"So is it worth moving the chopper over to the other side of the crater?" asked Hunter, sipping at his drink. He pulled up the map of the area, cursing at the badly pixelated image on the low-res map they had.
"I don't think so – it takes a fair amount of fuel to get airborne, and we're only talking about what – fifteen kilometres. Much better to take the off-roader. I can also send one of the drones over to keep watch or provide sensor assistance, and if need be, we can be on standby to head over there."
"How good are the sensors on the drone?" Kai sipped at his drink and raised a questioning eyebrow at Marius.
"They're not that great – it's a very basic model. If we end up near a decent supplier, it's one of the things I think is worth upgrading soon. Or replacing it with a dedicated surveillance model."
"Even though it's not fuel efficient, I would still like to move the helicopter closer to the target area." Marius made a face that indicated what he thought of the idea, but the others waited for Tads to explain. "We're hunting magical creatures that we know very little about. Even if we do manage to stun one of them, there's no telling how long it will stay stunned for. What if they've got some kind of biology that lets them recover faster than normal? Does anyone want to be driving across that kind of terrain with a couple of angry scorpions recovering and lashing about in panic?"
Even Marius had to concede that was a point, and was a strong argument for using up some fuel. As he thought about it, an idea came to him.
"Ok, how about this… if I send over the drone to try and help with the surveillance, and to keep an eye on things. As soon as there is any kind of sighting, I start to warm the engines up. When you capture the creatures, I fly over, and lower the ramp, but keep us in a low hover."
"Won't the rocks tear up the rotors? We've already looked for a landing area, and can't see one of the gullies being wide enough?" Aswon craned his neck over to examine the map.
"That would be an issue if we were landing. When the rotors slow, they start to droop, and that's when we run into a problem. As long as the power stays on, the rotors are providing lift and will remain horizontal from the rotor shaft – and that should be high enough to stay clear of the rocks. Of course, they'll be a lot of sand thrown up from the ground, so you'll all have to wear goggles…."
They all thought back to the landing in the quarry and the white-out caused by the marble dust thrown into the air from the choppers landing. Marius saying a 'lot of sand' took on a new scale…
They looked at the potential route, working out how to loop around the lower parts of the hills to travel over easier terrain, and then approach the crater by driving up one of the gullies rather than across them. Tads suddenly turned and fixed Marius with a gaze.
"Say. How much weight can that drone of yours carry?"
"Perhaps fifty to sixty kilos without too much effort. More in an emergency – why?" Marius looked at her suspiciously. She was obviously planning something crazy, and it involved one of his precious drones…
"Oh that's plenty then. I was wondering about casting a spell onto the drone and getting it to carry one of my foci. That way it's a magically active target, and it's really easy for me to find if I go out of my body and travel astrally." Marius looked at her suspiciously – he didn't really understand magic, and though he couldn't deny it was a very useful thing to have and invaluable for hiding from corporate security or helping them travel quickly, it still made him feel slightly uneasy.
He realised that he'd been woolgathering, and Tads was still talking…
"…so the spirit could be with the scorpions and that might make things very different indeed."
"What? Wait.. these are magical spirit scorpions?"
"No Marius, our spirits, guarding the scorpions. If Tads summons a spirit, she can ask it to monitor them, and with it being magic, it can spot if they're using any weird kind of powers or abilities to recover faster."
"Oh. Right." He let out a small sigh of relief, turning to the side to avoid their amused looks. As he did so, he looked towards the west where the sun was making a stately descent towards the horizon, casting a warm red glow over the sand dunes. A tiny black dot on the horizon stood out against the clear skies. No, a small black dot. A small-medium black dot. He didn't even remember dropping the drink in his hand, or kicking over the chair in his hurry to get up – he was far too busy trying to get to the cockpit as quickly as possible and shouting a warning.
"INCOMING!"
The others swung their heads around, trying to locate the threat, then dove for cover by the side of the chopper – all apart from Tads who stood where she was, looked around and then extended her vision into astral space to try and spot for magical threats.
