The Ranger company scout section left before anyone else. That was the job of the scouts. Go out and scout. Find first what we’d be running into so we could kill it or evade it. Their job was to make the unknown known before it became a problem. And of course, everything surrounding us currently was unknown.
The route Last of Autumn had laid out for us was fairly simple, and if it worked it would get us clear of the enemy and on our way to her people pretty quickly. The first section of the march was the hardest part. That was for two reasons. Reason one being the enemy would have its best chance to locate and destroy us during those early hours of the march in the night as we’d be closer to our last known position. Reason two was because the overland route was all uphill. We were carrying wounded and every piece of equipment not nailed down was on our backs. Who knew what we’d need once we got where we were going? So we were taking as much as we could carry and fight with. And then some.
We crossed over the river along the western bank and then made a short trek through a body-littered forest the enemy had been operating in. Most of these corpses had been killed on night two by indirect fire. We started up a series of hills that lined this edge of the river valley and used the ridgeline to cross toward a steep canyon farther to the north. There would be, according to Last of Autumn, a thin trail up that narrow canyon that the Shadow Elves, Last of Autumn’s people, used on occasion but hadn’t in some time. The bottom of that trail was Phase Line Fox, and the en route rally point was designated Domino. We’d reach it by midnight if we didn’t hit any snags.
Phase Line Eagle was on top of the pass the canyon led up along. Beyond the top of the pass was “Old Witch Pool,” as it was called in Last of Autumn’s language. A small stream that started there would eventually turn into a river downslope leading toward some ruins out on the plain below. The ruins, or what she called “The Philosopher King’s Palace,” were Objective Rally Point Match to the east along the river. After that we would depart the river and enter the Upper Charwood Forest, where we’d find the Shadow Elves’ Hidden Cave somewhere within.
Basically, it was north to the hills, east to the canyon, north again along a small river, then east into a forest they called the Upper Charwood.
She made it clear everything was dangerous until we reached the Charwood. I relayed that to the sergeant major. He made a face that indicated this was obvious but didn’t bother to comment other than being mature enough to say, “Good to know.”
Yeah, I said to myself as I got my ruck ready, obviously everything was dangerous. What was I thinking?
She showed us stars we could navigate by, and soon the teams were starting out in the deepening gloom, staggered to follow one another.
I’d been placed with the scout team and our elven guide. The Ranger scout team consisted of five Rangers and Sergeant Thor, who’d been added as sniper support for his training and experience as a pro Swamp Fox. There was one hangup. While working on the sand table for the route march with Autumn, I remembered Jabba and went off to retrieve him. When I came back trailing a goblin at the end of a length of 55O cord and a chain around his neck, the elf had a ninja sword out in a flash, and she was more than ready to use it to slice and dice the little thing in about two cuts. Funny, none of us had noticed her weapons before. And now here it was out and menacing all of us as I approached with the chained-up little Jabba, who was freaking out in the face of what he perceived as a mortal enemy. Last of Autumn. Jabba scrambled behind me for cover and protection as she shouted something in Tolkien Elven I can only guess meant something close to “Die, Goblin Scum.”
She seemed quite angry. And yes, she was sexy like that, too. Her face was pure dark storm cloud rage, and I was pretty sure being on the receiving end of that would not be a pleasant experience. A few minutes later the sergeant major was involved and asking me what the hell I was doing.
“This is our prisoner,” I told him. “The one I interrogated, Sergeant Major. I’m bringing him with us.”
The sergeant major gave me a look that suggested he was baffled, or perturbed, or both, at why the enemy thing was still alive after the pertinent information had been extracted and the creature’s usefulness expended. But since we were in polite and open company it was clear we couldn’t be as straightforward as we had been on the subject of now-deceased Deep State
Volman.
Side note. No one had missed Volman so far.
It all eventually got straightened out once I explained the goblin was disposed to work with us and might provide valuable intel later on throughout the mission. But Last of Autumn would have nothing to do with Jabba, and her whole bearing changed permanently after the incident, even though I kept explaining that the Jabba was a joein, or prisoner in Korean. German too. Häftling.
