For what it was worth, the men and women of Evergreen had at least somewhat used their downtime well, with the extreme excess of it that they had. Frequent trips to the base’s firing range to run drills centered around the titular “small unit” and indulge in other, less serious firearms-and-explosives-based shenanigans were how they spent most of their days while still on standby, figuring that keeping their edges somewhat sharp was probably in their best interest going forwards. Finding new and exciting ways to bide their time was probably the most anxiety-inducing part of their deployment so far, for at this point in time, the looming specter of Gallia was still threatening Bretonia, and the only thing they could do about it from here was watch the occasional update on BBC’s evening news service, just hoping that maybe they’d get suddenly reassigned to the New London theater on any given Gran Canarian morning.
To say that he wasn’t just a wee smidge worried, being a Libertonian man with questionable ties stuck this far out in the boonies, would be a lie, and should the Crown actually fall, there was about a billion possibilities for his fate, the most probable of which involved being abandoned by the new Bretonian puppet state and ending with his mutilated corpse being dragged upside-down through the streets of a freed Port Jackson by a mob of angry Zoners. It was astonishingly easy to get bogged down in his thoughts in all of his boredom, and Tal could hardly begin to imagine what it must’ve been like for their Bretonian partner force, but spirits seemed to be fairly high in and around the FOB at Port Jackson. An anonymous benefactor had even gone as far as to erect a crude plywood sign by their motor pool, fitted with a large paper poster that read “2 DAYS WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT” and was updated on the daily, which humored him and his team. Kinda.
And so, the everlasting quest to find a solution to his eternal boredom had finally led him here, the last crying desperations of a man clinging onto what scant sanity he still had, as he danced about in his housing unit, dressed in full battle rattle while a bass-heavy medley played through his PDA’s tinny speakers. It was a spur of the moment-type thing, as they had a proper mission briefing to attend in less than an hour, but that still left them with plenty of time to kill. At least this way, his roommate could get some gaffs out of it, as he stepped from side to side, swinging his arms around as the lyrics went on and on about acquiring large amounts of credits and probably drugs or women. He was pouring his soul into it, or as much soul as one could pour into something while being almost comically bad at it, and he even bothered to throw in some shoulder-shimmies, whipping his head around in tune with the beat drop so quickly that his helmet nearly slid right off his head. Stifling laughter, he reached up to adjust it, putting his palm against the angled forehead of the high-cut brain bucket and pushing it back into place, all while trying to keep the swaying of his body in sync with the tempo. Kincaid could hardly contain his amusement, his disappointed, secondhand embarrassment-fueled laughter audible at intervals between the echoes of a low quality instrumental rebounding off of the unit’s corrugated interior.
Truly, they were the cream of Liberty’s for-hire private military contractor crop.
“Alright fools, listen up. We’ve got new orders in from Station this morning, effective immediately.”
The men of Evergreen found themselves huddled together around a small, circular holographic projector in the base’s command tent, their faces illuminated by it’s dim, blue glow as a series of beeps accompanied a rapidly-changing image of Port Jackson and its surrounding areas. Among these men, of course, was a certain mister Ravis, who, standing lazily with his feet spread shoulder-width apart, his hands grasping at the forked shoulder straps of his plate carrier, and his head cocked to the side at a thirty-degree angle, looked on with relative disinterest, squinting reflexively as a sudden shift in imagery amplified the light output and threatened his vision. The images continued to shift inconsistently as their team leader struggled to make sense of the projector’s antiquated controls, until finally, he found the right file, a high-resolution topographic map of a mountain pass some few-hundred kilometers away. Undeterred by his fumble, the leader continued, beginning with a curt sigh.
“Apparently, Bretonian forces moving through the San Agustin valley in the past few weeks have been getting hit pretty hard. Local Zoner forces have been setting up mines, IEDs, and ambushes all along the main road through the region, and it’s making it hell for any recon units trying to traverse the region. That’s where we’re gonna come in.”
