You could have the fastest, most powerful army in the whole galaxy. You could strap a fusion drive on every tank, truck and pair of boots under your command, and arm your troops with weapons that would make Mars and Terra blush.

  Without sufficient intelligence, the only place you will end up is a ditch.

  Unknown Strategist, Red Nebula Independence Wars

  —

  “Is that a palace?”

  Victor glanced back towards the speaker, his executive officer. The lieutenant commander looked utterly shocked, and he couldn’t blame him.

  ‘If that ain’t a castle, I don’t know what is.’

  The ostentateous complex was built along the side of a river, with stone walls separating it from the rest of the city. The main structure itself looked to be made out of marble, though its glory days were long past. Erosion, time and violence had reduced what must’ve been a glorious achievement of civil engineering and architecture into a husk of its former self.

  Surrounding the palace itself were a dozen other sizeable buildings as well as a cluster of less recognizable, shoddy constructs. Housing, for guards or servants, and warehouses for storage. There was even a small dock connecting the palace to the river, though it was long overdue for maintainance; the bits closest to the water had been swept away in their entirety.

  “Not just a palace. This place is a city.” Another officer pointed out as the drone’s camera zoomed out.

  As it did, the Jackal banked to the right to show another side of the city.

  Massive walls, fifteen or twenty meters high and mighty thick, seemed to surround the strange, archaic city, protecting it from land and sea threats. Districts worth of housing spread out under the drone’s view as it climbed ever higher into the skies. Forgotten manors of marble made way for neat blocks of apartments made from brick and mortar many, many years ago. They climbed three, even four stories high in some places; a truly impressive feat for what seemed like a pre-industrial settlement. The pre-industrial part became especially obvious as the modest housing gave way to barely organized slums, though they seemed remarkably…contained, to the right side of the drone’s field of view.

  Stranger sights welcomed them further towards the waterfront. A huge seaport, filled with ships that must’ve once sailed the oceans with wind pushing at their sails. Once, because now most of them were nothing but rotten wrecks.

  Many had sunk to the seafloor, only the barest hint of their superstructure and their cracked and bent sails poking out of the calm sea. The area outside the port looked positively dense with watercraft; a large island, complete with fortifications and a lighthouse, provided shelter from the wind and waves for what must’ve once been a bustling center of commerce, culture and exploration.

  The sight made the hairs on Victor’s hands jump, yet he couldn’t understand why. Moments later, it dawned on him.

  ‘They’re all trying to leave.’

  It was like a picture out of a stampede. Not one ship was facing towards the harbor; their prows were pointed out towards the sea, as if every captain and sailor to call this port home had participate had tried to escape the city at the same time. For whatever reason —and Victor wasn’t sure if he wanted to know— their attempts had been met with failure.

  The city, from the most ramshackle of slum houses to the palace itself, looked wrong. Victor had no concrete ideas about what might’ve occurred here, and the few similarities he could draw upon from his knowledge —knowledge that stemmed from examples about violations of the New Geneva Conventions— made him feel all sorts of wrong. Shaking his head, he focused on the matter at hand; the area where they’d landed.

  “Signalier, have the drone look down at us and get a proper visual of our location.”

  “Aye, sir. Hitman-5, this is…”

  The drone banked right once more, the operator deftly piloting the fixed-wing aircraft and its gimbal-mounted camera. As the latter locked on to where they’d launched, murmurs erupted from around the conference room.

  “Are we in a…garden?” Victor asked.

  His XO leaned into his seat. “Maybe it was a garden, or a park, back when this city was actually populated. Now it looks more like a forest or wilderness reserve —those really big parks on Terra and Proxima Centauri and other places that are so populated they have to protect the wilderness from getting chopped and hunted to extinction—. I never thought I’d see one up close…there aren’t a lot of worlds with enough of a population to warrant the expense.”

  Whatever the plot once was, it was big. Maybe a tenth of all the space in the city, which spanned thousands of buildings on both sides of the river, was inside the rectangular plot of wilderness. Either its creators had intended or were stupid enough to have hostile fauna actively prowling the enclosure, or the beasties his soldiers were still repelling had managed to get in from somewhere else.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Tapping his fingers against the mahogany desk, he sighed. “Well, I wouldn’t say we crash landed on a paradise world, but at least this damn forest doesn’t go on forever. How big is this section?”

  “Algo says a square kilometer, maybe a little over that. Twelve percent of the city, with a three percent margin of error.” His ops officer, the third senior-most officer of the regiment, replied. His eyes darted from point to point on the crude map that was being algorithmically generated on his tablet in real time. “Which is actually about what most planet-side cities in the Core Worlds suggest for urban areas. Helps with stress, it’s actually cheaper and more effective than antidepressant programs on a planetary scale…”

  By the time he paused, every officer in the room bar the signalier himself was staring blankly at the lieutenant colonel. The man shrugged it off. “What, I like urban design. You know I won a bunch of contests back when I was a—”

  “We know, Ian.” Victor shook his head. “We know. Let’s carry on, we’ve still got work to do. Signalier, any heat signatures in close proximity? Humans, humanoids…aliens?”