The dot grew swiftly, enlarging into a jet plane and flying overhead only about three hundred metres in the air, whipping past their position in the blink of an eye. A few seconds later a deafening boom shook them and the chopper, stunning them all for a moment. In the cockpit, Marius quickly accessed the sensors, trying to get the best read he could on what had over-flown them.
"Twin-tailed fighter jet, two engines, and swing wing design. Underwing missiles and some kind of autocannon in the nose. Painted a mottled grey, looks like a single-seater!" Marius called out over the comms.
"Kinda looks like an Aztechnology design – think I remember seeing something like that a few years back. Hard to tell at that speed though!" from Aswon.
"There was no obvious magic on it though, and no spirit I could see. If there was a ward, it's on the inside of the skin or around the cockpit."
"Oh shit! We didn't bug scan those crates! Someone grab me the scanner. Shimazu, grab the other end of the crates and help me lay them out!" Hunter sprang into action, and the rest of the team ran inside with him to rip open the crates from the supply cache. It didn't take them long to play the scanner over the crates, and they quickly found a signal coming from the crate that had held the assault rifles, repeating a simple sequence every few seconds. Hunter pulled out his knife and started to hack through the foam insert trying to get to the bottom of the crate.
"We've got two options – we kill the signal, or we send it away as fast as we can!" Marius was starting the engines and rapidly working through the start-up sequence, and sounded distracted as he called out over the comms.
"Do you want me to try and hide the chopper? I can put up an illusion around us, though if they've got a mage onboard it won't help."
"Yes Tads, do it!"
"But Kai… hang on. If these are Aztechnology, don't they have blood mages and all kinds of other things?"
"Not in a fighter jet ,they won't, and you didn't see any spirits, did you? But if we don't hide, they're probably going to send some!"
She frowned, then concentrated and started to move her hands around, symbolically piling up mana around the chopper and then spreading it out to create an illusion of a massive sand dune, trying to cover them. She struggled with the spell, stretching the illusion as far as she could, but no matter what she did, some part of the massive vehicle poked out of the area of her illusion. She ran to the nose turret and looked out, trying to spot for the fighter and the right direction, and then angled the illusion that way, turning it into a large flat plane rather than a dome covering the chopper, and then angling it to cover their cross section.
"It's coming back!" Marius called out, and steered his sensors towards the plane. It had slowed, the wings angling forwards as it dropped subsonic. The fighter orbited them about ten kilometres out, banking slightly and sweeping through a huge arc. "I'm detecting sensors and electronic output, the systems are targeting us, but I'm not getting acquisition signals or terminal guidance lock."
In the turret, Tads watched the fighter carefully as it swept through the air, and steered the illusion around the chopper, trying to keep a picture of the empty desert between them and slowly changing the picture as it described a much tighter orbit around the chopper.
In the back, Kai had grabbed the half-inflated recon drone and bundled it up into the cargo bay, and Hunter had finally managed to dig through enough foam and packing material to dig down to the transmitter. It appeared to be attached to some kind of spring-loaded pressure sensor, and probably had activated when they'd lifted the box up.
"Got it! Now, do we kill it or send it away?"
The spirit of the desert materialised next to Hunter at a mental command from Tads, holding out a rocky hand for the device. Once Hunter had laid the slender transmitter in its hand, it levitated out of the rear doors and headed north, away from the chopper and moving swiftly above the surface of the sand, looking like a small sand twister as the rocks and debris whipped around the core of its being.
"Transmitter is out and on the way north by north west!" Hunter called out, hitting the ramp close button as he watched the spirit go. He had to raise his voice as the engines built up to full power, and the rotors started to drive down the sand, forming a vortex of whirling sand around them.
As soon as Marius felt the rear door close, he threw more power to the engine and lifted off. He was flying blind, a maelstrom of sand being thrown up into the air by the downwash of his rotors, spilling out past the illusion that Tads was vainly trying to keep in the right place. He put the nose down, and started to head south west, leaving a blast pattern in the sand below him. Slowly he picked up height, travelling in an arrow straight line. Behind him it looked like a huge plough had been driven through the surface of the sand, leaving a furrow of miniature dunes behind him.
