The Nomads

Outward Expansion: Ep. One

Oct 09, 2023

Captain Will August glanced down at the ship’s star map to orient himself. Jumping wasn’t a perfect science. Five hundred nautical miles was the margin of error, and in space that might as well be threading a needle. Coming out of a jump was, however, a bit of a navigational process, as bearings had to be found, and one's course reset.

It had been less than an hour since they’d received the distress signal from the settlers below, and he hoped they weren’t too late. Jumps took time. They weren’t instantaneous, but this side of the galaxy’s rim they were never more than a few hours out from a planet.

The ship’s bridge was located near the very center of the massive cruiser, named so eloquently—The Guts. Its walls, from floor to ceiling, were lined with one large wrap-around view screen. This provided a 360-degree view of the outside of the ship. Its resolution calibrated such, that the human eye could not tell that it was looking at a view screen. To the naked eye, space was just beyond the glass veranda where the bridge seemed to be located.

As they were less than 10,000 nautical miles from the planet. Aurion loomed large in front of them, as if at any moment they would be sucked into its orbit and eaten alive by the enormous celestial body. Aurion’s surface danced blue in the distance. It was overly large for a terrestrial planet, almost 20,000 miles in diameter.

Gravity was going to be a bitch, Will thought.

“This is it,” Will said. “Devlin, take us in.”

The ship’s pilot punched commands into the control dash. He was a heavy-set man, a big ol’ farm boy that hailed from a place called Texas, which if you heard him tell, might as well be the only place on Earth.

Will heard the ships gyro engage as they shot forward. He stood flatfooted as they hurled forward through the blankness of space. The gyros were an incredible feat of engineering, keeping the insides of the ship and its crew stable even as they hurled forward through space.

Lydia sat in the corner of the bridge. She was a Tharkonian, and as such, had magenta skin that bordered on lavender. Her hair was black, and eyes blue. She was beautiful by all standards, human or alien, yet completely asexual. More than one man had crashed and burned when trying to make a pass. Lydia very rarely informed them that they should never have even bothered.

“Give me a reading on the colony,” Will ordered. She closed her eyes. She was physically present, but Will could tell she was spiritually absent. Tharkonians were excellent remote viewers, specifically the female members of their race. The males possessed no such abilities. Tharkonians were, however, a mostly pacifist race. In fact, the only martial organization they’d ever lent their services too as scouts were The Rangers.

“Nomads are still there. Buildings burning, it looks like the settlers are putting up a fight,” Lydia reported back calmly.

“Can you find us a place to insert?” Will asked.

“One second,” she said.

Will watched in anticipation as her brow furled, and then seconds later she rambled off a string of coordinates.

“Did you catch that?” Will asked Devlin.

“Got it Captain. Already ported the coordinates into the Starfighters.”

“How much longer before we can drop?”

“Twenty minutes,” Devlin replied.

Will pressed the intercom button and spoke into the mic. “In case you ingrates didn’t put two and two together, Aurion is a class three planet, which means we’ll need the exo-suits.”

“Got it, Captain,” came the reply. It was Jax, his second in command. He sounded shaky.

“Twenty minutes to drop,” Will told him.

“Roger that,” Jax said.

“You two have command,” Will said.

Lydia smiled, a patronizing smile, and Devlin gave him a halfhearted wave goodbye.

Will shrugged into his exo-suit on the quarterdeck. It was lightweight, about thirty pounds, but its nanite frame was stronger than titanium. The suits were a force equalizer despite their drawbacks. Battery power only lasted upwards of three hours, for one. But more than that, they put a lot of stress on the nervous system. Three hours in one of the suits, and one would undoubtedly spend the next day feeling like they’d just been run over by an Orion freighter.

He pulled the small orange strap hidden beneath the suit's right elbow and engaged the electric motors. He then popped an Orlactin, a muscle relaxant. It was the only preemptive measure he’d found to counter the Exo-suit hangover. The only one that sort of worked anyways.

Will jumped up and down, testing each of the suit's limbs to make sure he had full control and mobility. The suit didn’t have a direct port into the user's brain. Instead, it was powered by an advanced operating system, or AOS, which had been called AI on old earth. That had been a misnomer as the operating system never possessed actual intelligence, only its advanced properties. AI was subsequently rebranded over the years, and eventually became known as AOS. The suit was filled with thousands of sensors which sent the user’s movements back to the AOS, where they were translated into motion through the suits tiny motors. In this way the AOS acted as almost a second nervous system draped over the user. The inherent lag was imperceptible to the user’s conscious brain or even his body at the time, but not to his subconscious nor the rest of his central nervous system. It was this lag that caused the brutal hangovers.

Will walked to the Armory located at the very end of the quarter deck. Harris was waiting for him. Harris ran the armory. He was a slim and dependable man, who walked with a limp from a Nomad hotshot.

“What is it today?” Will asked.

Harris handed him an L-Rifle over the counter. “Laser, sir.”

“I figured.”

“There’s just no good way to make lead work on a high gravity planet,” said Harris. “Throws all the ballistics off.”

“I know Harris. I know,” Will said. The laser weapons were slow to recharge. Averaging only one shot every thirty seconds. But they shot straight in high gravity, which often mattered more than sending rounds down range.
Harris handed him a brace of pistols next, also laser, and Will buckled them about his hips.

“Hatchet and saber, too,” Will said.

He slung the saber across his back and belted the tomahawk. The saber was of Imperial make, with a steel-nanite blade that looked carbon black. It also sported an intricate handguard, inlaid with gold. It was an elegant weapon.

