“Ahk here, Rahm. Should we accept so readily that we’re dead? There is always a chance of a missed transmission from the transport. I would suggest we use whatever power remains to sweep for another transport. If we cannot find one, then we can decide a course of action.
“May I remind the team,” came Ssah’s voice, “that dead or not, Rahm is still in command. As Commander, it is his duty, difficult though it may be, to decide our course of action, not waste our time in idle debate.”
“Mahz confirms Ssah’s contention!”
I was about to reply to this implication of my shirking of duty, when Zur’s quiet voice interrupted.
“If I may, Commander, there is no need for us to die. However, if the Black Swamp calls us home, there is much we can do for the Empire first.”
His assertion intrigued me.
“Explain, Zur.”
“There is another species of the Coalition of Insects present on this planet. This means the fleets will be back. If we can survive long enough, we can rejoin the Empire at that time. Even if we do not survive until rendezvous, we may be able to gather information on the Enemy to leave for the Empire’s use.”
His advice was timely and meritorious. If there was a chance we could still be of use to the Empire, there was nothing further to discuss.
“On my lead!” I beamed at the team and wheeled toward the planet surface. Behind me, the flyers broke from the circling holding pattern we had maintained for our conference to form the tetrahedron behind me. We were again Tzen with a purpose.
Time was of the essence now. The ground-based power sources for our flyers were not long lived. They should have output beyond the forecast time of the mission to allow extra flyers to find secondary transports if available, but as we had cause to know, casualties had been light. That meant additional drain on the power sources. We had no way of knowing how much time was left before our engines would die.
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