About a week had passed since our deployment. All the teams had reached their destinations safely and begun searching their designated territories. All of them were sending reports regularly, and all those reports were the same: nothing to report yet, Sir! My answers were equally consistent: keep looking!
Chrysalis wasn’t thrilled to keep getting the same news from me day after day, but she had to admit that finding a changeling who didn’t want to be found was bound to be a difficult task, bordering on impossible depending on the skills, wits, and determination of the changeling in question. Skills alone were going to be easy to surpass in this case, but wits and determination... that could be a whole different game: Thorax had every reason in the world to keep away from us, he had to have figured out that Chrysalis would have sent her soldiers after him, and he would undoubtedly use every advantage he could muster to stay one step ahead of us, and after the way he’d improvised his escape - and despite what anyling might say, I had a feeling that it was improvised rather than planned, or else I would have caught a hint of something odd in his behavior in time to do something about it - I’d gained a new appreciation for his resourcefulness, so much that I was almost beginning to trust him to succeed on his own! Assuming, of course, that he was still alive. In my reports, I’d mentioned the possibility that that might not be the case anymore a couple of times, and though she hadn’t openly responded to it, I didn’t want to be too insistent on it or she might get the idea that I was hiding something. She would only be half wrong, though, and I was asking myself at times if I might have made a mistake by wanting to secretly help Thorax out if I could, or by building the hunting strategy in such a way to allow me to actually do it, or both.
The dull routine was broken one evening when the Everfree team failed to report in as scheduled. I gave them about an hour before I had to submit my daily report to Chrysalis, but eventually I couldn’t delay it any longer. Just in case, I tried hailing the Everfree team first, to no avail.
“What do you mean, they didn’t respond?” Chrysalis roared at me from the communicator array when I told her about it.
“They were due to report an hour ago, but just because they failed to do that and to answer my hails doesn’t have to mean they’ve betrayed us too if that’s what you’re thinking! They could be following a trail, or their communicator might have broken down, or something else is keeping them busy… It’s easy to jump to conclusions, Your Highness, but they’re good soldiers, and I’m sure they’ll report in as soon as they sort out whatever is delaying them!”
“You’re not usually that trusting!”
“I’m just trying to keep a cool head! We all knew from the beginning that any team could at any point run into complications that could interfere with their progress, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the worst! Of course, sometimes it does, I agree. In my experience, situations like this turn out to be either something completely harmless and we all laugh about it later, or it’s already too late by the time we start suspecting something has happened, and I do remember a few months ago when you told me your own experiences were very similar to mine in that regard. Either way, it’s getting dark outside and they’re too far away for a quick glance at their supposed locations; I don’t think we can do anything about the team at the moment, not without the risk of blowing our cover or getting in the kind of trouble that would be easily avoided in daylight. You know well enough how unpredictable that place is!”
“So what do you suggest?”
“I was going to wait until morning, give them time to sort out whatever it is they’re dealing with, and if they still don’t report in by then, to send two drones from the Foal Mountain teams to investigate.”
“How will they know where to look?”
“All teams have reported the locations of their base camps upon arrival to their designated areas. I’ll have my soldiers start from there, maintain frequent contact with me, and report everything they intend to do and everywhere they intend to go. If they so much as sneeze, I’ll know about it!”
“Fine, do that!” She neither looked nor sounded satisfied, but at least she seemed to trust my judgment on this. “I’ll want frequent reports too!”
“Understood!”
Morning came without bringing the belated report from the Everfree Forest, so I assembled both Foal Mountain teams and relayed the situation.
“So you want two of us to go find the Everfree team?” asked Carapace, a member of the other team.
“Yes. The rest of us will stay in Foal Mountain and attend to our usual tasks.”
“‘The rest of us’? Why aren’t you volunteering yourself?” grumbled Brutus of my own team.
“Who put you in command?” I hissed at him.
He scoffed but said nothing.
“I’ll go,” Jackal from the other team volunteered.
“Me too,” said Grim.
“No, Grim, you’re staying here,” I countered. “Brutus will go, since he’s so full of energy this morning!”
“I swear, one of these days I’m gonna-” he muttered, walking away from us.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” he shot back.
“Any questions?” I looked at the others.
There were none.
“Good then! Jackal and Brutus, the Everfree team’s base camp is in a ravine spanning mid-forest, you can’t miss it; start from there! Carapace and Vermin, keep looking for Thorax as if nothing has happened! Grim, you’ll be patrolling the area around the command base while I’m at the communicators. Remember, anything out of the ordinary is to be reported, especially you two heading to Everfree! I want to know every step you make!”
I got yessir’s and understood’s from everyling except Brutus, who just rolled his eyes. Then they left to their tasks.
A communicator lit up a couple of hours later.
“Reporting already?” I asked Jackal and Brutus.
“We found the Everfree team’s camp, but no sign of the hunters,” said Jackal.
