome to Gran Canaria.

A certain mister Ravis crept along through an alleyway, taking the point position for his team with his rifle up, shouldered, and leveled at the wall ahead. He’d rolled the gun roughly 30 degrees to the left to allow him access to his offset backup optic, a simple LED collimator red dot sight, but kept his head upright along the wide-cheeked buttstock to allow him to peer well over his sight picture, his anxious gaze instead darting from wall to wall as he advanced. At this range, he was confident he could engage any point targets solely based off of inherent kinematic senses, with the firearm acting an extension of his body, and he figured the added situational awareness of having a relatively unclouded field of vision would be more conductive to surviving their travels than getting tunnel-visioned through a small tubular sight. The silence around these parts was unnerving, save for the occasional rattling of explosions reverberating off of skyscrapers in the distance, and the idea that things could pop off in an instant if some random Zoner got smart kept him on his toes.

As he approached a bend in what felt like a never-ending maze of damp, strange-smelling backalleys that reminded him more of the slums of Manhattan than a major Zoner settlement, he stopped, the men and women of the Special Projects team behind him halting in unison, and quietly shuffled his weapon around on it’s sling until he was able to comfortably shift the stock over to his left shoulder, taking a step back and around to clear the corner with the long barrel of his suppressed recce rifle. A single step and a slight lean was all it took for the exit to come into view, bright light shining into the scaffolded alley from the streets, and without a soul in sight, he stepped out entirely, shifting back over to his dominant side and assuming the position. Forward he pushed, taking a single deep breath to help calm his mind.

Their first mission had gone relatively smoothly, involving investigating a suspected resistance broadcast center in the basement of an inner-city residence that had been sending inflammatory, anti-Bretonian messages across the Neural Net since the failure of the Tombstone summit some weeks prior, much to the chagrin of the Crown, who considered it enough of a threat for it to be eliminated within seconds of landfall. With the longest rifle out of the bunch, Tal had entered last in their stack, though at this time of day, most everyone—including the residents in the target building—was still in bed, leaving little to no threats anyhow as they made entry. The twelve-man team was split into thirds, one to investigate the basement, another to clear the ground floor, and the last to head upstairs, with Tal heading down to the basement to find a plethora of communications equipment. The array in question was comprised mostly of new units, bearing the markings of well-known Kusarian brands, and after taking a few pictures of the setup and gathering any intelligence they could, they rigged it with thermite charges and packed up in preparation to leave. The presence of such sophisticated equipment here was at least somewhat worrisome, for whoever the owner was, they were either wealthy or had wealthy benefactors, neither of which bode well going down the road towards occupation.

As for the residents, when he came up the stairs back to ground level, he heard the muffled thwacking of suppressed gunfire followed by two meaty thumps that seemed to shake the entire house, leaving their fate fairly obvious once four geared men came back downstairs. It was all-in-all simple enough, a textbook smash-and-grab, and after setting the charges off and burning any evidence, they were on their way to their next objective. Total elapsed time? Less than five minutes. Slow had been smooth, and smooth had been fast.

Maneuvering through the city thus far had proved mildly inconvenient: air transport was strictly limited to ferrying the aforementioned 1.8 million Bretonian soldiers planetside from ships in orbit for the time being, while their uparmored, mine-resistant trucks hadn’t yet been brought to Port Jackson from Sprague, which meant that for now, they’d be huffing it on foot, using backalleys and mouseholing through houses to criss-cross their way to their next target with minimal exposure to long lines of sight down roadways. The problem was, then, when they actually had to cross the street, as the sneakier route would only get them so far. Hence, the situation he was in now, as he reached the end of the alley and repeated his arm motions to get his slung weapon across to his other shoulder. A strained depression of the thumb with his outstretched right hand returned a satisfying click from the dual-switch pressure pad mounted atop the twelve o’clock rail, and his primary magnified optic lit up in blue, working in tandem with the target detector sitting forwards of it to bring back clear images: no targets. Back against the wall, bricks chafing against the webbing on his flatpack, he kicked off of his hard cover and twirled with all the grace of a tactical ballerina, coming forwards to plant his forearm against stone and cradle his rifle in his steadied hand, sights now reset down the other way. Carefully, he’d scan the horizon and rooftops for any threats, finding well, none at minimum magnification, and so he let out a relieved exhale.

“All clear, go.”

He was met with the immediate shuffling of gear to his left, followed by hurried footsteps that grew more distant as the first pair made their way across the street, setting up at the end with weapons up in a similar manner. With more eyes now downrange, the second pair made their way across, keeping their rifles loosely pointed in the unknown direction as they moved with purpose. This charade went on until it was only him and another, whereupon he received a tap on the shoulder, signalling him to break cover and move. Minding his step, he hopped off the curb and followed his fellow man as they crossed no-man’s land, his rifle bobbing up and down in his grip as he divided his attention between his jogging path and where there were dragons, until after what seemed like an exposed eternity, wind gusts amplifying this feeling as they blew between the buildings along the crossing, he reached the other side, raising his weapon up and peering down his scope just in time to clip his boot against the curb, falling forwards majestically. With a hushed expletive, he landed on the pavement, going down in a slump of gear that clacked, rattled, and shuffled upon impact. Once the initial shock had passed, he took his hands off of his gun to push himself up, whereupon he scrambled to his feet and made it the last few steps to relative safety, finding that most of his comrades were just casually watching him eat shit on the sidewalk and stifling laughter as he readjusted his kit.

