We were puzzled over a crucial part. Back in the Marine Corps we had a shorthand for letting the commander know how long we could last in the field. Days of Supply or DOS when you were giving a powerpoint briefing, gave the Commander a good idea of how much time we could last without a resupply mission. Then usually we had to listen to some maneuver Officer tell us how infantry, armor or aviation was so much cooler than beans, bullets and bandaids a.k.a. keeping the mission going.

Days of Supply were always supposed to be above three. Unless some emergency happened during an exercise or you got cut off. I figured that we should know how soon to expect a resupply mission for the Volk if we were able to find out how many days of food they had on hand for Mane they had to feed. For a small group of five hundred, they needed a massive amount of food if each Mane ate half as much as a human. With a slow resupply they were liable to starve.

The Mane were herbivores and they had brought some seeds and plants when they initially arrived. After the incident they resumed planting. Their large agricultural operation was shelved without the manpower to keep it up.

In that vein, I joined Roh on some nights to check the Mane portion of the storehouse to figure out a no later than date of the Volk resupply mission. Neither Roh nor I had a need to eat. Roh sometimes liked to go through the motions of eating and drinking, and he enjoyed the Mane version of tea, which they called Fauve.

I tried Fauve a few times and Roh was helping us understand how to “taste” and “smell” in android bodies that we’d designed for touch, seeing, hearing as well as proprioception.

After a peek of the supply tent, I conferred with Hama and Roh about it. Hama gave me his best guess as to what food was and not and we took notes. For the most part we went by what Hama guessed. He was leaning towards a high number, but I always thought about reducing that by ten or twenty percent.

A week later, we checked again. The Mane had their food arranged in large closet sized moving pallets. It seemed to me that after one week they had gone through about half of one, and they had about three and a half of those left. Some quick math gave me their rough days of supply and I then had to alert Levi.

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“Levi, this is your ground team. We’re activating contingency plan Charlie. We expect a package in under six weeks.”

I hoped that Levi wouldn’t have a problem hiding all evidence of us being there. Killmonger made his way back to our spacecraft and covered it so it would not be visible from above unless someone was directly there.

We sat and prepared for the Volk to arrive. This was going to be a long wait.

The crew gathered again to plan.

“We've got a little bit over a month,” Kiernan said. “ Big news from Levi though. The best stealth tech available to us? Probably got blown up with the donut.”

“This is true,” Kilmonger said. “ On a hunch, Hama tried to figure out where they kept the suits that the Mane military used to use on raids. That portion, well it is all space dust now. We compared our notes with the station map that he had.”

“So that portion is a no go,” Kiernan said. “Stealth? Sneaking past the Volk without being noticed? That is not going to happen.”

“There is another way,” Roh said.

In his place, Hama had agreed to stand watch. Hama was adamant that he would help just this once. He would help us get in, as long as he didn’t get any heat from it.

Roh was thriving. It must have been a long time since he felt such camaraderie in working towards a goal.

“Go on,” I said.

“Rather than trying to hide but concealing ourselves, we can hide in plain sight. The Volk don’t come down here to count us, and I doubt that any of them know the name of any Mane here besides Julan.” Roh said.

Killmonger went to grab his chin where a goatee would be. Kiernan nodded.

“So what are you saying? Just pretend that we’re some of the Mane?” I asked.

“I can secure Mane clothing and make it about as non descript as possible,” Kiernan said.

“I’ll help with that,” Roh said.

“Well that part is good, so we’ll arrive in this… what did they call the type of ship?” I said.

“The translation from the Volk is Raptor dropship. The Mane would be loaded in groups of fifty to head to orbit.” Killmonger replied.

I was glad that he learned something from his extended time with Roh and Hama.

“It sounds to me like we need to play dress up for when the Raptor comes to town, ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “The next thing we need to do is practice this damn plan to hide in plain sight.