Explosions shook the night, just a few streets over from Tarlton's position. "They must be huge," he thought to himself. "I can still feel the shockwave, even inside my power armor."

A few feet away, his HUD readouts told him that Kaspersky was still working on getting that Goliath up and running, while Dr. Ashling worked on patching up it's unfortunate pilot. Once again, as he had every ten minutes for the last hour, he put down his rifle and tried their squad radio. At the sight of his movement, Ashling looked up.

"Seriously, Leonard, give it up. Northwest Outpost hasn't responded for almost three hours, and without the Lieutenant's ID codes, we can't access command frequencies. Get some rest, man. God knows we'll need it."

Kaspersky jumped down from the cockpit of the Goliath, the only one of the three not in combat armor.

"I'm with the Doc on this one. Get some sleep. I won't be done with this hunk of junk for at least another hour and a half."

Tarlton raised his helmet's visor, looking at the faces of his squadmates without the safe wall of glass between them.

"I'm fine," he sniffed. "I'm practically swimming in stims- I won't need to sleep for another twelve hours at least. I still say that we leave this twisted hunk of metal to the Zerg and try to push back to the front without it."

"That amount of stim use is unhealthy, as you well know." Ashling replied. "And have you forgotten how we lost the lieutenant? The only reason that we don't have Zerg fliers all over us is that this area of the city is mostly abandoned. The front may only be a mile or two away, but we can't make it on foot."

"At this rate, we may be royally screwed anyway. I can't even get this thing to turn on, much less activate it's missile launchers- which seem to be in pretty bad shape by the way. So get some damn sleep. If we find ourselves with Zerg up to our necks, you need to be able to shoot straight.", the squad's engineer answered petulantly, before turning back to her machine.

Tarlton thought for a moment, before responding to Ashling. "Alright. But if you get the chance, check the radio. I'll have my proximity alarm on, and linked into your suits. If any Zerg come within so much as a mile, I want to be awake for it."

Ashling nodded grimly, and went back to treating the Goliath pilot. The pilot's dogtag was missing, and his left shoulder was ripped to pieces, probably from the same Zerg attack that had shredded his walker's canopy. He was still alive, but unconscious. Tarlton sat back down, and closed the visor on his helmet, shutting down the dozens of bright lights that made up his HUD for a few moments of precious sleep. It had been a long day. The Dominion was losing, and losing badly. That much was clear, though practically everything else was chaos. When the Zerg had first hit Augustgrad, most of the Marines were confident, somehow, that the Swarm could be repulsed. Out of the whole of his unit, only Tarlton had ever faced down the Zerg before- he knew exactly what they were in for, and unless the Emperor had some sort of great plan up his sleeve, this city was going to become the tombstone of the entire Dominion marine corps. After almost a day of fierce fighting, the Zerg had managed to destroy their ground-to-space defenses, and push the military back into the city of Augustgrad itself. Tarlton's unit had been split up after some sort of huge Zerg worm burst from the ground beneath them, and started spitting out hundreds of fanged and clawed monstrosities. For a few hours, chaotic reports filed in from different squad leaders, trying to reunite the unit at Northwest Outpost, but none had been heard in an amount of time that was almost worrisome. From the sounds of the explosions, the Swarm had already moved past Northwest Outpost, and the fate of any squads that had managed to make it there could only be imagined. Any straggler squads were probably picked off by packs of Hydralisks or Zerg fliers before they made it to safety. The more Tarlton thought about it, the more likely it became that the three soldiers next to him were all that remained of their unit- and one of those wasn't doing so good. Right before he drifted off to sleep, he allowed himself an uncharacteristic dose of pity for the pilot. Looking at the wound, he was almost certainly going to lose his arm.