“You good?” someone had asked, prompting an affirmative nod from Tal. A pat on the back and a nudge forwards down the once-adjacent alley reminded him of his duty, and so he raised his rifle once again, canting it some thirty degrees to his left while the team fell in behind him. Once he got the signal, he began creeping forwards, taking the point position for his team with his rifle up, shouldered, and leveled at their future.

A certain mister Ravis found himself crossing yet another street, the now-midday Omega-49 sun beating down upon them as they streamed across the open, moving quickly in pairs to their next destination. By this point, the method to their madness had become a groggy, tedious blur, the frequency with which they conducted such crossings reducing Tal’s observational and situational awareness ability into little more than him lazily waving his rifle around to make it look like he was doing something important. To make matters even worse, the last few hours of their time on the planet had been almost wholly uneventful for the freelancer, who, in typical Tal fashion, hadn’t been given a chance to fire his weapon in anger, despite hot-dropping directly into the middle of the sector’s latest warzone and being on a team comprised entirely of super-special pipe-hitters conducting numerous extra-tactical smash and grabs and kill-capture missions. At least it wasn’t hot. Unlike Sprague or Nauru, where simply existing was hell in of itself, the milder climate on Gran Canaria meant that the effects of prolonged physical exertion were much less pronounced, and he couldn’t have imagined what it must’ve been like to do this all day in the desert without air-conditioned trucks to ferry them from point to point.

Resistance had still been extremely light up until this point, almost worryingly so. Not that they weren’t busy taking heads or anything: plenty of non-compliant Zoners and Corsairs had been thwacked by his teammates as they made the rounds, but nearly half of their targets so far had been outright missing due to relocation or bad intel, and aside from sporadic, distant gunfire and explosions, the real fight was far from them, if there was even one at all. The Bretonians, if his team leader’s comms were to believed, had run into the same issue, as occupying forces began moving through the city.

Maybe it was for the better.

Tal was one of the last to cross the street, making sure to glance over and step up and onto the sidewalk instead of tripping on his own feet and bowling over forwards again. He’d already embarrassed himself once in front of the boys; he certainly didn’t need to do it again. Now across, he shuffled into position at the end of the stack, though this time, they were going back around the corner and just up the road to their destination, the University of Gran Canaria satellite campus in the settlement of Las Palmas. Apparently, they were to fetch something out of the basement of the long-closed domain of higher education, the facility’s staff having closed their doors and evacuated weeks prior to the invasion. It was a far cry from going door-to-door to confiscate and destroy contraband, and a detour that took them well off the most optimal path to completing the day’s duties. Indeed, judging by the distance to their next objective, they were probably better off coming back to this later or getting a different unit to swing by and check it out, but their operational planner had decided completion of this objective was paramount to the success of something. In all likelihood, it was the work of a Bretonian noble somewhere in Cambridge just trying to get their hands on some unique glowing space rocks, if there were even any still left behind, that led them here, but they didn’t have much room to complain. They were the ones bankrolling them, after all.

Hugging the outer wall of what must’ve been an old apartment complex, they moved upstream with a purpose, rifles pointed every which way as they continued onwards with perhaps the most dangerous part of their journey. Fire, if it came, could come from anywhere across and above them during the few hundred solid meters they had to dash from cover to the target, their only solace being whatever wayside building they could break into if things went south.

And it eventually did, some halfway through the trek up the street, in the form of three projectiles fired from some kind of indiscriminate particle weapon. Tal hadn’t as much as gotten a glimpse of where the bright streams of light originated before the air began crackling around him, the first shot hitting the sidewalk with considerable force, scattering what looked like sparks all over them and leaving a sizeable scorch mark. The next harmlessly hit a passing pillar, but the third sizzled right over Tal’s head, causing a panicked flinch and scattering loose excited particles all over him and his immediate bystanders, accompanied by a heat wave not strong enough to do damage, but enough to make them uncomfortable as they pressed on. Within seconds, someone in the stack had the mind to return fire, followed up by a cacophony of suppressed gunfire aimed in the general direction of the enemy to suppress the supposed sniper as the mercenary column scrambled up the road. Dazed by having a stream of angry ions explode just mere inches beyond his head, Tal stumbled forwards as he kicked into gear and ran, hands shooting out from his weapon to prop himself against the pavement as he fumbled and fell over once more during the mad scramble for cover. The mercenary behind him was kind enough to lend a hand though, luckily, grabbing him by the handle of his flatpack and lifting him up off of the ground with considerable strength, and after a hop and a skip, he was back on his feet, moving with the crew as they banked right and busted into an old apartment complex.

By the time he made entry, his team had cleared the immediate area well in advance, keeping their eyes on every possible avenue of entry. To his right was a boarded up apartment, the numbers scraped off the wall plaque after some calamity occurred whatever number of years ago, and to his left was one that was presumably occupied, judging by the dusty doormat right outside that read “WELCOME” in faded lettering. In the center of this building was a fairly large stairwell, which at ground level only lead up, and one that fellow men took no time in advancing towards, the ebbs and flows of their movement within such an unknown and confined space providing a graceful display for any potential onlookers. Maybe that’s what they were, thought Tal as he brushed up against a wall with his recce rifle at high ready, shuffling awkwardly toward the first step just as the pointman was halfway up to the second floor. A gang of tactical ballerinas.

He’d be the centerpiece of this skirmish, as much as he hated the thought of it, with his specialized targeting equipment and marksman rifle. Once the second floor had been cleared, Tal broke cover and quick-stepped up the creaking stairs, keeping low when he got up to the next story and using the wooden guardrail as concealment from the window adjacent. Overall, the layout was the same; only that the door had been replaced by a window. A third of the team remained downstairs, while everyone else was elevated, keeping their eyes pointed around at every possible avenue of entry for anyone waiting in ambush.