The tomahawk’s blade was also steel-nanite, but its handle was made of Oak and wrapped in leather. Will knew the wood handle was a potential weakness, but he had a heart for old things, and had never felt the need to replace it.

Will made his way down the spiral stairs that led to the very belly of the star cruiser. The hangar was the very bottom deck of the ship. Thirty starfighters hung suspended in the air, attached to the hangar ceiling by hydraulic arms. And beneath them, twenty Rangers prepared for war. They were a motley lot, all signed on for different reasons, and from different places. They were all friends and brothers now, bonded by their hate for the Nomads and their love for each other.

Jax met him at the bottom of the stairs.

“The men ready?” Will asked.

“Just about,” Jax replied. He was more somber than usual. Jax had been at this for a while, and it wasn’t often Will saw him nervous ahead of a fight.

“What's wrong Jax?” Will asked.

“Aurion,” Jax said. “My brother and his family are down there. They got a homestead. Started a farm.”

“Which one?”

“Ted. The youngest. My niece, Riah, is down there too.”

Will put a hand on Jax’s shoulder. “We better get down there then.”

Jax just gave him a nod.

“We’ll get em,” Will said. “Don’t worry.”

Jax turned away, barking orders. The mask of command slipped firmly back in place, and Will watched him go.

It wasn’t unusual to get called to a planet that one of the crew had family on, rare sure, but not unusual. The Rangers were a volunteer force. They were not a state sanctioned endeavor in the way of most martial companies. They were funded and outfitted by a confederation of planets on the outer rim. Planets too far away from Earth to receive much assistance from the Great American Empire’s Space Force.

The outer planets were frontier planets. The mining corporations typically breached the edge of settled space first, and brought with them workers, who then brought their families—families that needed farmers, doctors, and builders. Families that needed protection.

These planets that started as lawless lumps of rock were then invaded by hard and driven men. Sometimes they turned into paradise, and sometimes they turned into dens of thieves, mercenaries, and mongers. Barren planets were given life by terraformers. Settlers struggled through all manner of hardship.

Solar storms that wiped out electronics and crops alike. Pirates and elite mafias that lived off rapine. Sometimes, whole settlements were wiped out by some strange native species. Miners revolted, and corporate strikebreakers acted as the heavy hand of god on the very edge of his creation. Some men got rich, while others went broke.

But ever so slowly, and just as surely, the march of civilization crept across the galaxy. Planets were brought to heel, and from them sprung new cities, new peoples, and new cultures. They were colonized, settled, and made into a home by people. People who marched and fought, and lived and loved, to one singular motto, one phrase that had encapsulated their faith—Per Aspera Ad Astra, or through struggle to the stars.

This was man’s destiny, Will thought.

But out of all these hardships, and all these struggles, the most feared, and perhaps the most deadly was that of the Nomads. They were a race thought to number in the millions. Whether they even had a home planet was unknown. They lived off their ships. Motherships that seemed to be entirely self-sufficient. Ships that hid behind nebulas or made camp orbiting around unfortunate planets. Motherships that could spawn a hundred screaming starfighters, and the silver-haired barbarians that piloted them. They were a race of beings that had taken to space, and never returned to live on the ground. They were an enemy that remained nearly impossible to fight; for their homes, their bases, their people were constantly moving. They were an enemy that could not be dealt with, only managed.

They were an enemy that lived for war and raided for sustenance, treating each planet along its way as a new hunting ground. And they seemed to be superstitious too, preferring not to lose too many men, or retreating as soon as their leader was cut down. They never fought to the last man, preferring to fight another day. They attacked as quickly as they fled. Treating every battle as a hit and run encounter.

Retreats were often handled through what the Rangers had come to refer to as a death charge. In which, they would send a portion of their forces on an all-out charge into certain death in order to distract long enough for the others flee. If they believed they would be captured, they would kill themselves. In all his years as a ranger, Will had never known one to be taken alive.

The Nomads didn’t bother with settled space anymore. The Space Force had shown them just how powerful human weapons could be. But the Space Force was stretched thin, and had their hands full putting down petty revolts and fighting the Orions. They couldn’t worry about the edge of outward expansion. And so, the outer planets, having been left to fend for themselves, did just that, they created The Rangers.

The Confederation of Outer Planets outfitted the Rangers with the best equipment mining money could buy and offered up their wildest sons to her service. Most joined to protect their families and their homes, but all joined for the fight, and for the adventure. They were men animated by the exploring spirit that had first driven man from the steppe and across the plains and oceans.

Will was but one Captain now, out of hundreds, and the Rangers were made up of an entire fleet of ships. How he had managed to stay alive this long had less to do with brains and more to do with luck, and Guts.

Will walked through the chaos that was the hangar before a battle. Men armed themselves and did final checks on their suits. Some wrestled playfully, sparring to keep their minds distracted and bodies loose. Dirty jokes were slung, and rookies roasted.

The moments before a drop were always like this, pure electric, driven by the raw nerves and beating hearts of warriors. It took a special type to be a Ranger.

Devlin gave the five-minute warning over the intercom.

“Looking good, Cap,” Chan shouted from across the way.

“Shut up, Chan,” Will said. “Now circle up.”

He waited as the men quieted down. They gathered around him, a throng of misfits and soldiers.

Will started out by saying, “It looks like we are going in outmanned and under gunned—”

“When aren’t we,” Toco shouted from the back.

“Shut up Toco, and let me finish. There’s fifty screaming Nomads down there, and they got the settlers pinned down in the fort. So far, the fort has held, but we are already late to this fight. We hit them hard and fast. Shoot and move. Don’t get pinned down. Watch each other’s back. And don’t get distracted.” Will paused for effect.

