Chapter 97. The Debrief
Once the smoke from the massive sweep had finally begun to clear, the commander gave the platoon a chance to catch its breath. We were still stuck inside the Loz'an citadel, and for the first time all day I had a quiet moment to take a proper look at their architecture.
The first thing that caught my eye was the sprawling network of aboveground pipes winding through the entire compound. Thanks to their flexible bodies, the Loz'an moved through those conduits, slipping inside and shooting across the base at incredible speed. Most of their buildings were impossible for a human to enter. Instead of normal doorways, they had narrow slits no wider than the thickness of a hand, forcing the locals to squeeze through them. It was a miserable place, built by aliens for aliens.
"Platoon, rally at the hangar in five minutes!" Leon bellowed. His booming voice cut through the wind without the help of a radio. "Time to get out of this stinking hole."
The platoon dragged themselves toward the assembly point with little enthusiasm. Everyone looked worn out. We had fought our way here over three straight hours, clawing forward yard by yard under nonstop enemy fire. The thought of hiking all the way back, even along a route that had already been burned clean and secured, did not excite anyone. Our legs ached, and our armor hung on our shoulders like it was made of solid lead. Even with my enhanced endurance, I could feel a deep, dull fatigue settling into my muscles.
"What's with the funeral faces?" Leon asked, sweeping his gaze across us with a wolfish grin. "You didn't actually think I was gonna make my boys hike home, did you? We're flying out!"
The recon team rolled one of the surviving Loz'an fighters out of the shadowed hangar. It was the same mercury-colored square craft with short, finlike wings. Up close, the thing looked even stranger than it had in the air, but after today it had proven more than once that it could fly and drop bombs with terrifying efficiency.
"Tony, is our bird good to go?" Leon asked, turning to our Tech Sense specialist.
"All set, Chief," Tony replied casually without even looking up.
"Then what the hell are we waiting for?" Leon spat his cigarette butt onto the ground and ground it beneath his heel. "Everybody on."
The fighter turned out to be surprisingly massive. Its broad upper surface gave the entire platoon enough room to ride on top, like we were sitting on some giant pale flying carpet. Only a handful of unlucky assault troopers stayed behind, left to babysit the base until the heavy recovery team arrived.
The cockpit and controls were buried deep inside the craft's seamless hull, but any human trying to crawl inside would have broken every bone in the process. Fortunately, Tony's ability made physical controls unnecessary. All he had to do was rest a hand against the craft's metallic skin and issue the command.
The machine lifted off without making a sound. There was no engine roar, no vibration, no familiar smell of jet fuel. It simply rose in a smooth, effortless climb to the height of a ten-story building, as quietly as a high-speed elevator in a luxury hotel. Compared to technology like this, our helicopters belonged in a museum. Once Tony set the course, the fighter glided forward at roughly fifteen miles an hour, just slow enough that the headwind would not blow us off its smooth armored surface.
"Man, this thing crawls," Ted muttered, dangling his legs over the edge while watching the alien jungle drift by beneath us. "I ride my bike faster than this. Why'd we even get on this thing?"
"Relax, bro." Danny flashed a grin and slapped him on the shoulder. "We've barely got any distance to cover. Fifteen minutes and we'll be back at base, stretched out on our beds."
"I like this speed," Mary said coolly without turning toward the others. "You actually get to take everything in. No rush."
The soldiers gradually relaxed, slipping into lazy conversations. I stayed alert, slowly scanning the dense jungle below. Loz'an guerrillas were as stubborn as rattlesnakes, and taking an acid grenade from the bushes at the very end of the mission was not how I intended to finish the day.
"Ross, where exactly did you run into their chief of staff?" Leon asked as he settled down nearby and pulled a tactical tablet from its protective case. "More importantly, where's the body? I need the coordinates for the report."
"Give me a second." I looked away from the jungle and toward a distant ridgeline.
