Boone grunted into his helmet as the shockwave made his shields flicker and flattened his body further into the thankfully soft surface of the sand he had landed upon. He kept his body angled to shield the precious railgun, every atom of his being ringing like a bell.

The armour was sturdy however, matter-forged plates and dual-layer shielding absorbing the danger-close detonation and saving the sniper from being mangled.

His helmet saved his hearing from being momentarily deafened, so the sniper heard the sound of his friend yelling at him over comms through the soft dunk-donk of stray shards of sandstone bouncing off the matter-forged headgear.

"Craig, get yer arse out from under that thing! It ain't yer bloody lover man!"

An expanding ball of nuclear heat and sand obscured the titan for a few moments before it's head was propelled out the side of the dust-cloud and slammed into the canyon wall with an almighty crack of fracturing stone.

Ulysses got up from where the titanic eruption of the beast had thrown him, crouching low with his sand-strewn duster pooling around his bent knees. He checked his Guppy, slotting out the now empty pack and loading in a fresh container of high-velocity Overcharged 4mm EC from his chest-rig.

He rose and strode in the direction of where he had lost sight of Joshua and the alien he had been fighting. Off in the near distance the worm roared, opening its mouth to display the back of its curved gullet, a darkness within like the mouth of a deep cavern. The mouth of a cave….

The Courier's Dream.

"Where are you, Burned Man?" he cast about him as he spoke into comms, looking for his former commander, "Your legend shines still, bright as the fire inside. You are not fated to die here."

Over the thrashing of the giant worm, worse than any denizen of the Divide, he focused his senses. Somewhere in the dust cloud that roiled around him, already settling, he felt the shuddering of feet close at hand.

"I lie no-where, old friend," a voice hissed through gritted teeth and still-transmitting comms, "I shall rest when the work of the day has been sufficient."

Joshua came reeling from the dust, limping slightly on a broken leg. His suit's autoinjectors were pumping him full of stimpacks and hydra but could do nothing about the pain. His chest felt as though he had broken a rib or two.

"I can keep going. A moment is all I require," he wheezed.

Painkillers had no effect on the Burned Man. It didn't stop him from hobbling along, hand gripping his custom sidearm tightly in the absence of his rifle, which was now probably buried under half a ton of flying rock and sand. Ulysses rushed to support him, keeping his stunned senses attuned for any more questing tentacles.

"Grown so old that a rock can defeat you, Burned Man?"

"Very amusing, Frumentarii," he said as the synth-muscle kept his fractured bone from sliding out of alignment, "You are fortunate that the Lord has taught me forbearance since my days in the Legion. What is it?"

Ulysses had stopped, one arm wrapped around Joshua's waist to keep the former Legate on his feet while the armour healed him, the other hold his Guppy at hip level like a pistol, waiting for the slightest provocation to juice the trigger. The Twisted Hair crouched, pulling the Malpais Legate to the ground alongside him as he let his weapon swing freely and check the ground once more with the palm of his hand. It didn't take the tribal long to satisfy his suspicion.

"Courier! There are two of them!"

It seemed as though there was a pause for every listening pair of ears to realise what exactly he was referring to. But when there is one insectoid monstrosity from the depths of the planet thrashing away at your pals and roaring bloody murder at the sky, there can only be so much doubt as to the subject of the statement.

"Are you fucking kidding me?!" Butch asked as blew smoking chunks of flesh into vapour on the exposed side of the creatures face with his laser rifle. With MaxCharge ammunition and the thick hide finally giving way after the impact of the 40mm mini-nuke, they were finally damaging the creature enough to give it pause.

"Where is the second, Ulysses?" Desmond asked through comms as he loaded in a fresh ammo pack to his P-36 and felt the weapon hum in appreciation of the MaxCharge ammo pack.

"Coming quickly, the storm front that scours land free of all but sand and stone!" The tribal waxed lyrical as he let Joshua stand unassisted. The Hydra and Stimpacks were working fast, injected directly into the affected areas. The synth-muscle had kept the broken limbs from falling out of alignment, an expected benefit of their multilayered armour.

The Courier slid the breach of his underbarrel launcher open and loaded another. His long legs sent him flying from the top of one boulder to another, sailing over the questing tentacle that tried to reach up far enough to pluck the express mailman from the air.

He blasted it with his rifle as he landed, sliding on his behind down the side of another to huge rock to land next to Boone as the sniper dragged himself out of the sand. ED-E joined them, shimmering into sight as it performed a wild figure-eight pattern around their heads, blowing a tentacle into charcoal with an errant burst of fully automatic laser.

"Good boy, ED-E! Come with me lads," the Courier snarled as he dropped the muzzle of his rifle, half in anger and half in shear manic joy at the chaos around them, "I got a feckin' idea to do for these little cunts! Wanderer, ye take one an' I'll take the other!"