Her seething hatred for him had changed her delicately placid and beautiful features into those of fiery avenging angel in the space of a moment. An avenging angel I would be none too happy about meeting if I were on the wrong side of the equation and at the tip of her shiny ninja sword of razor-sharp death.
The sword. Interesting. She was quick with it. Not McCluskey fast, but it was still pretty ninja. The weapon wasn’t like any of those the Rangers had picked up to use when ammo got down to nonexistent. What she was pointing at Jabba was something more like a fabled blade. Something straight out of an epic tale about serpents and Vikings. But at the same time, something a deadly Ronin might use to murder a thousand samurai on an endless quest for revenge. It was beautiful and definitely well-made. A fine thing. Not like, but in the same category of fineness as, McCluskey’s black blade had been. Coldfire, the SEAL had called it.
At that moment I wanted to ask her if she knew of this King Triton, but… now didn’t seem like a good time, what with her waving around a very dangerous weapon she was intent on drawing gobbie blood with.
She kept hissing at the goblin and calling it a “Diener der Finsternis!” in Grau Sprache.
Servant of Darkness.
Jabba earnestly shook his head like he was trying to tell some cops back on the block that he was just hanging out with those other guys the po- po were looking for. He was innocence defined and guilty as hell.
Jabba was even jabbering the equivalent of “It’s cool” in Turkic.
It was all kind of funny. Until she took someone’s eye out with the blade, and then it was liable to get out of hand. And then it would be even funnier years later. To the survivors that is.
Like I said, it all got straightened out, and Tanner was called in to take
charge of the prisoner. I ordered Jabba to obey everything Tanner said, and I gave Tanner a few phrases in Turkic to order the little goblin around.
By nightfall the goblin was overloaded with two huge duffels and carrying the weapons section’s extra gear as we departed the river island. No mean feat. They were feeding him scraps from their MREs like he was a dog, and truth be told the little goblin didn’t seem to mind much. Brumm had even taught him to jump up and down and roll over. They left the goblin on the 55O cord leash with a chain around his neck, but he was gonna earn his keep along the way. Those swollen duffels were heavy. Oh, and plus, he was carrying a 7.62 drum in each gangly claw. He was impossibly, and comically, overloaded, and yet like I said, he didn’t seem to mind. In fact he was grinning ridiculously. I think someone had let him try some Rip It they’d smuggled along for the ride. Once he was fueled up on a near-lethal dose of caffeine and vitamin B12 the little goblin seemed almost happy to be with us, proving once again that Rip It was mission-critical.
Private Soprano had been reassigned from Jasper’s fire team, which had been cannibalized to fill other squads who’d taken casualties. Soprano was now the AG for Specialist Rico.
“Get a load of this guy,” laughed the new assistant gunner. Gone was his comical Italian parody, replaced by a deep Bronx patois that gave away his hometown sure as command sergeant major’s drawl.
The exaggerated accent, likely a knee slapper among his friends back in the shadows of Yankee Stadium, made a comeback. “Looka da little monkey man!”Jabba was only slightly smaller than Soprano. “He’s-a too funny to kill. Hey… monkey, you bite and I’ll splitta your skull, sì, capisce?”
Now, heading into the night and up through a dark forest climbing toward the foothills, the scouts moved, sweeping ahead of Last of Autumn and myself at the center of their patrol wedge. We followed the scouts pointing out their initial course track. She was interfacing with “Hard,” or as he was officially known, Sergeant Hardt. Hard and Kurtz were cut from the same cloth. Completely competent. Zero personality. Strong opinions on everyone weaker than themselves. Spoiler: everyone was weaker. Both tabbed, and I’d bet my whole instant coffee stash they had their tabs tattooed to boot.
All I got from the Ranger scout leader when I reported with Autumn
was “Try not to make much noise and make sure she understands me and I understand her, or there are going to be problems for you, PFC.”
During the patrol brief, Thor stepped in and told Hardt I was “good to go,” and that dialed Hard back a bit. Slightly. A little. But you could tell he was wired tight and didn’t want any mistakes out of me that might jam up his section’s chi.
