From the moment we stepped out of the portal into those suffocating alien jungles, Leon led us in a straight line, hacking our way through tangles of damp branches toward the Loz'an base. Then, without warning, he stopped, glanced at his tactical tablet, and abruptly cut to the right. The platoon followed without a word until we reached a natural rise where the dense greenery gave way to gray stone. There, tucked into a rocky outcrop, the dark mouth of a shallow cave waited.
It stretched no more than fifty paces before ending at a solid rock wall, but the massive stone overhang above us and the cool, damp air inside felt like paradise after the sticky tropical hell outside.
"Platoon, take five," Leon ordered. He unclipped his canteen, took one controlled sip, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Techs, stay on task. Get the tower set up. Everyone else, hand your packs over."
Heavy military duffels hit the cold stone floor with a series of dull thuds. Since everyone wore massive compressed S-Power tanks on their backs, the packs had to be carried across the front of the body instead, turning every infantryman into an awkward pregnant duck. Ten people had drawn that miserable assignment. Everyone else carried the lighter loadout: tactical pouches strapped to their thighs for water, gear, and first aid supplies.
The men Leon had called the techs immediately got to work, unpacking the duffels with practiced efficiency. Out came metal pipe sections, adjustable wrenches, valves, and adapters. From a distance, it looked like they had decided to build a city sewer system in the middle of an alien jungle. They moved with effortless coordination, assembling the pipeline along the damp cave walls while the sharp metallic clinks of tightening bolts echoed through the cavern.
I settled onto a broad rock ledge, leaned back against the rough, pleasantly cool stone, and methodically slowed my breathing. My inner accountant had always appreciated quiet and the chance to calmly assess a situation. Naturally, not everyone in our squad was capable of simply sitting still and catching their breath.
"Hey, guys, what's going on?" Ted was already hovering over the lead tech, shamelessly peering over his shoulder. "Need a hand? I catch on fast."
"Kid, quit getting in the way," Tony muttered without looking up, shooing him aside with a heavy wrench. "Go bug your babysitter."
"Seriously? What's your problem?" Ted frowned, his voice rising immediately. "I was just trying to help."
"Kim!" Tony barked, finally turning toward the captain with a flushed face. "Get this little punk a pacifier before I shove this wrench up his ass!"
A wave of laughter rolled through the cave. I glanced at Mary. One corner of her mouth twitched upward ever so slightly in cold satisfaction. She was clearly enjoying watching Ted get knocked down another notch.
"Oh, whatever. Like I even care." Ted threw his hands behind his head and sauntered back toward our group, though his ears were still bright red. "You guys have fun crawling around in the dirt. I wouldn't want to interrupt true craftsmanship."
The platoon broke into open laughter.
Danny, sitting nearby, let out a quiet snort. "Nice one, bro. Real smooth diplomat."
Ted instantly lifted his chin, all traces of embarrassment already gone. He honestly did not seem to care whether people were laughing with him or at him, as long as he stayed the center of attention. Classic teenage insecurity.
"Ladies and gentlemen, since everyone's in such a good mood, why don't you take a look at the local scenery?" Leon said. He was crouched near the cave entrance in the shadow of a boulder, pointing toward something deep in the jungle below. "Get your scopes out. Look over there."
Without wasting a motion, I pulled my compact monocular from its pouch, pressed it to my eye, and adjusted the focus. At first, all I saw was an endless wall of lush green leaves, thick fleshy stalks, and vines as thick as my arm.
"Look farther," Leon said with the faintest hint of a grin. "About two hundred yards through the undergrowth. Trust me, it's worth it."
Everyone shifted, spreading out along the rocky ledge to find a better angle. I slowly swept the monocular to the left until I finally found a narrow window between the massive trunks of the alien trees.
The only word that came to mind was monumental.
Rising from the sea of vegetation like a colossal gray monolith stood the Loz'an outpost. Its walls, built from dark, rough composite, looked seamless and impenetrable. Clusters of flexible tubes jutted out here and there, the same emergency evacuation system Selina had lectured us about. The Loz'an could compress their bodies and literally launch themselves through those tubes if the base came under attack.
Guards armed with long-barreled plasma rifles paced steadily along the top of the perimeter wall. Sneaking past them would be next to impossible. But they were the least of our problems. Twin-barreled automated defense turrets glinted ominously from firing ports on the upper level. If one of those things locked onto you, its laser barrage would burn through your personal S-Power shield in seconds. After that, all that would be left was a charred corpse.
There were no visible gates or access ramps on our side. The service entrance was probably on the opposite flank. They obviously were not driving heavy equipment through evacuation tubes. There was no defensive ditch in front of the wall, but my inner auditor was certain that beneath the thin layer of imported gravel lay entire fields of acid mines and laser tripwires. The Loz'an had a well-earned reputation for paranoid engineering.
Breaking through those walls head-on seemed impossible. Reaching them under overlapping fields of fire would be pure suicide.
To top it all off, a transparent S-Power shield shimmered over the entire complex, barely visible except for the subtle ripples it sent through the air.
Looking at that feat of engineering, I could not help running the odds. My internal calculator came back with one big, hopeless zero. Maximum defense rating. It felt as though even if I activated [Special command] and pushed my brain's processing power to its absolute limit, the system would crash under the sheer number of variables and reboot. Trying to storm a fortress like that head-on was nothing but a statistical exercise in getting killed.