Piecing it back together was easy. I spotted the remains of the tower first. Then I traced the path of our flight after the explosion by following the scorched, shattered treetops. After that, my memory palace supplied the rest: a crystal-clear snapshot stripped of emotion. A dead tree. A distinctive scar in the trunk. A dark body lying at its roots.
"Over there." I pointed toward the right section of the forest. "See the tree with the broken top?"
"Yeah."
"Count four trees to the left. He's under the fifth."
"Perfect." Leon quickly dropped a marker onto the map. "Did he still have the laser sword?"
"No." For a moment I replayed the explosion frame by frame. "The blast knocked it out of his hands. It landed somewhere south of the tower in the thick undergrowth."
"Got it," Leon muttered, adding another note.
"Chief, we're almost there!" Tony called from the front of our flying platform.
"Good. Now listen up!" Leon raised his voice over the wind. "Ladies and gentlemen, I know exactly what you're all thinking. You're dreaming about peeling off that suffocating armor, getting outside the wire, and drinking yourselves stupid at the nearest dive."
Several of the veterans answered with approving cheers. Danny even let out a sharp whistle, lifting his face into the wind.
"Well, forget it," Leon snapped, sweeping the platoon with a look that promised trouble. "Nobody's taking one damn step outside the perimeter until every single one of you, and I mean every single one, emails your damn mission report to Corps HQ. Without it, those rear-echelon rats won't log the operation, and they sure as hell won't issue our tickets home. I'm not wasting another day in this dump because some asshole couldn't be bothered to type a few lines. Any questions?"
"No, sir!" the platoon shouted in unison.
As someone who had spent years surviving the corporate jungle, I silently applauded Leon. Strip away the military profanity, and he had just laid out the only management strategy that actually worked. He had handed responsibility to the group. Now we would make sure every last lazy bastard got his report done, because nobody wanted to be stranded on base thanks to someone else's negligence. I remembered all too well how an annual financial report had once stalled because one idiot disappeared on a drinking binge without finishing his section. The bureaucracy here was no different from an office in Los Angeles. The only real difference was that instead of filing paperwork, we were filing reports on bodies.
Tony set the massive mercury-colored craft down as silently and smoothly as he had lifted it into the air. The instant the fighter's belly touched the ground, the platoon poured toward the shimmering haze of the portal, eager to get the hell out.
Just before stepping through, I caught sight of the captured Loz'an soldier out of the corner of my eye. It was a bleak sight. Bound hand and foot and sealed beneath a shell of ice, he sat waiting for a bullet to the head. That alien soldier had almost certainly known what was killing his world. Which meant the people who had interrogated him knew it too. Leon definitely knew. He knew our own planet was headed for the same fate.
The moment we stepped back through the portal, the contrast hit like a punch. The suffocating Colombian heat that had seemed unbearable before now felt almost pleasant, familiar, and completely harmless compared to the poisonous alien jungle.
Four motorcycle squads were already waiting outside. Mounted behind each rider was a reinforced container for collecting biological and technological samples. The bikes looked like monsters, built with oversized frames and heavy hybrid off-road tires. I had never seen anything like them in civilian life. They had obviously been custom-built for the Corps.
"The citadel's secure. The Loz'an chief of staff has been eliminated," Leon reported curtly to the recovery team leader, who did not even bother taking off his helmet.
He handed over the tablet with the marked coordinates.
"The place is loaded with traps. There could still be guerrillas hiding in the jungle."
"We'll handle it." The rider tapped his S-Gun, took the tablet, and motioned to his team. "Let's roll!"
Nearly forty heavy motorcycles roared to life at once, making the ground vibrate beneath our boots. One after another, they disappeared into the mouth of the portal, leaving behind a haze of bluish exhaust and the smell of burnt rubber.
"Turn in your S-Armor!" Leon barked as he turned toward us. "And make sure your reports are in the system. You're dismissed."