The room had gone quiet.

Then he raised his hand, and watched as each of the Rangers inhaled a steady breath—they knew what was coming—then he let his hand fall and with it came twenty belligerent war cries so loud the hangar shook.

“Alright then, let's get some.”

The hydraulic arms lowered the fighters from the ceiling with mechanical efficiency, the creak and sigh of their pressure joints reverberated off the walls. The men spread out and stood impatiently beneath their respective vehicle. As the starfighters gently touched the floor of the hangar, the steel arms that had held them decoupled and ascended.

Will jogged to his own. He’d named her Cleo. The fighter was sleek, black, and all hard right angles. On the side was painted a pin up of Cleopatra. She wore a leopard print dress and held retro-style phasers reminiscent of the old earth pulps. Two ferns framed her, and a cheetah lounged at her feet. Next to Cleopatra were painted the Roman numerals XI, as this was his 11th Cleo, even though he still thought of her as his first.

Will popped the fighter’s canopy and swung himself onto the vehicles wing. He lowered himself down into the cockpit’s front seat. Each fighter had three seats, and a larger area in the back for transporting supplies or the wounded.

He’d barely sat down before the canopy reengaged, sliding over him. The fighters were of a unique design. They were created for dogfighting in both space and within atmosphere, and so unlike most space vehicles, possessed wings that could produce lift. They were thoroughly the offspring of 21st century fighter jets. The lineage was undeniable.

They did, however, have a few upgrades that separated them from the fighters of old. A rotary laser cannon in each wing, designed to fire off one round every second, ad finitum. They had no shields, unlike the Guts, which was a drawback, but the energy banks on the fighters couldn’t support it. They were fast though, and nimble, possessing a smaller gravity engine that operated off the same principles as the ones utilized in the bigger cruisers. They couldn’t jump far though, only about 20 nautical miles.

The Rangers called this blinking. The primary use was to get into a planet's atmosphere without burning up. The other use was typically defensive. If a Nomad fighter was on your tail, the Ranger pilots could simply blink away, and near instantaneously reappear 20 nautical miles ahead and just out of visual range.

Will adjusted the headset and tuned into the teams' combat frequencies. He ran his pre-flight checklists, and then checked the reserve power banks.

“Two minutes to drop,” Devlin’s voice came through the headset.

He cracked his knuckles and wiped his brow. He still got the sweats. The excitement of pre-battle. It wasn’t nervousness, it was readiness, and a steeled willingness.

“Lydia, what are we looking at?” Will asked.

There was a moment of silence, and then a crackle of static. “The Nomads are still attacking. Ground forces mainly, however they do have eight fighters providing over watch.”

“Only eight?” Will asked.

“Yes, Captain.”

“And is the landing zone still clear?”

“As the day is long,” Lydia replied.

Devlin gave the one-minute mark, and the hangar went completely dark. Will let his eyes adjust and dimmed the luminescent controls in the fighter’s cockpit.

The hangar went dark for a couple of reasons. One was to let all the pilot's eyes adjust before they were flung out into the pitch black of space. Even though space was hardly black. But it was a disorienting transition after the bright white lights of the hangar. The second, and probably primary reason, was because moving the launch floor proved to be such a drain on the ship's power.

Red lights blinked, signaling to anyone not in a jet to clear the hangar floor ahead of the oncoming pressure release. They bathed the hangar in a dull crimson. Then the ten second countdown blared over the ship's intercoms.

Will fired his engines, and felt the fighter levitate. He heard a distant whoosh as all of the hangar’s air was sucked out.

Then the lights blinked green, and the floor fell away even as the back wall of the massive ship proceeded upwards. As the Guts continued forward, it left the tiny fighters and their passengers hovering in space.

Will watched as the massive cruiser left them in its wake, the drop doors already closing. The ship reminded him of an armadillo, or a giant layered ball. Almost perfectly round, and cream colored, with two giant gyro rings circling it. Almost all confederate cruisers were spheres. It was an inspired shape and lent itself to gyroscopic control. And since there was no drag in space, the shape of a ship ultimately didn’t matter.

Will pushed the throttle between his legs forward and the fighter nosed down. He engaged the gravity drive and shot off towards the planet. The others on his tail.

The jet started to rattle as they breached the planet's heavy atmosphere.

“On my count we blink,” Will said over his headset. The fighter’s heat gauges rose, setting off alarms. The jet rattled some more as Will started his count.

On three, Will punched it, and for a split second his vision went black, and then it was over. They were slicing through the atmosphere. It was bumpy and took him a second to adjust to the feeling of flying. The difference between flying in atmosphere and flying through space was like the difference between walking and swimming.

As they approached the drop zone, they blinked directly past the Nomad air patrols, then descended quickly on the coordinates that Lydia had pulled. The Nomad fighters would be on them any second.

They levitated no more than six feet off the ground. Cockpits slid back, and the Rangers scrambled out of their jets.

As Will exited, he heard the shrill whine of the enemy fighter’s in the distance, and then spotted them far above. They were black specks converging in the planet's electric blue sky.

“Devlin, the squadron is yours,” Will said.

One by one the Ranger’s jets shot off back into the air, now minus a pilot. They would dogfight the Nomad fighters autonomously and then start doing their own over watch, with Devlin giving the occasional strategic input.

Will took in his surroundings, even as the fighters engaged above them. The whine of engines and screaming rotary cannons no longer his concern.