The howling of the aforementioned little cunt was now one of genuine distress and pain as it detached itself from the cliff-face and loomed once more, giant droplets of whatever ichor it had for blood oozed from the side of its massive head. One of its mandibles had been blown clear off by the 40mm mini-nuke, something that Desmond noted with relief.

They had more than one weapon that could dent the hide on these monsters.

"Ashur, 40mm min-nukes are the way to go. How quickly can you restock the autoloader?!"

"Almost done, two minutes or less!" Ashur replied.

The agent shook his helmet, unsatisfied with the answer. It would take them another ten to fifteen seconds to designate the target, another ten to fire, another twenty to wait for the rounds to splash down.

Too long. They had two to deal with, now.

"Smiles, can you fly a danger-close missile run on this thing without crashing into the canyon?" Desmond asked as he tossed a plasma grenade like a cricket ball, aiming it for the base of the creature where it stuck out from the ground below. "You can dump anything you want fucking-well want on our position. Broken Arrow, just kill this fucking thing!"

"Sure, good buddy," the ghoul said, agreeably, the prospect of being cleared for weapon-use with his Falcon doing away with his former ill-humour at their having threatened to kill him, "It'll be just like crop-dusting back home. But this might be a bad time to mention that this Falcon don't have anything other than the turbo-lasers mounted at the moment…"

"Are you fucking kidding me?" The ex-intel agent snarled as his grenade blew a meaty chunk from the creatures hide. Plasma weaponry was good, too, it seemed.

"Well apparently, according to some folks I can't be trusted with them!"

"You're not fucking kidding me."

"Crash two Falcons during the testing phase and suddenly no-one wants to let you have any munitions! It was the testing phase, you know? Crashing is what it's for!"

"All assets, clear the area. I will deal with this."

The Lone Wanderer motioned Toshiro off as he declared his intent, his relatively small figure standing out in the open, miniscule next to the towering monster before them. It turned its one good eye upon him, seemingly aware that it was about to be challenged.

If such a beast could be described to have humanlike emotions, it would have had contempt for something so small and feeble seeking to challenge something so massive and mighty.

"Ohh, fuck," Butch exclaimed as he let his rifle barrel droop, "You're not going to….?"

"Releasing safeties. Beginning charging sequence…"

"Piss," Desmond cursed as he grabbed Raul and hauled the ghoul away as more tentacles burst from the ground around them, "That's exactly what he's doing! Smiles, put a pin in that! Stand by!"

The gunslinger grunted in protest but sensed the urgency of his unexpected partner's abrupt exit as Butch sprinted past them as fast as his legs could carry him. A tentacle jabbed at him, but a burst of laser fire fried it like a piece of teriyaki.

"Show some concern for my old bones, will you?"

"Trust me, senor. You don't want to be around in the next two minutes! You're old bones will thank me!"

"All personnel, clear the immediate area at once. Safeties are removed," the Wanderer repeated.

Somewhere deep within the runtimes in his positronic brain a progress bar began hurriedly filling itself and within the armour that contained him, a faint light began to glow. The faint tick-tick-tick of a Pip-Boy Geiger counter was lost underneath the roars and the shaking.

Clover flattened herself against the upper plating of the Personnel Carrier, working her way away from the turret where she had spent most of her wild ride with hands wrapped around the rocket caging to hold herself steady. The armoured vehicle had ground to a halt once it realised that the terrifying monster that had emerged from the interior of the planet was no longer focused on them.

All about them, the aliens disengaged from the fight and began sprinting towards the two remaining vehicles. They had clearly had enough.

"I think these aliens are getting cold feet," she informed the rest of her fellows as the rear hatch of the personnel carrier dropped with a pneumatic whine and another alien, probably the gunner or driver judging from his less-extensive armour, ducked out and onto the sand. The alien motioned to the rest and pointed towards the upended LAV that the worm had destroyed when it first emerged from the ground.

The directive was clear, even if Clover couldn't hear the alien's comm traffic.

"Me and Charon are following them. One of the fuckers was right next to us in the rocks and never noticed."

She saw the outline of Charon and Jericho, the two of her Loverboy's former companions who she worked with the most, who she understood best. The two of them were from the same manner of ditch as her, had been covered in a lot of the same mud and muck.

It helped to work with people who you knew weren't squeamish.

Roughly seven of the approaching aliens branched off from the rest, making for the overturned vehicle. Likely looking for salvage or survivors. Who really knew what aliens thought?

And there was the Courier and Boone, moving in on the same overturned LAV. What were they doing there?

"Loverboy," she purred over comms for the Wanderer, "Know you're busy, but the aliens are trying to sneak out the back. Do we want them getting away? Maybe telling somebody what happened here? I don't like it when they kiss and tell."

She looked behind her, over the turret of the vehicle and out at the giant writhing mass of the worm who flailed at a distant speck on the ground in front of it. Dust rose high into the air around the impact zone where the mortar payload splashed down and more rusty smog was thrown up by the wild conflict still ongoing.

