“Don’t forget: print whatever information you find. Where they were being taken to, any details on where they were last seen, anything relevant, anything that may not be relevant—just anything that mentions them, okay?” Brint leaned out the truck window, hollering at his medical and intelligence sergeants as they were walking away from him.
“Yeah, we got it man,” Dev called back from a distance, lifting a hand in the air to wave his superior off. He glanced to Locke and shook his head—it was almost insulting, Brint acting like he didn’t know how to do his own damn job. They climbed a set of stairs leading to a building smeared with sand, and the pair ducked inside. A dilapidated sign above the steps read Lositani in scrolling, ornate Ossan. In less formal, half-shoddy Amstead directly beneath, someone previously tacked up a piece of shorn apart drywall that said Administration, but criss-crossing wires strung atop poles stripped from far away forests painted the real usefulness of the building: it was the last structure that still had internet.
Brint and the rest of his picked apart ODA landed back at Camp Losi a week after the ambush, when their dwindling convoy trundled along and through the front gates strung through with razor wire. The perimeter looked like some specter long-looming, decorated with plastic fingers from snagged bags waving in the wind that terminated somewhere in that desert from which they were spat. Usually, its appearance was taken as a sort of omen—so down on his luck, Brint saw it as more of a reprieve.
He pulled away from the admin building and began towards the airport. As a former city partially standing, Losi still had these small luxuries—Ossan airports were nothing comparable to the same structures in back Amstead, but it did have a building to process all arrivals. It had a waiting area full of dusty chairs, and it had a restaurant, staffed by three surly contractors from the seaside who knew how to use a microwave exceptionally well.
During the whole week spent in transit, the Lieutenant devoted his time working the wires. He was attentive only to their sat phone, ever engaged in a barrage of verbal relay, talking up the merits of his group to chains way above his pay grade. His unit was praised for its efficiency and its competency. Their lethality used to be a rumor—now it was a fact. At the end of it all, through his overabundant give and take ass-kissing and begging, Brint finally managed to finagle an immediate transfer from a similar ODA.
He parked in front of the airport and walked inside the terminal, half-lit by way of an electrical short that no one really cared to look into to restore full power. A lone admin sat at a desk in the middle of the floor, feet propped up, arms folded across his chest, and snoring. The set up appeared to be a check-in counter of sorts to be sure that anyone arriving was where they were supposed to be; the days arrivals were marked on an uncovered sheet stamped SENSITIVE. Today, there was only one. Brint’s uneven step took him past the napping man and up to the large window beyond, overlooking the quiet airfield.
18C St.Croix had a reputation that preceded them.
Adrien was the youngest child of a top Reva Corp design engineer and an Expressionist technology developer. The new transfer came into the army with a trajectory precharted, watchful eyes of superior officers always observant, ready to throw them up the chain of promotions as quick as they could unload that scraggly mad-bomber, especially after his tendency to wander off the straight and narrow path of specific orders to achieve group objectives was understood. He was credited with the destruction of several high level targets with cunningly constructed P4 bombs placed in socially engineered scenarios carefully crafted by a recently deceased member of their prior squad, 18F Harred.
Naturally, 18C St.Croix was destined to fall into Brint’s lap, to fall in line with that unorthodox group of front line soldiers whose reputation for destruction had spread like a virus across ODAs far and wide.
So Adrien St.Croix was bright eyed when he took his first steps into the airport off the sun beaten tarmac, pack slung over his shoulder and jostling to the tempo of his anticipation.
Brint marched back to the sleeping airport staff and snatched up their documents. He returned to the terminal door to open it for his newest assignee just in time.
“St. Croix?” he asked, squinting in the sunlight reflecting off of the bright white sheets he was scouring. “Adrienne?” The emphasis was questioning strange, but the lieutenant did not have a threatening demeanor, especially when his green eyes lifted to greet the engineer.
“Eugh, I guess that still hasn’t been fixed,” the engineer laughed, a little too loud, a little too forced, sheepish that a question about the paperwork not fully aligning with his present tense was his first impression. He rubbed the back of his head as he drew himself up to attention, growing a little more serious since he didn’t quite know what to expect from his new CO. “Uh—Sir, it’s Adrien, sir.”
“Okay,” the older man nodded and ushered the boy inside. “Well, first things first: go easy on the sirs. My name is Brint and you can call me Brint anytime except for when we’re in a line up, or in the presence of a bedazzled commander—you know, big time serious shit.” He shut the door behind them and pushed the young engineer along, speaking amidst his uneven gait. “I only vaguely know your other CO, never met him in person, so I’m not sure how disciplined he was with you, but you’ll quickly learn that I like to keep an open environment with my squad. If something is wrong, I want you to speak up. If you think you have a better idea on how to approach a situation than someone else—and believe me, we get some shitty ideas sometimes that need to be struck down—then let us have it, got it?”
Pausing at the table, Brint took up the acceptance stamp and smashed it all over the requisition orders. The napping admin woke with a start, however he was already moving back to the truck before that man could clear the blubbering from his deluge of excuses.
“Did they brief you on why you were sent out here? What we’re doing? What information did they prepare you with?”
“I don’t know what you’re doing but I know all about what you do,” Adrien replied, feeling more at ease knowing there weren’t going to be awkward follow-up questions to their initial introduction. He could always tell when people’s priorities were misaligned, when they prodded and poked at his business instead of getting on with their own. “We just got back to that camp they’re building outside of Arseiyat after getting stuck surrounded in some defilade bunker skirmishes in the east for a couple months, communications were pretty spare. We lost one of our comm sergeants pretty quick and we couldn’t get anyone new.”
Where Brint’s ODA was generally tasked with city strikes, the east had more hills, denser mountains—Adrien’s prior crew was charged with flushing forces out of the relative safety of high ground, overtaking bunkers and repurposing them if they didn’t destroy them outright.
