The Wounded Warrior by Jim Laughter

Author:Jim Laughter [Laughter, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Axia Books
Published: 2019-01-28T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Working with a portable lantern, the Red-tail commander grumbled to himself about the makeshift arrangements he was forced to endure. Knowing his alternative was to be processed into food back on the home worlds did little to dispel his sour mood. Still, he tried to focus on completing the ground operation of his plan.

His ship had landed some weeks ago depositing him and his contingent on this cold alien planet. Because of its central location to the other contingents scattered on other planets in the human galaxy, he had decided to make this his primary base of operations. After arriving undetected, they unloaded their supplies and equipment and moved them underground into a complex of caves nearby in a heavily forested region.

It was after he had sent his ship back up into space to act as a relay for his operation that things began to go wrong. Shortly after clearing the planet’s atmosphere, his ship had been detected by a ship from the human mass. The Red-tail commander’s pilot immediately headed for the transit tube to safely evade the following human ship. However, the humans called for assistance, and before the Red-tail ship had quite gotten to the transit tube, two more ships of humans arrived. Between the three of them, they blasted his ship to dust. Now he was stranded here until the prearranged time for signaling on a tight beam back to his home galaxy.

Expecting the worst after his ship had been destroyed, the Red-tail commander feared the imminent arrival of human ships to capture or kill him and his contingent. Their base was underground but it would not take much to trace the residue from his ship back to this planet. However, the feared over flights never came. After a few days, it was clear that they would not come looking for him.

Taking advantage of this break, the commander directed his soldiers to move all of their equipment much deeper underground. At first he was obeyed grudgingly as the cave was damp and cold. Then one of his soldiers discovered that if they went quite deep it started to get warmer due to a series of underground hot springs. This was most welcome indeed on this comparatively frigid planet.

Soon they had a nice base of operations deep underground where sensors could not reach them. If any humans came searching down the labyrinth of caves they would have plenty of warning and would be able to ambush them. Now he was able to get back to the main purpose of this mission; that of harvesting humans.

The loss of his ship changed matters somewhat from the commander’s original intentions. Instead of capturing humans and shipping them out as he had envisioned, now he would have to devise some way to hold a larger number of them until a ship became available. The unpredictable nature of the humans made planning more difficult. If the commander had learned one thing, it was that captive humans tended to cause trouble.

In the meantime, he also had to deal with his soldiers.

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