Unknown location, unknown time
Edward woke to the smell of smoke and dust and the chill of ice-cold metal against his bare skin, or so it felt. Raising his hand to his face, he rubbed his eyes open. Before he opened his eyes, however, he listened.
A sound, something he knew he'd never heard before almost anywhere in the Sovereignty's orbital space station: silence.
He opened his eyes, looking down at his naked body before glancing around the room. To his surprise, the lights were out, save for the eerie blue glow cast by the lights of the Reconstruction Tube he stood in. "A power outage… were we attacked?" he thought, glancing around the room. He stepped through the energy field that protected the delicately-controlled environment of the Tube's interior, immediately regretting his decision as he set his bare foot down on the freezing floor. "Holy shit!" he cried, leaping back into the warm interior of the Tube. "That's not supposed to happen…"
Cautiously poking his head back out of the Tube, he looked down the length of the hall at the other banks. Only two other Tubes were receiving power from their built-in emergency power reserves. Glancing to his right, he looked down at the floor and jumped back in fright from the frozen corpse laying on the floor, the feather-like ice crystals around his body only just beginning to melt. "Fuck me… Bill?" he thought, stooping down to observe the man's features, noticing the flash-frozen cup of dark brown liquid in his hand. "Waste of a perfectly good cup of coffee…" he muttered, shaking his head. "What the hell happened here? It's like an airlock gave out or something…"
He heard a feminine cough from down the hall that caught his attention. Glancing to the right, he found Charlotte staring back at him, poking her head out of her own Reconstruction Tube further down the hall. "The floor's freezing cold, Char, be careful," he said, looking back at his frozen friend on the ground nearby. "Don't get frostbite in your feet, 'cuz I'm no surgeon."
Suddenly, an idea popped into his head. "Hey, Char, take a peek to your right. Can you see the trans-mat pod?" Edward called. He watched as she poked her head out, craning her neck to try and catch a glimpse of the materials teleporter at the end of the hall. After a moment of looking around, she turned back to him and nodded silently.
"And is our stuff in there?"
She nodded once more.
"Alright. Close your eyes, I'm gonna make a run for it."
Waiting for her to disappear back into her Reconstruction Tube pod, Edward balled up his fists and silently cursed to himself before sprinting out of his own Tube, taking bounding leaps to keep his bare feet off of the freezing steel floor. Just as she had said, the materials teleporter, or "trans-mat" system was loaded with his own suit and gear as well as Charlotte's. Snatching up his own suit, he streaked back down to his Reconstruction Tube and stepped inside, taking a moment to hold his freezing toes in his hands to warm them up. "Thank god the data transfer for these finished before whatever the hell happened actually happened," he thought as he undid the chestpiece of his armor and unzipped the thick fabric jumpsuit, stepping into it and hastily zipping up. Donning the rest of his armor, he could feel the frozen metal sucking the heat from his body through the thick form-fitting jumpsuit underneath, but it wasn't long until the suit's life support system booted up. "The heating coils should take care of that," he thought as he strapped on the rest of his equipment to his armor.
Finished gearing up, he carried the rest of the equipment down to Charlotte, still waiting patiently in the Reconstruction Tube with her eyes closed. "Just like I'd found her six months ago," he thought. Realizing that she was just as naked as he had been, he stepped to the side of the Tube where he couldn't see her and held out her suit to her. "Come on, Char, get dressed. Let's go figure this shit out before it gets worse."
He felt the suit gently slip from his grasp as she took her outfit, leaving him to return to the trans-mat pod to fetch the rest of his gear. "Seriously glad these made it through, or I'd be in some deep shit," he thought as he picked up the long anti-materiel rifle and the small automatic pistol from the pod, their white-colored frames cool to the touch. Attaching the submachine gun to its magnetic hardpoint against his right thigh, he gently pulled the bolt of the long rifle halfway back, reassured by the sight of the pristine cartridge waiting in the chamber. "Good, that's what I needed to see," he thought, pushing the bolt forward once more. It wasn't long until Charlotte stepped out of the Tube in her infiltrator suit, her lengthy plasma rifle and satchel of gear strapped to her back.
"Now, question is," Edward thought, "…do the doors work on emergency power?" Reaching the door at the far end of the hall, he slipped his ID keycard into the reader next to the door, but the device didn't respond. "I guessed that would be the case…" he thought. Looking around for an alternative, his eyes came to rest on the blue lights emanating from the Reconstruction Tubes he and Charlotte had emerged from. "I guess we can steal one of the emergency battery banks from one of those, but I thought even the doors had backup power banks of their own… Yeah, that's what we'll do."
Withdrawing a small multi-tool from his engineer's pouch, he began dismantling the card reader's housing until he was able to lift the panel completely free of the wall, revealing the thick layering of wires hidden in the metal walls. "One of these would have powered the door from a reserve bank, but maybe it was damaged…" he thought, squinting in the dimly-lit darkness as he dug around among the endless wires, looking for any signs of a broken connection.