The canyon looked like the Battle of Rockland before Bradley-Hercules had fired, only with a massive alien worm playing the part of Liberty Prime. The ground shook in the same way, each thundering movement of the titan making their surroundings reverberate like a drum.

"You must be engaged to engage," the Wanderer reiterated coldly as he rushed down a narrow ditch surrounded by buried stone of both sides, a massive worm roaring at him from a burned and deformed mouth as it pursued the skurrying insect below.

His whole body was glowing now, the organic matter underneath his armour letting out a verdant green light that bathed the surroundings in radiation. The Geiger counter was screaming, a child crying for its mother to crack a window in the sweltering car so that it could finally breathe! The massive worm almost seemed attracted to it, drawn to it, like a moth to a flame.

A fitting analogy. Moths get burned for that unhealthy fascination.

'That was no fun,' Clover thought as she stopped thumbing the release tab on the Banger hooked to her belt. A fusion of a pulse grenade and a flashbang, it was meant to be used as a less-than-lethal option when combatting a potential enemy wearing a roughly comparable level of gear as themselves.

"Put them down non-lethally if you have to, Clover! I'm heading in your direction now! Everyone, keep your heads down," Butch ordered over comms, taking charge of the situation now that the Wanderer was occupied doing something incredibly dangerous, "When this blows, it's going to blow big!"

"You don't have to tell me, Butchie. I know loverboy knows how to make the earth move for a girl."

"I have two of the aliens with me," Lantaya cut in with a slight hitch to her breathing, as if she was sprinting as fast as she could. Clover looked across the sand, towards where she knew the Matriarch had set up before the worm had ambushed them.

She saw the outline of the multi-thousand-year-old alien approaching in a tightly-knit group of three. Two of the four-eyed aliens were with her, waving to the rest of their companions and doubtless communicating with them via their comms channel.

"They seem to be amenable to reason, although I cannot seem to understand them very well! What is the Wanderer doing?"

"Don't ask, just run!"

"If you need a bargaining chip Matriarch, tell them we have one of their boys here as collateral!" Desmond remarked as he recalled the four-eyed alien he had left hogtied in the rocks. Raul looked at him as they kept on sprinting.

"The one back there, mi amigo? In the blast radius?"

There was a beat as the two ghouls realised, then in the next they both skidded to a halt and sprinted back the way they came. "Piss, piss, piss! This is why you shouldn't secure assets in the middle of a warzone!"

Lantaya and her two alien companions came around the side of the personnel carrier at a respectable run, the far older Lantaya outstripping the two four-eyed extraterrestrials due to her synth-muscle jumpsuit and her own rigorous training regime. She tried not to look at Clover, the barely perceptible shimmering outline of the human woman regarding the scene from atop the APC.

She turned off her external microphone for a second as she approached the dismounted gunner. The armoured alien was clearly jumpy, frightened and eager to be away. Around her, a wash of aliens swarmed, the returning patrol who had been caught out in the open when the worm emerged from underground.

They were missing one of the Dinky the Dinosaur lookalikes. She could guess what happened to him.

"Don't hurt them, Clover. Plan A, remember?"

"Ohh, be my guest," Clover allowed with an ominous laugh through the comms, "This should be good. Tell them we come in peace."

Lantaya approached the gunner, who was now talking animatedly with the four-eyed alien she had saved and his partner. The two she was already passably familiar with gestured at her animatedly, obviously trying to convey some manner of strong opinion on the situation.

The gunner was leaning back. He had his head tilted to the right, regarding the two-armed contemporaries with a tenseness to his body that was apparent even through his armour.

"I'm sorry to interrupt," Lani cut in with little hope of them understanding her, "But you need to move to a safe distance!"

They turned to look at her. The two four-eyed aliens who she knew both spoke at her, clearly wanting something that she wasn't equipped to give.

"I don't understand you. Listen, something is about to happen to kill one of those giant creatures and you don't want to be around when it happens. You need to move these vehicles further back!"

She gestured with her hands, miming the removal of the two armoured vehicles further to their rear, away from the distant worm who still pursued a speck that could only be the Lone Wanderer. He was easily spotted. The glow that emanated from him was now so bright that to look at it polarized the automated safety visor on her helmet.

How it shone through the layered defences of his synth jumpsuit and the matter-forged plating was a mystery to her, but she remembered what had happened at Fort Defiance. Her prior experience was telling her that he was obviously attempting to irradiate the worm to death. But the comments from Butch referring to some type of explosion had her on edge.

The aliens looked as well and seemed very disconcerted. One of them looked through his rifle scope and relayed what he saw to the rest. A bipedal figure, glowing like an angry sun, being pursued by the titanic creature in the shape of a giant worm.

Her alien looked at the rest and motioned towards the APC, but the rest of them seemed reluctant to move. The gunner had the air of a man who knew he should listen, but also knew that he would get in trouble if he did. Her alien, the one she had saved, yelled at them, but roughly half of them were still reluctant to move.

