The darkness of the moonless night reflected my sullen mood as the swarm flew north, towards the vast jungle that bordered the changeling territory. The teams assigned to lands south and east of the Changeling Kingdom had separated from us early on, the Griffonstone team still had some way to go before doing the same, and the rest of us would spread throughout Equestria. I’d even assigned a team to Yakyakistan, though I doubted it’d be necessary. If Thorax would manage to get that far undetected with so many of us searching everywhere for him and remain undeterred by the yaks’ lifestyle enough to want to stay there, he’d deserve to be let loose!
Deployment had been somewhat delayed by Apex’s insistence that the airborne sentries should verify every single hunter’s identity and authorization, as well as check all our battle gear and communicators, before letting us proceed. Most of the hunters had been ready to jump out of their carapaces and start a fight with one another by the end of the ordeal, and though a small part of me shared their frustration, I was mostly glad the sentries had taken their jobs seriously this time.
If only they hadn’t chickened out when Thorax had decided to pull stunts, none of this would have been necessary!
At least they seemed to have learned from their mistake.
“Commander Pharynx, Sir?” one of the hunters approached me as we were reaching the jungle at near-dawn.
“Yes?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Sir, but how much longer do you want us to keep flying?”
“Tired already, soldier?”
“No, Sir! Forget I asked!” She turned to put some distance between us.
“Listen here, soldiers!” I spoke out loudly enough for everyling to hear. “I know visibility isn’t much at this hour and we couldn’t search the wasteland properly, but it doesn’t matter because Thorax would be a fool to still linger so close to the hive where any regular patrol would have spotted him by now! Our work begins when the sun goes up! When we get enough light to see properly, we’ll fly through the jungle and look for our famous deserter! There’s still some time left until then, so use it to spread out so we can cover as much ground as possible! As for you,” I said to the hunter who had approached me a minute earlier, “you’d better hurry to get in position if you want a moment to sit down and rest your wings!”
The others burst into laughter.
“What’s your name, anyway?” I asked her.
“Grim, Sir! My name is Grim!”
The name was familiar: it had caught my eye before that Chrysalis had put it in place of one of my suggested ones. I checked the scroll to make sure which one. Yep, as I thought!
“This says you’ve been assigned to Foal Mountain.”
“Yes, Sir, that’s what I’ve been told.”
“Congratulations!” I sneered at her. “Looks like we’re in the same team!”
A few nearby soldiers snickered. She got as close to being a tortoise as one could get without shapeshifting into one.
“Yes, Sir,” she stammered weakly.
“A word of suggestion: just because I’m used to being around a wimp doesn’t mean I like to be around one, so work on your attitude! Or don’t if you enjoy being yelled at all the time. It’s up to you, and rest assured, I can yell!”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Didn’t hear you!”
“I said I will, Sir!”
“Hm. Marginally better.” I checked the sun. “Okay, we’ve got the light! Let’s move!”
We were done searching the jungle by the evening of the next day, but none of the hunters had found any sign of Thorax. So, either he’d made an effort to fly over the jungle at top speed without stopping and we were yet to catch up to him, or he’d taken his time and we’d passed him already without realizing it, or he’d gone in an entirely different direction and some other team would find him. I’d assembled the communicator on the first evening to hear from the southern and eastern teams, but they’d had nothing to report.
It was of no consequence. I hadn’t expected we’d find him so soon anyway, and even if the others had, they were smart enough to not test my patience by showing it. One of the teams would find him sooner or later; there were only so many places a traitor could go to, and hardly any where he would be welcome. Add to that that he was alone and in a relatively unfamiliar environment, and he was bound to slip up and reveal himself sooner or later. He’d be easy pickings from there!
All we would have to do then would be to drag him to Chrysalis.
But the wait could take weeks, months even. Years? I didn’t think so, but if luck served him, anything was possible!
All that, of course, assuming he hadn’t been killed already.