“Tal, get over here, set up there and see if you can find him. Should be the second yellow house to the...right.” came through his comms, the hushed whispers of one of his teammates as they tried to keep the noise down. Looking around, he saw the position in question, right where two corners of the railing were joined, and so he began to move, taking a hand off of his rifle to reach up and use the rail as a guide and support, managing to slide on down and into place. What followed was some fiddling with his weapon, ensuring that the target detector was on and still feeding images to the optic by aiming down and off to the side, to help minimize his exposure to the enemy, and with one last deep breath, he stood up from a knee to a squat, twirling around and setting the rifle’s relatively long handguard along the two guardrails. The corner fit easily between the magazine well and bipod, leaving him a steady, if somewhat uneven, surface to pivot his weapon on as his offhand came up to steady the buttstock. From here, he easily found the proper cheek weld and eye relief, scanning the buildings across the way carefully at minimum magnification but ultimately finding naught in the way of signatures. Not any in the windows, and not any on the rooftops. Switching to clear channel didn’t help any, either, as he found the suspect yellow house, but no shooter. Perhaps they’d been somehow struck by the volley of return fire, or in the short amount of time it took for them to get to a vantage point, they were able to retreat and fight another day, but that was a thought more fit to reflect on later, when he was back safe and sound in Port Jackson. Visibly dismayed, he slowly reached down to his push-to-talk, depressing the button firmly.

“I got nothing, I think he fucked off already.”

His word was enough to get the rest of the team to start peeling off, keeping low in similar fashion as they moved back down the stairs. At least they hadn’t had the mind to get complacent, even if he’d spoken with confidence. Out here, surrounded in what essentially was “enemy territory” ahead of the actual landing force, lowering one's guard for even a second could lead to an early grave. He’d peel in kind, staying a few seconds more only to verify that there were no hostiles before moving back down the stairs and regrouping with the rest of his team. But, leaving through the front route wouldn’t be a smart option, and so, they would have to—

“We’re leaving through the back. Kincaid, you’re up.”

“Got it, boss.”

A short exchange of words, followed by movement in unison as they stacked up on the emergency exit. The pointman, his good buddy Jasper, lunged forwards and pushed the rusted-out handle, holding it for a protracted ten seconds before it unlocked and gave way. With no time to wait, the team stormed out in file, clearing their sectors as they continued towards the objective. One by one, Tal watched his teammates roll out, looking back towards the entrance to the complex and letting out a strained exhale before he too made his leave.

It’d been a little over two weeks since the Bretonians had first made landfall on Gran Canaria, and the two major Zoner settlements had since been pacified. Whatever loosely-organized local forces that attempted to resist the invasion were swept aside and replaced with a small garrison of Bretonian reservists that defended the newly-installed puppet government, and with the BBC now reporting victory in New Holland to images of Armed Forces soldiers and armor parading through the streets of Las Palmas, the public’s prying eyes were finished with this conflict, tossing it aside in favor of greater stories of heroism and grandeur over New London. Alas, a certain mister Ravis’ fifteen minutes of fame were over, but the occupation, and more importantly, the role of the men and women of Cold Harbor, was just beginning. While the major settlements were Bretonian-controlled, everything unmarked in-between was still badlands, a cold, unforgiving landscape fit with rolling hills and snow-capped mountains as far as the eye could see, and they surely hadn’t seen the last of the Zoners or their Corsair advisors. It wouldn’t be that easy–it was never as easy as the broadcasters made it seem, not for their nightly attempts at boosting the wavering morale of the Bretonian people.

After a brief, sporadic running gun “battle” inside and along the outskirts of Las Palmas, Tal and his team were airlifted via Clydesdale freighters to the garrison headquarters at Port Jackson, shortly before they were ordered to stand fast on their current position. The bureaucracy had some details to iron out regarding the occupation plan going forwards, and so for the time being, they bided in silence, having been assured by a handler that they’d see combat again soon enough. First was a short, late Christmas celebration for those in the company who actually celebrated it, and they’d all gotten together in the dining facility to countdown the new Sirian Standard year, ringing in 826 with some reconstituted synth paste from the climate-controlled facilities at FOB Jackson. Sure, it sucked to be so far from home, forced to live out of small, heated boxes for the duration of their contract, but it sucked together, Evergreen’s camaraderie taking at least some of the edge off for a war-weary Freelancer.

Now, they were a week into the new year, and there were no new orders in sight, only the occasional update. According to the team’s leader, the Stirling battlegroup up in orbit was able to secure the shipping lanes in and out of the system all the way up to the planet proper, meaning that their trucks would be arriving in-theater shortly to allow them greater range, mobility, and firepower going into the countryside. Until then, though, they’d be conducting small-scale direct action raids by air whenever the opportunity presented itself, which as of the then-current date hadn’t at all.

Instead, Tal found himself holding up an empty tin of powdered synth paste that he’d swiped out of the recycling bins behind the dining facility, dangling it in front of his good buddy Jasper Kincaid in preparation for a light upward toss. As per the usual, military–though in this case, paramilitary–men left their own devices would eventually devolve to such low-brow, homebrewed shenanigans, and so Tal let go on the upwards swing, allowing the small can just enough air time for Kincaid to try unsuccessfully to kick it right out of the air, much to the disappointment of the eight onlookers. Moans and groans of varying pitch filled the air, as Tal reached down to retrieve the target and reset himself for another attempt.