Aurion was a rocky planet. There was minimal plant life, and what there looked to be mostly moss and lichen. The ground had a deep gray coloring to it, which was likely somewhat of an illusion from the deep blue sky above them. It was not an earth blue. But deeper, and yet more luminous. Blue and violet auroral displays dancing around them. The skies had inspired the planet's name, that much was clear.

Will unslung his rifle, and wondered if it was a mistake not bringing the terrabikes. They’d inserted about a mile from the fort and could already hear the pulsing drone of Nomad hotshots.

“Double time,” Will ordered.

They ran in the direction of the noise. Each one of them in peak physical condition. The suits lightened the load by about 10%. How much of a boost the exo-suits offered was directly proportional to the gravity on a planet. In some instances, they were an equalizer, and in others they were a force multiplier.

“How are we doing Lydia?” Will asked.

“They just breached the walls.”

“Fuck,” Will said, and picked up his pace. The others did too.

“What’s the plan Captain,” Jax shouted.

“We try to draw them off the fort,” Will said. “We’ve got a flank, so we might as well use it. Let's just hope those settlers are ready to put up a fight.”

“I take right?” Jax asked.

Will smiled and said, “Read my mind.”

When they crested the hill, Jax’s team split off to the right and the rest followed Will down a rock gulch that ran parallel to the fort.

They could see the Nomads and the fight below them. Yellow bolts of energy from their hotshots flew across the battlefield, punctuated by the red lasers from the settlers' rifles.

The Nomads had them on weapons tech, at least for handheld weapons. However, their fighters were still garbage in an air fight. A hotshot could fire a burst of bolts in a matter of seconds, and then only required an equally brief moment to recharge, which heavily outpaced anything humans could leverage. The only time it was ever a fair ground fight was when the humans could use regular projectile weapons. Will would put an M540 up against a hotshot all day long.

The Nomads lumbered about the field below, moving to and from cover. They were big, averaging 7 foot tall and humanoid. Other than size, and hair color, they were preposterously similar to humans. They wore heavy plate armor, that was semi-effective against projectile weapons and completely useless against laser arms. Their hair was silver, bordering on white, with very little variation based on age, but there skin was a steel gray. Unlike the humans though, the Nomads let their women fight. And being a sexually dimorphic species, the women were quite a bit smaller, averaging only about five and half to six foot tall. They were skilled fighters, and in some ways more brutal than their male counterparts.

Will and his squad worked their way up the gulch and took position about 200 yards off the left flank of the Nomads. They hadn’t seen them yet.

“On me,” Will said, and then he raised the rifle. He fired a blast from the gun and drew the rifle sideways across the field. Each beam lasted about three seconds. If one could pick his targets carefully, and drag his aim, it was possible to take out multiple enemies with a single shot. It was one of the ways they compensated for the recharge time.

The other Rangers began to fire, each man holding his fire until the man next to him had fired. The Rangers had learned over the years to never fire all at once. In this way, they ensured that the team always had multiple men with charged weapons. Where technology faltered, tactics adapted.

Jax’s team opened fire from the other side of the battlefield, and the Nomad flank was drawn into instant chaos. The Rangers had the high ground, as the Fort was set up in a sort of bowl, and the Nomads were getting hit from both sides with a slow, but steady barrage of fire.

Will switched to a pistol and fired off another beam, dragging his aim through two Nomads that had turned to charge. The red light sliced through them, cutting them cleanly in half even as they ran. It was gruesome, but not bloody, for the laser weapons cauterized the wound even as it created it.

His aim had been too low however, and he’d cut the Nomad off at the hips. The legless enemy now fired back, and Will ducked back behind the cover of the stony embankment. The ridge exploded above him in a flash of yellow light and brought a subsequent downpour of heavy rock chips.

A Nomad cut off at the hips could survive like that for a surprisingly long time. The shock typically killed humans, but for some reason the Nomads didn’t experience shock the way humans did. They were built differently, either biologically, or through some mental fortitude that the average human simply didn’t possess. It was just one more reason that Will preferred projectile weapons.

Yellow bolts from the hotshots started to hammer their position. The Nomads had regrouped and concentrated fire.

“Pull back,” Will shouted. “And spread out.”

The Rangers slid back behind the cover that the terrain provided them and ran several yards forward in a staggered formation.

“Hit em again, starting with the lead man,” Will commanded.

The lead ranger some 200 yards off popped up the ridgeline and emptied his rifle into the enemy before ducking back into cover. Each Ranger behind him did the same. When the fifth man popped up to fire, Will also scrambled up, starting the firing line from his end so that at any moment two rangers were popping up and firing down at the Nomads below. This prevented the Nomads from picking up a pattern. The pattern was there of course, but now had an extra layer of complexity that bought the Rangers time.

“How you doing Cap?” Jax’s voice came over the headset.

“Got them in a double waltz,” Will said.

“Same. They’re starting to fall back,” Jax called.

The ridge above Will exploded, showering him with more dirt and rock. And one of his men cried out “death charge.”

Will lost his grip on the rifle as he tumbled backwards. Out of the smoke and dust, emerged two Nomads, a woman and a man. They came forward, hotshots raised, and fired just as Will dove out of the way.

When he righted himself, he pulled his pistol and fired in the same instant. He caught the man through the face, dropping him with a heavy thud, but because of the angle at which he’d dragged his aim, the beam continued uselessly over the woman's head. She slung her hotshot, and started towards him, drawing a war club from her back.

Will blocked her blow with the hatchet, and drew the saber before quickly slipping around her. She was about his height, but he could already tell she was stronger. She shouted something in the Nomad’s guttural tongue and then took another swing.