Tal rolled his eyes at the thought of whatever this “special” assignment was going to be, his gaze wandering up and around to the rest of the command tent’s interior. Tent was no exaggeration, either, as this soft-skinned structure had been erected at around the start of Bretonian presence in Port Jackson some time ago, and for some reason, despite having all of the time and resources in the world to field a replacement, the base commanders had seen fit to just leave it here as it were. There was a metaphor in here somewhere, as he traced along little patched-up pockmarks along the ceiling where shrapnel from that suicide attack had torn through, the new fabric they’d laid over the holes clashing with the rest of the tent’s faded, dilapidated interior. He couldn’t quite put his finger on just what kind of comparison to draw here, probably something to do with everything being shitty like always, and so he sneered to himself like an idiot, all while his team leader droned on like he was reading from a pre-written prompt.
“Station wants us to travel from Jackson by air down to this landing zone the Brets were nice enough to clear for us next to the trail.” Station had become a colloquial name for any of their Bretonian handlers, enough so that it’d become an accepted radio callsign locally. “From there, we’ll disembark and hike it through the woods until we reach this mountain right here.” A red dot pinged atop one of the many mountains in this hilly region of Gran Canaria, with a trail connecting their destination to their landing zone. Total distance, according to the projector, was three kilometers, promoting groans from the men flanking him.
“Our primary objective here is to plant motion-tracking devices and cameras along this trail at intervals, and then set up remote monitoring devices from that vantage point on the target mountain. If we take contact from Zoners, great, if not, it's whatever. Targets of opportunity are a go, but we're not going in just to find a fight. Intelligence gathered in the coming weeks is going to precede a surge of Bretonian troops in the region in an attempt to drive insurgents further out into the more isolated regions of the planet, and their long-term plan here is to try and starve them out once the weather starts getting worse. Any questions?”
“Yeah. How heavy is this shit we’re gonna be carrying?” asked Kincaid, raising a hand.
“Not too bad. The cameras, probably a few pounds each, but the monitoring equipment’s more like twenty or thirty.” More groans.
“Hey, I have a question too!” One of the more younger additions to the team, a real hotshot, chimed in with what they were all probably thinking. “Why the fuck can’t the Bretonians do it themselves?”
“That, uh, good question. Just be glad we’ve got an actual mission, for once, is all I’ll say. Get your stuff packed up, Clydesdales are dusting off in thirty minutes. Move it out.” And so, with much silent disappointment, they broke formation, shuffling out of the tent in a neatly-staggered single file.
Tal watched on with much anticipation as his good buddy Kincaid connected the final two wires of their monitoring equipment, the thick, heavy-duty cords coming together with a satisfying click and locking by means of a fairly simple plastic clasp. Hopefully, it’d hold up to environmental abuse and the occasional animal; he couldn’t be assed to hike the whole way back up here, and he was sure his team felt the same way. They’d inserted as planned by a pair of Clydesdale freighters that attempted to do a combat landing, screaming in at cruising speed and nearly going perpendicular to the ground at the absolute last second to minimize exposure to enemy fire, but heavy crosswinds in the valley area had made their initial landing attempts a series of successive washes. It wasn’t until the third pass that they were able to safely settle down at the target landing zone, and they’d dismounted with much gusto.
Securing the immediate area, they found that all their racket hadn’t attracted the ire of any locals, and thus they began the arduous journey through three kilometers of forest up to their objective. Tensions were at least somewhat high as they trudged along, with the thought that there could’ve been hundreds, if not thousands, of Zoners and Corsairs out here in the badlands, ready to cut their little twelve-man unit down to the last man in the blink of an eye, but they thankfully managed to reach and scale the mountain without any resistance. Tal had been lucky enough not to have to carry the equipment up until it came time to actually set it up, when he and Kincaid were given the dubious honor of lugging all that equipment up onto the mountaintop and completing the final installation while the rest of the team pulled security around the base of the mountain. They’d been assured that it was idiotproof, and that it came with it’s own little picture-book instruction manual that even a poor factory worker from Leeds could decipher, as if that was supposed to be any consolation.