“Goddamnit, it’s these friggin’ winter pants holding me back,” Jasper had complained, “I can hardly feel my legs in these stupid things, how do you expect me to kick something that small out of the air?”

“More with the excuses. Do you want the credits or not? You got one more try, dude, come on.”

“That’s easy for you to say, standing there watching me make a fucking ass out of myself trying to punt this thing. How ‘bout you come over here and try this shit? I’ll cut you that five-hundred if you do it, huh?”

“Just hurry up and miss again so I can go inside. I’m freezing my ass off out here.”

“Fuck you.” With that, the man readied himself, entering a staggered runner’s pose and hyping himself up for what would surely be his best attempt.

“One...two...three!” Tal counted down, releasing on three and drawing his hand back in close to his body, leaning away to avoid accidentally being kicked in the face. Kincaid’s leg came up in response, and in a then-stunning display of flexibility, the side of his boot met the can, sending it careening unspectacularly right into Tal’s face, falling down and clattering on the gravel below. By the time he could react, the tin was out of reach, and so Tal helplessly flailed his arms up, much to the amusement of the bystanders.

“Hah! That’s 500 bitch, you owe me.”

“Fine. Tal, go toss that shit, let’s call it a night.”

Sighing again, Tal bent over to pluck the can from the rocks and began making his way back to the waste receptacles, giving some half-assed good-nights and farewells before pulling his shemagh up over his mouth for additional warmth. Along the way, he chuckled quietly to himself, having realized the utter absurdity of them resorting to finding entertainment in kicking random trash around for sport. It’d been this happy-go-lucky for a fair while now, and he swore he was beginning to grow complacent in these conditions, forgetting the dangers of complacency in this particular neck of the woods.

As he tossed the can back where it belonged, he swore he heard some kind of distant rumbling, followed by a deafening explosion no more than half a mile down the road, likely at the first entry checkpoint. The resulting shockwave and dust soon hit him full-on, knocking him backwards onto his rear, and for a second, all he could hear was his own breathing. Once the dust had finally settled, he propped himself up on an arm, wiping at his eyes and looking up in awe to find a tall, distant mushroom cloud that rivaled some of the neighboring skyscrapers in height, with heavy activity quickly coming online within the base as friendly forces scrambled to respond.

Tal took in a deep breath, gritting his teeth as the freezing nighttime wind chill bit the few exposed areas of his face once the transport he was riding atop, a Bretonian armored personnel carrier, began rolling down the main road out towards the incident site. Though the explosion occurred roughly five, maybe ten minutes ago, the attendant forces on watch at Port Jackson’s forward operating base had secured the immediate area, while reinforcements began trickling in to assist with recovery and investigation efforts. Evergreen, having been partaking in various goofs and gaffs in the time prior, had to return to their quarters to hastily grab their kit and weaponry before hitching a ride with their adjunct partner unit, and since the nature of the situation at hand necessitated the ferrying of various heavy equipment within the troop carriers, they were forced to ride along on top.

And so, here he was, a certain mister Ravis, looking around at an otherwise starry night sky made hazy by a thin, lingering cloud of dust. Preliminary observations had been passed down to them via word of mouth from the response teams, and it all seemed so grim. The entire checkpoint, including the forcefield-gated entryway and the accompanying outpost and observation towers, had been leveled, along with a major disruption in the hardlight barrier surrounding the complex that funneled all traffic through the main gate. As they were coming upon the scene, he was able to witness the devastation firsthand: nothing more than scattered piles of rubble with an unidentifiable smoldering wreck as the centerpiece, all illuminated with the help of various floodlights shining brightly on both the scene and beyond. Tall armored vehicles with Bretonian markings, armed with all manners of the latest and greatest in lend-lease technology, stood watch over the area, providing cover for the numerous figures walking about, busy with their radios as they sifted through what little remained.

Tal braced himself with the help of a nearby bustle rack as the APC came to a stop, inhaling the burnt air and passing his buddy Kincaid a glance before hopping off the side, the sloped armor serving as a slide of sorts to help him cleanly land on both feet with an audible crunching of gravel. The curves of his rifle fit neatly in his arms as he cradled his weapon at patrol ready, reluctantly waddling forwards through the cold with the rest of his team in an effort to try and look busy. Curious, Tal idly tilted his head down to look between the rocks, finding little more than small specks of debris, rubble, and perhaps most disturbingly, chunks and bits of what had to have been human flesh, charred on some ends, and rendered in vividly bright red in others. Gulping down nervously, he forcibly peeled his eyes off to the side.

“Jesus Christ,” chimed Kincaid, keeping his voice down for fear of offending the Bretonians, “What the fuck even blew up here?”

Tal threw him only another, slightly more concerned glance, looking back down at his boots once he came to a stop. At least three men were to be manning the checkpoint at any given time of day, and putting two-and-two together, they’d undoubtedly been turned into a fine mist in service to their country and crown. Yet, through all of that, only one thought populated his mind, as much as he sought to suppress it, one that was and would be laden with guilt and helplessness.

Better them than him.

A certain mister Ravis laid quietly along a row of seats in the back of a Bretonian armored personnel carrier, arms folded over the rifle splayed out across his chest with his head resting on a small rucksack. Idly, his eyes combed the ceiling, noting every little rivet and weld in the vehicle’s construction for what must’ve been the thousandth time, while his tired mind wandered elsewhere into the realm of daydreams and other meaningless thoughts. It’d been the third night in a row that they, the Armed Forces’ very own auxiliary adjunct partner unit, were sharing the burden with regards to standing watch over the main gate as it was being rebuilt, and it’d been the third night in a row that the ever-fortunate Tal Ravis had been volunteered for guard duty.