Unable to find anything wrong with the wires, Edward looked back to Charlotte, about to ask her to give him a hand, but instead found her waiting with two wires in her hand trailing away from one of the two illuminated Reconstruction Tubes. "Didn't waste any time on that, did you?" He joked, gratefully accepting the wires. "At this rate, I'm going to be out of a job!" Charlotte simply nodded in response, the glow of her helmet's visor glowing in the darkness. Flipping his small multi-tool open to expose the pliers tool, he reached into the jungle of wires inside the wall and began digging through once more, until he found the wire he thought he was looking for. With a few quick snips of the pliers' wire-cutter blades, the ends of the wire came free, their copper innards exposed.
"Here goes nothing," he thought, holding the two live wires Charlotte had handed him up to the newly exposed wire ends. With the spark of arcing electricity between the wires, the panel of the dangling card reader came to life, blinking red with a warning message. Suddenly, the door unlocked with a mechanical click, and two slots on either panel of the thick blast door dropped down, each painted with yellow and black stripes. "Whoever developed that backup power system needs to be fired," he thought, shaking his head in disgust. "The door doesn't unlock if the panel loses power, which doesn't have a local backup source? That's as dumb as it gets."
Placing both of his hands on the handle, he pulled hard to the left until the heavy door began to slide, fighting the stiff unpowered hydraulics with every muscle in his body. Bright light and a blast of hot, dusty wind filled the room as he pulled the door open, forcing him to shield his eyes for a moment.
Finally locking the door open, he peered outside, shielding his eyes until his visor tinted itself to spare his eyes from the pounding sunlight. Outside, beyond the shredded wreckage of the hallway just beyond the blast door, he could see a plateau-dotted desert stretch far to the horizon. Edward stepped out onto the peach-colored stony ground, looking up at the bright orange sun in the sky above. "Holy shit, that thing's huge," he thought, his visor dimming as much as it could to counteract the bright light filtering through his parted fingers. "Definitely isn't Auraxis… that's got to be a red giant, definitely not the G-class star Auraxis orbits around…"
Charlotte joined him at his side, looking around. "This definitely isn't northern Indar, Char," Edward said, turning to walk around the remains of the Reconstruction Tube hall. "I don't know what happened… well, I take that back, I sorta do," he added, stopping dead in his tracks. "Bill and Jimmy, they were frozen solid. That means all their heat radiated away, so the room must have been isolated from the space station, meaning they wouldn't have access to power to keep the heaters running, or maybe there was an air breach... It happened too fast for them to even react, but that's space for you. It must've been the artifacts in the data relay, but I'm not sure how… I tested it myself beforehand and it worked just fine for data transfer… Anyway, first thing's first, shelter. We don't have any food other than those flash-frozen coffee beans, and no water to speak of. Best chance of finding that," he said, pointing toward a dusty mountain range rising high above the horizon far behind the building, "…would be in some crevice of those mountains, where a natural watershed might form. Might find some animals to hunt, too. Any other suggestions?"
Charlotte shook her head.
Edward nodded. "Alright, well, if you've got everything you need, then we'll get going."
"Damn, not a drop of water anywhere," Edward thought, looking down into the valley to his left in hopes of catching sight of a glistening stream in the citrus-orange evening light. The thought that they could very well be stranded on a nearly waterless planet nagged at him in the back of his mind, but for the entire day of walking, he'd done his best to ignore it. By now, though, he couldn't begin to ignore the dryness of his throat. "I have a grand total of two hydration chemical packs, but there's not a chance in hell I'm using one of those yet until I hit day two," he thought, rummaging through his armored tool pouch for the small grey airtight packets of powdered crystalline chemicals until he found them, reassuring himself. "Toss them in a bottle or other container and mix the crystals, and they react with the atmosphere to produce water, hydrogen gas, and trace amounts of chlorine for purification. The wonders of modern chemistry."
Suddenly, he felt a tap on his shoulder. Stowing the packets in his pouch once more, he looked over to his partner, who was tapping the side of her head. Understanding her message, he stopped what he was doing and stood dead still, straining to hear whatever she might have heard.
After a few seconds of listening, he finally heard it over the breeze: the thundering stomp of a MAX suit, somewhere farther along the winding stone ravine. "Goddamn, you've got some good ears, Char!" he muttered quietly, giving her a thumbs-up. Hoisting the heavy rifle from his back, he took a moment to check that the scope of his rifle was ready to go before taking his next step, rifle low and at the ready as he proceeded along the gently sloped mountainside.
Hiking higher up the mountainside, it wasn't long until he found them – rather, Charlotte pointed them out before he had even thought they were within line of sight. Just beyond her fingertip, he saw them: a pair of Terran Republic soldiers, a machine-gun-toting heavy assault trooper leading a MAX suit soldier, hiking along the bottom of the ravine some two hundred yards down the mountainside from them. They were headed in the opposite direction for some reason, toward the relatively open desert he and Charlotte had come from. "How the hell did they get here…" Edward muttered, slowly crouch-walking over to the nearest boulder for cover.
Charlotte quickly joined him at his side, shouldering her purple-tinted plasma rifle as she braced herself against the boulder. "Approach?" she asked quietly, her soft voice tainted by the buzz of the electronic speakers built into the bottom of her facemask.