"We don't have time for this! Move the vehicles back or I can't guarantee that you'll survive what is coming!"

In reply to her statement, a second skyscraper size worm erupted from the sand, roaring its challenge to the sky like a territorial foghorn.

The aliens suddenly seemed far more amenable to the idea of a quick retreat.

Lantaya found herself bundled into the back of the APC along with every alien close enough to jump aboard before the loading ramp was raised. They clustered around her in the back of the vehicle as they seated themselves in neat rows. Four-eyed visors peered at her curiously in the overhead lighting of the vehicle's interior.

Through her HUD, Lani noticed the outline of Clover surreptitiously pulling Jericho and Charon aboard the exterior of the vehicle. Their presence imparted a feeling of security in the midst of the unfamiliar.

She had backup close by, if needed.

Far below the second worm, two ghouls gaped up at it from behind helmet visors. Raul peeled around to the left and Desmond took the right as their synth-muscle enhanced limbs pumped like pistons.

"The second one is here," the intelligence agent said, displaying his profession's exceptional ability for supplying the obvious, "It's coming for me and Raul. Smiles, we need that turbo-laser run now!"

"Ohh, me and my baby were waiting to hear that! Coming in hot boys! Smiles all around!"

Desmond hurdled an emerging tentacle like an Olympic gold-medallist as the Falcon emerged around the bend in the canyon and sped towards them like a race-car following the track.

It's engines howled, an unholy chorus of ghosts in the sun of the red planet, in competition with the whine of the turbo-lasers spinning up to spit red death at the new target. As the light-fast beams lit the creature in a continuous belch of superheated fire the worm roared once more, mandibles spreading like the beckoning arms of death, waiting to receive a new congregant.

The two pre-War ghouls sprinted past the outlying rock cover of their original ambush zone and clambered over boulders in an attempt to avoid the tentacles that still emerged from the ground like arms from the depths of Hades.

They found the alien stock-still, a tentacle curling around it curiously, probingly, like an animal that doesn't know what it has found. The four-eyed extraterrestrial didn't dare move a muscle. Although, if Desmond was to guess, the lower regions of the suit might very well be filled with excrement right about then.

The tentacle uncurled from the traumatised alien like a boa constrictor, sensing the vibrations of their approach. Raul blasted it with his handcannon.

It jerked as it was almost separated from rest of the subterranean beast in a jet of acidic blood, then flopped like an abandoned jump-rope as the gunslinger ratchetted back the hammer on his revolver and severed the last few stubborn inches of flesh with a second shot.

Desmond landed on his feet next to their prisoner and hauled the body up onto his shoulders in a fireman's carry. "When the time comes to ask questions you silly sod," the ghoul growled through his external microphone, "If you don't answer, you'll wish I hadn't just saved you."

"Don't think he can understand you, mi amigo."

"Know that" the ghoul grunted as he took off back the way they came, "But I got to keep up tradition."

Howling engines screamed louder and louder as the Falcon neared the battlefield, causing Desmond to slow and spare a quick glance over his broad shoulders. The outline of Smiles' Falcon glowed on his visor HUD.

Smiles himself had his eyes fixed on the second creature, taking in the sheer absurdity of its size and the impossibility that the two measly turbo-lasers mounted on the underside of his winds could hope to make any significant impact on the course of the battle. They were meant for dogfighting, not penetrating hard ground targets.

The way it's massive maw opened reminded Smiles of his namesake, with twice as many teeth.

A lightbulb went off in his head and the ghoul grinned. Crashing two of these birds had given him a fairly good feel for how durable they were, if handled correctly…

"Say cheese."

He juiced the trigger and the throttle, bathing the creatures face in fire as he rerouted power from cloaking and life-support to the forward shielding. He picked up his flight helmet from the cockpit rack and slotted it on, concealing the mad grin he wore like it was never going out of style.

The speed demon was cackling on his right shoulder, telling him that if he went just a bit faster his overtaxed adrenaline glands would give him a shot of the good stuff.

"I ain't got no heavy munitions," the ghoul stated through a grin so wide that his jaw physically ached, "but I got one missile I can throw at you!"

He juiced the throttle further, causing the engines to cycle up to a speed that made the air distort as a heat haze developed from the sheer speed of the craft through the scant atmosphere. Every eye on the ground that wasn't occupied with survival looked skywards as the craft shimmered into the visible spectrum, cloaking system deactivated to give the shielding system every joule of power that could be supplied.

"Flyboy, what the hell are you doing?!" Desmond slowed his sprint as the aircraft tore overhead at speeds that were almost as blistering as the spitting turbo-lasers. "This is not my idea of close air support!"

"What do you mean?! Can't get closer than this!"

Smiles let out his jubilant cry like a cavalryman sounding the charge through a bugle, utterly without fear or a sense of self-preservation as he cannoned towards the maw of the beast, "Whooo-Weee!"