Tiredly, he sat up, groaning quietly as he stretched his arms out against the side wall of the cabin. The only other unlucky soul in the APC with him was none other than his good buddy Kincaid, who was up front manning the remote weapon station, and the most part, he’d been left to his own devices, letting out a strained exhale as he checked his watch. It’d hardly been an hour since the night shift started, much to his disappointment, and he set aside his rifle on the seats across from him to allow him more freedom of movement. The energy drink that he’d lifted from the dining facility had lasted him no longer than 15 minutes, the empty can lying discarded on the floor of the vehicle for him to accidentally kick around as he spun in the seat and stood up to a low crouch, head grazing the cabin roof as he reached out for the rear hatches. His bare hand met cold metal, a chill going up his spine as he twisted a recessed handle down and pushed outwards to open the door just a crack, feeling a rush of bitter, cold air rush in from outside as his partner almost immediately spoke up.

“You good?”

“Yeah, I’m just, uh, having a smoke,” he trailed off in reply, exhaling deeply. The silence from over yonder that ensued signaled his acknowledgement, and Tal wasted no time in reaching down onto his plate carrier’s placard to fish for smokes, finding it tucked away in front of an array of loaded rifle magazines, lost somewhere in a sea of multitools, spare power cells, and other similarly-styled nonsense that constituted his admin pouch.

Fumbling with his hands in the newly-reacquainted cold, he managed to pluck out one of the cancer sticks after expending a considerable amount of effort, stuffing the carton back into the depths of his gear and sealing up the zipper to a satisfying end. A stick between pursed lips and a labored light later, and he was huffing and puffing towards the open hatch, taking care not to hotbox himself and his buddy. After all, they were in it for the long haul. A proverbial lesson in not defecating where one slept, he thought, though much less elegantly in his head.

At around the third or fourth drag, he pulled the smoldering cig from his mouth, eyeing it between his fingers before slumping down into a rut. Another quick check of his watch confirmed that little more than a minute had passed since he thought having a smoke would bring him solace in these trying times, but alas, it had not, and as punishment, Tal flicked the cigarette out into the wild, watching as it sailed gracefully through the small crack of the open hatch before coming to a rest amongst some gravel, the lit tip glowing faintly in the breeze. Unamused, he frowned, pulling the door back shut and locking it up tightly to allow the life support system to reset the vehicle’s environmental seal.

Within seconds, he’d gone horizontal again, finding a cozy place to lay down on the bench so that all of the equipment protruding from his vest didn’t poke into his back. Once his body was nice and comfortable, he reigned in the rolled-up miniature blanket that he was using as a pillow, getting all nice and cozy once the hot air started coming in. Maybe it was worth giving the daily holodramas a try, he thought, a hand coming up to chest-level to flip the tablet he kept attached to his carrier down, allowing him easy viewing at the cost of craning his neck out and forward. It’d do for now, the warm, light blue glow of the Neural Net tablet’s screen bathing over his tired face, and for the next few hours, he’d find entertainment in the plight of whatever B-list actors were on this time.

At least, until something interesting happened.

Tal watched intently as the first of their armored vehicles rolled off the rear cargo ramp of a parked Clydesdale freighter, a perilous endeavour in which one of his teammates had been volunteered to carefully back it out and down the ramp while another guided them with the aid of two red high-visibility batons. With last week’s attack claiming the lives of four Bretonian servicemembers, the local chain of command had seen fit to accelerate a couple of things down the logistics pipeline, namely the expediting of their trucks from Sprague. Evergreen was to be given two days from delivery to prepare themselves and their vehicles for armed long-range patrol, and would now be tasked with conducting targeted raids against suspected insurgents and other unsavory dissidents around the countryside in order to prevent future attacks. In a way, some of them were glad that things played out in this manner: no matter how tragic it was, they finally had something to do.

The six-wheeled, uparmored gun truck in question finally rolled off of the ship, suspension straining as it just barely managed to clear the incline despite it’s high ground clearance, continuing to reverse for ten more meters before stopping, gravel crunching under the heavy-duty tires as they turned off to the side. Once the driver had gotten the all-clear, the truck pulled forwards and made way for the nearby motor pool at a safe speed, while the second one began backing out of the freighter, evidently being driven by someone less experienced. This particular truck began backing out at an unusual angle, a detail noticed by the guide who attempted to correct it with wide, exaggerated motions of his batons, but the driver heeded none of these directions, choosing instead to stop, go, stop, go, and finally attempt to try some kind of basic course correction, albeit far too late. Now overcorrected, the truck’s front right wheel slipped off the side of the ramp, hull groaning as it scraped along the ramp’s edge to a screeching halt, the free wheel spinning slowly in the air amongst yelling from both the guide and several other uniformed men who came crawling out of the woodwork to rush towards the disaster scene, flailing their arms wildly on approach.

The sound of metal-on-metal had been enough to make Tal visibly wince in pain, though the collision was likely to just buff out later considering the types of punishment the truck’s armor was designed to withstand. All he could do was look on helplessly from his position some ten, twenty meters off in the distance leaning against a concrete barrier, eternally glad that it wasn’t his truck being dinged up by that jackass as he sighed and drew a fresh pack of cigarettes from a coat pocket, plucking one out from the crisp red-on-white packaging and pinching it between his lips, patting around his pockets for his lighter.

It was going to be a long day.