The last little leg of their journey was probably the worst, having to try and get those large, unwieldy high-impact polymer cases up such steep slopes, but once they made it as far as they could reasonably go, it wasn’t too bad. Sure enough, the directions were about as simple as could be, and the system itself was astonishingly simple, consisting of little more than a pair of sensor arrays, a small solar-power collecting array, some long-range encrypted communications hardware, a bunch of wires to connect it all, and some dark gray rock-colored tarps to make the getup less obvious. With everything now properly set up and ready to go, Tal pulled one of the glorified blankets from the very bottom of a carrying case, unfolding it partially and whipping it in the wind as hard as he could. It fluttered back down gently, the ambient wind shear threatening to blow it right out of his hands, until Kincaid gave him a helping hand and pulled the other two corners back down, allowing Tal to put a knee over his half and grab a pair of metal stakes. With the assistance of a nearby rock or something, he hammered the stakes through the fabric and firmly into the ground one by one, handing the tool off to his partner once he was done, and while he was busy finishing up on his end. The absurdity of the tarp, beating away in the breeze, bewildered him. How was this supposed to disguise anything at all? Since when did rocks just flap around like that?
Whatever. He continued to observe with much intensity as Jasper smacked the last stake into place, tossing the rock away once he was done and wiping at his brow. There was only one thing left to do, and it was to try and test the connection, a process that’d require contacting their handlers up in the Stirling to see if they had access to the surveillance data, but as soon as Tal reached a hand towards his push-to-talk, the air around them exploded in a flurry of blue and yellow sparks. Streaks of particle cannon fire sizzled overhead, impacting the mountainside behind them and showering them with little bits of dirt and rock, and the pair immediately scrambled for cover behind the rocky outcroppings lining the cliff face.
Exhaling deeply, Tal looked over to his buddy, who’d taken immediate cover behind the surveillance equipment, and then peered just slightly over his shoulder, as if he could see anything way down below with just the naked eye. His fingers, already on the push-to-talk button, shook helplessly for a brief moment, until he could grab his composure by the neck and get a hold of himself. “Fucking Christ, Evergreen one, this is Evergreen three, we’re taking fire from the valley down below, over,” he spoke, sounding unnaturally calm for somebody experiencing an emotional event as significant as his own. Behind him, as he’d leaned up against what little cover he could find behind these outcroppings, he could hear rounds impacting every which way. Whoever it was that was shooting at them, they really wanted them dead.
“Roger, three, get down from there as soon as you can, over.”
“Easier said than done, one--shit! Kincaid, you good over there man?"
“YEAH.”
A quick peek to the side saw that, unfortunately, their monitoring equipment had just about been wholly fried in that first hectic exchange of gunfire, though his comrade managed to make it through unscathed. With a curse under his breath, he rolled over onto his stomach, both of his hands taking up his rifle and balancing it up along the berm. He’d been a little slow to try and return fire, the nature of the landscape before them making it difficult to actually identify where it was coming from, and the smart move now probably would’ve been to immediately break contact and haul ass back down the mountain to regroup with his team, but as he adjusted the magnification on his primary optic, he couldn’t help but immediately zero in on bright muzzle flashes coming from a clearing between some trees. His thumb quickly pushed the throw lever to maximum zoom, and, with just a cursory glance through the lens, he spotted nothing more than a convoy of three Bretonian light vehicles, fitted with the proper markings and dismounted infantry wearing proper uniforms. Either they were insurgents donning elaborate disguises, or far more likely, a twitchy BAF recon patrol who spotted movement and assumed that it was Zoners, and instead of commiting to any sort of target confirmation, decided to stop in the middle of the road and turn heavy weapons on them.