The sound of the Falcon impacting the worm's face was like a thundercrack, accompanied by a bright flash of white light as the zetan shielding system protecting the craft flared like a second sun. The worm bent like a beanstalk, stunned by the blow as the Falcon itself skipped off the beast's face and tail-spun towards the ground like a spinning top.

Emergency lights flashed inside the cockpit and klaxons sounded a clarion wail as the ghoul wrestled with the controls, still grinning with fanatical glee as the craft tumbled through the air. Shields were redlined, engines were screaming, the straps that held him into the pilot's seat were working to take up the slack from the inertial-dampeners that no matter how good they were, could not account for the kind of reckless flying their pilot could subject them to.

"Come on girl," he rasped at the control panel through his gritted and grinning teeth, "I know I crashed your sisters, but you and me are meant to be, see? Ride or die baby, time to choose! I'll treat you right baby! Come on!"

At the last moment, Augustine Smiles jerked the craft around and out of the spin, transferring its momentum out of the crash and into a steep climb just soon enough to barnstorm the fleeing four-eyed aliens as he roared overhead.

They got a full, unobstructed view of his grinning decal on the bottom of the ship as he did so, sand buffeting them from behind. The smiling yellow face grinned at them, looking for all the world like the one person on the face of that sandy hellhole that got the joke.

"Whooo-Weee! I knew you liked me, baby! You and I will go far!"

The smiley-face grinned down on the Courier and Craig Boone as the two wastelanders sprinted through the sand towards the overturned alien LAV. ED-E rushed ahead, scanners tearing down the LAV into data and transmitting it to the sniper's helmet feed in a rush of ones and zeros, chirps and whistles.

Boone, bereft the cargo bag for his AMRS, had the heavy weapons system propped up against his shoulder like a polearm as he ran beside his friend. In his offhand was his sidearm, a GuS2 gauss pistol that he had on its fully-automatic setting.

The Courier took point, his leather cheek-protector welded to the side of his helmet, but his barrel still pointed at the ground. He glanced sideways at the stunned worm and then in the opposite direction at the retreating Falcon as it soared upwards once again to gain altitude.

"Now that's a feckin' pilot! Suicidal cunt."

"I'm taking the teleporter back up," Boone commented.

"Coward."

"Just not stupid."

"You callin' me stupid now?" the Courier asked with his voice full of menace as his legs bent and he looped in a springy half-crouch towards the side of the overturned LAV. He flattened himself against the armoured hull and sidled to the edge, duster falling open with the wide stance of his legs.

"Uhh-huh," Boone said, utterly unafraid of his friend and knowing that the hostility wasn't aimed at him. The Courier was swimming in adrenaline and ill-intentions, just looking for a target that he could unload all his rage upon like a loaded weapon.

ED-E beeped and warbled through their comms, cloaked and floating above them with a clear view of what was around the corner of the LAV.

Aliens.

Seven in total, including the remaining Dinky lookalike. The Courier reached out and tapped Boone on the pauldron, "Get up top an' set up the Big Gun. Try to get that big feckers attention. I'll be inside."

"What about those aliens?" Craig asked as he stepped up to the side of the LAV and glanced speculatively at the height of the jump. It was shorter in the centre of the vehicle where the worm had given it a love tap, buckling the armour inwards ever so slightly. He had no doubt that it would have caved entirely if the beast had bother to put all of its strength behind the blow.

The stocky marksman tossed the AMRS up so that it cleared the edge of the armoured siding and then hopped skywards, synth-muscle jumpsuit assisting him in achieving the elevation.

"Givin' then a proper Earth hello, see? Don't worry lad, I won't kill them unless they engage me first, right? Those are the rules," The Courier chortled with a hint of mischief in his voice, "I'm just gonna ask them if I can use the gun on their LAV for a second or three, see? All nice an' neighbourly."

"Uhh-huh," the marksman said, less than convinced as he hauled himself up on top of the overturned LAV.

"Don't be givin' me that tone, Craig! I'll tell Lani that it were my idea if ye don't feel like bein' scolded. Feckin' child! What happened to the man who stormed Fortification Hill with me? He were mighty craic!"

Boone didn't reply, snagging the AMRS from where it had landed and crawling forward to position himself with a clear sightline on the second worm, settled comfortably in the depression left by the creatures headbutt. ED-E landed next to him, metallic legs clacking on the armoured plating of the LAV and camera feed transmitting to the marksman's helmet, a rush of data for him to orient himself by.

The Courier slung his rifle, sinching the Kevlar strap tight over the back of his riot duster. It didn't whisper to him. Not as Randell's rifle did. Not yet. It would be a while and several hundred bodies stacked high to the sky before the weapon could muster enough spirit to reach his own. But the day would come.

He knew what a spirit needed to develop, like an egg that would hatch and give birth to something fuller of life in reality, than life in potential.

An incubation period needed to elapse.