---

Some few hours had passed by the time everything had gotten unloaded and sorted out, with the supply freighter unfortunately leaving Port Jackson behind schedule, but for now, everything else was Kosher. The weather was now somewhat overcast and pleasantly mild, ideal for working outdoors and thankfully, a far cry from the hellish nightmare that Sprague would’ve been at around this time of day, allowing Tal to do his work on a truck’s remote weapon station in relative peace. All together, the convoy was about five trucks deep, armed to the teeth with all manners of heavy weaponry and loaded for bear with enough ammunition to level a city block. They’d packed in everything they could’ve ever needed out in the frontier: light anti-armor weapons, spare power cells, extra fuel, and plenty of “Synth Special”, a homebrewed concoction consisting of reconstituted freeze-dried synth paste melted down and mixed in with hearty numbers of dietary supplement powder packets for added density and nutrition, all packed back into their original resealable tin containers. Suffice to say, they embraced their new mission with open arms.

Tal was preoccupied with boresighting a heavy machine gun mounted onto the aforementioned remote weapon station, laying splayed out atop his truck with another cigarette in his mouth as he endlessly fiddled with a small Neural Net tablet that’d been hooked up to the system’s multi-spectrum sight. He’d inserted a simplistic IR device into the muzzle of the gun, which projected a beam that he was meticulously attempting to line the sight’s crosshair up with using one-half minute-of-angle adjustments, flicking back and forth until he was eventually satisfied with the results, forgoing the use of any manuals and instead choosing to eyeball it. After all, it was an automatic weapon.

Sighing, he sat up, turning off his tablet and unplugging it from the sighting aperture array, locking the rear compartment and giving the remote weapons station two appreciative pats as if it were some kind of pet before pivoting around to fumble with a man-sized roof escape hatch. Without a running engine or auxiliary power unit to power the environmental control system, the hatch easily gave way, carelessly flung to the side with a loud clang of metal-on-metal as Tal slid in feet-first, staggering about in the spacious backseat storage compartment for two or three steps until he properly caught his footing. From there, he pulled his cigarette from his mouth and blew smoke all throughout the interior in a particularly bad lapse of judgement, sticking it back between his lips while he looked around for cans of machine gun ammunition underneath the segmented benches running perpendicular to the wheelbase.

After some strenuous digging, he found one tucked away next to bottled water and some rations and undid the storage compartment’s retention strap, his gloved fingers scrambling under the side handle and pulling the ammunition can out into the open for him to inspect. It was marked “AGEIRA, 10MM API-T, 500 ROUNDS” in stenciled yellow letters on the flat faces, with “FOR LE/GOVT USE ONLY” lettered underneath it, exactly what Tal had been looking for. Grunting audibly, he heaved the fairly heavy can up and over his head, just barely able to reach high enough to push the ammo tin out of the hatch, nudging it forwards so that it fell over and comfortably sat balanced on the roof for him to dissect once he himself got back up there. A hop, a skip, and a jump on the benches later, and he was wiggling his way back up through the hatch in a stunning display of acrobatics.

Once he was seated on the roof, he took the can in both hands and ripped the lid right off, pulling out the foam insert to reveal a long belt of linked cased-telescoped rounds capped off with a starter tab that he elegantly plucked between his fingers and drew up and over the tin’s edge for easier access once he’d relocated and secured the can into the mount’s dedicated ammunition receptacle. It was a simple action, fitting the beveled tin with slots facing the correct positions so that it snapped securely into place behind the weapon. He then opened the weapon’s feed tray, carefully stringing the belt out onto it and making sure it was nice and snug before slapping the lid down shut and giving the charging handle a rack, eliciting a loud, authoritative click-clack that echoed throughout the motor pool.

Done for now, he took a deep breath as he rested an arm over the gun and leaned his weight onto it, stoically peering towards the horizon. This was the calm before the storm; their last few precious moments of relative peace until they’d face whatever laid in wait for them beyond the wire.

He sought to enjoy it while he could.

Tal sighed quietly, leaning back against the faux-leather upholstery underneath him as he watched their convoy’s dedicated recovery vehicle slowly rumble along past their right-hand side, traveling precariously halfway off the side of the unpaved dirt pathway they were using as a motorway. So far, their first outing into the unforgiving Gran Canaria wilderness had been a nightmare far beyond any reasonable expectation, starting with one of their trucks getting bogged down in soggy, deep mud only a few miles out from Port Jackson. Their attempts at freeing that said truck with what they had on-hand proved to be futile, and so they were forced to stand fast for nearly an hour while a recovery vehicle was scrambled from the Bretonian base to unstick their lead vehicle, biding their time by idly watching the surrounding treelines through the thermal imaging cameras of their remote weapon stations. Within minutes of its arrival, the recovery vehicle was able to get their lead truck up and out of the earth, and so they were on their way again, making it only a few more miles up the road before getting stuck once more.

Indeed, their heavy, uparmored trucks were much better suited for the environment back on Sprague, where there was no melting snow by mid-morning to turn the only makeshift paths connecting Port Jackson to nearby smaller settlements into untraversable wasteland, and it was another thirty minutes for the recovery vehicle and its accompanying escort to execute a K-turn and come back up the road to lend them yet another helping hand. That time, their new lord and savior decided to stick around for the rest of their trip, heading out into the mountains with them to nab a bad guy from their house in a remote village, and the men and women of Evergreen were grateful that they did.

Tal pulled the remote gun’s gimbal-mounted display screen down and to the side, moving it out of his peripheral field of view so he could watch as a pair of Bretonian soldiers hopped out of their vehicle and began hooking up a series of tow cables onto their trapped truck. It was a tedious process, one that he certainly wasn’t going to dismount to try and help, and so he instead opted to gently shift around in his seat, leaning his head onto the padded interior walls and enjoying the warmth of their truck’s climate control suite.