He parried her blow with the saber, and then swung the spiked end of the tomahawk towards a gap in her armor with his other hand.

She blocked it with a plate armored forearm and then shoved him backwards.

The pistol at his hip vibrated, signaling its charge was ready. He waited for her to charge again, and this time, as she readied a killing blow, the red laser that filled his hand drilled a hole her chest. She dropped to her knees, and fell forward.

Will looked past her dead body, his attention already focused on the rest of the Rangers facing down similar opponents.

Toco, the next Ranger fell beneath a Nomad’s heavy blow. Will charged the attacker and sprung forward to thrust his saber through the alien face.

He turned to help Toco up, but he was gone, his face was gone, unrecognizable.

“They are pulling back,” Jax said over the comm.

The other pistol vibrated at his side, he tossed the saber to his left hand, drew and fired in one single motion, killing the next nomad up the line.

There were several dull thwaps then, followed by sonic booms so close together that they made his head hurt.

“They are leaving,” Devlin said. “Do you want the fleet to engage.”

“Better not,” Will said. “They might’ve taken prisoners.”

“Copy that,” Devlin responded.

There was another red beam from further up the gulch, and then silence. As the air cleared, Will only counted six of his rangers left standing. Bodies littered the gulch. He guessed they’d killed probably twice as many Nomads, which was little consolation for the men he’d lost.

“Jax, is it done over there?” Will asked.

There was a long static silence.

“Captain, you better get over here,” Ronin said. Ronin was one of Jax’s men.

Will’s stomach curdled.

The front of the Fort was a mass of smoking rubble. Bodies and parts littered throughout. The Rangers were crowded around so that Will couldn’t see what had caught their attention. But as he approached, the rangers made a hole for him.

There on the ground knelt Jax. A wave of relief washed over Will at the realization he was still alive. This followed by wave of grief upon the realization of what was happening.

Jax cradled a man in his arms. Obviously one of the settlers. His brother. He was crying. Tears streaming down both cheeks, his blond sweaty hair a matted mess.

“Give him some space,” Will ordered. “And get the wounded sorted out, anyone with a serious injury needs to be taken to the ship.”

Will knelt next to his friend and said nothing. He placed a hand on his second’s shoulder.

“They killed both of them,” Jax said. He was staring blankly off into the deep blue distance.

“What about your Niece?” Will asked.

“They took her,” Jax said. “One of the settlers seen it, tried to stop em. They took a bunch of the children.”

Will wiped a hand over his face. The fucking Nomads. Why did they do it. What was all this about. Whenever they attacked, they stole as many children as they could. Nobody knew why, some had theories. Theories that they had some need for biologics. That they needed new DNA. Others accused them of harvesting the kids for food, but that made even less sense. Why take only the children and kill everyone else if that was the case.

Will wanted with every fiber of his being to promise him that they’d find her, but he knew it would be an empty one. They’d never recovered any of the stolen children. They’d only cornered a mothership once, and when they crippled it, it self-destructed. Took two Ranger Starcruisers with it.

"We have to figure something out,” Jax said suddenly. “We can’t keep fighting a war like this.”

“I know,” Will said.

The fighters hovered above the battlefield. The Ranger’s helped the wounded into the backseats of the fighters. Devlin sent the remaining ten from the ship’s hangar to help transport the wounded up.

Will helped Jax to gather up the body of his brother and lay it down next to his sister-in-law. They wrapped them in the coarse blankets that the rest of the settlers offered up.

“I think I’ll bury them on their homestead,” Jax said.

“We can wait for you,” Will said. “If we get another alert, we’ll just come back.”

“Thanks,” Jax said. He looked out at the rest of the settlers that had already went to work trying to repair the fort. A few of the children that had not been stolen looked on blankly at the commotion.

The Nomads made new Rangers with every attack, Will thought. The thought bothered him, even though he knew it was the truth. How many of these boys had lost a parent or a sibling today? How many had already decided on their life path.

“I knew it could happen, but never really thought it would,” Jax said absently.

Will said nothing.

Minor explosions went off behind them as the hotshots that the dead Nomads had dropped started to implode. The weapons were programmed with some sort of self-destruct sequence. One that prevented capture and reverse engineering. One that prevented their arms from ever being used against them. Small puffs of smoke went up from the battlefield, as the weapons crumpled, their interiors super heating and parts melting.

Nomads were the definition of cloak and dagger, Will thought.

Will found Trent posted up inside a small room with its outer wall collapsed. Trent was a big man, with dark hair, and a goatee that almost looked black. He’d flown with the Rangers for the better part of two years. He sat, an overly large man, on an overly small chair, interviewing the colony’s Mayor for the after-action report.

“And what brought down the wall?” Trent asked.

“They had a new weapon,” the Mayor responded. “Some sort of sonic cannon. We weren’t expecting it.”

“How many children were stolen?”

“Six. We think. But we are still searching for two more.”

“So six to eight,” Trent said, punching the keys on the Recorder. “And how many dead?”

“Thirty-one adults, ten of which were women.”

Another Ranger approached at a quick jog. He motioned for Will to follow.

“We got something Captain,” the Ranger named Santiago said.

“What is it?” Will asked.

“You’ll see, can’t talk here,” Santiago said.

Will followed the Ranger across the field in front of the fort. Three other Rangers stood at the far edge of the field, on the flank that had fought Jax’s men. When they were a good ways away from other men, Santiago said, “We got one.”

“What do you mean you got one?” Will asked.

“Alive. We got a Nomad alive.”

“How though?”

“You’ll see.”

