The Wastelands rolled by as Dalton got away from the outpost and began to pick up a bit more speed. There weren't really a lot of roads around, more just paths that military-grade vehicles could handle. Mostly. It was a relatively straight shot to where they were going and so far, he hadn't encountered much of anything actually dangerous out here.

So he decided to take a shot in the dark and see what happened.

"So, Frost, you got any idea what's going on?" he asked.

From the way she reacted, jumping very slightly, he really began to wonder about her. Every Ghost that he had ever worked with showed so few emotional responses that he'd pretty much just accepted that they didn't have emotions.

He wondered about Frost, though.

"No," she replied, "I don't."

A moment of terse silence passed in the vehicle as they bumped along.

He decided to keep trying. "So, no official news on why there's a lot of weird shit happening out here?"

"No," she replied flatly.

"All right, any theories?"

"It's probably just animals," she said. It was extremely difficult to tell, behind that armor and filter, but he thought she might be lying.

Not that it would surprise him.

But if she wasn't going to budge on that avenue, then maybe she would on another. "All right then, how about this? Why are you here? What brought you to our very middle-of-nowhere outpost?"

Because that was something he'd been unable to square in his head ever since she'd shown up. Gamma Seven truly was isolated, not just in a physical sense, but in a practical one, too. Tactically, financially, geographically...it just wasn't important.

"That's classified," Frost said, now looking directly into the rearview mirror.

"Uh-huh," he said, and stopped asking.

That was code for 'leave me alone before I find an excuse to ruin your day'.

Well, he could respect that. He could just barely hear Dix let out a soft little laugh of amusement from the exchange. For a moment he considered trying to strike up a conversation with the man, but decided against it. Too much chance that him, or both of them, might say something that didn't sit right with the Ghost and then she'd really find an excuse to screw their day. Anti-Confederate sentiments were barely tolerated among civilians, and a bit more overlooked out on the fringe worlds, even among the Marines, but Ghosts were hard-coded against it.

So they drove in silence for the rest of the trip.

"Well, that ain't good," Dix muttered as they crested a rise and rolled to a halt.

The mood, which had been a little tense up until now, abruptly changed. Dalton looked around, scanning the surrounding area as his survival instincts kicked up into high gear. Ahead of them, the remains of the missing rover lay scattered across the cracked dirt. He didn't see anything around them but miles of sun-baked earth and scrub bushes and boulders.

"Anything, Dix?" he asked.

"Nothing," Dix replied.

It was weird. He and Dix had never been in combat together before, but both of them worked so well together in the field that most people would assume they'd served together for years. For whatever reason, they just fit together in military scenarios.

Dalton checked the dash-nav again, not that it was going to show him much of anything. It had extremely basic sensors with a very limited range. All it showed was the rover's beacon. He sighed softly and then kept them rolling. They moved down the hill and came to a halt a few meters shy of the wreckage.

Dalton activated his radio. "This is Sergeant Dalton. Brick, Pill, you out there?" It occurred to him that Frost might get on his ass for his lack of radio protocol, but he was too worked up to give a shit at the moment.

And she remained as silent as the airwaves while they waited for a response.

He sighed and then changed the channel. "El-tee, this is Dalton, come back."

The response was almost immediate. "I have you, Dalton. What's happening?"

"Found the rover. It's torn to hell and back. No immediate sign of Philbrick or Pilsner, or what did it, but something bad happened here."

A pause. "Understood. See what you can find."

"Got it. Out. Come on," he said, killing the engine and stepping out.

Dix and Frost joined him. He gripped his Gauss Rifle tightly as he came out into the sun-baked air. The rover, which they had named Dorothy before Dalton had arrived on the scene, God knew why, was in pieces. It was immediately obvious that it wasn't a scavenging job. There were enough pirates and mercenaries and outlaws operating in the Wastelands that it wasn't impossible to run into a crew wily enough to attack a lone rover, kill the Marines inside, and strip it for parts, if not steal it outright. But this thing looked like a pack of metal-eating monsters had come after it.

The windows were shattered, the tires torn up and deflated, the frame dented or outright broken in several places.

And there was a lot of blood and shell casings around.

"They were firing like hell at somethin'," Dix muttered.

Dalton studied the shells and realized something was missing: no bootprints. There were a ton of other prints, though. Weird ones, unlike anything he'd ever seen before. Whatever it was, it had sharp claws.

"They didn't get out of the vehicle, Dix," Dalton said.

"What?"

"No bootprints. And there's a lot of shells in here, too," he replied, peering in through the broken driver's side door. "They didn't get a chance to get out. They just started blasting out the windows at...something. And...then they must've been pulled out, still firing like crazy." There were enough shells to account for a pair of completely emptied Gauss magazines. And those things had four hundred rounds per mag.

"I don't see any corpses," Dix said.

Dalton nodded, feeling that cold weight in his gut get colder and heavier. "They fired off everything they had...and didn't kill a damn thing." He stopped looking into the trashed rover and instead began checking around the immediate area. "Here. There's signs that they were dragged off…" He looked up, following two thinning trails of dried blood, just barely visible against the cracked earth. They went off towards a nearby boulder.

"Let's check it out," Dix said, raising his flamethrower and igniting the end.

"Yeah," Dalton replied, double-checking his rifle. Although in the moment, it was giving him a lot less reassurance than it normally did. Philbrick and Pilsner had apparently emptied their entire magazines and it hadn't done them any good.

What in the name of hell could it possibly be?