“They’re, they’re fucking Bretonians!” Tal called out, ducking his head back down into cover and slowly scraping his rifle back down with him as he reached for the push-to-talk again. “Evergreen one, we’re taking fire from Bretonian forces, uh, in the valley. Say again, we’re being fired upon by Bretonian forces.” Incoming fire was becoming more sporadic now, but the impacts were still heavy and jarringly close. Kincaid had much more difficulty trying to manipulate himself into a suitable position to do anything, being basically stuck behind those flimsy electronics, and it was only now that he dared to show himself.
“They’re WHAT? Goddamnit, are you kidding me--am I good to move?” he hissed, standing up to a vague crouch and adjusting the fitment of his helmet.
“Yeah, let’s get the fuck off this thing,” Tal replied, rolling back over onto his back and cradling his weapon in his arms, looking over to his buddy and nodding his head towards the only path down the mountain. Immediately, he dashed forwards, keeping himself as low as he could in tune with his pacing, all while gunners down below tracked the sudden movements and began putting more fire onto them. Several rounds impacted the mountainside right above him, some missing by mere inches as he bolted a few good meters downhill until he fell, kicking up a big cloud of dirt as he skidded along the ground.
“They’re shootin’ at you, Kincaid--aw, fuck, YOU ALRIGHT?”
“YEAH, I’M FINE, I’M FINE!”
Sighing again, Tal looked over to the mangled mess of electronics now spewing a plume of smoke, rolling his head back over to check if he had a clear path, which he did. Slowly, he pivoted his body around and began crawling to safety on his back, not one wanting to chance it in the face of crew-served weapons.
Their race to the bottom of the mountain had proved relatively uneventful, at least, once they had enough rock behind their backs to give them the confidence to do anything more than a slow crab-walk downhill. Incoming fire became increasingly sporadic as the pair shuffled out of view of opposing Bretonian scouts, but picked up shortly after Tal and his colleague rendezvoused with the rest of their twelve-strong team, their fast-moving silhouettes against a sparse woodland backdrop providing an ample opportunity for their partner force to practice their gunnery. Indeed, they were forced down into a defensive position just slightly adjacent to the original target area, patiently waiting for their team leader to attempt to negotiate a cease-fire through a middleman aboard the Stirling.
The handler, a ubiquitous unnamed figure codenamed Station, had at first denied claims that they were being fired upon by Bretonians, asking the team to re-identify the threat and confirm that they were being fired upon by actual Bretonians. Independent verification by two other mercenaries, who used a riflescope and a pair of binoculars to observe the convoy over the top of a frighteningly short berm whilst heavy weapons fire buzzed overhead, was not deemed proof enough. As such, the team leader resorted to verbally describing the color of incoming particle cannon fire, whereupon the handler acknowledged and began attempting to get into contact with Bretonian command elements in that particular sector.
In the meanwhile, the team had been completely boxed in and pinned down two ways by a line of vehicles maintaining a steady rate of fire at and around their position. The rapidity of which they shifted their attention back onto them at even the slightest movement meant leaving their position was bordering suicide, for the small divet in the ground they were huddled up in was flanked by nothing but flat woodland with heavy undergrowth. Nearby trees were blown apart violently by stray rounds, showering the mercenaries in splinters and branches as they seemed to be getting more accurate, and at least one person had the mind to try and signal the friendly forces through visual means. A small flare launcher was the best they could produce, though firing it upwards into the air only seemed to intensify the fire coming down upon their position. For the next few minutes, members of the team began to expend every single device they had on their persons in an attempt to get the Bretonians to cease fire, from flares to marker smoke, all the way down to bundles of glowsticks and yelling expletives in their general direction, though nothing seemed to help. The volume of incoming fire soon slowly began to wither, probably as the scouts grew bored or assumed that their team had disengaged, to the point where one mercenary had the mind to kneel up and check if the convoy had moved on or not, catching a grazing hit in the process and falling back down to the dirt.
