Where was Mastina? Schadd looked over his shoulder; she had to have gotten away. But she wasn't right behind him. She had to have gotten away... right? There was no time to go back for her; no time to figure out exactly what had happened. Backwater needed to know what was coming. They needed to understand...
The flames of the vulture engine flashed as Schadd gunned the throttle. He had to get there! Hovering over the sandy dunes, he saw a military FOB. A siegetank, out of siege mode, sat in the dusty plains, with only a few units around to provide vision and support.
Schadd drove up. Opening up a comm link, he said,
"You guys need to pull back! There's..."
"Listen, we're just a bunch of survivors out here,"
Creature said back,
"Nothing to see here."
With that, he leaned up out of the tank and made a hand motion to cut the official coms.
Schadd nodded and turned off his radio link. Stepping out of the vulture, he walked over to Schadd, his adrenaline still pumping.
"Sir, there's... we were attacked!"
"By what?"
Creature asked.
"Aliens, sir, I'm sure of it. They were using some sort of..."
"Make sense man. I tell you, what you backwater rangers need is some good 'ole fashioned discipline. This unit's a mess."
"They got Krazy! I'm heading into the outpost to alert them of the situation,"
Schadd said.
"Got one of your boys huh? Well, we're not pulling back from any fight. It'll take some time, but we'll start setting up into siege mode! Boys, ready her up!"
"Sir,"
Schadd said,
"I really think you should pull back into the town. You're on your own out here."
Creature shook his head.
"Been a general for fifteen years, and you think I'm going to take orders from a pup? Go ahead and go into town, boy."
Frustrated, Schadd jumped back onto his vulture and began burning fuel on his effort to reach Backwater Station. Maybe Creature's plan would work... there was no reason to think there'd be a sieged tank out here, with only talk of survivors on the radio...
- - - - -
Mastina's vulture blasted forward, turned back, and she let loose a fragmentation grenade. Where the hell did Schadd go? She could micro whatever they threw at her.
But where was the enemy? Damn it, did they manage to burrow? Or was it DTs? What the hell had happened anyway? Whatever the case, she dropped a Spider Mine. No matter who or what it was, if they tripped that, cloaked or not, they'd be in for a world of hurt.
She had been so ready to micro too... But no, time to get going.
She sped down the mountain, and could see the trail of dust still from Schadd's vulture. She lowered her visor and tried to cut out of the way of his dust-wake. There was nothing fun about trying to hoverbike your way through a dust cloud, and it was an all too common problem. Better to go off-road.
But she wasn't familiar with this area, and her plan to take a shortcut through a lower gulch ended up being a dead end. Damn it! By the time she got back to the main road, the dust wake was gone, but so was any sign of Schadd. The day was getting long, too. Night was coming on.
And that's when she heard the gunfire. It was coming from the direction of Backwater Station!
As she made her way through the night, she saw some military outcropping. There was a siege tank... shot all to hell. Why? How? She stepped out of her vulture and made her way to the cockpit of the tank. Another corpse. She fished for the nametag. "General Edmund Creature."
It didn't make any sense. Who would shoot a Terran General? Was there some sort of insurrection?
With the three moons hovering overhead, and the stars of the night sky bright, Mastina turned her lights on bright. She didn't want to miss anything else along the way.
And there was something else. As she drove along, there was some elephant-sized automated turret. What the hell was this thing? What madman would design such a strange weapon? But as she hovered closer, she saw that it too was shot to pieces. Was this a manned or an un-manned turret? She circled the thing once, and then saw a bunker--flaming, clearly having suffered a significant attack. Walking past some unused fuel cans by the door, she wandered inside and found another poor corpse. "Chief Engineer Rory Irrelephant."
What a brutal and violent night! But what could have happened? Where were the signs of alien attack? All of these dead looked like they'd been shot.