When they reached the Nomad, Will saw immediately how they’d captured him. The man was more or less whole, but missing both his hands. His arms had been chopped off by the Ranger’s lasers at the elbows. He was also missing a leg.

“Is he stable?” Will asked.

“Yeah,” the nearest ranger responded. He was kneeling over a field med kit and taking the creatures vitals. “At least as far as I can tell.”

The creature stared up at him, his bright green eyes baleful.

“He was passed out when we found him,” a second Ranger said. “Almost didn’t realize he was alive. Gagged him as soon as we did.”

They had gagged him to prevent him from arming the self-destruct device he wore across his chest. The device could be activated either manually or vocally. Will had seen them do it both ways.

“Devlin,” Will called over his comms piece. “Send a fighter outfitted for med pickup to our position.”

“Rog that,” Devlin’s voice came back sharp and clear.

“You three make sure no one at the settlement comes over here or knows what's going on. We don’t need to lose our first Nomad prisoner to a bunch of irate settlers.”

“Oh, and Devlin,” Will said. “Tell Harris and Truckee from Maintenance to meet us at the MedBay. They’ll have to figure out how to get that harness off.”

Med Bay was white walls and stainless steel. Its lights were harsh, bright fluorescents. The smell of antiseptic that permeated the room made Will nauseous. The truth of the matter was he hated hospitals, hated med bays, and mostly hated doctors.

The ship’s med bay sat on the upper deck of the ship, just above the domiciles. It was a large room, that could accommodate dozens of fold out beds and support up to 50 wounded, and they looked to be damn near capacity.

They had smuggled their Nomad prisoner in through the back and hidden him in the observatory, a private room, walled by thick frosted glass. If the wounded settlers caught wind of their prize, they’d have a mini-revolt on their hands.

Doctor Nicholas Trout stood on one side of the bed. The captured Nomad lay belted down and sedated. On the other side, Harris and Truckee worked silently to try and extricate their Nomad guest from his self-destruct harness.

Trout was running tests and taking samples. He worked silently. His face angular, and jaw firm. He glanced at Will with two piercing blue eyes, crowned by neatly combed brown hair, but said nothing. He was young, and quite new to the ship. He had taken the place of their old sawbones no less than two months ago.

He was by all accounts friendly enough in most casual settings, but downright disagreeable anytime the conversation turned more serious. His penchant for playing devil’s advocate had rubbed Will the wrong way at first, and he’d been close to requesting a new Doctor after only a week. But the man knew his shit, and on second reflection, Will realized those qualities were everything he wanted from a man of science.

“What do you plan to do with him?” Trout asked.

“Take him back to Atlas,” Will responded. “Maybe they can finally figure out something about them.”

“Do you really think he’ll talk?” Trout asked.

"Don’t know,” Will said. “But it's something the Rangers have been after since this shit began. A chance to learn from one. General Order 10.2 states any Nomad captured alive is to be transferred to Ranger HQ immediately.”

“How quick is immediately?”

“That bit is a little more gray,” Will said smiling. “We ain’t leaving until we are done here.”

Will collapsed into the captain's chair; the deck still bathed in Aurion’s blue light. Stars winked above him. The bridge was without a doubt the most beautiful and peaceful place on the ship, it was like working from a veranda that hung eternal at the edge of space.

“Devlin, send an encrypted message to Ranger HQ and tell them we caught a Nomad, we will prepare for transport as soon as the wounded are treated,” Will said.

“Done,” Devlin said.

“Let me know what they say,” Will said.

The Bridge doors opened with a mechanical whir behind him, and he turned to find Jax standing at the edge of the bridge.

“What are you doing b—”

“When were you going to tell me?” Jax cut him off.

“Tell you what?”

“About the prisoner.”

Will sat up. “What about him?”

“We could trade him,” Jax said. “For the children.”

Will paused for a long moment, and the bridge went deathly silent.

Jax continued, “We could—”

“Wait, I need to think,” Will said with a raised hand.

Jax lowered himself into a seat.

“Lydia,” Will finally said. “Can you find the mothership?”

“That’s not how it works,” Lydia said. “I need a place to start, something to look for.”

“Can’t you just look for the ship?” Will asked.

“Not if I don’t know what it looks like,” Lydia said. “Or have a sector to search.”

“What about a person,” Jax said suddenly, he patted the front of his jacket and then produced what looked to be a photograph. He handed it to Lydia.

“Is this your niece?” she asked.

Jax nodded.

Lydia ran a slender violet finger over the image in her hand. “I can try.”

“But wait,” Will said. “ I need a moment to think…. General Order 10.2 says we are to return any prisoners to Atlas immediately… under threat of court-martial and exile.”

“Will, we can’t just leave those kids... my niece,” Jax said, his eyes wet and voice shaky. “Who knows what they do with them.”

“We could send a video of the prisoner out over subspace,” Devlin said. “As long as Lydia can get us a location of their ship, we can get the video to them.”

“But how will they know what we want?” Will asked.

“I’d trust it would be obvious. You have to think they’d want their man back more than anything else, as sensitive as they are about capture. I mean shit, they don’t even let us get a hold of their hotshots,” Devlin said.

Will leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, face resting in one of his hands. “And what if they won’t trade all the kids?” he finally said. “What if we can only get your niece back, Jax?”

It was an unfair question, and Will knew it. But it was one that needed to be asked. Will hated the thought of those kids in Nomad hands, and if he was being honest, he’d more or less already committed to their new course of action, but he wasn’t only concerned about Jax’s niece. He couldn’t be. It was his job to weigh all of their options. His decisions affected the settlers below, the crew, and even the entire rim.