In Mandarin, chi literally means “air” or “breath.” Figuratively it refers to the vital energy in all living things. Spelled qi in the Pinyin romanization. Chi or ch’i in the Wade-Giles transcription.
This is me contributing.
In any case, I didn’t want to jam up anyone’s chi. Armed dudes operating out in the unknown dark, surrounded by the enemy, needed as much energy flow as possible. Especially with me out here with them. Jammed chi probably meant all of us getting hacked and stabbed to death by something mythical and angry. I was intent on avoiding this fate until I had at least one last decent cup of coffee somewhere. I had reached the “Not Particular” phase of this little adventure. As in, if we had run into the worst gas station in the world with coffee that had been brewed sometime last week… I would have hit it and been exceedingly grateful.
We started out at evening nautical twilight, like I think I said, and just before we did, Last of Autumn whispered a few Tolkien words in her dappled-gray horse’s ears, and after that the horse followed the patrol wedge, but so far back it was almost out of sight. Every so often I’d look back with the barely working NVGs and see the horse standing near a thicket, almost invisible, still following us like a good boy. I wasn’t even sure if the horse was a boy. But he, or she, was a pro at stealth.
Once we were underway, the comm was up and the following teams started out on our back trail. The scouts under Sergeant Hardt knew what they were doing. They were constantly back and forth, up and down terrain high points and checking visibility along the route. Our rucks were impossibly overloaded, but as scouts we weren’t loaded down as heavily as the rest of the company. That allowed us to move faster and quieter. And the scouts were definitely quiet. But they were also carrying weapons and gear, and when the air was still enough and there was no background noise like rushing water or wind through the trees, you could just barely hear their muffled hustling movements as they went softly from tree to tree in two-
man teams. Covering and watching. Whispering into their throat mics.
But Autumn—Last of Autumn—I was forcing myself to use her proper name given the discomfort and embarrassment my familiarizing of it had caused her—Last of Autumn moved without a sound. None. She made the quiet scouts sound like elephants trampling through dead grass. And she was wearing armor to boot. That silvery fine mesh tunic beneath her forest- green cloak. There were times when I moved forward, following Sergeant Hardt’s form in the gray-green glow of our precious night vision—the scouts carried rechargeable and solar chargers, but there was still a shortage
—when I couldn’t hear her at all and I had to look back to see if we’d somehow left her behind. Instead I would find she’d moved ahead of me without me even noticing her. She could move incredibly fast. And her cloak… at times in the night vision it was like some type of active camouflage system that adjusted to the viewer’s conditions to blend her into the background and make her near invisible. You had to look hard to find her. At one halt, while Sergeant Hardt and the point man were checking the top of a hill and the gully below we were about to descend into, I took off my NVGs to let my eyes acclimatize to human night vision, and I tried to find her where I’d just seen her with electronic-assisted night vision.
Nothing.
She was flat-out invisible in the dark night under the stars in the shadows along the silent hills.
And then she was right next to me and whispering in Shadow Cant. “Tell… Sergeant Hardt… circle. Close… to me.”
She was carrying a dark ashwood bow and a quiver full of silver- feathered arrows she’d taken off her horse from the bare equipment she’d packed.
“Defensive?” I wanted to clarify what she needed so I could relay to Hard, who was forward and coming back now, alerting us we’d be ready to move shortly. Sergeant Thor was near the top of the hill on overwatch with his rifle.
“To… to…” She was searching for the right word and not finding it. “To… inform. No… to illuminate your… fellowship.”
Ah. She wanted to tell us something. Explain something. But even as I connected with Sergeant Hardt I thought to myself that she could just tell me and then I could relay to everyone. Maybe she didn’t understand the
concept of our radio communication.
I relayed, and Hardt came in to link up with her. Shrinking the scouts into a tight patrol circle and getting close. A moment later they were all there with Sergeant Thor, hunching his way down through the bracken and dead tall grass along the side of the hill. Rifle upright and squatting down next to Hardt, me, and Autumn.
I nodded to her that we were all here and she could proceed with what she needed to tell us.
