And then there were none

It had been weeks since we'd heard anything at all about the remains of the Loyalist platoon who'd been abandoned. For months they'd been living in the outback, moving between remote bases set up in abandoned mining installations or ore storage bunkers. Without resupply and given Hale's acute lack of surface resources, they'd taken to raiding town or outlaying settlements for food and water.

And now it's stopped. General'd put some effort into tracking them down and eliminating the remaining threat but had come up mostly empty. Like previous efforts, he'd found the remains of several of their camps and indications that only a few of them remained alive. Unfortunately, he didn't manage to find them. Since, even then, the raids had become little more than a nuisance we didn't pursue further.

It seems that Entropy finally won the battle with the Loyalists for us.

One of the mining teams checking out a remote facility found the bodies of three recently deceased Loyalist soldiers. While we could never be entirely sure, it seemed entirely likely they were the last of their unit. The long running annoyance with a rogue Black Ops team was finally done.

Being civilized folk, we gave them appropriate last rights and buried the bodies. Annoyances or not, they'd been soldiers and deserved that much. Their idents would be going home on the next Alliance transport heading coreward. Small consolation their families though. Small consolation to the people they'd hurt.

I'd been in Black Ops myself. I knew the mindset and the level of loyalty to the 'cause' instilled in the men and women who fell into that life. When you started to question the ethics of what you were doing you either got out, or got dead. I'd gotten out. But you never really left that world. You could change though. You could learn to shed some light into a very dark world, but the memories stayed with you forever.

Were we finally done with the Loyalists? Who knew. It was possible one or two of them were still alive out there in the Back Forty. It was even possible that some of the original unit had made it off world. It's not like our Customs folk were overly thorough in checking what came in and out. But, for now at least, it seemed that particular threat was past. At least locally.

The Loyalists were still a factor in Alliance politics. There were still MP's who aligned themselves with the Hardliners, and there were still noises about 'suppressing' the more vocal supporters of Independence on the Rim. While our Loyalists were no longer a threat, the overall issue was still there.

We'd still have to be vigilant.