“We actually got back yesterday afternoon, barely had time to prep to fly out this morning.”
All that meant to Adrien was that something serious was happening out near Losi.
Brint nodded. “Our mission was to overtake Lasandet. We’ve been cutting off supply routes for forever now and command finally gave us the go ahead to advance toward the city proper. We were working that way, but got ambushed a week or so ago. These motherfuckers really did a number on us—a lot of our boys think that we were being tracked. Not even for days, I’m talking years, kid.” Sitting in the truck, the lieutenant fetched his battered cellphone from a front pocket on his uniform and tossed it into Adrien’s lap. He was on the road in an instant.
“We lost two and the raiding crew took two with them. Our second 18C and 18B. They both look like they’re from Ossa.” Pausing for a breath, Brint drove them along the quiet dusty roads of Losi, its squat buildings growing nearer by the minute. “Passcode for that phone is 5707—the idiots you’re assigned with think they’re really clever—go into the camera roll, which is probably buried under all the apps they won’t stop downloading, and scroll through until you find them. Both have black hair, there may be some video too.
“Anyway, so they’re out there either dead or roaming the desert, and we’ve been cleared to go try and bring them back.”
Settling into the vertex of seat and truck door, a heel hooked on the edge of the dingy upholstery. With nowhere to go since his pack was taking up most of the passenger side’s seat well, the new boy fell into the familiar posture of some good old fashioned phone scroll, quickly unlocking the phone and accessing the photobank via the camera itself. He ran through his new ODA’s faces and moods. A large man with laugh lines beginning to crease his eyes, no longer looking like he wanted to laugh. Another man with pale eyes with his head in his hands, hunched over a rough looking satlink computer, lit by the glow. Another blurry action shot of what he assumed was his new ODA loading a pair of body bags into the back of a truck. He scrolled and scrolled, silently searching for the guys in question—until suddenly he found them. At least one of them. A lot of him.
He stared at the phone quizzically, one brow raised.
“Hey, uh… Brint?”
“Yeah, St. Croix?”
Adrien scrolled once. Twice. Man—that was a lot of nudes. A dark haired boy with an undershave smoking a cigarette laid out nude in the meager shade of a tree. Naked about to drop a scorpion on someone’s arm. Coming out of a rock spring, grinning and wet another soldier jumping off a rocky outcropping with his boxers on, blurred in the background.
“I don’t wanna make any assumptions or anything, cause it’s really cool that you’re open about it, I guess?” Adrien was walking on eggshell words, trying to find the right way to phrase his question. Brint really must have been chill if he was fraternizing with one of his sergeants. “Did you give me the right phone? I mean it’s cool, I’m not judging or anything cause you do you, but there’s like… a ton of nudes on here—”
He scrolled again, looking at the phone a little sideways when he finally caught a glimpse of another black haired boy, grinning wide with his arm around the oft-naked one from before—this time wearing pants, even if they were unbuttoned.
“What—” The palpable deflation in Brint’s voice was in the key of death. The truck screeched to a halt and he snatched that phone out of his subordinate’s hands so fucking fast that those smiles became a skintone smear.
“Oh my fucking god,” the older man lamented aloud, “What is—what the—how could—FUCK Sejan, what the fuck!” His index finger furiously swiped through the thousands of photos until he found a presentable portrait of the pair, a waist up selfie taken amid the vibrancy of an erstwhile sunset. He shoved it back at Adrien. “Look, nothing weird is happening here, okay? The one who gets naked all the time, that’s Kasse Sejan, our 18B. He’s got this knack for getting scorpions in his pants, so he’s always taking them off. And he’s really good at getting them off very quickly—ask the rest of the squad when you meet them, they’ll vouch. They put a bunch of naked pictures on here because they like to fuck around. I’m not some pervert messing around with my squad, understand?”
“Uh…huh.” Adrien was trying so hard to look convinced with those wide blue eyes trained on Brint, even when he picked the phone back up and held it aloft in front of his face. He wasn’t sure he was pulling it off. “I mean, yeah—I mean, no—no, you’re not a perv. I definitely didn’t think you were a perv.”
Fuck, man, Adrien just got here and he was already heading down a weird path where he was gonna get murdered in the desert for knowing too much. Truly lame.
“Sorry,” he blurted out as he yanked his stare back at the phone, focusing on the two sergeants—focusing on the boy with the shorter hair, eyes impossibly black even when directly lit by the waning sunset. “What’s the other guy’s name?”
“That’s Toriet. Eoran is his first name. Everyone in this squad is close, he and Sejan are kind of a set though, a matching pair. They’ve served alongside each other since they were privates, worked really hard to get on this gig together. It’s honestly really quiet without them.” Even if Adrien’s agreement was a surface-level appeasement, Brint seemed to accept it. The boy’d find out the truth soon enough, once they found those missing sergeants. He pulled back onto the road, engine rumbling along in a steady chug.
“Like I said, we were a week to the north of here when it happened. We found the truck they were taken in and it was a disaster. Since you’re used to mountains, I think you’ll be a real asset to this team.” Brint glanced aside. “I hope you’re as good at navigating as you are at blowing shit up. Toriet was good at blowing shit up, but he would argue with the devil himself if he thought there was a better way to get somewhere.”
Adrien’s lake blue eyes were muddy in the truck as he looked at the screen, tapped on Eoran’s face and waited as the phone’s AI tried to identify him in the thousands upon thousands of photos the whole ODA had managed to jam into that overworked piece of technology. When he’d found success, he tapped on the first picture—Eoran looking a little pensive at sunrise, lips pressed together, a wisp of someone else’s cigarette smoke trespassing on the left hand side of the frame.
Then, he just swiped left.