The dark of the night gave way to the first rays of the sun.

                "Finally," I muttered much to myself.

                Drops of rain scattered the rays to produce a brilliant kaleidoscope of colours on my Mech's ferroglass windshield. I felt the warmth of the sun and finally the chill went away. The chill; it had been following me for these few rainy nights. And on Bar-2 Pharhat, night lasts 72 Terran hours while daytime just lasts for 12 hours. Plenty of time to sleep, I'd thought when I was first assigned to this backwater world outside of the Periphery. What a joke, I snorted, I've hardly got any sleep ever since –

                "Hey Lieutenant, it's finally day. Maybe we'll see less of those mercenaries now."

                Jolted from my daydreaming (or more like night-dreaming), I cleared my throat responded to Sergeant Trisha.

                "Daytime or not, keep your eyes open. The Hellhounds will probably be thinking that way too and might try to attack once more, when we're off-guard. Stay sharp –"

                I yawned, and obviously Trisha heard it.

                "Sure thing, sir. But we're all dead beat, sir, especially you. Couldn't we stand down for a few hours? Take a break. We won't fight well if we're yawning all the time, would we?"

                "We're down to less than a lance of Mechs, Trisha. You know it. We'll need all the firepower we can get to repulse any first attack by the Hellhounds; otherwise we won't have any chance to repulse a second attack. Nap in your Mech. That's it."

                "Yes, sir."

                No mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Trisha was still quite green, even after surviving the last two engagements we had with the mercenaries Hellhounds recently. She wouldn't understand how fluid battles tend to be – a Gauss slug could slice off the head of her Enforcer in a split second and then we would be down to only three Mechs. We needed to have the initiative in this battle. In our last engagement with the Hellhounds, we succeeded in driving off a force of 6 Mechs but we lost Jennings and Clara. That really hurt our morale. Now I'm doing my best to keep the morale up, and with daylight returning, spirits were coming back up. Thank goodness.