Blood and viscera showered Sayeeda, Neil and the vehicle as the corpse crashed to the ground behind them in a gory pile. In theory the static charge on Sayeeda's faceplate should have kept the fluid from touching it and obscuring her view but there were limits and gobets of bluish blood spattered across the front of her field of vision. Several louder thunks sounded from the back as piece of meat the size of apples pattered over the back of the jeep. Junebug made a half heated effort to sweep the blood from her face shield but it only served to smear the fluid further. Sighing she throttled down slowly before bringing the jeep to a halt and allowing it to settle to the moist sand of the riverbank.

"Well," she said judiciously, picking pices of meat off the passenger seat and tossing them over the side of the vehicle.

"Any one you walk away from I guess," she finished and took her helmet off to free her hair. The things blood already stank, although the smell was both different and more unpleasant than the familiar smell of human death. Whatever the native lifeforms where they clearly used some other substance for oxygen transport, perhaps cobalt or copper, but that apparently didn't stop it from smelling. Climbing out of the jeep she stretched her legs and looked around. They were parked on a broad sandy flat land that probably served as part of the river bed during flood. Here and there creeks, like the one that had come so close to ending thier little joy ride, snaked their way down to the main river, carrying run off from the walls of the valley. Patches of tough greenish yellow grass stuck up like hay in a half cut field and insects, small gnat like things with four sets of wings whirred around.

"Good shooting," she said, somewhat reluctantly, "I hope we dont have to deal with too many more of those things."

Using a shimmy cloth from her cleaning kit she managed to get the blood of her visor and fitted the helmet back onto her head, by chance the thermal overlay was still running.

"Weird..." she said as she caught a glimpse of an oddly dappled pattern at the end of one of the small feeder creeks. It wasn't anything unusual, just a grassy bend in a creek, but there was an odd cross hatching in infa red. Reaching up she toggled the helmet to millimetric radar, the distortion vanished.

"There is something weird at the end of the creek," she explained to a doubtlessly confused Neil.

"Lets check it out, we should probably let the engine cool down on this piece of shit, if we are going to keep it we need to talk about some serious overhalls," she said as they started walking away from the car, its engine still pining with differential cooling.

It was maybe fifty meters down the creek when it finally occured to Sayeeda what they were seeing. Camoflague netting. Not the at the market in millitary surplus stuff either, good stuff, not quite as good as they would have used in the armored but still of very high quality. It was pulled over something nestled in the corner of the creek. Junebug made a cover me gesture with her right arm and unslung her plasma rifle. Bringing the weapon up to her shoulder she moved low and fast across the sand flat to the netting, cranking up the thermal imaging gain just in case. She needn't have bothered.

"Son of a bitch," she said, straightening and relaxing as she looked down into the creek. Reaching down she tore back the netting, almost invisible even this close, to reveal a battered looking land-drifter much like their own. Whoever had left it had clearly taken pains to conceal the fact and he had gotten his hand on military grade disruption netting.

[@Penny]