Before long, three blacked out buses drew up, and the bulky soldiers piled awkwardly on board before settling in for a long drive into the dusk. They didn’t chatter. Everybody seemed to be occupied with private rituals, though Kayla saw with jealousy that some Raiders had dozed off. She could barely keep her hand from shaking, and she hadn’t slept properly since the mission briefing two days earlier.

The driver navigated the dark country roads with her night vision, flooring the accelerator on the long straights, so that every bump or pebble of the poorly maintained tarmac shook the vehicle. After a few hours of that torment, they arrived at the staging area in pitch darkness. It was a large field outside an abandoned farmstead, far from any other community.

The buses were met by Combat Controller Elmira Aliyev, whom Kayla remembered from her shuttle trip. During the previous night, Elmira had carefully prepared the isolated area to serve as a forward refueling depot and airfield for the task force’s dozen dropships, including those that would soon carry the Rangers from the Banshee. Now she would join one of the Raider teams travelling into the valley.

As others began dropping their night vision vizors, Kayla did likewise, and saw that the field was already filled with small drop ships, each no larger than a truck. Known informally as ‘Cicadas’, they would carry four Raiders apiece to the planned landing zone in the mountains, from which they would begin their long hike into the target area.

Urtiga ushered Kayla over to one of the nearby Cicadas, sitting her next to Masey on a small bench bolted to the airframe. Gucci had to struggle to get herself seated, since her pack was larger and heavier than the others. She carried the squadron’s command radio, from which Urtiga would direct the unit’s operation.

There had been a problem with the radio built into Kayla’s Ranger suit, however. Because it used Ranger encryption, Gucci hadn’t been able to patch it through to the individually protected channels used by the Raiders. It had surprised them that nobody in the Collective had considered the need to have different suit types communicate with each other directly, instead of going through the command net.

As they waited for the rest of the squadron to load into their dropships, Kayla sat facing outwards from the aircraft, feet just off the ground. All around her women were hustling, preparing the dropships or stacking ammunition boxes for resupply. Kayla felt unworthy to be at the tip of a spear handled by so many people so much more competent than herself. She reminded herself that Urtiga certainly knew what she was doing, and swore that she would do as she was told and not screw anything up.

Looking up into the sky she saw the fire-scarred surface of Ran hanging in the blackness, and she shivered with disquiet.

Above her, the twin outboard engines of the dropship spooled up with a whine. Urtiga continued broadcasting and answering radio messages for some time until the fleet of vessels were ready to launch.

“All Cicada call-signs, green-light. I repeat, green-light,” she finally announced, and as a single body the ships lifted in the air, span around to face the mountains, and raced into the night.

The flight took another hour while Kayla stared in awe at the terrain sweeping past thousands of feet below, tinted green through her night vision display. She had trouble connecting with the reality of what was happening—even tried to shake her head as if to dislodge a wiring problem. Try as she might, no rational thoughts helped her come to terms with the fact that she was flying over the mountains she had once dreamed about on the farm, on her way to destroy the source of the creatures that had killed her father. But there was so much to think about, from all the training she struggled to recall, to the strangeness of following a Raider team into unknown terrain.

Eventually their ship separated from the others, flying alone through a valley as tall peaks towered over them. The Cicada slowed, descending towards a flat ledge that sat just below a main spur. From there, the team would climb a predetermined route which would take them into the heart of the search area.

A cliff ran alongside the landing zone, and Kayla watched in horror as the ship slowed to a hover, one of its outboard engines mere inches away from the rock. The tiny, flat piece of ground they were to land on seemed impossibly small, and for a terrifying moment she thought they would surely crash.

Fortunately, the pilot seemed to exercise superhuman control of the aircraft, touching them down perfectly without even a scrape. The second the skids touched Kayla stepped off, running forward through the darkness to the four-o’clock position of the ship and dropping to a knee with her carbine raised, as she scanned the surrounding terrain. Moments before the landing, clarity had dawned, washing away the doubt and uncertainty in a rush of determination.

With a shriek of engine power, the Cicada climbed away into the night, leaving the four of them alone in the darkness. The whine of thrust faded into the breeze, leaving an oppressive silence to fall upon them. They waited patiently, scanning the area for threats. Kayla was in her element now. She was a hunter, and she would pass through the shadows to stalk her prey, as she had been doing since the day she had learned to walk.

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After a long pause, Urtiga gave a low whistle. The group moved away from the landing zone in single file, walking quickly over the rough mountainside and heading towards the ridgeline. For the first thirty minutes, they stopped every five hundred yards, dropping to a knee to wait and watch. Eventually, when Urtiga was satisfied, she gave them the signal to move out again.

