"Me neither." Adams agreed, stepping out of the hamvee. The expression on her face was more frightening than her rifle. "Colonel Bishop, permission to nuke this asshole's brain if he even looks at me funny?" She looked Rogers in the eye. "I've spent the past five days being starved and tortured by the lizards, and I really, really want to shoot something."

"Everyone, calm down." The voice of reason came from a sergeant in Rogers' patched-together unit. "LT, maybe we should hear them out."

Rogers nodded, and his people slowly lowered their weapons. With a nod from me, my people did the same. "That's better. Now, I'm Colonel Joe Bishop, you know, the Barney guy." Recognition dawned on Rogers' face. Damn. Adams had been right, never give up an advantage. "The four of us were prisoners of the Kristang, until the Ruhar hit the base, and sprung us, by accident. All the other prisoners were shot, or tortured and hung, by our allies the lizards. Former allies. Now, you have comms," I pointed to his zPhone, "what have you heard?"

"Nothing, sir, comms are down, even the GPS location system is down. All we get is a recorded message from the Ruhar, for us to stand down, cooperate with the Ruhar, and await further instructions. Nothing from UNEF Command, no emails or texts, but the translation function is working."

"How are you fixed for supplies?"

"Lean, sir." Now that he knew who I was, he kept looking at me in a way that suggested he wanted to ask for my autograph. "Plenty of water, everyone has a standard load of ammo, but we don't even have enough food for one meal for everyone. Most of us were on our way to a French FOB when the Ruhar came back. We saw smoke in the direction of the base," he pointed to a thin column of smoke off to the south, "and the bridge over the river in that direction is out. I pulled together everyone I could find, and assembled here. We've got two French, three Indians and four Chinese with us. I figured this bridge is a traffic chokepoint, sir."

It was decent thinking, of a sort. I leaned close to talk quietly. "We have about a dozen MRE packs. The two women with me were starved and tortured by the lizards, they were going to be hanged tomorrow morning."

Roger's eyes showed his shock. "What the fuck have we gotten into, sir?"

"We're in over our heads, that's for certain. Let's load up and-"

"Dropships!" A soldier called out.

"Theirs or ours?" Lt Rogers asked. I didn't bother to point out that nothing in the sky was 'ours' anymore.

"Can't tell yet, sir." Replied the soldier with the binoculars. "Wait, they're hamsters! Three, no, four Vultures and a pair of Dodos, looks like."