Windblown grit drifted across Sayeeda’s helmet. Even at this speed the minute static charge was enough to keep the visor clear. The LAV roared up over the dune, briefly leaping into the air as it crested the rise. Neil poured the power to the fans and set them down on the far side without loss of speed or direction, where a less careful driver might have smashed them into the ground. The LAV roared down the other side of the dune, none the worse for wear. The tank, lacking the power to weight ratio of the light attack vehicle snorted over the rise at an angle before cutting back sharply to traverse the reverse slope.

When Sayeeda had envisaged the ‘poles’ of Hahn, she had imagined it would be cold, but the lack of axial tilt and the intensity of the star the world orbited rendered the place a slightly cooler desert, that was also radioactive. The four Highlanders, if Saxon could be given an honorary place, road in a light attack vehicle. It was a boxy vehicle with four drive fans mounted in attached nacelles. The sides of the vehicle sloped away from the fighting compartment and were made of layered tungsten steel ceramic armor, proof against most small arms and anything but a direct hit by anything short of a tank shell.  The vehicle was armed with three quad barreled plasma weapons, two mounted on the wings and one mounted forward. Taya had been give the forward facing weapon while Sayeeda and Saxon had the left and right guns. Taya had been very pleased with the apparently important assignment and Sayeeda hadn’t seen any point in telling her that the forward facing gun was the safest spot for a newbie. One rarely drove directly at a threat if one wanted to survive.

They had been pushing north for the better part of three days, or more accurately, three nights. They operated mostly at night for comfort and because the sophisticated sensors of the vehicles gave them an advantage in fighting in the dark. Canek’s column, two LAVs the tank and a pair of hover apcs were difficult for anyone to miss, they had spotted glimpses of other treasure hunters and the wild natives how lived in the blasted land, but so far they had kept a respectful distance. Not that it would be difficult to sneak up, true to Taya’s words the sensors were nearly useless outside visual range, which was very short in this broken landscape of dunes and rocky outcrops.

The landscape itself had an austere beauty to it. Long dunes of sand rippled across rocky plains that occasionally thrust up mesa like outcrops. Water here was even scarcer than on the rest of Hahn, with few oasis, even those they did see supported only twisted trees, warped by the unhealthy background radiation. What water the nomads used came from springs that bubbled up beneath the limestone mesas where ancient charcoal deposits provided some measure of filtration. Now and again the entrances to such cisterns could be spotted on infrared viewing, dark green swaths radiating a few feet from the mouth of small caverns and cracks in the bases of the rocky mesas. The column had stopped at a number of the larger peaks and bivouacked long enough for Canek’s people to plant sensor units on the high ground in a rough ring around the projected crash site. The sensor units were simple high powered models, designed to cut through the radiation, at least at reasonably short range. Canek calculated that the complete array would be able to sweep the wide area well enough to give them some idea of where the crashed starship might be found.

“Junebug,” Sayeeda’s helmet visor tagged the incoming transmission as gun 1, which was Taya’s station. She didn’t turn her head to look at the girl, but kept her eyes on her sector, empty and barren though it appeared. The comm channel slug was followed by an asterix, indicating it was locked and private.

“Go ahead,” Junebug replied mechanically. The long run had wrung them all out and the dull vibration of the lift fans was enervating even to veterans like Sayeeda Cyckali.

“So what happened with you and Neil back in the city?” Taya asked. Sayeeda only just resisted the urge to snap at the girl for clogging up the commo net with useless trivia but that was an old reflex and no one very pertinent to the present situation.  

“I told you, I got jumped by a couple of Canek’s goons,” Sayeeda replied.

“No, I mean before that.”

“Oh…,” she did look now, not towards Taya but down to the back of Neil’s head. It was bobbing up and down as he listened to some music, doubtlessly more of that retro trash of which he was so fond. Taya’s question wasn’t unreasonable, afterall she had seen Junebug and Neil go of to a private room together.

“He told me that he had romantic feelings for me,” she said in a neutral tone. Sayeeda hadn’t had time to process the information. She had a vague notion that Neil was viewing her as some kind of rebound from Woods even though that contradicted what he himself had said. 

“And?!” Taya asked, her excitement evident even over the two way link and its accompanying compression.

“Also he thinks Saxon has a thing for me,” Junebug relayed. Since that revelation she had done a little research. The data banks on the Highlander contained little information about Hex’s and their mating habits and what data nets there were in the city had little more than interspeices erotic holos, which while extremely enlightening on the subject of Hexagallion anatomy, were of limited use in determining their courtship rituals.

“What?!” Taya exclaimed so loud that she could be heard even over the roar of the fans. The helmet AI squashed the volume of the words in Sayeeda’s ears which resulted in an odd echo that Sayeeda subconsciously associated with screams of pain. 

“You don’t have a thing for Saxon do you?” Taya asked. The map which covered a quarter of Junebugs display in a transperent mask pulsed to draw her attention to it, then zoomed down to a close up of the terrain ahead. The last mesa in their sensor grid loomed before them, glistening in the moonlight.

“Taya,” Junebug replied.

“What?” the girl asked eagerly.

“Watch your sector.”