Finding Reinforcements

Maria

Date: February 2833

"What...?" Icey mumbled as bright lights shined in his eyes.

"Get up."

"Do I have to?"

He came to instant alertness as Xenogears poured a liter of ice water over him. He yelped. "Argh!"

"Report to Ops."

"Ugh... what use will I be there?"

"That hung over are you?"
"I had a good excuse."

A sigh. "I suppose you did."

Tycho, one of his best friends, had taken his Talon out into the sunlight and disappeared. The sensor trace was clear: he had walked straight into a large Cybrid formation.

And now he was gone.

Icey and Xenogears, also a good friend of Tycho, had sat around Ops last night. Icey had a drink in his hand, several, in fact, while Xenogears merely sat at the monitor regarding it sadly.

Maria was more frustrated than sad. She said she should have seen it coming, but even Icey hadn't noticed any change in Tycho.

So now there was one less Ghost of the Antipode.

-----

Tycho sat in the shade of a crater rim, toying with the last remaining piece of his Talon. It was a commlink, tuned to Wolf Pack frequencies. A coded message from an orbiting dropship had left a message on his Talon's computer several nights ago, and now he waited for pickup.

The residents of Fantasma were his people, certainly, but he was still Pack. The time he'd spent as a merc on Mars had taught him something: one can never run from who they are.

He'd disappeared from the Pack, long ago, to join a mercenary force. He sought fortune, and working for the Martian rebels he had found it. When the Knights dropped, he was glad he never encountered his brothers of the Pack. His actions could be construed as treason. So at the first chance he got, he went to Mercury, to live out his days in piece.

Then the Cybrids landed, burning the face of Mercury clean of human presence. Or at least as clean as they could: several survived.

The Cybrids made the mistake of enslaving several thousand humans, Tycho among them. He remembered his days crammed into a chamber that met, just barely, human environmental requirements. For months he toiled, drugged into submission by the Cybrids, hearing their hated duotone voices in his head ordering him to do this, do that, go here, and stay there. And he obeyed, having no choice.

He was rescued, at last, by the Ghosts. One of the few slaves who had any fighting experience, he volunteered for the Ghosts training program.

He passed, despite not getting along with Maria very well. He even had a hand in saving the colony from a massive Cybrid assault, just before the destruction of Prometheus.

The death of the Big Toaster had by no means ended the war. Mercury's Cybrids were more flexible than those of the rest of the system, and they continued to be a threat. Seeing the colony threatened by a new glitch regrouping, he formulated a plan to get help.

The final piece to his plan fell into place with the dispatching of the dropship Camel Fangs, which even now had reached Mercury and landed fifty kilometers from Fantasma Colony.

He would return to the Pack, and he would find someone he could trust. And he would bring that person (and whatever squires he could get reassigned to his command) back with him when he returned to the colony.

He only hoped that by the time he got back, the colony would still be standing...

-----

Date: May 2834

"Yes, yes, yes! Picking up a familiar transponder. Del's Shepard!"

Tycho's companion shook her head. "Looks like they're in the middle of a battle..."

"Prep your Seeker for drop, dear. Let's get ready to whack some glitches."

As she left, she muttered, "I could do that on Mars."

Tycho grinned, and launched a burst at the nearest of the enemy vehicles. "Tycho calling Antipode, come in please..."

-----

Del froze, her fingers centimeters from the firing controls. Tycho?!

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