After saying goodbye to my fireteam, I hopped a series of flights to the Launcher, it was long and boring and I was in a foul mood. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but if UNEF needed a scapegoat for the Kristang, they’d expect me to fall on my sword. A demotion seemed likely, I hadn’t been a sergeant long and had barely gotten used to it, I would miss the feeling of being in charge of a team. We’d done good work in Teskor; stayed out of trouble, established good relations with the natives, gathered solid intel and routed it up the chain. And built a basketball court that made our command post a popular spot for patrols to stop, which was good for morale. There hadn’t been any serious friction among my fireteam, not any more than you’d expect from four guys stuck together in the boonies with not much to do. Looking back at our time in Teskor, it seemed almost idyllic, peaceful. We had landed on an alien, enemy planet, established control and we were doing our part in the war, showing the Kristang that we could pull our weight, little as that was. We felt we had a sense of purpose, of accomplishment, we all had been looking forward to the day the inhabitants of Teskor got loaded aboard transports and joined the evacuation. That would be mission accomplished for our EOT.

Looking back now, my view of our time in Teskor became less idyllic for me after I began getting disturbing intel from the burgermeister. Learning humanity had been conned into setting up an Expeditionary Force, that UNEF was nothing more than rent-a-grunts to the Kristang, that the lizards considered Earth to be a war prize to be exploited however they wanted, kind of killed my buzz on any feeling of accomplishment. Not being able to share intel with my fireteam had put a distance between us, they knew I was meeting with a high-ranking Ruhar official, they saw a UNEF intelligence officer visiting the day after I met with the Ruhar, and they could put two and two together. And, of course, there were rumors. Some of the rumors traced back to intel I’d received from the burgermeister, and made me nervous about UNEF HQ’s information security. It pissed me off that I was supposed to treat as secret intel that was flying around the rumor mills. I couldn’t even tell my guys which rumors were total bullshit, and there was plenty of that, and which intel had at least a grain of truth to it.