[center][hider=Recommended Listening][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maJyoTpkj0E[/youtube][/hider][/center]The empty jump tanks and the heavy-gauge parachute cables fell to the ground, landing with [i]thuds[/i] inaudible in the cockpit and agitating an inert layer of moon-dust which the ravenous, shrieking winds then whisked away. Gan left them there to become Triton artifacts, buried under decades and centuries of such wind-storms as they refused to rust away; or the scrappers' and the salvagers' next meal as they hauled it away to a smelting plant. But leaving them there was still risky. The storm would not bury the refuse and the scrappers wouldn't cut it up and cart it out before a patrol found it, if the patrols wandered out this far from the base. Hopefully, they didn't. Hopefully they marched tighter circles around the quarry, to keep watch over their prey, and stick together through the storm.

Engaging in an evasive maneuver, Gan three-sixtied his surroundings. Fruitlessly. Maybe. The short field-of-view and the frizzling optics and the cloudy-white wall beyond the glass did little to persuade him that he hadn't been seen or happened-upon while he fell; but that being the case, he still belonged on the move, before a scout or [i]any[/i] kind of straggler came back with his buddies. He'd just have to trust OpInt, a decade-old map, and the split-second judgment of his commanding officer, wouldn't he?

At the least, the whirls of dust and soot would blur his tracks. And conceal his coming.

The empty tanks and the parachute faded deeper behind him with every thundering step from his hydraulic metal feet. Now only rock cradled them on his eastward journey. Rock and powder. The rookie had gotten the raw deal in all this, Gan realized; in her light, sporty, corvette-like little mech, she would arrive at the RV point minutes before him, and there she would wait, alone, unguarded. He, on the other hand, would arrive to an ally waiting for him. If she hadn't wandered off to make snow-angels, that is. Yeah, on the radio she'd been all "Roger, roger, roger," but whether she was paying attention the whole time, Gan would be first to find out. Then again, in the hangar she was rushing her pre-flight, too, seemingly hurrying or even skipping key systems checks. What if he was overthinking this, and she was just another glory-hound like that smirking, pompadoured prick, Strauss?

[i]Better than a space-cadet, I guess.[/i] At least a glory-hound, even if he bragged about it for months and months after, would pull Gan from a burning wreck when it came to that.

The thought of this—his Basilisk, charred and smoldering in the sub-oxygen atmosphere of this place—inspired Gan to double back again. After slowing the mech's forward momentum, he quickly backed up, and gave his hip joint a full 180 pivot; to catch any followers more subtly and quickly, of course, than if he had simply turned around. For another few minutes, he was satisfied. Surer that a smaller unit hadn't retreated into the fog to avoid being spotted, Gan righted his direction and his speed, again beelining to the RV point. Until another mech really did appear from the fog. It was ahead of him, having sat dead-still for so long that the quarry "snow" blustered from smooth piles clinging to its starboard leg and shoulder, its cold gun barrel; its entire right side. He zeroed in immediately, or at least as quickly as he could pivot. Aiming. Watching.

The mech didn't move, and showed no idling behaviors at all. The "snow" didn't shake away form its body as if from the rumble of an understressed reactor engine. Nor did little port flaps open and close with the various machinations of its coolant system. In death the thing was locked to stare north-westward, its back permanently turned from Gan's current position. He ventured closer.

"A Vitruvius?" he guessed just from its hulking, industrial shape. Getting closer and circling the thing affirmed this theory: someone had retrofitted it for war. The mining wheels at the ends of its arms were welded off, the stumps coupled to crude, blunderbuss-like gun barrels; on its shoulder, not a pivoting crane mount, but a wire-fed explosive launcher. As for the enemy, they had needed to drill through inches and inches of backplate to reach any of the critical pipelines or hydraulic valves ... but they'd done it. The digger-mech had bled all its coolant, Neptune-blue, through a circular gash bored into its flank. Various joints were also sprung, crimped, and crippled; maybe while bringing the enormous mech down. Maybe to make sure it wouldn't get back up.

With no sign of the pilot in the cockpit, the wound, or anywhere else, Gan turned himself around and hurried onward. More wreckage continued to tell this story on the way: these were smaller, more mobile ... more professional. The attackers which the gargantuan digger-mech had managed to pluck from the battlefield before they, too, hobbled it: tanks. APCs. A single mobile command unit. All of them scorched, empty, and dead, whistling as the wind jabbed through their many exit holes and blast craters.

When Gan crested a hill and saw a Talarius Fire Ant standing atop it, he would have been grateful first if not for having his thumbs over the caps guarding his trigger buttons. Damn it, the fog must've been getting to him; he could've [i]shot[/i] her!