Furnace (Hunter-Killer #1)

Chapter 23 - Stare Down the Devil

"It's been two weeks!" Reaver snarled, his voice boiling with frustration. "Two damned weeks and we haven't learned anything! All you've got is a picture of some bloody Scraegan jewellery and a captive who might as well not even know we're here for all the information you've gotten from it. Do you have any idea what's going on out there?!"

Colonel Hackley's face darkened as she narrowed her eyes at the Hunter-Killer office. "You are speaking to a superior officer, Major. I suggest you mind your tone. And yes, I'm well aware of what's happening."

"Are you sure?" Reaver's eyes blazed as he held Hackley's stare. "My people are buying you these days with their damned lives and all you can say is 'mind your tone'?"

Ryke watched the exchange, his eyes widening in horror, and he knew he wasn't the only one. The senior Hunter-Killer officers had been summoned to the command operations module deep beneath StammBasin by Major De Lunta, and it had quickly become apparent that HK-Warlock's newly promoted commander had a very large and angry bone to pick with the base's hierarchy.

While he might have been surprised by how Reaver spoke to a superior, Ryke knew the truth underpinning the man's anger. Bad enough that his old commanding officer had died to bring the Scraegan captive back to Brekka, but now all they seemed to have accomplished was to force the Hunter-Killer Corp into a perpetual, guerrilla conflict with swarming Scraegan packs. The numbers were unlike anything Ryke had ever seen. No information had been gleaned from the creature they'd captured; no smoking gun and no watershed moment of understanding.

The humans remained just as in the dark as ever.

While Ryke and his companions had beaten off the attack on Cresentscar, other settlements, and other units, had not been so lucky. Casualties were mounting exponentially on both sides, but the Commissariat of Brekka, ensconced in the fortifications of the Forge, seemed content to let the carnage unfold while they interrogated the monster in their vaults. He had no idea what methods the Commissariat thought would coerce the Scraegan into ... well anything, but whatever they were doing wasn't working. There hadn't been even a whisper of information to tell them that their raid on the Scraegan compound had accomplished anything at all.

"I understand your frustration," Hackley continued carefully, holding Reaver's furious stare. "I really do, but we are working with complete unknowns here. No-one has ever had a live Scraegan to interrogate, but we still can't effectively communicate with it. We're piecing together a language that bears no resemblance to human speech, and we're doing it from battlefield recordings from Hunter-Killer cams. It's going to take time."

"It's time we don't have, ma'am," Sergeant Parnell interjected, her tone orders of magnitude more respectful than Reaver's, but disagreeing nonetheless. It had been a while since Ryke had taken to the field with her, and the veteran commander certainly looked more haggard than he remembered. Parnell's HK-Bishop was a hardened unit – that meant they'd probably been involved in some of the fiercest fighting.

"We don't have the numbers to catch every incursion," she continued, shrugging helplessly. "My people have been out in the badlands non-stop for the past four days. They're burnt out. We can't keep fighting like this."

"She's right," Ryke agreed, reluctantly looking up to meet Hackley's eyes. "It's costing the Scraegans, but they don't seem to care. For all we know they could keep this up for months."

"Somehow I doubt that," Hackley replied smoothly. "If they could have sustained this level of intensity they'd have done it long before now. This is a direct response to the capture of their... priest – shaman – whatever you want to call it. The chamber it was found in was some kind of worship shrine, our people are sure of that."