SNAFU: Hunters

He checked on the boys, both in their early teens, who were unconscious but appeared not to be seriously injured. Then he turned to watch as Vida crossed the clearing they’d been guarding. Roughly in the center, she stopped. The moon had risen now, and pale light seemed to surround her.

She set her weapon on the ground then stood straight once more. Her arms moved in a strange, graceful progression of symbols formed with her whole body. As Harris watched, intrigued, her techtatts began to glow. The light flashed and flared in enigmatic designs, and a few feet in front of her, the air began to lighten to the same intense shade of blue. Harris was amazed, as one of these so-called rifts he’d been briefed on appeared in mid-air. The edges twisted, billowing in a different rhythm than the wind-tossed foliage around the clearing.

The blue light, searing the edges of the tear, revealed a different landscape on the other side. Instead of moonlit knee-high grass ringed by shadowed trees, there was wet black stone and steep stairs curving away out of sight. Before the rip began to narrow, he thought he saw two small crescent moons hanging in that alien sky, one bluish and the other with an orange cast. Then the edges closed together, sealing in a burst of searing blue fire.

Harris blinked, trying to clear the afterimage of the rift from his retinas. In his ear, Tighe spoke.

“Vida, hope you’ve still got some juice.”

“What’s up, bòs?” she asked.

“We’ve got a live one.”

* * *

Two days later, Harris woke to find he hadn’t dreamed any of the last few days. He really was dealing with monster bugs from a different reality, and everyone else in the group seemed to take it all as perfectly normal. The live one they’d captured and brought back to base was a different breed than the ’poneras they usually dealt with. Tighe called it a belos’, named after the belostomatid or giant water bug it resembled, just as the ’poneras were named for the paraponera or bullet ant. Like the huge monster Harris had encountered in his first mission with the Bani, it stank to high heaven, and they’d put it downwind from camp as much as they could.

“Is she still at it?” he asked Aio, who was pouring a cup of coffee.

“Vida?” Aio handed him the cup, and poured a second for herself. “Yes. It was difficult for her to link with it, and I don’t think she wants to have to do it again. She’s trying to get all the information she can before the connection fails.”

“How does she do it?”

Aio shrugged, taking a seat at the small table they used for meals. Hot sunlight beat down on their camp, but the awning over the table kept it a few degrees cooler. “Magic and tech. She’s equal parts.”

Harris raised an eyebrow, his skepticism obvious.

“You think the tech does all the work?” Aio asked, smiling. “She could already do most of this stuff on her own; the tech just gives her a power boost.”

“But how?” he asked again. It wasn’t like you could take a class for this shit.

Aio shook her head, her flawless coif and bright-flowered outfit a complete contrast to the rest of the crew. She looked as though she should be sitting in a garden somewhere, eating tea cakes or playing croquet. Not in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of scruffy ex-military types, or two doll-like teenagers and their sideshow pets. “She’s got a lot of old blood. Descendant of Haitian voodoo, Apache medicine, and Icelandic Seidr; some of it she learned from her parents, some just came naturally.”

Harris sat beside her, drinking the strong, bitter coffee. Past the trucks and maybe a hundred feet into the trees, Vida and Tighe stood beneath a hastily-erected canopy. Strapped to a metal table was the belos’ they’d caught. Even in the bright daylight, gleaming blue light could be seen coursing along Vida’s techtatts. She did not move, and Harris couldn’t hear anything from this distance, but obviously something was happening. “It’s like the origin story for some kind of super hero,” he said, grinning.

“She is amazing,” Aio said, slanting a glance his direction.

Harris ran a hand self-consciously over his military haircut; he knew it made him seem boyish next to the rest of the men.

“But she paid for it, every bit,” Aio said.

“Never suggested otherwise.” He pulled his gaze from the tableau across the camp, and looked back at her. “How’d you end up in this madhouse?”

She laughed, eyes sparkling. “Just lucky, I guess.”

About that time, Bronze approached. Of the men in the group, he was the shortest, built stocky and muscular. His right leg had been amputated above the knee, and he switched out prosthetics depending on his need. Today he wore a simple recurved blade, which seemed to make his gait more bouncy than usual, although that might just have been Harris’s impression. “Aio,” he said, nodding to her, “Nate, you ready for duty?”

Harris nodded. He’d had little to do with Bronze so far, but had deduced the man was Tighe’s de-facto second-in-command. “What do you need?”