“Albert, while I do not believe any of us support continuing the war effort, I wonder what makes you think they will change. Do you not remember Mars? Do you not remember how they forced us to hunt an entire species to the brink of extinction? If—by some chance—you do not, I invite you to visit the red planet. We drove them underground, and they’ve never seen the light of day since. For a thousand years, the closest we’ve gotten to accepting that another species has a place among the stars is to fight them to near genocidal levels. Can we save humanity without being forced to rule them again?” — Letter to the Unranked Council, from Sarath Wells.

  Alec pushed the throttle, picking up speed as they gained altitude and crested the trees surrounding the garrison. The open top of the non-combat transport was perfect for moving soldiers and supplies from one location to another without wasting combat vessels on tasks far below their capability. Almost completely unarmored, the machine closely resembled the trailers he and Dave used to use on the farm to move cattle back on Earth. With only one engine for thrust and two for vertical lift, it was extremely lightweight and relied heavily on an Aegis to protect its crew in the event of a firefight.

  While traveling by sled was far from a safe practice, it offered an experience that was hard to rival. Soaring through the open sky, controlling the machine through sheer will, Alec felt like he’d become a god of legend, long lost to history. He’d always been suspicious of how he’d ended up in the Dragoon Corps, but moments like these inevitably forced him to recognize that fate had chosen correctly. If some cosmic being decided his future, would that be any worse than pure luck? No. Machines were always the crux of his mental well-being, and having the ability to integrate with one filled a special hole in his heart.

  After an amount of time in the air best described as ‘not enough,’ Alec saw the location where they were supposed to drop the equipment. Flying over the inlet, he saw the beauty Thea talked about earlier in the day. A pair of stone cliffs stood sentry, watching the waves like a pair of guards at their post. The stone walls surrounding the inlet gave way to a strip of glittering white sand that sank beneath shallow emerald waves. Past the mouth of the inlet, the water immediately turned a deep green, indicating a sharp drop to the extreme depths below.

  Alec backed off the throttle and held the craft even with the grassy ridge. With a thought, he dropped their altitude and opened the storage bay, exposing crates of food, drinks, and other equipment to the elements.

  “Get this shit off my sled!” he yelled over the repulsors.

  “Got it.” Dave said as he, Nessa, and Jack pushed the metal boxes out. They tumbled to the ground, and a voice in the back of Alec’s mind reminded him that containers built for military use were more than capable of surviving a short fall. Once they were clear and the loading ramp closed, he took off toward their landing zone. “You think they’ll be fine without us?”

  “Who’s going to take it?” Nessa asked, interlacing her fingers behind her head and leaning back against her chair. “There’s nothing and no one for miles and miles. We’re effectively alone.”

  “Wasn’t that the point?” Jack replied, watching as they crossed the mountain range.

  “It is, but doesn’t this planet have scavenger beasts like Earth?” Dave asked.

  “Probably, but those crates are sealed tight. If something can break through, it deserves to keep it,” Warren laughed, pulling up a database of creatures on Erochea. Finding nothing of interest, he swiped at the air and dismissed the windows in his HUD.

  On the south side of the range, Jack watched as Alec landed in a wide, grassy meadow. As the sled settled and the ramp opened once again, he pulled up a topographical map displaying the route, pace, and distance to their destination in his HUD. It would take roughly two hours to summit the mountain, and another four to reach the inlet.

  “Grab your packs, and if you need to refill your water, do it now. If we follow the same path Thea and I took, we’ll summit the mountain in about two hours. We’ll stop for dinner there. It’s not an easy climb, but the view is worth it.” Jack explained.

  “Don’t forget about the other stuff we’ll run across,” Thea said, throwing her pack over her shoulders. “The biggest waterfall I’ve ever seen is out here. My best guess is that it’s over a hundred meters tall. When we get to the part where the trees thin, you can look straight up and it feels like the water touches the sky.”

  Jack grabbed his pack and checked the bladder to verify how much water he had. Satisfied, he slung it over his back and locked it into place. Around him, the other members of Speir squad did the same. Armed with the knowledge that drinks and relaxation were waiting on the other side of the mountain, Turaspeir squad set off at a comfortable pace normally unacceptable in a military environment.