But one thing he did know, they couldn’t try this without a solid plan, and they couldn’t negotiate with an alien species unless they were prepared to back it up.

“If they won’t trade all the kids,” Jax said, and his voice wavered. “Then we launch the atomics and take them all out.”

“Everyone?” Will asked calmly.

“Better dead than a life as a Nomad slave, or whatever the fuck they do,” Jax spat his disgust and stood up, wiping sweaty hands on his pants.

“What about the intelligence from the prisoner?” Lydia asked calmly. “This hasn’t happened before. What we learn from him could even change the course of the war.”

“I know, and I thought about that, but the important part is we proved it could be done. If we can do it once, we can do it again,” Will said. “I’ll take the heat from command.”

“Heat,” Lydia scoffed. “You mean court-martial.”

“Such is the job of a Captain,” Will said, with a smile.

The communications bay beeped, a long slow tone, indicating an encrypted message. Devlin checked it, his face ghost white. “Command says to transport the prisoner now, and then bring any wounded back after we are done.”

Will turned to Jax. “You have horrible timing.” Then turning to Lydia and Devlin said, “Nothing’s changed. My orders stand.”

On his way back to Med Bay, Will passed Harris in the hall. He was gingerly carrying a steel box. At the sight of Will, his eyes lit up. “We got it off Captain.”

“Is it awake?” Will asked.

“Don’t know. Still asleep when I left.”

“Good work Harris. Where’s that thing going?”

“To engineering, sir.”

“Copy that, let me know if they find anything.”

“You’ll be the first to know,” Harris said, and then plodded off down the hall.

Will turned the corner to MedBay and made his way through the wounded. Two had sheets pulled up over their heads. Three of the ship’s nurses tended others further down. Another wrapped an amputated limb. Will continued past them and made his way to the observation room with its frosted glass.

The bed was tilted up. The captured Nomad stared at him. His eyes were striking, an emerald green, and not unlike a cat’s, in the same way a cat’s eyes did not show a soul. A cat’s eyes were nothing but the sense organ of a predator, made to kill, and empty otherwise, Will thought.

“Well, he’s awake,” Trout said. He was sitting in the corner of the room, arms folded.

“Has he said anything?” Will asked.

“Not a word.”

Will approached the creature. Its eyes followed him closely, but not another muscle moved. There were no dramatics, no snapping teeth or struggle against the bindings.

“Did he fight the bindings when he woke?” Will asked.

“Yeah, he already tried them.”

“So, he’s intelligent,” Will said.

Trout chuckled. “I would hope any race that had mastered—”

“I mean not brutish.”

Trout’s brow furrowed. “I don’t think those things are exactly—”

“I know Trout. I know...”

Trout smiled knowingly, showing a surprising bit of self awareness, and Will continued his orbit around the prisoner. The heart monitor that the creature was hooked up to beat steadily. The monitor's screen and its tiny green letters read 30 bpm. Will pointed to it, and asked, “Is that normal?”

“Seems to be,” Trout said.

“Can he understand us?” Will asked.

“That’s a bit unclear,” Trout said.

“What do you mean?”

Trout shrugged. He had more to say, Will could tell, but he obviously didn’t want to divulge it in front of present company.

“We’re gonna kill him. Just as soon as we get all the wounded off the ship,” Will said, taking a beat for effect.

“You aren’t really?” Trout asked. He was acting. A horrible actor, Will thought, but good enough to fool the Nomad.

“No, you’re right. That was a joke,” Will said. “We are going to trade him back to the Nomads for those kids.”

Trout nodded, a slight smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth.

“Keep him alive, Doctor,” Will said. “Just long enough for the trade.” He walked out then and waited for the Doctor to join him.

Trout waited a respectable time, long enough not to rouse suspicions and then exited the observatory. The glass doors sliding shut behind him.

“You saw it too?” Will asked quietly.

“I did,” said Trout. “Rather odd physiological response to both the news that he was to die, and then that he was to live.”

Will had watched the heart monitor the whole time. The creature’s heart had slowed upon the news of his death, yet on the revelation that he was to live it had risen dramatically.

“Agreed,” Will responded. “They seem to know an awful lot about us, while we know surprisingly little about them.”

“Looks like it’ll stay that way too,” Trout said.

“I know.” Will ran a hand through his hair. “Oh, trust me I know, but we can’t leave those kids to rot.”

“How is Command going to take it?” Trout asked.

“Not really my concern?” Will said.

“It is if they court martial you,” Trout responded.

“I dare them... the desk riding bastards,” and even as Will said it, he knew he was full of shit. It did matter, and they probably would court martial him, or at least try. But it couldn’t matter.

There were two types of right in the world. The law that the spirit wrote, and the one that got sloppily transferred onto the clay tablets. They weren’t always the same law. And the measure of a man was against the first kind; the second was for lawyers and priests.

“They’ll do it, Will,” Trout said. “Watch yourself.”

“They sent back a video with only six children?” Will asked. He stood on the Bridge, Jax behind him. Lydia and Devlin at the helm. The Guts had fallen into orbit around Aurion’s eighth and largest moon, and on the other side lay the Nomad cruiser.

“That’s right,” Devlin responded.

Figuring out that the Nomads could understand them had made communication somewhat simpler than Will had originally thought it would be. He was a bit surprised at first, even though that seemed foolish in hindsight.