“There kind of is, actually,” Brutus corrected him. “Something we found before the actual camp, but it’s close to it, and anyway, we found the camp while looking for a safe place to report this find from.”
“Well, what is it?”
“There’s some disturbed ground almost at the edge of the ravine, and destroyed bushes, suggestive of battle. We weren’t going to give it much thought initially with all kinds of beasts that could have left such a mess, but then Jackal noticed these lying about.” He held up half a helmet and a couple of broken spears. Changeling battle gear, I realized. “Something must have attacked them. We don’t know what, but if I had to guess, I’d say timberwolves.”
Great. Absolutely wonderful! Chrysalis was going to be properly thrilled to hear the news!
“If you’re right about it being timberwolves, then our team is most likely dead,” I agreed. “You’ve seen the area. How recent does the... damage… look like?”
“It couldn’t have happened this morning, Sir. I’m pretty sure they were dead by the time we were expecting their report.”
At least I hadn’t left them stranded by opting against sending backup immediately. But what could have happened? My proposed roster for the Everfree team hadn’t been altered; I knew their records had suggested well-trained and resourceful fighters, perfectly capable of dealing with the many perils of Everfree! That was the very reason why I’d assigned those three soldiers to that area! What had gone wrong? Had they been overwhelmed by too large a pack to handle? Had they been exposed to something in the environment that had hindered their combative abilities? Had they been distracted? By what? And an unlikely option, but not an entirely impossible one: had their records been exaggerated?
“See if you can find out more about what happened,” I commanded. “Chrysalis might want to send another team there, and I don’t want a repeat of this if they don’t know what to expect! But don’t risk your own safety for it! I’d rather be left with a mystery than with two more dead soldiers! Understood?”
“Yes, Sir!” they said in unison.
“Good. Report if you find something, collect any gear they might have left there that’s still undamaged enough to be useful to ponies, and be back by sundown!”
I heard from them again after another couple of hours.
“Sir, we didn’t find anything really useful in that area, and we’re still inclined to suspect timberwolves, but we took a slightly different route back and, well, there’s something curious here. We don’t think it has anything to do with our lost team, but we figured you might want to know about it anyway.”
“I’m listening.”
“There’s this strange hollow tree here, turned into a hut for someone to live in. It’s got weird decorations too. They remind me of some I saw in passing in Zebrica on one of my previous missions.”
“Our infiltrators in Ponyville already reported a zebra living in the Everfree Forest. She’s a shaman of sorts, and mostly harmless by the sound of it. If that’s all-”
“It isn’t, Sir. We only took a quick look around when we realized no one was home, purely out of interest and the off-chance that Thorax might have hidden there, and we were about to leave when one of the hundreds of jars on the shelves caught Brutus’ eye, and get this: there’s two labels on the same jar, one that says ‘healing ointment’ and one that says ‘changeling revealer’.”
“A what?! Are you sure you didn’t misread it?”
“We’re sure, Sir. The writing is as legible as can be. Basically, we were wondering-”
“You wanted to know what to do with it,” I finished Jackal’s sentence. “I suppose you were smart enough not to mess with anything?”
They nodded.
“Are you still in the hut?”
“No, we found ruins of some old castle nearby.”
“That jar, if its contents are what the labels say they are, could be valuable to us. Do you still have it?”
“We left it in the hut. We thought the zebra might notice it missing if she returned while we were reporting this.”
I had to agree it had been a smart thing to do.
“You think you could go back there and see if this ‘changeling revealer’ is the ointment itself or an object hidden inside it? And, whatever it is, can you bring it with you in something that wouldn’t be missed? If it’s the ointment, don’t take too much in case the zebra knows how much of it there’s supposed to be!”
“We’ll do that, Sir!”
Once they were back with their loot, which had turned out to be the ointment iself, I reported to the hive.
“What took you so long?” Chrysalis snapped at me immediately.
“The situation was developing gradually so I decided it would be better to give you a full report when we’ve sorted things out.”
“And?”
“I have some bad news and something I’m not sure whether to consider good or bad.”
She raised a questioning eyebrow.
I told her about the dead team. She would have pulled my fangs out and driven them into my eyes for it if we were in the same room, and it took all my persuasion skills to convince her that it had already happened by my last report to her and that I couldn’t have done anything to prevent it! In the end, she decided to send another team like I’d predicted, even if Thorax wouldn’t have been expected to survive in such an environment.
Then I told her about the peculiar potion that Jackal and Brutus had discovered by chance.
In a flash, her fury about the lost team was replaced by curiosity that seemed to have drowned any lingering misgivings about my handling of the incident. I could almost hear the gears in her head turning: if this really was what the label had claimed, we could study it and maybe find a way to counter its effects, or to use it against our enemies! At the very least, the knowledge of this substance’s effects would be invaluable! But we would have to know more, and I was pretty sure Chrysalis would make studying this a priority!
“You said they brought some of it with them?”
“They did.”
“Guard it with your life! I’ll send a team to bring it to the hive right away!”