Chapter 2
After we had rendezvoused near what remained of the tank (which honestly wasn't much), we examined the attack more closely than we did during our adrenaline-pumped scramble. Nothing more could be said about the tank itself, since nothing but tiny scraps of charred metal remained, but we decided that the first explosions we heard came from the northwest, and sure enough, as we headed towards the northwest, we saw more and more large craters in the ground. What we couldn't figure out was how it knew which direction to go to reach us. It was obvious it wasn't attacking the main part of the battle, because it didn't know exactly where to fire. It was taking random shots into the fog, looking for something. Looking for us. Rex decided we should head back to camp and form a plan before moving on.
Unfortunately, during the attack, we failed to notice the tank hit a lucky shot on our base camp. The entire thing was a huge crater with random pieces of equipment everywhere. Our long range communicator was history, so we couldn't contact anyone more than 50 meters away.
"Well, there goes our plan for backup..." Zan said with a sigh.
"We could always try short-ranging the fleet at the main battlefront," I suggested.
Manny shook his head. "It's too far," he said, "Our comms can't even reach 02, and he's supposed to be closer to us than the battle is...if he's still alive..."
"C'mon now," piped in 36, "Let's not lose hope on 02. He's the third lead of the Scouts . I'm sure he's fine wherever he is."
I agreed with Alex, but the mission came first. I planned on finding 02 if it was the last thing I did, but we had to figure out where that tank came from. I had a feeling it was only the beginning of whatever our superiors were fearing. Hell, I was starting to fear it, too. But whatever Helm sent us here to stop, we were going to stop it using whatever means necessary.
We gathered what we could at our camp (if you could call it that anymore) and tried to formulate the best plan we could, given the circumstances. Manny and Rex would try to communicate with the main force to see if any more strange inventions had found their way onto the battlefield. Alex and I would team up with Zan, since he didn't have a partner, and we would try to scout out where the tank had come from. We decided to get some rest before we started out, so we waited until the next day, though I doubt any one of us got a decent amount of sleep. I don't know about the others, but every little explosion that came from the battle put me on full alert in preparation of another Confederation surprise. I heard one of my teammates rouse slightly.
"Hey Ryan?"
It was Alex.
"What is it, 36?"
"What do you think we'll find out there?"
"I wish I knew, my friend. I wish I knew..."
As I suspected, in the morning no one looked like they had slept a wink. But that was OK. We were all battle-hardened soldiers trained (and in our case, bred) to withstand days of non-stop combat without sleep. Even so, I would've like my team to have been in prime condition, since none of knew exactly what we were up against.
We were still packing whatever we could into our lightweight backpacks on our armor. We were never coming back to this camp, or what remained of it after the explosion, so we wanted to pack up everything we could. Which included our handy vibroswords we used for hand-to-hand combat. Those puppies were from our basic melee weapon training, and polishing them was one of our favorite time-consuming things to do during our 62 days of boredom. Man, those things were shiny. After looking mine over a bit, I sheathed the sword in its simple, plasteel casing, and strapped it to my back. After we were all done searching for anything we could salvage, we met in the middle of the carnage.
"Alright!" I exclaimed, "This is it! Let's finish this mission so we can get off this God-forsaken ball of ice and rock."
"*Amen to that*" 185 mumbled. We had all had enough of this foggy, deserted ice planet.
"See you on the other side!" Zan told Manny and Rex. And with that, we were off.