Welcome to Galactic Axia
The Wounded Warrior
Lightning ripped across the black sky revealing the ominous shapes of the departing thunderstorm that lashed the land. As the thunder echoed among the debris, a pair of frightened eyes peered out through the mist left by the hard rain. She sniffed and waited. Nothing. She sniffed again -- carefully. Her terror-heightened sense of smell betrayed no scent of them. Another flash of lightning farther away lit the scene before her in stark black and white. As the small girl beheld the torn bodies of people she had known, a single tear trickled down her dirty cheek. A clanging noise off to her left caused her to jump. She knew that sound, and it meant pain and death. All she could think of was to flee. But where?
"Leatha!" a voice croaked from the shattered wall of a building. "Come child!” Leatha whirled and ran toward the voice. An old bent man rose up from his hiding place and gathered her into his arms. "Oh, my little one!" he whispered. He held her briefly and then set her down. Motioning for silence, he grasped her hand and together they started to run from the approaching noise.
Between burnt buildings and down rubble-clogged streets they ran, the girl gasping for breath as the old man wheezed beside her, each urging the other on. But the sound grew closer. Time was against them and they would have to hide...and hope.
Frantically, the old man looked around and spotted the remains of a doorway leading under a building. They approached it together. He looked at her and she sniffed and shook her head. His old fingers tore at the buckled door and frame, trying to force it open. Slowly, it gave way enough for them to squeeze through. From inside he pushed the door back and hoped there was no sign of their passing from the coming patrol.
Closer and closer the clanging of the treads sounded as the two scared humans, one an old man and the other a shaking child, huddled silently inside the ruined building. Who these invaders were was immaterial now. It only mattered that they survived, and the way to do that was to avoid them at all cost.
Through a crack in the wall, the old man saw the tread-mounted vehicle hove into view. The leathery red skin of its driver was plainly evident in the lights mounted along the top of its holding cell where the crumpled heaps of humanity, both living and dead lay piled together. Around the vehicle was a foot patrol searching the ruined city for prey. While he continued to watch, he saw one of the footmen move off to one side, its clawed feet making a scraping noise on the pavement. It soon returned dragging the broken body of a man, and with a flip belying unusual strength, tossed the still-bleeding corpse over the top of the holding cell to land with a sickening thud on the others already in there.
The old man drew back from the crack and pushed himself and the girl deep into the dirt and debris under the building. He fervently prayed that their scent could not be detected down here among all the ruin and waste. Too many times he had seen the enemy's uncanny sense of smell betray the hiding places of friends and family.
Ever closer the patrol came. The two fugitives held their breath in fear. Suddenly, there was a blast of explosive energy at the buckled door. As the dust cleared, the old man could see that both the door and its frame had been blasted away. In a flash of lightning from the retreating storm, he saw one of them standing in the doorway peering into the darkness. He feared the worse. He feared death. He feared them!
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Pushing through the last of the brush, the two women saw the river ahead of them. Glancing to their left, they could see the fallen tree upstream they had used to cross the rushing torrent. Carefully surveying around the edges of the clear area between them and the river, Leatha and Anna could not detect any sign that anyone else had come this way since they had passed here only a short time ago.
"Looks like we made it!" Anna said as she started to step out of the screening brush into the open. Leatha reached out and held her friend back with a firm hand on her shoulder.
"I think we better wait a second," Leatha said cautiously. "Give it a minute or two," she continued. "It doesn't feel right."
"But now's our chance!" Anna pleaded in a subdued voice. Before Leatha could argue, there was a crash in the woods farther upstream. Both women ducked down as Leatha unconsciously checked the wind. It was blowing toward them from the direction of the noise. Again, there was another noise and some low guttural growling.
Peering through the brush, the two women watched nervously in the direction of the sound. Preceded by another burst of noise, first one and then a second Red-tail soldier burst out of the woods just past the fallen tree bridge. Having never seen one live before, Anna had to stifle a gasp at the sight. Leatha instinctively covered Anna's mouth.
Out in the cleared area along the riverbank the two aliens sniffed around, working their way toward the tree. One stalked over to the fallen tree trunk and angrily growled at its companion who was examining the sapling that the women had tied their ropes to earlier to get the packs across the river. The first alien indicated for the second to step out onto the tree. Knowing what she knew of Red-tails, Leatha doubted it would support their greater weight. The second Red-tail bent down and sniffed the top of the fallen tree. Satisfied, it stepped out over the rushing water below.
The air was rent by a loud crack as the tree broke beneath the alien's clawed feet. Only its rapid leap back toward the bank, aided by the outstretched arm of the first Red-tail who grasped him, kept the Red-tail from falling into the torrent below. Behind him the tree fell into the rushing water and tore loose from it is mooring on the far bank. He watched it being swept away by the fast current. The two women watched it float past them as the two Red-tails argued angrily, growling and snapping at each other, their guttural language impossible to understand.
Anna and Leatha hunkered even lower when the argument ended and the two aliens started looking around. Then one of them spotted something caught in the brush and strode over to it. Another argument ensued about something neither woman could see. Leatha could not remember anything that either of them might have left behind after crossing the river. She looked at Anna in silent question when the air was split by a deep guttural laugh. The two Red-tails then strode back into the woods back along the path the two women had originally taken from the destroyed tree bridge. Anna turned her attention from the aliens back to her young friend. Unexpectedly, she saw a confused, almost child-like expression on the young trooper's face.
"Leatha!" she whispered harshly. The young woman shook herself and her expression changed back to a more normal appearance, though Anna thought she detected signs of suppressed fear. "We're trapped on this side of the river," Anna continued, her voice still in a whisper.
The sounds of the aliens faded as they got further away. "I know," Leatha agreed absently.
"What are we going to do?" Anna whispered anxiously. A sullen look of cold fury washed across Leatha's features. Later Anna would almost swear that the temperature had dropped several degrees at that moment.
"The game just changed," Leatha said in a quiet, stronger voice. "Now we are the hunters!"
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