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A few moments later, the radio crackled to life.
[Lt. Cooper]
"Angel-06 do you read? This is Heaven. What is your status?"
[Quaid]
"The site is secure and Beaufort has given his SitRep. Angel-09 is going to inspect the bodies. Over"
[Lt. Cooper]
"Affirmative. Keep an Eagle eye and hump it back here ASAP - Radiation is reaching high tolerance levels in eight hours. Over."
[Kingsley]
"Top. I have plotted the course of the Skullet rover - it appears that it has crossed over the dunes about two klicks from here towards a rocky escarpment. I don't see any return tracks. If we are on an ASAP mission, I think we should jump in our rides and make a bee-line after him."
McIntyre and Duff climbed back into the habitat. Duff pointed out the results of the shooting as well as the body of Johnson within the greenhouse. After thorough inspection, McIntyre concludes that the wound in Johnson's chest was caused from the inside out.
[McIntyre]
"Top, you had better come take a look at this." Within minutes, Quaid is standing over Duff and McIntyre.
"I think this wound was made from the inside out. I mean, look at the blood spatter-pattern - it's all over here, and here," he point out over the area, "but there is nothing from behind - where an exit wound would have splattered him."
"It's the strangest thing I have ever seen. Unless he swallowed a shaped charge, I don't know what could have done this to him." He conceded.
[Quaid]
"Alright. Duff, what else have you found here?"
[Duff]
"The only other information that seems to have any relevance is these maps," he took them back into the common room where he had found the maps laid out, "They seem to have plotted a course from here to here." He
pointed out a position on the map. The origin was the habitat, while the
destination was about 8 kilometers away - and away from the safety of the colony...
[Quaid]
"Alright boys, let's mount up."
A half hour of following the Skullet rover tracks, the Marines and Duff find Skullet's destination. It was a wide plane near the edge of the Devil's Abyss crevasse. His rover was parked in a haphazard position on the top of a small dune. The far side of the dune was the plateau of the Abyss.
Immediately, the first squad jumped into action. The small force maneuvered into the traditional straight-V deployment. Kingsley and McIntyre took point, while rest of the squad fanned out behind as not to foil the attention of the motion tracker carried by McIntyre.
The team creped up the slope, cautious of any movement as well as the vehicle being a decoy. They reached the cab to find the side hatch open and the cabin empty. Several of the internal storage bins had been opened and their contents spilled out onto the deck. It appears that Skullet was
desperately searching for something in great haste and not caring what was disrupted in that search.
[Lutes]
"Top! I have one target on the plateau and, a ahh, looks like an escape pod. Half a click down slope five degrees to port." He explained.
The entire team took up positions on the hard rocky dune, peaking over top. Kingsley, the only one with an M56 lay on his back with the gun twisting over his head and the rise. He used the focusing lens within his helmet to acquire the target without exposing himself. He would be the last to leave in a fire-fight. He was the pig-man, first in and last out of any
combat-sit. He was the team's base of fire and would lay it down while the rest of the squad were to evacuate.
The helmet HUDs brought up an enhanced image of the target Lutes had pointed out. The helmet cameras could only zoom about three or four times, but even that was of poor quality. Leave it to the marines - recipients of the best gear supplied by the lowest bidder produced for the lowest prices...
The image was not a pleasing one. A crashed escape pod lay partially buried in the loose rusty soil. A parachute deployed for several meters behind it. About fifty meters beyond the parachute lay a body in an e-suit.
Who was in the suit couldn't be ascertained from this distance, but whoever it was lay motionless...
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