He sensed Frost moving to join them. Well, nice to have a Ghost at his back, he supposed. Though it would probably be one of the only times he thought that. Right now, this situation was scarier than any Ghost could be.

Probably.

The only sound he could hear as they approached the boulder were their footfalls and the whine of power armor, and the occasional shriek of wind as it gusted across the dusty hinter around them. Dalton began to hear his own heart as he kept going, step by step, closing the gap between himself and the boulder, getting ever closer to whatever was behind there.

He made himself relax. He had Dix, and he trusted Dix with his life. And for some reason he couldn't articulate, he trusted Frost, at least in a combat situation. His instincts said she'd help. Fine, but what the hell was back there? Pilsner had been an idiot kid, but Philbrick could at least defend himself. He'd mostly had this position because he wanted something quiet. He was an older guy, a Guild Wars vet who'd been busted back down to Corporal for a reason he never told the truth on, as the story changed each time, but he knew his shit.

So what nightmare had clawed them away, probably screaming?

There were wild animals on Mar Sara, but nothing so lethal as to produce this.

Or, at least, nothing he knew of.

"I'm going for it," he whispered, and stepped around the boulder.

Almost immediately he recoiled. He'd seen a lot of bad stuff over his seven years as a Marine. A lot of gunshot wounds, stab wounds, burns. He'd seen what a Spider Mine did to a patrol squad one day and still sometimes randomly got three-second clips of all those bloodied limbs coming off and flying through the air against a clear blue sky playing across his mind's eye.

But he hadn't seen something like this. Not even among the few animal attacks.

"Crap," he managed.

"What is it?" Frost asked.

"I think it's Pilsner."

Dix stepped around with him. "Damn," he muttered. "Gutted like a fish."

"Yeah…" Dalton took a few steps around the other side of the huge rock and looked around. "But where's Philbrick?"

The blood trail ended here, as did all the weird footprints.

He looked back at the body. Really, it was more pulped and shredded meat oozing out of the cracked, broken shell of a suit of CMC armor. Dix walked forward and knelt by the remains, studying them more closely.

"Yeah, it's Pill," he muttered. "Damn," he repeated, getting back to his feet.

Dalton turned and looked at Frost suddenly. "Do you know anything about this?" he asked. "Anything at all? Animals didn't do this. No way. Not unless it's something completely new, something that was brought from offworld maybe."

"I don't know anything about this," Frost replied. It was impossible to read her in her suit. He sighed in frustration and turned away, knowing he'd never be able to force an answer out of her or intimidate her into telling him if she actually did know anything.

"...what the hell is that?" Dix asked.

Dalton turned to face him. "What?" He saw the Firebat was looking off in the distance now, to the west. A huge gray cloud bank was building up there. It didn't rain often in the Wastelands, but it wasn't unheard of. "What?" he repeated.

"I saw something in the clouds. Something floating. Something big," Dix replied. "One o'clock."

Dalton and Frost stepped up beside Dixon and studied the clouds. Dalton's heart was thundering in his chest now. He stared, focusing. For a long moment, he didn't see anything. And then, suddenly, he saw it.

The clouds were shifting, the storm brewing, and he caught a hint of huge dark movement. He had the impression of something big and shaped vaguely ovoid with big tentacles dangling off of it. And then it was gone.

Frost put her rifle scope to her eye.

"What the hell is that?" Dalton muttered. "We all saw that, right?"

"I definitely saw it," Dix said, "but I'm a little crazy so…" He shrugged.

"I saw something big," Dalton said. "Frost?"

"I can't get any kind of visual," she muttered. They waited. A minute went by. Then another. Then five long and lonely minutes washed over them. She never once lowered her Canister Rifle as she stared through the scope.

It never reappeared, as far as Dalton could see.

In the distance, lightning struck and thunder boomed.

"We should get these remains back to base, I don't think we're gonna find Philbrick," Dix said unhappily.

"Yeah, I'm not too keen on being out here with just us anymore. Frost, will you get up on that boulder and give us overwatch? See if you can see anything, including Philbrick."

"On it," she replied, and began climbing deftly up the boulder.

He and Dix started gathering up Pilsner's remains.

"Christ, he was nineteen," Dalton muttered as he looked into the shattered visor of the decapitated helmet. Half his head was still in there and there was enough left to see an expression of pure, naked terror on his young features.

How did that even happen?

"Yep," Dix muttered. "Don't think about it."

Dalton shook his head, then just grunted and kept on with the grisly task.

Five minutes later, it was done. They put down some plastic in the rear cargo space and put everything they could find of poor Pilsner on that. Dalton was kicking himself for not bringing a body bag, as it would've made this whole thing so much easier, but he genuinely hadn't thought they'd drive out here to find a corpse.

Let alone such a chewed up one.

"Anything, Frost?" he asked over the radio as he closed the cargo compartment.

"Nothing," she replied, her icy voice piping into his helmet, "just dust and dirt."

"All right, come on, we're leaving." Dalton got into the driver's seat and started up the engine, then hit his radio. "Miller, we found Pilsner. Uh...he's KIA. Philbrick is MIA."

"What happened?" Lieutenant Miller replied, his response time again almost immediate. He was waiting for them.

"He's shredded, armor and all. No other bodies."

A brief pause. Miller was trying to figure out what to do. "Return to base for full debriefing," he said finally.

"On the way."

Dix and Frost got back into the rover and Dalton got them turned around.

Going back, he drove a little faster.