Kal's Quandary (Teristaque Book 2) by Aaron Frale

Author:Aaron Frale [Frale, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

The same alien eyes visited Sarge in his dream. This time, they were in his camp. A creature stood there, watching over them. It was hard to pin down the form, but it was slender and tall. There was a mist or writhing tentacles enshrouding its torso. It was hard to tell. The head was in a hood or maybe a helmet. It was like he was watching some blurred video in a ghost hunting show. The thing did nothing. It watched them.

Sarge sensed that there was something sinister about it. He attempted to move, but his body was paralyzed, like the servos in his suit had locked up. His struggle to gain control of himself had alerted the creature of his presence. It turned its gaze, and he could feel the intense stare. Sarge tried to scream, but nothing would come out. The eyes moved closer and burned into his soul.

He woke up.

A commanding officer would have noticed that he was sweating. His heart was pounding, as they would have had access to his biometrics. Since he was the ranking officer, the others didn’t notice as they huddled around a portable burner where Wellesley had taken the coffee orders literally.

Sarge leaned into the circle, and Wellesley poured a cup of black slug from an empty ammo cartridge into another smaller casing and handed it to Sarge. He told them that he was from Seattle, and his family had been making coffee for generations. He had squirreled away some beans in his personal stash.

The bittersweet beverage burned his throat. It was good, but Sarge wasn’t a fancy coffee drinker, so he couldn’t distinguish between what he was drinking and the replicator sludge. Once they were finished, Sarge studied the auto maps for a bit. The terrain estimator had guessed that the peak they could see would be pretty rough with thick trees and steep climbs.

He ordered them to move out. They were already in the thick of the forest by the time the sun had climbed over the horizon. The buzz from the coffee wore off quickly, and some of the team had already injected some stimulants. While chemical enhancements were combined with drugs to reduce their chances of dependency, Sarge had seen too many soldiers come back from service with a problem.

Half of the drug shacks (as nicknamed by the local kids in the night district) regulars were men and women of service. Despite the enhancement chemicals in their med packs being touted as safe, Sarge had seen too much in his time. Sarge had it all figured out, unlike many of his compatriots who didn’t know what they wanted after the war.

He’d buy a plot in the woods somewhere. Probably a planet where the people were scarce, and the land was cheap. He’d figure out something to raise and slaughter on that world and bring some Kansas City barbeque to some corner of the galaxy. It wasn’t much, but he figured he could afford it with sergeant’s wages and a hazard pay bonus.

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