"I mean, you're the one with the cloaking suit, here, so…" Edward replied with a shrug. After a moment's thought, however, he shook his head. "No, I take that back. Here, give me your gun," he said, shifting his grip on his own rifle for her to take. "You've seen me use this thing before, I know you know how to work it. As much as I'll be kicking myself for it a few minutes from now when they pull their guns on me, we could probably use the help, so I'm going to go talk to them. They probably realized how fucked we all are a few hours ago, I imagine, so maybe they'll be reasonable."
Nodding, Charlotte took his rifle, handing him her own. "Be careful," she said.
Edward looked down at the purple, alien-looking rifle she handed him. "Hey, I helped build this thing. If I break it, I'll fix it," he said. Only her silent stare replied, until his lips parted into a smile at his own silly joke. "Yeah, I'll be careful."
Attaching the weapon to his back, he drew his auto-pistol from its hardpoint against his leg and began his trek down the mountainside, watching his opponents like a hawk as he went. "If they so much as hear a footstep, I'm wide out in the open and fucked five ways to Friday," he thought as he jogged to the bottom of the ravine, well behind the two enemy soldiers. He could feel his heartbeat rise with every step as he slowly closed the distance between himself and the hulking MAX suit in front of him, each stomp of the heavy exosuit ringing out in the ravine like a small bomb going off. Within minutes, he was close enough to hear the two soldiers talking.
"-don't have a fucking clue, but we need to find an open place to put up a beacon to orbital HQ and get the rest of our squad down here, so for the time being, take whatever you intend to say for the next half hour or so and shove it up your ass, private," a female voice barked. The MAX soldier raised his exosuit's heavy arms in a brief shrug. "Sure, captain," the armored soldier replied with a sigh.
"A captain? Leading an individual squad? That's not the typical order of TR chain-of-command, back when I served with them… must be some special commando squad or something," Edward thought, gently raising Charlotte's sniper rifle to his shoulder. Checking that the safety was off, he took cover behind a boulder and propped up his rifle against the rock, taking steady aim. Taking a deep breath, he peered down the magnified scope of the rifle and took aim at the infantry lady's head. "Don't move!" he called, his finger tightening on the rifle's trigger.
Like a startled jackrabbit, the enemy captain dove for the nearest cover behind another rock as the MAX unit lumbered about, both arms raised as the soldier inside searched for the source of the voice as he slowly backpedaled away. "Come out with your hands up or your MAX unit loses his head, captain!" He called once more, tracking his aim to the stone the soldier had taken cover behind.
"Are you who they call Moses?" the lady called out from behind cover. The MAX soldier glanced back at his commanding officer in a moment of confusion, his shoulders dropping. "For fuck's sake, cap, you're going to get me shot again!" he called to her, his voice amplified by the speakers beneath his helmet. "Fuck off, private!" The lady replied.
"How the hell do they know my callsign?" Edward thought, tuning out the two Terran soldiers' bickering. "Maybe they have a vendetta against me… this could get messy." Re-focusing his aim on the MAX suit soldier, he slowly stood up from behind his own boulder, catching the armored soldier's attention. Still holding the rifle to his shoulder with his left hand, he cautiously waved to the Terran with his right. To his relief, the MAX unit returned the wave. "So maybe it's just the captain that hates me," he thought.
"Well?" the lady yelled, still not daring to come out from cover. "Are you Moses, yes or no?"
"No, now get out here before I kill your squadmate!" Edward said, giving the MAX unit a thumbs-up. The MAX soldier nodded, turning to face the rocky outcropping. The soldier stomped off toward his commander, disappearing behind the rocky outcropping. "Private, what the-" Edward could hear the lady say before the screeching sound of metal on metal rang out, cutting the lady off. A few more moments passed before the MAX suit soldier stomped back out into the open, his fellow soldier hanging limply from the grips of his left arm wrapped around her torso. His mouth hanging open in surprise, Edward strapped the rifle to his back and quickly regained his composition before jogging over to the Terran soldier.
"Always wanted to do that," the armored soldier said, extending a hand toward Edward. "The name's Tony Smalls, and this angry cunt here is Sofia Izetta, my CO."
"Edward Saller. I've heard a thing or two about a lady named Izetta, so I suppose this is the one and only?" he replied, taking the soldier's extended hand and letting the suited soldier shake it for him, lest he break a wrist trying to resist the suit's powerful hydraulics.
"Oh yeah, she's a hardass who takes it out on the recruits when she doesn't get her evening pleasure, if you catch my drift," Tony said.
Edward shook his head. "Yeah, I don't miss those days in the slightest. By the way, if she mentions Moses again," he added, nodding toward the unconscious lady, "…you have my full support if you decide to knock her lights out again."
Tony let out a short chuckle before catching his breath. "No joke, you're who she calls Moses?" he asked. "Man, cap's got a shit-list longer than my arm, and you're number one, my friend. What'd you do to earn that honor?"
"Beats me. You guys found any water or food yet?"
"Yeah, found a small stream about half a mile up the ravine that drops off into some deep fuckin' pit in the ground. You know what the hell is going on here?"
Edward shrugged. "Sorta? Let me go grab Charlotte, I'll tell you on the way to that stream."