  ~~**~~

  Like most hiking trips, the beginning was uneventful but filled with an unbroken stream of words as members of their group made plans for their first day on the water. For the first mile and a half, they followed a game trail through a lush forest filled with life. As they crested the third hill, the faint roar of rushing water echoed through the trees, drowning out the whispers of animals hidden in their dens and the songs of birds nestled high in the branches.

  The closer they drew, the more the waterfall thundered. The foliage thinned, revealing a clearing with a small pool carved in the stone, created by a hundred thousand years of erosion. A stream led away from the pool, its fast-moving waters eventually slowing to a lazy drift as its depth increased and the impeding rocks fell well below the surface. A wall of sound slammed into them like a punch to the chest, rattling their bones and stripping away their senses. Despite that violent roar, it was a place of peace and concentration.

  “Be careful when crossing these rocks. They’re covered in algae and incredibly misleading.” Jack explained, forging a Light circuit between himself and the rest of the squad. While impossible to hear normally, an optical connection to the electrical impulses in the auditory nerve allowed them to speak without external interference. “Between that and the speed of the water, one wrong step can be a bit of a nightmare.”

  “Isn’t that why we brought Thea?” Cecile asked, judging the difficulty of crossing the few dry stones spanning the stream.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “No, you brought me because someone’s going to jump off a cliff and hurt themselves. Also, I was not about to hang out at the garrison with nobody else to keep me company.” She replied, pulling off her boots and boldly picking her way across. Almost losing her balance, the phantom recovered before falling into the icy mountain water.

  “She has a point,” Jack said, following her lead. “You just know Dave and Alec are going to do something incredibly stupid in the next twelve hours.”

  “Hey, I resemble that remark.” Alec shouted over the connection, causing everyone to wince in pain at the mental intrusion. Choosing not to remove his boots, he tried to follow suit and instead ended up knee-deep in water. If not for Candice’s quick thinking and the yellow line of cable wrapped around his chest, the waters would’ve beaten him senseless as he floated downstream.

  Not wanting to mimic the unlucky dragoon, the rest of the squad copied Jack and Thea’s method of crossing and removed their boots to feel the slick stones under their toes. They took a quick break to ensure Alec wasn't injured, then followed another game trail up the mountain until they eventually reached the summit. While not very large, the tree-capped peak offered sights that were only rivaled by the aerial view a few hours before.

  “And how did you two find this place?” Nessa asked around a mouthful of food artificially warmed by the used chemical bag between her feet.

  “We talked to some people in the village after returning that sailboat when we first got here. The guy wanted us to rent the boat again and sail around the continent, but we didn’t have the time nor the expertise to do so.” Jack said verbally, their optical bond long dissolved as he squeezed cheese onto a cracker and took a bite. “So, we talked to Summers, and he gave us the OK to disappear for a few weeks.”

  “He’s making it sound like we walked all the way here. A local flew us out to that meadow and told us he’d be back in two weeks. We had a hammock and all the food we needed. This place was truly beautiful to explore, and more than worth the time.” Thea explained, eating her food while staring out at the ocean just a few miles away.

  Jack and Thea spent many nights staring out at that water, dreaming of the day they could retire from the AHF and find a place of their own. Once, they’d imagined themselves on a world like Phoenix—heavily populated, but filled with large swaths of natural land—but their time on Erochea had almost convinced them both that a slow, rural life was the answer they truly wanted. After Ortiz’s death, the couple had considered abandoning the military and their squad despite the potential consequences. Wisely, they’d chosen against going AWOL, recognizing that serving the rest of their contract was the only way to keep the honor of their word.

  “It would be an amazing place to live.” Jack said, “Could you guys imagine having a piece of land out here where we could retire?”

  “We couldn’t stay this far north. It’s owned by the AHF as protected land. However, the area to the south and in the village is available for purchase.” Warren countered. “But it’s no less beautiful. The southern mountain range is just as majestic and sparsely populated.”

  “That’s just as good. A life on the beach with a beer in my hand and a five-minute walk from an ocean-side sandwich shop sounds like the perfect retirement to me,” Dave said, packing the trash from his meal back into his pack.

  “I would kill for that life,” Alec said, standing and frowning at his boot as it squished under pressure.

