The western sky had begun to lighten as the surviving conscripts made their way towards their objective. The ecological disaster around them grew starker with the extra sunlight, the landscape must once have been a forest but the changes that wide scale mining had wrought had killed all but the hardiest trees, leaving only dead fungus encrusted tree boles reaching towards the sky. Some trees, those hardiest and best adapted to the new conditions still sprouted leaves, but they were twisted and unwholesome looking, as though they had passed too close to a flame and begun to curl up in the face of the heat. The landscape itself had suffered as atrophied roots could no longer combat the vicious downpours that came each rainy season. Long gulleys were cut back to the bedrock where rain swept debris and detritus into pockets in the rock substrate, piling up impressive conglomerations of dead wood and small rocks.

Going was slow as the platoon slid down the sides of the erosion cut trenches and climbed up the other side. The loose soil was often to pliant to provide much in the way of hand holds and they frequently had to divert along the dry watercourses to find a place where the ascent was easier. Kyra was glad that they hadn’t landed during the rainy season as she was sure progress would have been completely impossible. Even with the suppressor chip in her neck she could feel the ambient mixture of fear and excitement. Each time a distant explosion shook dust from the trees she could feel a momentary spike of fear and then a trough of relief. The gunfire seemed more sporadic and less intense than it had during the landing, perhaps because the heavy guns that had been firing at the drop ships were now silent. What rifle fire they did hear was distant, and uncertain in its direction given the broken nature of the landscape.

They moved in a loose skirmish line that buched and expanded as the terrain demaded. Kyra stayed close to Edwin on the right end of the line while Reyes commanded they left. She didn’t know if the formation offered any advantage other than to keep them from bunching together where an artillery shell or machine gun burst could cut them all down, but truthfully she didn’t much care. After an hour or so her only focus became the defile ahead of her and she focused only on crossing each of the jagged cuts in the earth. 

When Edwin’s hand fell on her shoulder she started and looked up for the first time in hours. They had reached a small ridgeline covered with shorty scrubby bushes with pale blue leaves. The landscape on the other side of the ridge was markedly different, though no less depressing. Instead of the knife cuts and tree stumps there was a flat rocky plain  Kyra was momentarily surprised to see such a difference in terrain but then realised what had happened. Heavy earth movers had scraped the ground bare, bulldozing the top soil into the valleys. Now she knew what to look for she could see the lines of discolored, vaguely purplish earth, where the spoil had been sprayed with chemical plasticizer to turn it into a kind of poor man's concrete, presumably to prevent it from being swept away by the rains. Perhaps two hundred meters from the ridge lay a large compound. It was the size of a small town and surrounded by a thick burm of plasticized earth several meters high.  Vast derricks reached into the sky from the center of the drilling station like the armatures of artificial mountains. The great rusted towers thrummed with power, the drills and pumps working ceaselessly to plumb the depths of the poisoned world. Periodically jets of flame or steam burst from outlet valves with a rush audible even from the distant ridge. A pipeline of rusted metal stretched off over the horizon, carrying whatever they were mining to its distant collection point. 

Kyra tried to think back to the briefing but other than the word ‘drilling station’ didn’t remember very much. More for something to do than any real notion of what she was doing, she lifted her binoculars to her eyes and dialed up the magnification to X64. The burm was a real barrier, studded with watch towers ever thirty meters or so, spindly looking cheap constructions, with sand bagged platforms atop them. There were two large gates on the walls perpendicular to the ridge, each of which was protected by a block house. At the southern entrance an armored vehicle of some kind was parked, its turret pointed off to the south though clearly not aiming at anything in particular.

“We are supposed to capture this place?” Kyra whispered to Edwin, her quiet an instinct rendered completely unnecessary by the rumble of the heavy machinery at work at the base.