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3/29/2025, 12:12:23 PM
When the change in wind direction still brings no unfamiliar scent you decide to give it a few more minutes, long enough that a snuffling mammal identical to the one you just hunted and skinned trundles through the clearing. It trundles right past your stone form, close enough that you could have reached out and grabbed it. As it exits into the foliage you finally sigh and stand up, wincing at your stiff muscles and awkwardly scratching the back of your neck like you do when Crane is giving you one of his sober lectures. Nothing, after all. Just nerves.
Instinct gives way to reason, and you try to reassure yourself with the blanket over logic even as you keep one eye cast over your shoulder the rest of the way back. The Cradler Auxiliaries may be out there alright, but there was still a lot of jungle to cover out there. If they had been hunting here that would mean the Cradlers were already right on top of the rebel’s main encampment, the Savis bombers and artillery you can still detect in the background would have been falling a lot closer to home rather than their usual indiscriminate barrage.
Still, that had it’s own issues. The initial advantage of longwave comms had been turned from an advantage into a weakness once the Savis grew wise enough to set up their intercept points, but it not biting your people in the arse due to an earlier discovery was yet another saving grace that Lieutenant Blue had you to thank for. Since then the rebels had to rely solely on shortwave, with each outpost and hidden camp serving as a link in the network of slave resistance out here. But it left them terribly isolated, not to mention slower to coordinate responses between bases than it had been in the early days of the fighting. Only a handful of the inner circle, yourself among them, knew the location and trails for each individual rebel site. But, as you had warned the Lieutenant repeatedly, it was only a matter of time before the Cradler Auxiliaries bagged the right body and then this knifes-edge you had been balancing on thus far was going to tip very decisively in the wrong way. Your people had to get out of here before that happened, and thus far the briefings on when exactly getting out of here was on the itinerary had remained worryingly vague.
[2/3]
Instinct gives way to reason, and you try to reassure yourself with the blanket over logic even as you keep one eye cast over your shoulder the rest of the way back. The Cradler Auxiliaries may be out there alright, but there was still a lot of jungle to cover out there. If they had been hunting here that would mean the Cradlers were already right on top of the rebel’s main encampment, the Savis bombers and artillery you can still detect in the background would have been falling a lot closer to home rather than their usual indiscriminate barrage.
Still, that had it’s own issues. The initial advantage of longwave comms had been turned from an advantage into a weakness once the Savis grew wise enough to set up their intercept points, but it not biting your people in the arse due to an earlier discovery was yet another saving grace that Lieutenant Blue had you to thank for. Since then the rebels had to rely solely on shortwave, with each outpost and hidden camp serving as a link in the network of slave resistance out here. But it left them terribly isolated, not to mention slower to coordinate responses between bases than it had been in the early days of the fighting. Only a handful of the inner circle, yourself among them, knew the location and trails for each individual rebel site. But, as you had warned the Lieutenant repeatedly, it was only a matter of time before the Cradler Auxiliaries bagged the right body and then this knifes-edge you had been balancing on thus far was going to tip very decisively in the wrong way. Your people had to get out of here before that happened, and thus far the briefings on when exactly getting out of here was on the itinerary had remained worryingly vague.
[2/3]
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