If only he could have a smoke. That’d be the icing on the cake, the proverbial dinner-and-a-show, but alas, the tight environmental seal around the interior cabin was exactly that, and his good buddy Kincaid didn’t particularly appreciate getting hot-boxed with cigarette smoke. Sure, he could’ve broken the seal in a number of ways and gotten more air circulating, but that required effort, effort that was hardly worth it to expend in exchange for his relative comfort now. So there he sat, looking on, embroiled in some kind of slightly-less-than-first world problem, but one thing was clear. He was glad he wasn’t like those suckers, trapped out in the cold while they did their jobs.

They were underway again in only a few minutes, returning to snaking along the mountain paths until they inevitably got hung up on something again. He swore it was going to be an endless cycle of this nonsense, as he quietly watched the world go by through his remote weapon station’s camera, even though the team leader assured them that the terrain would become more vehicle-friendly the farther out they got from Port Jackson. Unfortunately, it got no better, as the target building was still hours away, and coupled with the numerous delays that they experienced, meant that by the time they finally arrived at their destination, their target had moved on. No one was present at the residence in question, and, after attempting to ask the locals, all of whom seemed fairly discontent that they were there, to try and get a lead as to where their target went to no avail, the team was forced to return back to Port Jackson empty-handed, another agonizingly-long journey fit with numerous trucks getting stuck, including Tal’s own, for once, and one breakdown on the lead vehicle. Something had apparently gone wrong with the engine, which took a fair amount of time to fix, leaving them exposed along a mountainside for the duration of the repairs—an unavoidable, but nonetheless ideal place to be ambushed.

No shots rang out, much to the chagrin of a unit who was expecting to get to shoot something or someone that day, as somehow, none of the disgruntled Zoner villagers had gotten the mind to call it in and actually stage such an attack, despite the area being a suspected hotbed of insurgent activity. It was obvious and everywhere, the hatred in their eyes as they glared at the tall, tan trucks of their occupiers, and Tal had really hoped that things would’ve popped off in the village, or maybe later when they were further away down the road, but no. Their day had been devoid of any meaningful action, and they returned to Port Jackson under the cover of night.

At least it masked their shame.

It’d been roughly a week and a half since Evergreen’s first outing into the Gran Canarian wilderness, their inconvenience-riddled adventure ultimately resulting in failure as the convoy returned to base empty-handed, and despite their command’s best efforts at pushing them into using the same strategy over and over again until it worked, their subsequent missions had gone about as well. At least three direct action raids occuring at various times of day had been attempted in the past week, all of which went without success, while an additional four kill-capture missions were frozen in the pipeline once their handlers came to the realization that their current approach was entirely unfeasible. For the time being, their heavy trucks would be unsuitable for the terrain, something that the team members were well aware of from the start, and it wouldn’t be until later in the spring months that they’d be a viable means of transportation.

Operational alternatives were limited: the smaller, lighter Bretonian scout cars preferred by their adjunct partner units for heading outside the wire worked leaps and bounds better for navigating the sketchy terrain but were notably thinner-skinned, and isolated ambushes caused significant damage to both equipment and personnel. As of now, the only truly viable option for carrying out raids was by air, and at nighttime, with riskier information-gathering tasks delegated to Bretonian scouts or aerial photography. Hypothetically—and, this was all just hearsay passed down to Tal by his team leader—Evergreen would act on collected intelligence via freighter or air shuttle insertion, thwacking whatever bad guys needed thwacking as quickly as they could, collecting any additional field intelligence, and then getting out of there before local forces could response. It sounded reasonable, maybe a little too reasonable in some regards, but their next major obstacle would be securing air transport, a task delegated to liaisons currently working with the BAF.

In the meantime, they remained as part of the garrison in Port Jackson, assisting local forces as needed to try and make it seem like they were upholding their end of the contract. The “enhanced”, or rather, existing infrastructure inside the city walls were much more conducive to travel by truck than the soggy mud-bogs just outside the military checkpoints, making routine show-of-force patrols a breeze, and as much as they hated being effectively a watered-down version of the BPA for the time being, they served well in a general peacekeeping role, and at times, sporting their tougher imported hardware, were legitimately necessary.

Such as now, as a certain mister Ravis swayed from side-to-side in the passenger seat of an armored vehicle gunning it down a nondescript central avenue. Their handlers had received a call for assistance from none other than the local Constabulary, reporting a dangerous barricaded suspect who had weapons and potentially rigged the entire apartment building with homemade explosives, and scrambled Evergreen to lend bodies and equipment to the officers on-scene. So, dressed in what essentially amounted to mismatched camouflage pajamas at this early crack of a winter’s dawn, they went, a convoy led by a constable’s vehicle with five tall, heavily-armed tan pocket-tanks in tow. As far as they’d been made aware, the situation was urgent, and they were explicitly told not to stop no matter the circumstances during their approximately ten minute-long drive over to the area of interest. Any traffic in the way that remained undeterred by blaring emergency sirens and bright flashing lights were to be bowled straight through, while warning shots and subsequent escalation of force was authorized toward any vehicles attempting to stop or otherwise delay the convoy.

Tal watched through the passenger window as city blocks blew past, their vehicle pushing the upper limits of its speed capability as they hit a slight dip in the road, causing him to violently lurch towards the impact-resistant glass pane. A quick hand coming up to brace himself kept him from cracking his helmet open on the door, and he took a second to steady himself in his hazy, half-awoken state, attention returning to the machine gun’s RWS display. Trying to discern any details in the local architecture through such a small, low-resolution screen was basically impossible, and only served to make him dizzy when they weren’t between intersections, but he persevered nonetheless, the fruits of his labor culminating in him spotting what looked like a trailerless long-haul freight truck barreling along toward the oncoming intersection. At the speed it was going, it was poised to hit them straight on from the side, and, thinking quickly, Tal did what any self-respecting gunner would’ve: he brought the machine gun around and to bear on the inbound truck.

