Suiting up and squeezing himself into the Minvera Force's uniform was nothing Harald hadn't become used to many months ago, but doing so with the definitive info that this was not a drill felt quite different still. Slightly nervously, his fingers slid over the keyboard of his laptop giving the next input that would keep the system busy just long enough for him to check his weapon. His secondary weapon, that was. He considered this laptop to be the primary one and the pistol a tertiary stopgap measure, but just maybe. So it was always good to give his digital assistant some maintenance and cleanup before departure, but it was even better to make sure that none of these updates had turned things into a binary mess accidentally. This was not Microsoft where one could almost expect that to happen, but still...

Software really wasn't Harald's primary concern at this point however -- it was trigger-happyness. This was essentially some sort of first contact at least on their side and they would go in not even trying to stretch out a hand, but with the firm intent of fixing up any alien's lead deficit ? Sure, hostile action against a cargo ship was not nice to say the least, but the mere thought of an alien species capable of interstellar travel coming to Earth just to attack some big, rusty bucket running on Diesel fuel was no way less horrifying in its own respect. It was just way too ridiculous not to blatantly point at some much bigger affair behind it. Either that or somehow these aliens were brainless creatures who had somehow managed to miss the fact that the universe held all the resources one could possibly need in abundance without coming to Earth. The only thing that made Earth so unique was the presence of life, but killing that would take this aspect away which made no sense either...

---

At least the pilots had not to stress their minds about that, he thought. They would be out of this thing soon enough, but that was assuming that they would make it there in the first place. Harald didn't know whether anybody else of their team had any real idea about handling an aircraft, but he certainly hoped that the guys in the cockpit really knew what they were doing. Otherwise they all should have come with a lifejacket and some extra bait for distracting the sharks instead. Oh, and speaking of sharks, if [i]he[/i] was ever to lead an alien invasion, he'd do it exactly this way and go submarine instead of keeping UFOs roaming in the sky. Humanity knew fewer things about the ocean floor that it did about the moon. If these aliens were already building a damn construction yard down in the Mariana's trench, science would likely not know anything about it yet.

UDO, 'unknown diving object'... The German operative remembered having heard of this in some old computer game.

Anyway, they would either find out something, die right away or come back with more or less empty hands. That was abundantly clear. Harald tried to take in the looks of his teammates as long as he'd still have the opportunity, but soon found out that the gear they all had to carry rendered this to be a quite difficult task. Some sort of anonymity had probably been considered the very least a positive side effect in the design process. At least Avalanche was easy enough to spot given the fact that he had just decided that deliberately risking open sparks in an aircraft was not against regulation.

[color=yellow]"I wouldn't say I was dragged out of a shithole to be honest. I would rather say that some other people's shitholes brought me here."[/color] Behind his face mask, Harald couldn't resist a sheepish grin at this point. Yet could he dare to openly blame U.S. government agencies for what they seriously dared to call 'IT security efforts' or would this be taken as an offense ? [color=yellow]"And I hope for you it's not an LNG carrier we're headed to or you won't even have an open deck to make proper use of your gun -- not the mention the danger of all the highly compressed gas itself. How many millimeters of steel can this thing punch through ?"[/color]