The Jackal Wars: 1

 

The darkness was stifling. It was the type of night that would make you feel like there was no such thing as light even possible.  The stars had gone out and the moon was a faint memory. As John crept forward, he strained his ears to pick up even the slightest sound.  The area he was in was dangerous enough as was, he didn’t need to be surprised by something and give his position away.

 

The Jackal base was close, that he could tell from the stink of ozone ionization in the air. Their suits needed a constant refresh of energy to keep going, so the area near their hold out spots was always peppered with the tinge of a violent storm.  John thought this was appropriate considering the devastation that was left in their wake was just like that of a violent hurricane.

 

He didn’t want to be there; he didn’t want to be this close.  He knew that they had sensor mines, sentry guns… all sort of nasty tricks laid out through the surrounding area that should make any man decide against this sort of thing, but he needed to see.  He needed to know what was going on.  The last raid that they had been hit with was driven off, and contrary to normal behavior, they had left behind some of their dead.  This had never happened before. Not once during the whole time they had been on the planet.  Something had changed.  He and his team needed to know what that something was.

As he slowly stalked forward, he heard a squelch in his ear piece. His spotter saw something.  She was letting him know to stop moving. Stop everything. Stop breathing if he possibly could.  The only reason she would have chanced that momentary breach of comms black out was if she absolutely had to.

Carol watched the valley through here sensor scope, she could see where John was, he had stalked about 200 meters from her position, normally that was no serious range at all, but as she looked down range, she thought it might as well be two kliks.  He felt damnably far out.  Exposed. She knew she could cover him; she was certain had the range and a clear field of fire, but she didn’t want to have to.  This was a recon. See what’s going on, and get back out. Further out she could see the telltale blip of a jackal moving about.  Where there was one, there was, absolutely bound to be another.  They always worked in twos, or multiples of it. She couldn’t see the other one. John had stopped dead as soon as she had clicked her radio trigger. It had only been a moment of squelch on the freq, but there had been teams exposed and destroyed by that same action. Didn’t matter, he needed to know something was up and needed to stop. He did. She knew he would.

As she sighted the exposed Jackal, she had an uneasy feeling.  This was not normal at all. Where was its match. Where were the rest of the team?  She knew that the Jackals had adjusted their patterns in the past to contend with the guerilla fight that the human resistance had brought to bear against them.  They may be aliens, but they knew how to wage war just as well as humans did.  Better it seemed sometimes.  One of those twists had been the deployment of teams of four sentries to keep their nests safe. Before that they had relied, almost exclusively, on automated weapons mounts. But then John had figured out a way to bypass them and he and his kill team had actually cleared a nest outside of Boise.  From that point on there was always a patrol. Always.

This one was… it was almost wandering back and forth.  It didn’t seem to on patrol so much as to simply be lost. Almost like it was looking for something it had lost. Eventually it began to wander back toward the base complex. With its back turned she, seriously, considered taking the shot. She didn’t. But she really wanted to. Once it was far enough out, she keyed the recall squelch on her radio; letting John know that he needed to back track and return to the watch post.

Twenty minutes later he rolled back into the depression that they had taken cover in.

“Fuck. That was close, wasn’t it?” John asked in a low whisper.

“You have no idea how close that was, John” Carol answered in the same hushed tone.

Nodding, he pulled his night goggles from his hip pocket and scanned the Jackal base. “I can’t believe I’m alive.” He said sweeping his head side to side. “How many of them were out there?” he asked absently.

Carol took a moment be fore she answered and said “One.”.

John stopped scanning and looked at her confused. “Could you not see it’s match? Or was the rest of the squad maybe around that outcrop over there?” he asked.

“No John, I just saw the one” she replied. She told him everything that she had seen and let the concern she felt about it put an edge to the words.

He dragged his hand across the stubble on his cheek and said “That… that doesn’t make any sense.”. Setting back to scanning he said to her sideways “You don’t suppose it’s a new thing they’re trying out?” continuing he said “Something they think might draw us out when we see a lone sentry?”

“I don’t know, John. But we should get back. We are almost at mission time, and there is nothing really going here.” She said after a thought “We’ll tell Myles about this.  He knows way more about them than anyone else”

“Yeah” John said. “Yeah, you’re right. Let’s go.”

They started to roll back over the back side of their makeshift foxhole when the were blinded by a glaring bright white light. Rolling back in to their hole they looked in the direction of the Jackal base.

They both hissed in breath through their teeth. The base was gone. No sign of it at all. Just a perfectly clear area of land where ten seconds ago there had been an enemy installation.  Now it was just a circle of bare earth.

“What the” John started to say.

Carol finished for him “actual fuck just happened?”