Crouching, he peeked around the edge of the upturned LAV, an almost imperceptible shimmer around knee-height on his own sizeable frame. The LAV's rear loading ramp was open to the atmosphere of the planet, a dull glow of emergency lighting letting the wastelander know that despite being tossed into the air like a football, the alien vehicle was still powered by the internal battery.

Several of the four-eyed aliens stood ready. Two were peeking out on the opposite end of the LAV in an effort to set up perimeter security, one crouch and the other not.

Three more arranged in a cordon around the rear ramp, unloading mangled bodies and storage crates of equipment. Dinky the Extraterrestrial was with them, rumbling words into an orange holographic screen that extended from his arm. Whatever species Dinky was it was a large one.

A foot taller than even the Courier or Ulysses, Six judged. And thicker around the waist than a tree-trunk. The legs and arms weren't as large, the Irishman thought with a speculative air.

But of more immediate concern was the four-eyed alien crouched on his haunches not more than a foot away from him, rifle laid across his thighs and visor staring out into the sand dunes their side of the LAV like a sleepwalker.

The figure was utterly still, but clearly alive judging from the fact that it hadn't keeled over sideways. The Courier knew this stillness. He'd seen it on many occasions.

After the Battle of Hoover Dam in those who strayed too close to the B-52 bombing path.

During the Eighth Battle of Tarifa, when the Caliphate armies based at Algiers and Tangier had tried landing near Gibraltar and had been beaten back by the combined weight of the Cavalier and Europa Nueva.

And when he had been a bit more free than usual with his explosives outside Quarry Junction. That had been a mess to clean off his amour afterwards. The Anti-Material Rifle had proven to be a far more effective tool for hunting Deathclaws.

He tapped a knuckle on the armour of the LAV, mere inches from the crouching alien's headgear.

No reaction.

Shellshock. Probably from the crash. A thousand-yard stare that began in the waking world but terminated somewhere amidst the ever-shifting fabric of the Dream.

The Courier rose up, slowly, eyes flicking between the nearest alien and the rest of his counterparts. He nodded sagely, then left his hiding spot and walked leisurely towards the clustered group of aliens. His boots crunched on sand, passing by the shellshocked alien with nary a pause in his stride.

It didn't react.

The sound of his passage went in one ear and out the other; if, indeed, this species even possessed them. Who was to know? Unless he peeled off one of the buckets and held the alien steady, to study their head as they suffocated in the unbreathable atmosphere of this uninhabitable ball of rusty sand.

"These hostiles are not very observant," the spirit of the Stealth Suit loaded into his helmet's electronics informed him, playfully, "You could do anything and they might not even notice."

The idea had promise. Maybe after he killed one? All they needed to do was engage him first.

Above this, Craig checked the scope and made sure it had retained its zeroing with practised hands. His body adjusted itself to mould the rifle butt into his shoulder and unfolded the bipod, bring the weapon into alignment with the entire weight of his supine form.

He equalised his breathing and placed his visor to the scope.

"In position."

ED-E trilled companionably off his left shoulder and took to the air, insectoid legs curling up beneath his belly. The tiny bot's camera zoomed in and began cycling through points of interest.

First was the writhing form of the second massive worm, stunned by Augustine's near-suicidal collision and slumped over letting out long, shuddering roars of pain. It had a noticeable dent in the side of its head where the Falcon had rammed it at Mach Two. If it lasted long enough to see another sunrise, Boone suspected that it would have a headache almost as large as it was.

But that was unlikely to be the case. He readied the AMRS and sighted up on one of the creature's massive, half-lidded eyeballs.

Behind the injured creature, Raul and Desmond emerging from the rocks with the trussed-up body of a four-eyed alien across Desmond's shoulders. Raul fired off shots on the run at tentacles that emerge from the ground like homing missiles, tracking them by the vibrations of their feet on the sandy dunes.

They were making good time, but it wasn't going to be enough.

Even more distant, both Boone and ED-E could see the glowing figure of the Lone Wanderer had started running towards the towering figure of the worm, teasing it, goading it to strike and squash the bright figure like a boot obliterates an ant.

The sniper took his finger off the trigger of his rifle and keyed his comms. So much for getting started immediately.

"All stations, think the Wanderer is making his move. Seek cover now."

Desmond and Raul, caught out in the wide-open expanse of sand between the two lines of rock that served as the original ambush sights ground to a halt.

They looked at one another.

And at the bare dunes that surrounded them.

"What fucking cover?!" Desmond snarled as he cast about him desperately for something, anything to get behind. The last time he had been in a situation like this, he had been secreted underneath several dozen feet of earth and ten feet of reinforced concrete bunker.

He glanced at Raul, who was fingering the grip of his handcannon with a speculative air. Ulysses rumbled through comms, "We have gone to ground in the earth's embrace. Will see you once the danger is passed."

"You seem like a man of the world," the British secret agent commented with a hopefulness restrained by his customary gruffness, "How did you survive the day the bombs dropped?"

Raul's helmet turned towards his contemporary and regarded him. He didn't bother telling him that he had been at a Ranch, well-clear of the nearest ground-zero of a nuclear detonation. The question had been rhetorical.