They picked up the pace, and the stops became less frequent. Unused to walking in night vision with its blurry peripherals, Kayla stumbled across the rough ground as she struggled to keep up with Masey. They were moving faster than she had ever travelled off a trail with so much weight. At the same time, she was trying to maintain awareness of her surroundings, checking for distant movement, or unusual sounds, while thinking about surrounding cover in case of an ambush. It was a tough mental game that required all her concentration.

They only had six hours of darkness to climb nearly four thousand feet and travel ten miles in map distance. Though she drove them ruthlessly, Urtiga allowed them to stop for breaks, to quickly eat an energy bar or drink from water tubes installed in their helmets. When she noticed that the others barely seemed tired, Kayla tried to hide her heavy panting. She wondered, with a stab of shame, if the breaks had been planned just to help her keep up with the much stronger operators.

No words were uttered at all throughout the hike, except whenever Urtiga took advantage of a break to radio the unit squadron’s commander that their team had reached a pre-ordained checkpoint.

The higher they climbed the more Kayla felt her lungs burning with the lack of oxygen. Every step became a struggle. But people’s lives were depending on her, so she refused to allow herself to fail. That commitment gave her the strength to keep going, astonished as she was that the enhanced body of a super soldier could still be so weak in the face of an ordinary mountain range.

Soon, a rosy haze began to creep over the horizon silhouetting the black teeth of the innumerable peaks. At the next checkpoint, after Urtiga had radioed the task force, she announced that they would lay up for the day. Bathed in a cool sweat, Kayla enjoyed the rush of relief that the ordeal was over—for now.

They had stopped in a dell nestled into the side of the ridge line, framed by rocky outcroppings they could hide amongst. After traversing two peaks during the night, avoiding the summits so as not to skyline themselves to any potential watchers, they were all fatigued.

As Kayla pulled out her poncho, Gucci covered their hide site in camouflaged netting, drawing it across the rocks to make them invisible to the outside world. Kayla shifted position, trying to find a comfortable spot. She looked out at the rows of mountains, like frozen waves in a storm, and caught sight of the distant farming plain through a gap in the crests.

“Jesus,” she said, softly, too tired to heed the image of an annoyed Thandi that flashed through her mind.

“What?” Gucci asked, her voice low.

“Out there on that plain somewhere there’s my old village with a big old barn,” Kayla explained, also keeping her voice as quiet as she could. “As a kid I used to sit up on the roof and stare at these mountains, dreaming of being an explorer. Now here I am, kitted out like a cyborg and getting ready to get my arms ripped off by some freakish bioweapon.”

“Yup.”

“Just feels… I dunno—”

“Like standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down? Like what the hell am I doing here?”

“Yeah.”

Gucci grinned. “It’s an awesome feeling, right? Personally, I love that sensation. Now Urtiga, she gets off on it.”

“Cut the chatter,” Urtiga ordered tersely.

They wolfed down food and drink as the sun crested above the mountains, lancing the world around them with sharp rays of light. Kayla was last on the watch schedule, so she lay down and fell asleep the second her eyes were closed. She was nudged awake around midday by Gucci.

“Nothing happening,” announced the bleary-eyed soldier. “Don’t screw up, or I’ll throw you off the mountain.”

Kayla nodded meekly and rubbed a tender spot in her back where a rock had been jammed as she slept. She grabbed her rifle and moved to take up a sheltered position from which she could observe the ridgeline.

The day passed lazily as she watched, scanning every inch of the mountain slopes, trying not to let herself get distracted or doze off. Soon she felt her mind slip into a strange level of awareness.

She was a part of the mountain, like the rocks buried in the dirt for millions of years, or the blades of grass shivering in the breeze. She was no different than the small rodents, themselves hiding in their burrows from the large birds of prey above, whose screeches rang out across the valleys. She was as timeless as the planet they sat upon, drifting in space, the cycles of life and death spinning over the surface like the hands around a watch face.

The peaceful sensation slipped away in one terrifying moment when a pride of small mountain cats wandered too close to their position. Kayla knew from experience that these cats, if disturbed, would call out in high-pitched wails that carried for miles—a defense against bigger predators. Her heart pounded in her chest as they sniffed around the slope a dozen yards below the hide site. She forced herself to remain calm, her body as still as the rock as she wondered if the entire operation was about to be ruined—and of course Gucci would certainly make good on her promise.

The cats looked directly at her more than once; curious, but without showing any undue alarm. Fortunately, the combat suits masked their scent, and between the netting, suit camo and her face paint, she was completely invisible. Of course, a cat that spent its entire life in this terrain would find the slightest oddity suspicious.

Fortunately, the pride was either hungry or had other business, and they wandered off quickly. Kayla started to breathe again. She felt humbled. Valkyrie’s thousands of years of technology and experience had just about given them the ability to fool a natural predator, provided it didn’t indulge any curiosity.

An hour later, Kayla checked her watch, moved slowly over to Urtiga and nudged her awake.

“Nothing to report,” Kayla responded to her mentor’s interrogative look. “But watch out for cats.”