There were dangerous animals in the jungle, some of which he knew about, but only a few basics, and I was pretty sure there were a few he wasn’t aware of… or hadn’t been the last time I’d bothered to check. Any of them could have attacked him, and his fighting skills weren’t good enough to save him from them! Could he be dead already? None of the hunters had reported having found evidence of battle or remains of a changeling or something that might have been one. Had they looked? They would have, I told myself. Those had been the orders: to find Thorax or whatever was left of him and bring him to the hive! Or to bring his remains to the hive or whatever other credible evidence of his death we might come across, whatever. Just because I wasn’t stressing that part all the time didn’t mean it wasn’t important! The hunters would know it! They would, wouldn’t they?
Suddenly I wasn’t so sure anymore.
But with Thorax being as exact-opposite-of-battle-ready as he was, if the wild animals had gotten to him, would there even be any signs of struggle to suggest it? What if Thorax was dead and there was nothing to find, not even a snapped twig, to clue us in on his unfortunate fate?
Unfortunate. What a choice of words! Compared to what Chrysalis would have in store for him if he lived to see the day of his capture and punishment, getting eaten by any wild animal would surely have been a blessing and an easy way out! And I didn’t know anymore which outcome to wish for him!
The last of the hunters were gathering at the north end of the jungle. I’d assembled the communicator again while waiting, but the reports from other teams were the same as the evening before. So I turned to the swarm.
“Attention!” I shouted.
All heads turned to me.
“Report! Any of you found Thorax?”
No response from anyling.
“In case you were wondering, I’ve just finished talking to the other teams, and they have nothing to report either! That means we’re still hunting, in fact, we’ve only just begun! We’re about to enter Equestria, where we all spread out as assigned, so it’s time for the last roll-call before we separate! Any questions?”
There were none.
Slowly and steadily, I roll-called every team one by one, asked about Thorax again, got the same negative response as before, then gave them their communicators and instructed them when to report in. They all gradually set out, except for a few whose members had taken their sweet time in the jungle and were still arriving. Eventually they were all accounted for, again with nothing to report, so they just joined their teams and left like the others. One of the stragglers had incidentally been a member of the other team headed for Foal Mountain, the team that would do the actual hunting as opposed to mine whose sole purpose would be to coordinate the others and supervise the immediate area around our base camp.
We travelled there together, or better said, the two teams travelled there in close enough proximity to each other to maintain visual contact at all times, but none of the soldiers separated from their own team to approach the other one at any point. The closest we came to each other had been at the roll-call prior to entering Equestria, and finally at our destination after we landed. We agreed to set up separate base camps in order to avoid interfering in each others’ work: ours was an abandoned mining shaft that we’d found first, and theirs was a rotting, half-fallen-apart shed. Though we’d kept the non-interference agreement, we still ended up being close enough that face-to-face reporting made more sense than use of communicators - the shed might have belonged to the mine in its active days, though it wasn’t quite as close to the mine as I would have thought logical and practical, but whoever had built it must have had a reason for such an arrangement, not that it mattered to our purpose - so we decided to do that instead unless something forced either team to relocate.
By the time my team had finished setting up, the first updates from the Equestrian teams that had reached their destinations were due to come in. The ones covering northern Equestria, Crystal Empire, Yakyakistan, and Griffonstone weren’t due to report yet; they would do so as soon as they arrived to their destinations, which was expected for tomorrow for northern Equestrian teams and the day after for the other ones, unless they ran into trouble or happened to find Thorax while still underway. They hadn’t reported either scenario, though, and the expected reports form the other teams were just as unremarkable as before.
I relayed all of this to Chrysalis. She acknowledged my words and told me there had been no unexpected developments that I would need to know. Also, Psycho had found the replacement infiltrators with hardly any trouble.
I bet he had, I thought. He must have altered my roster to grab a few soldiers from it while Chrysalis had been ‘thinking about my plan’!
Whether or not that had been the case, there was nothing I could do about it now, and regardless of Psycho, I intended to complete my task to the best of my ability.
I only had to hope that Thorax wouldn’t mess it up.