"Holy shit..." one of the veterans behind me muttered without taking his eye off the scope. "That damn place is bigger than the freaking White House."
"I've seen bigger," the man beside him replied lazily.
The platoon stirred, spreading out along the rocky ledge. The shelter of the cave created a false sense of security, and the soldiers began quietly trading impressions.
"Pretty amazing, isn't it?" Danny said as he wandered over to where I was sitting, absentmindedly adjusting the focus ring on his spotting scope. "Just think about it. The brightest minds of an alien civilization designed every wall of that place."
"That's a nice way of putting it," I admitted, studying the gray fortress from a different perspective. "You ought to write science fiction. I think you'd be good at it."
"Oh, come on." Danny waved me off with an easy grin. "Me? A writer? I'm just an ordinary guy. I like skateboarding, stuffing myself with pizza and beer, and reading the latest comics. My greatest literary achievement is filling out an incident report without any spelling mistakes."
"You can discover a talent at any age." I shrugged, shifting my gaze to the shimmering dome. "What worries me is something else. Where are they getting that much power? Keeping a shield that size running would take an enormous amount of S-Power. Did those creatures really build a generator that can pull energy straight out of the atmosphere indefinitely?"
Danny paused, his relaxed expression turning thoughtful. "I'm no lab nerd, but in all the years I've been fighting the Loz'an, I've never heard of technology like that. Huge outposts? Sure. They build those all the time. But a generator with an endless power supply? No chance. Their generators have to cool down after every full cycle."
"Then how are they keeping that shield up twenty-four seven?"
"What makes you think they are?" Danny slipped the scope back into its pouch and looked at me with a faint smile. "They picked us up on radar and switched it on. That's how the Loz'an always do it. Saves power. Every operation I've been on worked the same way."
I nodded silently. My brain immediately filed the information under tactical options. If the shield depended on an active power source, then it had windows of vulnerability. That made things considerably easier.
"What the hell are you all staring at?" Ted called from behind us, his voice carrying an edge of frustration that bordered on panic. He twisted the scope in his hands so violently it looked like he was trying to wring it dry. "All I can see are freaking bugs, mud, and a bunch of damn branches!"
"Adjust the elevation and keep scanning northwest," I said calmly.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Mary quietly following my advice. A second later, her lips formed a silent little "oh" as the scale of the problem finally sank in. And this was only one of the four outer walls. I could only imagine the nightmare waiting inside the perimeter.
"How the hell do you work this stupid thing?" Ted snapped, looking ready to smash the optic against the rocks.
"Here. Take mine. Stand where I was. You've got a much cleaner angle from there."
Ted snatched the monocular from my hand and pressed it to his eye. He went completely silent for a heartbeat before blurting loud enough for the entire cave to hear, "No freaking way! It's the damn Death Star!"
"Compared to the Death Star, that's just a toolshed," Mary said coolly without even turning her head.
"You know what I meant, you little smart-ass," Ted muttered, but all the fight had gone out of him. The sheer scale of the alien fortress had knocked the wind out of his ego, leaving him without enough energy for a real argument.
"Everyone done sightseeing?" Leon took one last drag from his cigarette, pulled the empty pack from his pocket, and crushed it in his fist. It had been his last smoke. "That's what we're up against. Tony, give me the numbers. What's waiting inside?"
Without looking up from the pipe he was carefully connecting to a high-pressure valve, Tony answered in the calm, matter-of-fact tone of a seasoned professional. "Based on my Tech Sense, I'd estimate roughly a thousand laser weapons and about the same number of acid munitions in various calibers. Twenty light fighters in the hangars. Eighteen wheeled armored personnel carriers with heavy laser turrets. Fifteen support tanks. And yeah, Colonel, every one of those machines has its own S-Power shield rated at ten thousand units."
A heavy silence settled over the cave. I noticed a couple of battle-hardened veterans visibly lose color. Fighting infantry in the jungle was one thing. Charging shielded tanks was something else entirely.
"And we've got thirty guns," Leon said, exhaling a thin stream of gray smoke. "You know, boys, if it were up to me, I'd handle this with a little style. I'd strap a hundred pounds of plastique to myself, go intangible, slip into their central ammo depot, and give them their own private Independence Day. Then I'd station the rest of you outside the front gate to finish off whatever half-dead bastards managed to crawl out."
The colonel spoke with the kind of dry, hard-earned cynicism that made everyone pay attention. Unlike Danny, Leon had no interest in coming across as friendly. He was the Army's attack dog: ruthless, relentless, and brutally effective.
"But nobody's going to let us do it that way." Leon spat onto the ground and ground the cigarette butt beneath the heel of his heavy combat boot. "The well-fed bastards in the Pentagon want this technology delivered nice and intact without so much as a scratch. Damn collectors. So our plan's going to sound a little crazy. We're going to smoke those cockroaches out into the open, tear them apart out here, then head inside and finish off whatever cowards barricade themselves underground."
"And how exactly are we supposed to pull that off, Colonel?" one of the sergeants asked with a frown. "What's the play?"
"The play?" Leon flashed a predatory grin with no trace of humor behind it. "We're going to hand those bastards the perfect chance to wipe every last one of us out in a single strike. And they're going to take it."