By this point, most of the team was willing to start returning fire, with their casualty able to quickly apply a med-stasis band to his affected extremity with the aid of a comrade, when their handler finally reported back to them and stated that the Bretonian chain of command claimed not to have any assets in the region. Immediately, Tal and company set up all along the berm, just about ready to squeeze off some vengeance when their team leader ordered them to hold fire under the assumption that the firefight was already coming to a natural close--naturally, this was met with profane protests, but the men had enough mind to listen and so held their fire until finally, the gunfire stopped, and the wilderness of Gran Canaria grew quiet again. The silence had hardly been still for a moment when their handler chimed in over the radio again with some good, but nonetheless frightening news: the convoy was Bretonian in origin, and their command had ordered an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal from the area, however, the Bretonians only realized their scouts were in the area when they called in for air assets to blanket their position in the forest with heavy ordnance.
Their twelve-man team had been mistaken for a Zoner gun team setting up for an ambush up in the mountains by a scouting force that was returning from their assignment several days ahead of schedule, after having encountered heavy resistance further up in the north. In their call for fire, they’d claimed to have inflicted multiple Zoner casualties whilst drastically overestimating the size of the opposing force. It’d taken a solid minute for communications crewmen aboard the Stirling to put two and two together, and a pair of Templars were already launched and en-route by the time they’d called everything off. By any account, the men of Evergreen had narrowly avoided a messy death, and soon were extracted by freighter to the relative safety of their base at Port Jackson.
For what it was worth, the pair of Templars did eventually arrive on station and provided aerial cover for the mercenaries as they withdrew, even if their original mission involved laying waste to them with a salvo of missiles and cannon fire. Tal had been ordered to remain entrenched by the side of the road, emerging only when a small medical shuttle arrived to carry their casualty off to the nearest aid station. Unable to carry the rest of the team, and the larger freighters incapable of making a safe landing on such a narrow passageway, the team, now twelve-minus-one, made their way back through the woods to their original landing zone.
And so, there they were, the aforementioned twelve-minus-one stood gathered around the command tent’s holographic projector once more, having gone through a lengthy, regretful debriefing on the situation with added emphasis on the Bretonian chain of events that led to this incident. Surely, this would be the subject of yet another investigation by their partner force, hot off the tail of Tal’s earlier escapades in the city streets of Port Jackson, and the veterans in Evergreen could only roll their eyes as the cogwheels of military bureaucracy spun back up. Effective immediately, they’d been ordered to do two things: first, they’d be required to standardize some type of uniform within the week, for a majority of team members donned their preferred combat gear over simple civilian clothes, and second, they’d now be required to have some kind of authorized Bretonian identification symbol on their person, as the polygonal logo featuring an embossed bird-of-prey on a dark red background had been deemed too “aggressive” and may have helped mislead the scouts into believing they were a local insurgent cell.
Strangely, this hadn’t been much of a problem on Sprague, nor was it an issue during the initial invasion when they were in closer proximity to a far greater number of friendly forces, but Tal digressed. There wasn’t much of a point trying to argue about it, for there was nothing he could’ve said that his team leader probably hadn’t already brought up with Station. Suggestions for a more standardized appearance would be open, though the trading of company identifiers for Bretonian flags would be non-negotiable. Their partner unit in Port Jackson would soon be by to deliver them additional supplies, and, once they were redressed in a to-be-determined “satisfactory” manner, they were to go back out to the same site to either repair or replace the disabled unit they’d set up only a few hours ago.
There wasn’t much in the way of concessions on the Bretonian side of things, though their team leader had assured them they would be keeping a better tab on their active units in the region, and while their man down was already treated for his wounds and would return to duty within the day, nobody was particularly keen on having to stick their necks out like that again. No matter. They were being paid for a reason--to do their jobs--they were reminded, right before dismissal back to their quarters.
January 29, 826 A.S.
