He was lying on his back and looking up at the trees around him. The old giants were swaying from side to side in the wind. He could hear the sounds of his homelands' majestic forests around him. But… something was off… It took him a few seconds to figure out what it was.

There was no way these trees could move in the wind. And the forest sounds he was hearing sounded… off. As if its peace had been disrupted, shattered, by something that didn't belong here. Or someone. What happened? He pondered it, but couldn't remember much. His mind felt like a net had been thrown over it and had been tied very tight. He drifted off into nothingness again..

—

"How are you doing?" Rose had slowed down a bit to walk next to Julie. Even though her injuries had been less serious than they had feared at first, the group had to move slower to enable her to keep up with them.

"I'm alright," Julie said, while forcing a smile to her lips.

Rose looked at her for a few seconds and turned her head forward again, in the direction they were walking in.

"You know that you can't lie to me, Julie? We spent most of the last 300 years together, remember?"

Julie smiled at Rose painfully.

"Worth a try," she winked at Rose. "What about our new friend?" She looked at the sleeping local on the stretcher carried by Wells and Morris.

"Terry says that he will make it. Barely. He is lucky Austin found him or he'd be dead by now."

"I figured," Julie answered. "I bet there aren't many amongst his people that were run over by a horse, cut open by an Ossetian bayonet and lived to tell the tale."

"Well," Rose joked,"we don't know if he will tell you anything."

Julie gave her a lopsided grin. "I really can't tell if that was your weird sense of humor or if you're trying to insult me."

Rose smirked and shrugged: "Uhm, I think Terry needs me!" She quickly made towards him, not without giving Julie a wink over her shoulder.

Before Julie could think of a fitting retort the stranger on the stretcher started to steer. She quickly moved up to Wells and Morris and told them to stop and put it on the ground.

—

When Tomos woke up the first thing he felt was the excruciating pain coming from his chest. The first thing he smelt was the smell of gunpowder. And the first thing he saw when he finally managed to pry his eyes open was the soft and pale face of a young woman, not much older than him, with blond hair, who was looking down at him. For a second or so he thought that she was studying him like someone would study an insect or a particularly nice rock. Then the corners of her mouth turned up and she began speaking in perfect Lerwikian.

"Greetings, stranger. My name is Juu-lee," at least that is what her name sounded like to him,"what's your name?"

"Tomos," or at least that was what he tried to say. To him it sounded more like a croans call. He coughed a few times and felt wetness on his chin.

The strange woman, Juu-lee, looked worried for a second and looked up to someone outside of his field of view and said something in a language he had never heard. A male voice answered in the same language. He tried to turn his head and see who was speaking but trying to do so let to pain shooting through his head and he decided that lying still and hoping for the best was a better course of action. What had even happened, he thought to himself. Before he could find anything in the chaos that was his mind, Juu-lee turned to him again.

"Our doctor says that it is going to be fine," she assured him, "but it may take a few days." She put a gray cylinder to his mouth. "Drink this, it should help. It's just water", she added after noticing the skepticism in his face.

After Tomos had taken a sip from the bottle he tried to speak again. "Tomos, my name is Tomos." This time it sounded almost like him. "Where am I? What happened?"

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

—

"…and that's how you ended up on our stretcher," Julie finished. The young Andonan looked so exhausted, she wasn't sure that he had understood even half of what she had told him.

Before she could continue with her questions the young native had fallen asleep. "Well, I guess we will have to wait until he wakes up." Julie said to no one in particular.

—

Over the next hours they made steady progress towards the Andonan city they had decided to begin their work at.

Only a few kilometers from its outskirts the small group came to a halt. De Clare decided that they should take the time to interrogate their prisoner before going closer to the city and finding a place suitable as a first base of operations. There was also the issue of them still wearing their combat fatigues, which weren't exactly ordinary clothing for the planet.

Rose had checked the drone feed a few minutes earlier to find a place near the city where they could stay for a while to finish interrogating their prisoner. As the canopy had gotten a lot lighter, undoubtedly because the locals pruned back the vegetation regularly, she had even finished to find one or two promising spots and ordered the drones to go in closer and give her more detail.

One, an old barn, turned out to be in better shape than she had dared hoping from the first pictures. Although she was still pretty confident that it was abandoned, as it stood next to the ruins of a mid-sized building that had probably been a farm house, until a fire destroyed it a while ago. It appeared to be perfect for their purposes, as the next building was more than 5 kilometers away at the outskirts of the mid-sized town.

The other spot turned out to be less than ideal, as the roof had mostly collapsed and it wouldn't provide much or any shelter at all.

"Alright people, looks like the drones found our next camp," she called out to the others, who had taken the opportunity to sit down at the foot of a large tree to take a short break from the march they had undertaken over the last hours.

"We'll get going in 5 minutes. It's not very far, so don't worry, we should easily reach it before sunrise." She didn't want any of the locals to spot the group, as it would be quite impossible to mistake them for locals, because of their gear, clothing and weapons. As they had come a lot closer to the city, she expected there to be a lot more people around once morning broke.

"How is our guest doing, Terry?" She asked the team's doctor.

"Still asleep. Aside from that, he'll survive. Although I have to say that there is no way he would have survived, if he had had to rely on a local healer."

"Alright, then let's get going!"

—

The team reached the old farmstead they had chosen as their next camp shortly before sunrise. As Rose had expected a group of men had begun making their way out of the town right at the crack of sunrise. They had only narrowly avoided being spotted by the group.

Tomos woke up shortly after and proved surprisingly talkative after the short conversation, if you could call it that, they had during the march here.

It turned out the city nearby was his hometown and he owned a small apartment near its city center. He also explained to them that he was an officer in their military and that the riders that had attacked them had been soldiers of their southern neighbor Ossia. Which was a country that prided itself in its colonial pursuit and its strong military that was loyal to its monarch to the death.

Over recent years tension between Andona and Ossia had been on the rise, as Andona not only had a lot less inhabitants and was only sparsely populated but had also been through a revolution recently, that had led to it becoming a parliamentary monarchy.

Naturally, as a result Andonas southern neighbor, which happened to be Ossia, and its northern neighbor, which was a Kingdom called Lerwik, both started to play with the idea of getting a "part of the cake".

Rose looked at the others after Tomos had given them the fast rundown of the situation.

"Well. Looks like we managed to find the worst and at the same time the best place on the entire planet to set down at."

"I have a hard time seeing what makes this the best place, Rose. Care to elaborate?" Harry said, with the rest of the team, except Julie, nodding in support.

Rose gave them a dangerous smirk and replied.

"War means that we can basically do what we want, without drawing unwanted attention. Who is gonna care about businesses that are suddenly incredibly successful or political change, when you have to fear losing your life?"

She gave them a winning grin, which turned into a frown for a second.

"Although I do have to admit that it may have been advised to land a bit further away from the frontlines."

During all this Tomos sat on the ground and looked at the strange people around him talking in a language he couldn't understand. He was a bit scared of Rose. He thought that she always had a bit of a predatory look to herself. Still he wanted to find out where these people were from and who they were, maybe they could help him and Andona to get out of this alive. He cleared his throat and asked no one in particular.

"So, what about you? Where are you from? Are you from one of the western continents?" He asked.

No one answered him but he felt a sting on his left arm. Before he could turn his head to look at its source he suddenly felt so tired that he sank down and fell asleep immediately.