404 Independent Platoon Battle (b)Log

Smoother than expected The white page stared at her from her retinal display, the cursor blinking mockingly, showing second by second all the time she was wasting. Mariam got up, grumbling, the page automatically becoming more transparent to let her see her surroundings. “What am I even supposed to write in this after action review, ‘I sat on my ass for two hours and let the Special Forces guys do all the work’ ?” “I guess? Man, at least Dinka got to shoot some baddies in the end.” dejectedly answered Zuri from her bunk - she was clearly having the same problems as her, with the added difficulty of having been the Commanding Officer for the operation. Everything had started  two days earlier, with a strange hostage exchange proposal from an anonymous source: the Nomad tech they had lost in Porto Interplanetario, Joline Sandoval, in exchange for Hsien Peng Huizhong. Only problem was that they never did capture the Hsien, despite crossing paths with him a couple of times - and indeed...

Ripe for the Harvest Prologue - Whatever it takes Reap and sow. R eee ap ‘nd Sss ow. Those three alien words flowed quite smoothly off the mandibles, without the usual jarring contrasts of human speech. Maybe that was why the overseers of the Enclave had chosen that name, meditated Ashk in their slumber-chrysalis - all vital processes kept to a minimum to save precious energy, except for that lone strand of conscious thought. They told themselves it was to be ready in case of an emergency, but in reality it was a way to ease the regret of wasted time that gripped them every time they woke up from a prolonged period of deep sleep. Ever since leaving the Baekdu Enclave, many body-cycles ago, Ashk had felt like time was a precious commodity: together with their memories, a sort of urgency accompanied their passing from one genetic descendant to the next, and they had no doubt that even their future bodies, the three spawn-embryos traveling beside them, would inherit the same restlessness....