The gunslinger reached down and plucked a chunky grenade from his belt, twisting the safety to arm the device, then tossed it underhand towards another deep depression that had likely been caused by one of the Courier's 40mm grenades. The ghoul backed up and dipped the lip of his sombrero, "When you ain't got any cover, I find it helps to dig down."

The alien on Desmond's back had a perfect view of the glowing figure facing down the titanic subterranean worm and was deathly silent, not struggling or making a fuss in the least. The intelligent part of its brain had decided that it didn't want to risk being left behind.

A soft boom as the relatively small parcel of explosives and showered the three of them with sand.

"Pull up a stretch of sand and get comfy," Raul said as he lifted his hat from off the top of his helmet and dusted it off.

He walked with leisurely slowness in comparison to Desmond, who was already ahead of him and sliding down into the crater, sand already running down into the hole to cover them. Raul's spurs clinked as he replaced his hat and hopped down into the hole.

"Felt about time for another nap, anyway."

"This is your grand scheme, you Latin rube?" Desmond hissed as he glanced up at the lip of their ever-so-slightly smoking pit. A trickle of sand landed on his visor and even the alien that he had unceremoniously dumped next to himself in the hole managed to look worried through the surface of his own inscrutable faceplate.

"A bloody foxhole? We're going to get buried alive!"

"And that's better than being buried dead? Those are your choices," Tejada responded with a marked lack of fear. He tipped his hat forwards and gave his ghoulish companion a two-fingered salute. "Wake me up when we know whether we're dead or not."

Desmond grumbled, looked upwards at the last sky he might very well ever see, and crossed his arms stoically. He would do what any self-respecting Brit would do, then.

Sit back and think of England.

Boone, meanwhile, stayed on top of the LAV watching for the show to begin. He had seen what happened at Fort Defiance through his rifle scope and was curious to see what was about to occur. Was the Lone Wanderer a Glowing One? Or something similar? He'd never seen a Glowing One who could pass as human at a glance.

Not that the Lone Wanderer passed as human to anyone with more than one eye and half a brain.

Especially as he was now, sprinting forwards faster than any humanoid being had a right to travel, his arms held out to the sides and a sickly radioactive green glow emanating from his body through his armour plating. The Marksman couldn't make out the crosshatching of his scope's sight past the brightness.

It was the glow of infinitesimally small atomic bodies splitting like rocks under the sledgehammer.

It was the glow produced by the building-blocks of the physical world being unlaid by subatomic hands.

It was an angry god who decided to remind his worshipers that those who create, necessarily know how to destroy.

Fleshy tentacles attempted to wrap themselves around the cyborg's legs and arms, pull him down and rend him limb from limb. They touched him for less than a second before they bubbled and melted like wax drawing too close to a roaring inferno. He strode through them, shaking the organic ropes from his metallic body like a tree shedding leaves in autumn.

The worm bellowed its challenge to the impudent gnat, burnt and cooked flesh from its mutilated face tearing as it did so, sending a rain of caustic acidic blood down to patter on the ground below like the acid rains of the wasteland.

Back at the overturned LAV, the Courier stalked the four-eyed aliens. They were so preoccupied with the feverish unloading of the LAV that they didn't notice the faint shimmer that approached them, the inexplicable outlines of footprints in the sand.

He didn't draw any weapons but snuck up right behind the closest, whose back tensed as he accepted a storage crate into his arms from another of his kind. The alien wore a rust-red hardsuit, only slightly off-shade from that of the surrounding landscape. Weapons of various descriptions hung from magnetic holsters on his hips and from his upper and lower back.

A uniform state of armament that all of these four-eyed beings seemed to share. That spoke to Six, in a voice he knew all too well. It spoke of endless hours drilling the same set of predefined motions, endless time spent march, maintaining, obeying. The rigours of the parade ground and the standard of excellence required to wear the uniform of your chosen Nation.

It said military. Or something very similar in purpose and intent.

He towered over the alien, an ominous presence that had yet to be noticed. The four-eyed alien turned and crouched, hefting the box and placing it with a grunt upon the waiting stack of similar storage crates. It straightened.

All four of its eyes looked at the footprint in front of him, next to the boxes. At the strange, almost imperceptible shimmer that distorted the sand. It looked up…

And up…

And up with growing alarm, until it was staring at the front of the Courier's helmeted head, the peak of a semi-transparent figure that was so tall and broad that it dwarfed him by almost a foot in height.

Six revelled in the sudden fear he saw in the alien's body language.

"Hostiles have spotted us."

"Much good may it do 'em."

Then he drove a fist into the alien's sternum.

It went staggering back, struggling to breathe as the Courier pushed it aside with a negligent shove of his massive meat-hock of a hand. The second of the three four-eyed aliens went for its sidearm rather than try and retrieve the rifle holstered on its back. He received a kick to the side of his leg that flipped his entire body sideways and sent him crashing to the ground.