  The soldiers nodded, speaking to the drone operator. After some confused back-and-forth, he winced and turned back towards Victor.

  “Thermal camera’s malfunctioning, sir. Some wire must’ve gotten cut during the launch, or a manufacturing defect got past quality control. We’ll have to land this one for repairs or launch another one.”

  McRiley let out a groan. “Get another drone in the air, it’s faster. And have the company commander talk with sustainment for a fresh bird, we’ll just toss this one in the recycler.”

  The signalier nodded and focused back on his comms gear. In the meantime, Victor and his officers got to work with the information they had.

  “Well, this changes things.” Archer was the first to speak. “Hopefully for the better.”

  “It sure is strange.” Major Strumman, the regiment’s top diplomat, commented. “This all looks human, yet who would build something so utterly ancient on a colony world?”

  McRiley countered. “It could be a lost colony. They used to find one every decade two centuries ago, and they still do now and then. The early colonizer ships weren’t exactly reliable, and the colonization failure protocols had yet to be established back during the Great Leap. This could very well be the creation of an expedition’s descendants, after a few centuries of technological regression. It’s happened before.”

  The early years of humanity’s first wave of interstellar colonization were bumpy, to say the least. With so many expeditions being assembled by so many entities —from superpowers to fringe religious groups and excentric trillionaires to war refugees— more than a few were forgotten. Add the fact that there was no standardized template for establishing a colony, and you had a recipe for disaster.

  These days, no human, sane or insane, would attempt to colonize a virgin world without the most basic of colony packages, as well as insurance. Whether that insurance came in the form of a single messenger boat checking in once every two years or a search & rescue cruiser passing by every two years, it was widely accepted that one did not even attempt to plan a colonization campaign without having the funds to pay somebody to check on the colony during its nascent years.

  Many a horror story were shared amongst patrons of drinking establishments throughout the known galaxy, of colonies falling to disrepair, strife and hunger because some critical component had been forgotten on a loading dock light years away.

  “Whatever it is, it’s fallen on some really bad times.” Victor summarized. “But at the very least, it gives us resources to work with. Not many, and not usable without some processing, but we can use them to our advantage.”

  He pointed at the second screen of the room, which showed the recently generated map of the city. Surrounded by the neat strait lines of fifteen-meter-high stone walls, it took a trapezoid shape, with the northern side being the smallest. Tall towers, veritable fortresses in their own right, sat at each corner.

  The two standing guard over the northwest and southwest corners were established on hills, giving them quite the commanding view of the plains and forests beyond. To the east, the lighthouse on the nearby island appeared to double as a fortress, with the island itself also walled against eastern naval invasion. There appeared to be a smattering of gates on every side, big and small, each with their own warehouse.

  Truly, the more one examined the city, the more protection they found against outside threats. Was it aimed against the monsters which now infested the forest, or other humans? Had the colonial expedition’s survivors split into warring city-states? Many questions swirled about Victor’s mind, but he dismissed them for now.

  “The city appears to be abandoned, for reasons yet unknown, but its structures remain largely standing, and especially its walls and large fortifications, as well as the castle. We need to send scouts, whether human or robotic, to check on the fortifications’ status and the usefulness of major buildings inside the city itself. Living inside the Victoria is practical when we’re all buttoned up and cruising through the void, but we need to find or build a proper base of operations.”

  His words were answered with nods from his officers. Seeing that Archer wanted to speak, he gestured to the man.

  “Perimeter security and construction ops have been transferred to 1st Infantry and 6th Engineers, which frees up the 4th Scouts to move out in their actual vehicles —not the IFVs they commandeered from 3rd Cavalry— and scout the fortifications further away.”

  With their wheeled carriers and more independent profile they were the suited for such work.

  “Meanwhile, we can send elements from 2nd Infantry and possibly 3rd Cavalry to scout the Palace, the south-eastern gate, and the lighthouse. Our Crocodiles ought to be able to ford over the calm waters with ease.”

  Victor nodded in agreement. “A good start. Let’s—”

  “Colonel!” The signalier exclaimed.

  He turned to look at the soldier, whose eyes were wide open in utter disbelief. “Sir, the second drone is in the air, and IR imaging is picking up signatures. A lot of signatures, all over the place.”

  “Where exactly, and what kind?”

  “T-They’re in the buildings, on the walls, in the ships, there’s even some on the streets. I can’t believe we didn’t notice them before; the previous drone’s camera must’ve been malfunctioning as well, because—”

  “What kind of signature, soldier?” Victor asked again, his eyes boring into the panicked signalier.

  “They’re….they’re human, sir.”

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