There wasn’t really a good reason why the Nomads wouldn’t know their language. It wasn’t like the Outer Planets, or the humans had made a big secret of their languages or even their culture, blasting English out over every open line across the galxy. It was ironic to think that just as it had become the primary language of Earth, English had thus became the primary language of space, facilitating trade and treaties. At least space, seemed large enough to avoid the monocultured bottleneck that had almost choked humanity out on earth.

“Have the settlers confirmed where the missing two are?” Will asked.

“No, they still can’t find them,” Devlin responded.

“It doesn’t make sense to send a video of six if you captured eight,” Jax said. “Not in the context of a trade. You’d either send a video of one or all.”

“Maybe,” Will said. “But we don’t know that.”

“It's a good guess.”

“You aren’t wrong,” Will relented. “Lydia, can you view the children? Could you confirm whether there’s only six?”

Lydia shook her head. “Their shields, Captain. They have some sort of blocking mechanism. A sort of psychic shielding.”

“How though?” Will said. “How is that even possible.”

“We never figured it out,” Lydia said. “It's why they genocided our planet. They live by stealth. Tharkon’s very existence was a threat to them.”

“But you found the ship?” Will said.

“It's complicated,” Lydia said. “I found her imprint, like finding a shadow in the ether, and with it a ship sized hole in my vision. Any more detail than that is impossible with their shields.”

“So, six kids,” Will said, turning back to the video of the hostages. The children in the video seemed fine, frightened for sure, but in otherwise good health. “Devlin, send them the coordinates for the trade. Let's make it on the surface of the moon.”

“The moon?” Devlin asked. “How will we make the trade if they don’t have any respirators for the kids?”

“That’s a good point,” Will said. “Make it Aurion again, but the opposite side of the planet, far away from any settlements.”

Will scrambled out of the fighter as it hovered above the swap location. Mountains rose in the distance, the same steel blue color as the rest of the planet, except one of them was smoking, and fingers of red magma ran down its peak. In the distance, geothermal geysers went off with an almost melodic rhythm. The swap location was indeed away from any settlements.

“Devlin, did you know this area had volcanic activity?” Will asked.

“No, is it bad?”

“I think we’ll be alright,” Will said.

The area was truly alien. The steam from the distant geysers was parlayed into fog, hiding all but the mountaintops from view. Two other fighters hovered behind him, carrying Jax and Chan respectively.

Will and Jax helped unload the Nomad from the back of Chan’s fighter. The creature was secured firmly with the skeletor—a restraining device that secured a prisoner's arms behind his back and attached securely to leg irons around his ankles. The device was impossible to break out of and left the prisoner completely immobile.

The three of them walked the creature out to the flat area in front of the jets. Even with his missing parts, he was almost too heavy for them to handle.

“I’ll make the trade. You too cover me from a ways back,” Will ordered.

They heard the scream of the Nomad fighters first, and saw them second, as they jetted downward out of the dancing blue sky. The fighters did a pass above them, and Will spun around to watch the fighters as they circled. There were a million ways all of this could go wrong, Will thought, but if it did, they were prepared to make it just as painful for the Nomads. And they knew it too. Will had made it known in his last transmission that if they pulled anything or reneged on the exchange, their ship would be reduced to atoms.

The fighters did another orbit before landing gently about 100 feet off. Two of the enormous creatures disembarked, their silver hair braided down the back of their head. These looked different than the regular warriors, bigger, and somehow more regal. They looked like they were in command.

They circled to the back of their fighters, and when they reappeared, brought six children with them. Riah smiled as soon as she saw Jax, and started to run forward, but a heavy gray hand stopped her.

Will held out a hand behind him, to steady Jax.

The two Nomads walked the children forward and stopped six feet off Will and his prisoner.

Will nodded to them in acknowledgement but they made no similar gesture. Carefully, Will pulled the electronic key to the skeletor from his pocket. His other hand he kept extended, ready to draw one of the laser pistols at his hip. He ran the key over the locks on the restraining device, and the skeletor released its hold on the Nomad, letting the prisoner fall helplessly forward.

The two Nomads gently pushed the children forward then, and they ran past Will to the safety of the other Rangers.

“I hope we can talk sometime,” Will said.

He turned to walk back then, showing his back, both as an act of unconcerned dominance and as an olive branch of trust. It didn’t really matter, though, as Jax and Chan both had him covered.

“You are Will August,” one of the Nomad’s said. The voice was deep, and gravelly, and to hear English spoken in such a manner only made the encounter seem more alien.

Will turned back around. “I am.”

“You have killed many of us,” the creature said.

“As you have us,” Will said.

“I hope to meet you again, Will August,” the Nomad said. “On the field of battle.”

Will simply nodded.

Then the big Nomads grabbed their wounded man and turned towards their ship.

Riah was hugging Jax’s leg, but Jax was still watching the Nomads as they dragged their comrade unceremoniously back towards their own fighters.

“It's done,” Will said. “They aren’t going to do anything.”

Will helped Chan load up the rest of the kids and was just about to scramble up into his own when the sound of a Nomad hotshot broke the silence.

He whirled in the direction of the creatures, laser pistol already in hand, but he stopped just short of shooting when he saw what had happened.

The two Nomads stood coolly, watching his reaction with both interest and amusement, but made no aggressive move in return. At their feet lay the still body of their comrade.

They’d executed him.

It was later, after the wounded had all been removed from the ship, the bodies of the fallen Rangers given proper burial, and Will had managed a few hours of sleep, that he returned to the bridge.

“Where to now, Captain?” Devlin asked.

Will leaned back in his chair. “Set course to Atlas.”

“Do you want me to let them know about the prisoner?” Devlin asked.

“No,” Will said. “I think I’ll break that news in person.”