Dinky turned with his comparatively stubby arms already reaching for his own array of weaponry. Behind him, the last of the four-eyed aliens who remained standing tossed a heavy crate he had been in the process of unloading to the side. Both of them barely disconnected the guns from the magnetic holsters before the human hit them at full sprint and with his mouth roaring a war cry, driving low at Dinky's legs.

The force of his charge picked the large alien up off his feet and slammed his helmeted head into the frame of the open rear hatch of the LAV with a satisfying bang of metal-on-metal, then into the confused alien behind him with an equally satisfying crunch.

There was a deflated squeak from underneath Dinky's massive bulk, letting the Courier know that whatever those four-eyed aliens were made of, they weren't built to withstand one of Dinky's race from being slammed into them at high speed.

The Lone Wanderer continued his advance.

Within the endless complexities of his coding, the progress bar reached the much-awaited one-hundred percent and the signal ricocheted through his artificial synapses in a hum of electricity. Synthetic muscle clenched as the light became so bright that the observing eyes of Boone squinted behind his polarised visor.

The sniper discarded his curiosity in favour of good sense and rose to his feet in record time, AMRS held in both arms. He threw himself off the edge of the LAV, landing on top of an alien who was attempting to rise to his feet. The impact drove the four-eyed being into the sand with a crunch of ablative ceramic plating.

Around the Wanderer, the glow solidified into a solid wall that surrounded the post-war cyborg like a deadly cocoon, as the fundamental building blocks of the universe were chained and tethered from the world surrounding him. The ground underneath his armoured feet turned liquid and molten as grains of sand were melted and cast into perfect glass moulds of the groves on the bottom of his boots.

His presence on the surface of the planet captured forever in a small slab of crimson glass…

Above him, the creature lunged downwards, mouth agape and it singular remaining mandible poised to rip his mechanical body asunder.

Nuclear Anomaly Primed

Commencing Controlled Discharge

And the world became the surface of freshly milled paper as the light turned from sickly green to brilliant, snowy white.

The lunging worm was caught at point blank, unable to scream as its thick hide, naturally resistant to the perils of solar radiation and the vacuum of space, was baked dry all the way down to the bone. Liquid boiled away in an instant, bone spontaneously fractured from heat-shock, flesh and muscle turned to petrified stone.

Then it all turned to dust as the shockwave hit, carrying what remained of it away as a giant exhaled. It peeled back the stone and dune-cover above the creatures bulk, exposing the majority of its seldom-seen form to the open sky. Headless as it was, the aftershocks of the pain it felt in its dying moments still crackled along its nervous system, causing the massive folds and curls of the worm's body to shake and spasm with tectonic force.

The twitches continued, even as the nuclear forces at play on the surface above it cooked the monster alive in its burrow, like a clay-roast pig.

Wind buffeted the canyon walls like a legion of angry ghosts, screaming and whistling through rocky outcroppings and scouring sand from every orifice to send pelting up and down the valley like the inside of an industrial sandblaster. Boulders and shards of rock were plucked from the ground and thrown with shocking, wreaking-ball force against dunes, the canyon cliff-face, other rocks.

One wildly careening rock smashed into the side of the one still-functioning LAV and shattered in a hail of sandstone and bent metal and high-strength plastic. The entire amalgam of wreckage vehicle, now including a chunk of rock the size of a small school bus embedded in its rear like a shard of shrapnel, jolted, veered off course and flipped itself over and over as the dust-cloud washed over it.

The APC faired better, heavier and more thickly armoured as it was. On top, Jericho, Clover and Charon held onto the rocket caging with grim solemnity as the entire vehicle began to lift up off the sandy ground beneath them as the strength of the shockwave tried obstinately and with malicious intent to pluck the vehicle up and fling it across the valley like an angry toddler.

Inside, Lantaya held on to the crash netting around her, preventing all inside the APC from being tossed about the interior like pinballs. Her teeth ground against each other like a mortar and pestle, vehemently pounding a particularly stubborn kernel.

And at the crashed LAV, Boone ducked low as the entire ruined vehicle was flipped from where it lay in the sand and arched over his helmeted head to land on its rear door. Metal screamed as the force of the impact smashed the rear door home into its frame and stuck it there, hydraulics and motor mechanisms smashed together into one messy clump that could no longer wrench the mangled rear door down to expose the interior of the vehicle than they could be separated from each other into some recognisable array of parts.

They were sandwich together as effectively as though they had been deliberately melted together in a forge.

And inside the vehicle, Courier Six snarled in terrified glee as he and his opponent were lifted up and slammed bodily against what felt like every interior wall and storage cabinet available.

The LAV cartwheeled across the sand, pinwheeling and throwing up great sheets of sand in wild explosions of force as it hit the ground and bounced off and away.

It came to a rest, finally, blessedly, on its mashed front end and slowly toppled down.

Amazingly, it did so right-way up.