And then I translated what she told us. Short version: She’d figured out that our “magic” for seeing in the dark wasn’t that good. According to her. Also, she could tell by our whispers that we were communicating in what she called some kind of magic “shadow speech” all our own. Like hers, but different. Apparently, there were correlations in this world. Not radio. But something. She understood we were communicating.
Then she said, “Can… make better with… I can.” She stopped and found the right words she needed. “Hunters’ Fellowship.”
She asked us to take off our night vision and if she might proceed with what she called, “make better.”
Sergeant Hardt sighed audibly, clearly annoyed by the superstitious indig jibber-jabber he would now be forced to endure. He knew she was a VIP and that Captain Knife Hand had given her some level of authority. So, best to play along.
She was kneeling as we flipped up our NVGs to show we were complying.
“Okay, Talker… what next?” spat Hardt bitterly with no small amount of impatience. “Clock’s burning and we need to stay ahead of the follow-on teams.”
“They’re ready,” I told Autumn. “Make better now.”
I had no idea what make better meant and I was pretty sure my elf- pidgin-patois sounded stupid to the Rangers. And… also I had a feeling it was all about to get very weird.
She closed her eyes and I could see her full lips mumbling something in the moonlight under the stars. Did I mention she was exotically beautiful like nothing and no one I had ever seen before? Not in a while, at least, right? She just whispered for a long moment, swaying in a circle, and then raised up her hands, which… started to glow a soft blue.
Yup.
Magic stuff.
The Rangers watched in amazemed disbelief as she opened her clenched fists and little ghostly blue fireflies fled from her palms and began to circle around all of us, raining down…
I could feel Sergeant Hardt dying inside as he was forced to have… Fairy dust.
Rain down on him.
Never have I seen someone look so utterly miserable. To him this was a violation of noise and light discipline of the highest order. Under normal, non-magical circumstances, something like this would be punishable by having the rest of the scout team beat me into unconsciousness.
I mean… what else do you want me to call it? It was Tinkerbell-type fairy dust. It was crazy. And hauntingly beautiful at the same time. Of all the things I’d lived to see in my very short life, which probably wasn’t going to last much longer, it was one of the coolest things that had ever happened to me. That was the real magic. The wonder of it. It was like gossamer moonlight made real, and it was something special. Something we never would have experienced when the world wasn’t ruined. Something wonderful found in the ashes of all that was lost to us. Ghostly blue fairy dust that floated over and around all of us. Bippity boppity boo.
And the crescent moon resting in the inky sky suddenly spiked its luminary output to that of straight-up noon on the brightest day of the year.
We. Could. See. Like. Never. Before. Everything.
As clear as day and far better than our regular unassisted or even assisted eyes ever could.
I’ve never done psychotropic drugs or any other hallucinogenic, but I’m willing to bet the experience was similar. Our eyes were pinned wide open and relaxed at the same time. When I looked at Hardt and Thor, their pupils were huge. As in yuuuuge. Everyone was staring about in amazement. Every detail, texture, surface… all of it was revealed in layers we’d never thought possible. Our gray-green night vision was now replaced by something the US Army and DARPA would’ve classified as sixth- generation night vision in white phosphorescence.
The kind of boot-strapped alien tech only Delta got to use, if you
believed the crazier conspiracy theories.
But way trippier.
I looked downslope past the horse and was stunned to find my vision telescoping way down toward the river, which was completely out of sight with normal vision. I found myself looking at the faces of the Rangers coming up from the river and felt as though I could reach out and touch them.
Great distances could suddenly be focused up close and personal.
It took a moment to figure it all out. A real freak-out, fall-off-the-edge- of-the-universe moment when none of it felt comfortable. But then it settled down, and a supreme sense of calm came out of nowhere and washed over us. I’d been sweating all through the hump up the hill and then freezing cold as the sweat dried and we waited for Hard and the point man to recon our next movement. It was gonna be like that all night. Now? Now I felt warm. Comfortable. Blissed out. But still completely aware of every sound for miles around us. My brain was processing it all like I was one with the Force or something. That Matrix moment where he suddenly knows kung fu.
Pretty cool, huh?
Then everyone in the scout team could hear everyone else’s thoughts.