The platoon headed for the mobile equipment depot in a tight pack. A crew of technicians was already waiting there, cordless impact drivers in hand, ready to strip the armor off us before we had even stopped moving.
I finished before anyone else for one simple reason. There was almost nothing left of my S-Armor except the undersuit. The quartermaster accepting the wreckage looked at me as if I had emptied his wallet and set the cash on fire right in front of him.
There was one upside, though. I got the first shower. Everyone wanted to scrub away the sticky sweat and chemical stink clinging to their skin.
Standing beneath the hot water, I picked up my razor. It seemed like a trivial detail, except I had shaved that very morning. After only three hours on the other side of the portal, I had already grown the kind of heavy stubble that normally took two days. I vaguely remembered reading a scientific paper claiming that extreme stress could trigger massive hormone surges and accelerate hair growth. Apparently, my body had passed that test with flying colors. During the operation I had never screamed or panicked. I had calmly lined up my shots and stayed fully aware of every decision I made. That did not make the mission easy. For three straight hours I had been balancing on the razor's edge between an adrenaline rush and a complete nervous collapse. My brain had simply learned to bury fear deeper than most people could.
After drying off, I checked out one of the duty laptops from headquarters. It was a heavy, rugged machine with reinforced corners and absolutely no hint it had ever been designed for games. It existed for one purpose: writing long reports without having to torture yourself on a phone keyboard.
I sat down on my bunk, rested the cool metal laptop across my knees, opened the mail client, and got to work.
My memory palace worked flawlessly. I could have reconstructed the entire operation minute by minute, even repeated every conversation word for word, right down to the smallest verbal tic. That would have been ridiculous in an official report, of course. Instead, I focused on what mattered: the facts of each engagement, an analysis of enemy tactics, and a brief section describing Ted and Mary's clashes. On the surface, it read like a professional assessment of team compatibility. The real message was much simpler. They were both still kids who had been thrown into a meat grinder. I hoped the analysts back at headquarters would read between the lines and stop expecting Rambo-level heroics from either of them.
"Tom, did you include everything that happened during your fight with their chief of staff?" Danny asked quietly from behind me. "You didn't leave anything out, did you?"
My fingers froze over the keyboard. Every muscle in my body tightened. Why was he asking that? Had he somehow heard the war leader's final words? No. Impossible. I had not been wearing armor with an active comms link, and Danny had been pinned down near the tower a couple hundred yards away. There was no way he could have heard us.
"What are you getting at?" I looked up and met his eyes without looking away.
"Tom, you totaled an entire S-Armor rig," Danny said as he sat on the edge of my bunk, rubbing the back of his neck before meeting my gaze. "That thing costs as much as a high-end sports car. If command decides you trashed it because you were reckless or negligent, they'll dock the full value from your contract. You'll be fighting for free for the next three years."
"I destroyed the armor because it was the only way to keep the team alive and finish the mission."
"I know that," Danny said with a serious nod. "But almost nobody else saw what you saw. Most of us never even realized the threat was there. So your contract depends on how well you explain it in your report. I already wrote in mine that I saw the incoming sphere of compressed electricity, exactly the way you described it. Hopefully that'll keep the accountants off your back."
"Thanks, Danny. I appreciate it."
He patted my shoulder and stood up. I immediately went back to the final paragraph of my report and rewrote it, making the description of the threat as precise as possible while emphasizing that sacrificing the armor had been unavoidable.
After uploading the file to headquarters, I closed the laptop. I had no interest in celebrating a successful return. The dying Loz'an commander's words were lodged in my mind like a splinter that kept digging deeper. I needed answers, not a drink.
I pulled out my phone and found the one number that might finally shed some light on everything: the highest-ranking person in the Corps I knew personally.
She answered on the second ring.
"Hi, Selina," I said, keeping every trace of emotion out of my voice. "The mission's over. We're back at base. When I get back to the States, we need to have a serious talk."