So Tito’s mercs split into three groups. The A Squad was tasked with getting through to the rebels while safeguarding the cargo, while the B Squad was sent to find and eliminate Mother. The C Squad stayed back at the ship in case anyone needed to be extracted quickly.
Tito led the A Squad. Eva led the B Squad. Pink was on the C Squad. None of them were especially worried, as they’d seen worse situations and made it out just fine.
A Squad was hampered by the terrain more than expected; the buildings were translucent and only partially resistant to projectile weaponry, so the squad had to rely on finicky personal shielding rather than structural cover. The government fighters were quick, agile, well camouflaged by the tree, and able to move between branches much more easily than Tito and the others, especially given the restrictive webbing. Their companion Attuned made it even more difficult, striking without warning and retreating into the leaves.
It was like fighting angry psychic ghosts, someone said later.
More like giant flying squirrels, Tito had said, but then he’d always been a little racist.
Meanwhile, Eva and the rest of B Squad followed a circuitous route behind the body of fighters, up and down through the branches to where Mother was expected to be, trying to maintain a low profile so they wouldn’t be noticed. There were several buildings where the xana leader could have been stationed, assuming she was even indoors rather than on some open platform behind a giant leaf, or moving between branches along one of the many ziplines, or even traveling up and down in one of the cable cars to get a better view of the conflict.
All their speculation was absurd in retrospect, and could have been avoided if Tito had told them everything he knew. The things he deemed irrelevant. But he hadn’t, and so they proceeded.
B Squad was ambushed by a half dozen xana and their Attuned, working with a cohesion Eva had never seen in her years as a merc. It was like they had rehearsed a carefully choreographed dance for weeks and were simply following the steps, while Eva and her comrades tried in vain to learn it as they went. Their shots met empty air, and in close quarters each of them seemed to find themselves facing multiple foes at a time despite their numbers being even.
One of them managed to knock Eva’s helmet off with a weapon like a sharpened spoon, and their Attuned tore her face open with its claws, but she had no time to deal with it in the moment, even as the hot blood ran down into the collar of her armor. There were too many of them, and they were winning, and she hated being a loser.
Eva was as short-tempered as ever back then, but she wasn’t a fool. She knew they wouldn’t last if they stuck to standard tactics. So she did what she was good at.
She burned it all down.
The fires Eva set were fast, and they were hot, and they sent up clouds of toxic black smoke that obscured the canopy and sky above. The soldiers who had been so focused on her squad shifted to engage in emergency evacuations of that branch and the others around it. Because one of the things Tito hadn’t told her, in his infinite wisdom, was that this combat zone was full of civilians.
To her knowledge, they all escaped. The redirection of soldiers and deployment of other local first responders, coupled with appropriate infrastructure, meant the xana weren’t entirely unprepared. But they had to cut through the branch to save the tree, and when its massive bulk fell like the tendril of some impossibly huge beast, Eva felt the first stirrings of a sense that this mission was going even more wrong than she realized.
Still, she had a goal: find and eliminate Mother. And while the fires burned, while Tito’s crew made their own slow forward progress, Eva returned her squad to their task.
They climbed, and they climbed. The closer they got to the sky, the brighter it became as the layers of leaves decreased. More widespread evacuations had also occurred, because the buildings they passed were all empty, their brightly colored walls and floors translucent and showing only the shapes of furnishings inside. Whether the people had fled or been taken, Eva didn’t know, but she pressed on until looking down made her dizzy, and looking up made her angry. Everything smelled green and alive, and she was there to kill, and a seed of doubt that had been planted at some unknown point in her past began to grow faster and faster.
They found Mother on a platform near the top of the canopy. There were no barriers to stop her from falling over the edge, as if she were unconcerned by such things. Eva wasn’t entirely sure it was her, except that she was surrounded by other xana who knelt in front of her, pressing their small horns against the edge of her tail one after another. Then they would rise and leave, as if she had issued silent orders and they were eager to follow.
As stealthy as they’d been, B Squad’s presence didn’t go unnoticed. Soldiers appeared, first in pairs, then in larger groups, until they had no hope of survival, much less success. But Eva had a job to do, and she hadn’t come so far to fail now.
She and her comrades huddled in an isosphere as Eva assembled her sniper rifle. There were five rounds in her magazine, but she doubted she would have time to take more than two shots before the xana reached her.
As it turned out, she needed only one.
Eva aimed, letting the scope’s targeting systems guide her. The shimmering pearlescent isosphere was deactivated, and she pulled the trigger. The boom came moments later, after the shot had already hit its target, after the recoil had wrenched Eva’s shoulder, sore from climbing.
Mother fell over the side of the platform, and as she did, every single xana who had been attacking them fell as well.
Eva had seen meat-puppet soldiers in action, mostly in holovids, but also once on the ground in a far-off war that had not a damn thing to do with her, except she was delivering something to the troops. In the middle of accepting her cargo, the soldier had suddenly frozen, then turned and marched over to the barracks like he’d been possessed. He’d shouted an apology at her as he went, because even though he had to go where he was told, do what he was made to do by his controller, he still retained some basic functions.
As it turned out, one of the things Tito had failed to tell Eva, beyond the civilian presence, was the extent of the psychic abilities the xana possessed. They could mind-link with each other, and by so doing create a neural network that let them share thoughts more quickly than other forms of communication. It meant they could operate as a single unit, a creature with many hands and feet, a tree with many branches.
But if you killed the brain, the rest of the body died with it.
When C Squad arrived to attempt an extraction, Eva was staring down the barrel of a miniature plasma cannon, attached to the arm of a certain Nara Sumas, whom she later learned had been hired by the planetary government to find the rebel leaders and eliminate them. They were surrounded by the corpses of xana soldiers, and Eva was still trying to figure out exactly what had happened, because the scope of it was more than she could handle after being so sure of her own imminent demise.
Nara, in her terse way, explained. Eva didn’t believe her. It wasn’t until Tito arrived, wearing his smug sinvergüenza face, congratulating her for a successful mission, that she realized he had known all along what would happen.
The rebel leader proclaimed Eva the Hero of Garilia that day, but quietly, in the belly of Yamamoto as Pink was tending to her wounds. The revolution had been successful, and a new age of peace and enlightenment would carry his people proudly forth into the wider universe.