  “You already are,” Jenkins replied. “What do you think being a soldier is? They literally pay you to kill.”

  “Yeah, but I haven’t killed to retire… yet.”

  “But haven’t you?”

  “No. The retirement plan for the AHF sucks. We get out with almost no money and a ton of trauma.” Alec complained.

  “You’d have money if you stopped spending it on companionship every night. I know those girls are cheap, but fifty credits is still a lot of money at the end of the month.” Nessa jabbed, knowing how often Alec hired various ladies of the night. They tried to keep them off the HUB ships, but between civilians that needed jobs and soldiers looking for extra cash, getting rid of humanity's oldest profession was significantly harder than it appeared.

  The group finished eating and got back on the trail leading down to the inlet. While long, it was mostly uneventful. But when they broke through the line of trees separating the edge of the forest from the rocky coastal ocean, all the excitement of the day returned in full force. For Jack’s part, maintaining even a modicum of direction over the group was like controlling a busload of children after giving unlimited access to an arcade.

  Jack kneeled beside one of the metal crates and clipped a carabiner and a thin cable to the casing. Spaced evenly across the edge of the cliff, Dave pounded three anchors into the stone. Taking her cue, Candice grabbed each cable and flooded them with the yellow light of the binder corps, animating the lines and lowering the attached boxes to the beach below.

  Free of his duties, Dave stripped down to his skivvies, shoved the clothes into his pack, then tied the laces of his boots to an open loop. Without a single care for what may be inside, he clipped the bag to the line and dropped it to the white beach below.

  “I don’t know about yall, but I’m just about done with smart decisions for the day.” Dave said, a wide grin spread dangerously across his face.

  Before anyone could stop him, he turned and sprinted for the edge of the cliff. He heard his friends protest the antic, but all it did was push him more. With the lush grass beneath his feet, he dug in and pumped his legs. Throwing a quick look over his shoulder, he saw his pursuers begging him not to jump, but he knew this experience would be entirely too fun to throw away. With timed precision, his toes dug into the ground where grass met stone, and he jumped with everything he had. He hung in the air for a split second, questioning his life choices before casting away his worry and embracing the freedom of falling. As he dove toward the waves below, he wrapped his body in a protective shell of Light and laughed like a child as his shield struck the water with the force of a cannon before he plunged into the cold water.

  Above, the group of soldiers crowded around the cliff’s edge, tension building as they waited for a body to surface. Caught off guard by the man’s actions, Jack hadn’t created an optical connection with Dave until it was too late. Now, the only thing he could see through Dave’s eyes was the dark green of the depths. He panicked, assuming the brightening water meant Dave's corpse was rising to the surface. Fortunately, a minute later, the laughing man surfaced and waved to the group above.

  “You bastard! You scared the shit out of us!” Jack yelled over a mental bond.

  “Screw it. If he can do stuff like that, I’m done being responsible.” Candice said, pulling a length of rope and a hammock from her pack. Animating the materials, she used them to crawl down the cliff face and hang her bed between two rocky outcroppings nearly a hundred feet from the water’s surface.

  Below, Nessa and Cecile were using a small device infused with the power of their corps to create a volleyball, and were playing a game of one versus one that could potentially last until all the stars in the sky burned out. Alec, Warren, and Jenkins sat in a shadowed corner a few feet away, actively constructing what was likely the first of many sand structures the beach would see that week. Shifting his gaze to the woman who came up with this idea in the first place, Jack watched as Thea changed her clothes and stepped into the water. Casting one more look off the edge of the cliff to check on Dave, Jack realized he was the only member of his squad that hadn’t already rappelled to the beach.

  With a contented sigh, he smiled at the proof that the friends he’d made so long ago could still be themselves with no need to adhere to military structure. The ability to put aside the soldier and embrace the person beneath was something he wasn’t sure most ever really came to terms with. It wasn’t easy—he was certain many of his friends were masking their true emotions to some degree or another—but it was a necessary skill to have if they wanted to maintain who they were.

  Ready and willing to embrace that same level of relaxation, Jack clipped a line to his climbing harness and lowered himself down the cliff face and into the embrace of his brothers and sisters in arms.