The men of Evergreen returned to the site the following morning, numbering still eleven combatants as their team leader had made the executive decision to leave their prior wounded--even if he'd been cleared to return to duty--back at Port Jackson to recover. By mid-day on the twenty-eighth, a Clydesdale had come by to drop off their casualty along with several crates of uniforms, all of a standard Bretonian make. Replacing their worn-out, grungy camouflage outfits for solid colors hardly bode well with any of them, with Kincaid pointing out to Tal the usefulness of bright red accents in the hills and forests, but of course, they begrudgingly accepted their orders and instead focused their energy on the upcoming tasks at hand, namely, lugging another monitoring sensor kit up a mountain.
They remained spread out in a line formation, weapons cradled closely as they advanced through the trees and brush towards their target. Tal found himself somewhere in the middle of this evenly-spaced gaggle, having donned simple outerwear under his body armor in addition to his crisp, starched trousers. His good friend had stuck small Bretonian flag patches of various colors and patterns to every hook patch on his jacket and equipment, reassuring him that it was for his own good and that there would be no way in hell another patrol would fire on him looking like that. Trying to keep in good spirits after their disastrous run so far on Gran Canaria, Tal decided to humor him, at least, up until a round struck bramble very close to his groin.
Immediately, he hit the deck, landing face-first into a pile of dead leaves and sticks as he tried to get into a suitable position to starting shooting, regretting that he looked just a little bit like a Bretonian disco ball as he brought his weapon to bear. All around him, calls of contact and near-immediate return fire began to erupt from their line, with incoming rounds still tearing through branches and scattering debris all around. They were heavy, for sure, judging by how violent the impacts sounded, and were certainly not of Bretonian manufacture--some kind condolences for a man who tucked his rifle stock into his shoulder pocket, found his cheek weld, and began hammering into the distance, hardly able to see targets through the dense woodland. Even his thermal imaging was spotty, with much of his view blocked out by his environment, and so the best he could do was try to gain fire superiority while his team leader called their contact in.
"Where the fuck is that coming from?" came barking through his headset, the overall volume of outgoing gunfire seeming to decrease.
"Like fuckin' fifteen degrees to my right, man, that shit was close," Tal keyed in, reaching down to his belt line to withdraw a fresh magazine and swapping it for the one in his gun before scooting around to relocate. "You see them at all?"
"No, I'm trying to figure that out. I think they're fucking off, might've tagged one of them."
Having successfully crawled to the other side of a particularly large tree, hiding by the base, Tal lowered his weapon momentarily to take a breather, the air ripe with the smell of burnt propellant gasses, and made some minor adjustments to his optic, throwing the power lever to middling magnification and conducting another brief scan of their horizon. Suddenly, he was greeted by more distant popping, followed by the sounds of splintering wood and follow-on suppressed gunfire. Still unable to make anything of the battlefield picture, Tal cursed under his breath, opting to throw his fire selector to automatic and firing off a magazine in a wide arc to try and catch something with his rounds.
This exchange would continue for roughly twenty more minutes, with Evergreen locked in a stalemate with a cell of Zoner insurgents sent out on a gathering task. Neither side could wrestle an advantage, with Evergreen maintaining fire superiority and attempting a maneuver to try and close with their enemy to no avail, being otherwise unable to find a decent position to relocate to. Unbeknownst to them, the Zoners had already taken a fair number of casualties, and were beginning to withdraw from the scene with their wounded and dead when Evergreen's team leader, still in communications with the Stirling, decided to burn the monitoring equipment with incendiary grenades and make a coordinated retreat back to their insertion point, not wanting to chance it with potential Zoner reinforcements. After all, this was still the badlands, at least, in their minds.
The remainder of the engagement would be uneventful, the sides choosing to part ways, and Tal, ammunition reserves a little lighter, returned to Port Jackson aboard a freighter to inevitably be scolded for failing another mission. Such was life here, it seemed.