It didn’t matter much to him if it was intentional or not; the road immediately ahead of the truck’s flat face found itself in the RWS’ crosshairs, and with a firm squeeze of the control stick’s trigger, the big, boxy machine gun mounted atop their vehicle came to life, firing off an electronically-boosted burst of five rounds that impacted nothing but pavement, the incendiary cores sparking off asphalt underneath clouds of smoke caused by heavy bullets making impact. Up above, through the cabin ceiling, he’d heard some muffled thumping, followed by the clinking and clattering of spent polymer casings and disintegrating links on the roof, while the remote camera’s crosshairs shook and rattled from recoil with every round fired, but aside from such minor stimuli that had been mostly drowned out by engine noise, there was an utter lack of feedback, nothing to denote the gravity of what he’d just unleashed: only a surreal, remote-controlled detachment from the power he truly wielded. Had he put his point of aim just a few inches higher, had the mount been unable to depress low enough, he’d have undoubtedly struck the oncoming vehicle with his entire course of fire, perhaps to go as far as to end the life of a husband, or a father, but in the brief amount of exposure the two trucks had to each other, amounting to little more than a handful of seconds, the message had been clear.

The driver perhaps never swerved to a stop sooner in their life, Tal catching only a passing glimpse of the resulting scene in his rear view mirror and sighing a breath of relief. Surely, his decision to open fire, even though the exchange remained bloodless, would garner some modicum of attention once they returned to the FOB, just as the tailing vehicles rotated their guns around to face the offending truck, but he'd cross that bridge when he got to it. For now, they had other things to worry about, and he had a nagging feeling that that incident wouldn't be the most exciting thing to happen today.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

What seemed at the time like a tense standoff turned out to be nothing but hot air, the three-hour confrontation ending with negotiators successfully managing to talk the assailant down. With their man in custody and the building secured, Tal and his team abandoned their positions, having been set up in pairs all along vantage points on rooftops and upper-level windows, and once the local authorities began rolling out, started making the trip back to base. Ultimately, it was just another fruitless endeavor atop a tall pile of similar ventures for the men of Evergreen, most of them feeling slightly miffed that their morning was interrupted by a stint of lying around in what amounted to their pajamas in the cold, keeping a close eye on the vague silhouette of a man through his blinds with the aid of expensive low-power riflescopes and reflex sights.

By now, it was close to sunset on this corner of Gran Canaria, though the rest of his day had proved to be anything but uneventful. City surveillance systems and several witnesses had caught his little burst of gunfire during the ride there, thus marking the start of an exhaustive, but short investigation by local authorities on his use of force. After some review of external camera footage from each vehicle in the convoy, as well as testimonials from himself and his teammates, he was cleared of any wrongdoing, though his handlers definitely saw fit to rectify any issues before they persisted. If sitting in a sweaty questioning room was far from how he wanted to spend his midday and afternoon, then sitting in his housing unit studying up on his company’s use-of-force continuum was certainly far from how he wanted to spend the rest of his evening.

“Y’know, if I have to deal with this bullshit every time we run into some truck driver who forgets he has a brake pedal, then I’m just gonna go home and let the one-point-eight million Bretonians take care of it,” he complained to his roommate, a certain mister Jasper Kincaid. They were much alike, in fact, both having been former Libertonian Marines who threw off the yokes of their government to pursue a more lucrative career in private military contracting, and the pair had both been in employment with Cold Harbor for at least a year, now. “Why do we need refreshers on friggin’ use of force? I know exactly what I did--I followed this shit to a fuckin’ T, man.”

“Yeah, yeah,” came the dismissive reply from across the room. The order to study the use-of-force continuum had gone unit-wide, and every other Special Projects member was sharing in the misery brought on by his decision, should that have been any consolation. And so, mister Kincaid was head-down in a personal device of his own, furiously tapping away at some kind of riveting assessment of his force-using knowledge. “Do you really think the Bretonians sent one-point-eight million people here to invade this place? I thought there was like, a giant war happening right on their doorstep. Wouldn’t most of these dudes be better served, like, fighting the Gauls or something? Better yet--if we’re supposed to be elite or whatever, why aren’t we over there fighting that war instead of this one?”

“I mean, Leeds has been under total froggie control for years now, and the rest of the fighting’s so thick that a boarding shuttle wouldn’t make it five meters from a destroyer before getting waxed. Where the hell would we even go to fight? Can you fly a fighter?”

“...No.”

“Then we’d be fuckin’ useless. Maybe if they reach New London or something in a few weeks, they’ll send us over there. It’s all just a bunch of like, reservists and dumb shit like admin clerks here anyways. It’s like a dumping ground for people who don’t qualify to fight in the real war.”

“Yeah, but think about it this way. You heard that communication the Admiral sent out before we landed, right? The thirty-minutes-to-death one? What if she just lied and told everybody she was sending two million guys to ransack the place so they’d all get scared and run off? Rest of it’s easy picking anyways.”

“I, guess, man. Shouldn’t you be doing your homework?”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks for this, by the way. Really cool.”

With a sigh and a roll of his eyes, Tal returned to staring at the soft blue light of his PDA’s screen, hoping that he’d finish up with this by the end of the night.