Princess Rescue Inc Snippet 3

   So, I see Lil Red is having trouble staying off the naughty list, she's made some of my decorations disappear and is currently tormenting our other elderly grumpy resident. Loki is not amused by her being playful and hateful all in one bundle of tussling fur.😼

  She got me this morning; my mistake in assuming the wire tie was long enough and she wouldn't go after the hand holding it. Sigh. It's skin, it'll grow back... eventually.😩

 In other news, Christmas print and paint projects are moving forward full steam. And on to the snippet!

 

 

Chapter 2

 

Retired Master Sergeant Wayne Waters watched the military exercise. He nodded to himself as he watched the boots being put through their paces on the obstacle course. Another platoon was jogging past him.

He'd had to adapt the native terms to some degree, but he was creeping in some modern military terms and training into things as time passed. He nodded to himself and then took himself off to the next stop.

He heard the soft rounds going off, then a flashbang and winced. He'd planned to get there ahead of time but had been delayed. Oh well.

He got out of the jeep and went to the control center. Once inside he looked down at the inside of the shoot house. “How are they doing?”

“Fair to middling,” the tech in charge of the shoot house replied.

He nodded. He had the effective rank of a general but refused to put on airs. He insisted on being called a sergeant if someone had to call him by a title. Not that anyone did so. He liked that they deferred to his wisdom, though it felt odd.

His eyebrows rose as he saw the two competing teams in the shoot house. The attackers were a SWAT unit attached to security. The equivalent of the Secret Service in the Imperium. They were in a hostage rescue scenario. The counterforce was run by some of the Flying Legion, and they weren't making it easy on the SWAT people.

Good. That was how he liked it. Train hard. The more you sweat, the less you bleed.

The assault team was making their way through the shoot house but had gotten bogged down at a door. Typical, it wasn't like you could blow holes through the building like you could back on Earth. Here, a majority of the buildings were made out of stone. Even the lathe and plaster ones were tough to penetrate. If you set a charge, you might kill the hostage on the other side with shrapnel.

As he watched, the point on the assault team underhand threw a grenade. It went off and the two guards opposing them were graded as terminated.

The assault team moved forward as the disgusted guards got on their knees and placed their hands behind their heads to signal they were out of the fight. The point waved and another team member came up with a handheld scanner. They scanned through the door. The sergeant looked down to a screen that echoed what they were seeing. He saw the heat signatures of four people in the room including one, the hostage, seated facing the door.

“Yeah, this isn't going to end well,” the tech murmured.

Small charges were placed on the hinges and latch and then blown. The door bounced off of the lip in the inner archway and came back at the assault team. The point shrugged it off but the delay allowed the shooters inside to fire at them and more importantly, take out the hostage.

“Sucks to be the hostage,” the sergeant muttered as the team entered, took out the opposition with a flurry of shots and then the exercise ended. A klaxon went off to signal it was over. The lights came up.

“Fail,” the grader said over the PA. The sergeant crossed his arms and listened as they graded the exercise. He made a mental note to look into some sort of recon drone that could fit under doors. Something flat. Maybe even a flashbang? Something about as thick as an eighth of an inch that would go off and momentarily disable the people inside? The doors in the Imperium were thick and solid but had gaps on the bottom to allow them to swing easily. Some of those gaps were damn near a half inch wide. He'd seen Hex-rats go under them easily.

“Carry on,” he murmured as they began to reset the exercise.

^^^^^^

“It's been a year local time. No sign of anything from Earth. I wonder what is going on?” Sydney asked. The group was together for a rare evening. Not everyone was there of course; many were off on one duty assignment or another. But a full one-third of the Terrans had managed to get together to make it something of a party.

“I'm not sure I care,” Max replied with a shrug as he toyed with his beer bottle.

“I do care. I don't like not knowing,” Sergeant Waters growled. “They are up to something.”

“Well, fortunately, Doctor Delacroix has made it so they can't come through easily,” Sydney said.

“With a bit of help,” Max interjected with a nod. They'd figured out how to flip the gate so it faced out to sea rather than to the plateau above the cliffs. That meant anyone who came through would replay the Loony Toon gag of walking out into open air.

Of course they'd warned the people of Earth with a message in a bottle. There had been no response.

Given that the gate was inside a room on the platform and had a narrow ramp entrance to get up it, they couldn't launch aircraft other than small drones. There had been two drones that had been reportedly sent through the gate, one a ground drone, which had pitched over the cliff into the sea, and then an air drone, which had gotten about a hundred meters out over the sea before a local Pterosaur had pounced on it midair.

After that, nothing, nothing at all.

“They earned it. Wanton poisoning the planet with pollution … raping the natural resources …,” Charlie sniffed.

“We were a part of that group too up until a few years ago,” the sergeant reminded her.

“But we've done better. I did. I went as green as I could,” she said defensively.

“Sometimes you have to break eggs to make an omelet,” the sergeant said.

“And what's that supposed to mean?”

“It means we can't always take the high road and go green right off,” Ginger, one of their lead pilots stated. She flapped her hands. “Being green is nice, but it is extremely limiting.”

“But it is the right thing to do,” Charlie insisted.

“And we're not doing the same here?” Ginger asked. “We've got to have petroleum for some things; we've got to have fossil fuels to extend the range of our vehicles and aircraft …”

“We're trying to not do that! Right?” Sydney demanded. “Right?”

“We're trying. That doesn't mean we’re succeeding totally,” Max admitted with a shrug as he left.

^^^^^^