He continued to rise, and as the ground effect lessened he called over the intercom.
"Hang tight! Manoeuver in 3…2…1…now!"
True to his word, the pitch shifted on the rotor, the engine soared into the red area on the gauges, the tail rotor reversed and the huge craft spun around like a centrifuge. The airframe creaked and groaned, and the crew were thrown violently to the side, knuckles going white as they hung on tightly and resisted the sudden forces that tried to throw them around. Tads just let herself be flattened against the nose of the turret concentrating as hard as she could as she manipulated the illusion to cover their violent gyrations.
Marius kicked the tail rotor back in, dropped the nose and relaxed the pitch on the rotors, and in a few heartbeats the craft had swung through one hundred and eighty degrees, and was now heading north, clearing their original location and well away from the course marked out on the desert floor. Debris rattled in the cargo area as small items fell to the floor or rolled out from under things, the casualties of the sudden high-g movement.
In the desert the fighter jet continued the turn, scanners aiming towards the huge billow of sand, electronic fingers questing through the air and trying to locate them. Marius's abrupt change of direction and the magical cover foxed the pilot though, and the sensors fired off across the desert, failing to get a return on them. A few seconds later the fighter broke off, and headed south, lighting the afterburners for a moment and rapidly dwindling.
"How come they don't send anyone to rescue their patrol…but the second we move some boxes, they send a jet?"
"Those guys were skeletons, Tads. They've been here for a long while – probably since last season. Perhaps last season this whole area was a warzone and they couldn't get someone in to look at them. And besides, if those boxes haven't moved for months and months, it's not surprising that they'd be curious about what is going on and decide to send someone for a look."
They continued to increase the distance between themselves and the initial location. Marius caught a faint electronic trace and shouted a warning, swinging his sensors to the aft as well. As they watched, the fighter streaked in from the south, heading towards the general area they would have been in had they not changed direction. The nose cannon lit up, and explosions traced across the desert as the pilot fired off a long burst from the autocannon. Dust plumes rose in a long arcing pattern as the speculative fire raced across the landscape – but it was nowhere near them. They flew on, and just as they were losing the range, saw the fighter turn to the west and gently start to climb.
"Probably heading to base. If he's over in the Tunisia area, he's probably burnt a bunch of his fuel getting over here on burner, and only had enough loiter time for a few circuits before he has to head back." Hunter used the ruler tool on his map, sketching out possible distances and bases from the areas to the west he'd identified as corporate operations centres.
Marius bent their course to the east, flying parallel to the route the team had driven up earlier, watching as the land rose up to meet him as the broken landscape grew higher. He covered in a matter of minutes what had taken the ground team hours, and soon spotted the crater, jarring against the landscape with its uniformity and surreal nature.
"So – where do you want me to set down?"
"Not in there!" Tads exclaimed firmly. "Let me see if I can spot the exact gully we need." Soon enough she'd identified the area the spirit had told her contained their prey, and they followed that gully to the north east, eventually finding a spot large enough for the chopper about three kilometres away from the crater. As before, Marius lost all visibility as he descended, and had a moment of concern when the chopper started to sink in the soft sand – but after about 300mm, they hit firmer ground and their descent stopped. Once they were safe, he continued the launch sequence for the surveillance drone, getting their eyes in the sky up and surveying their position, ensuring it was safe.
"Hey everyone? Do I need to keep this illusion up? I've got a massive headache, and I can't rest and keep us hidden." Tads climbed out of the nose turret and they could see her wobbling slightly as she moved into the rear area, still concentrating hard on maintaining an illusion of an empty piece of desert to anyone watching from overhead. They ran a sensor scan from the chopper and the surveillance drone, and the rest of the team looked out of their windows, checking with astral vision and cybereyes alike – but they found no trace of anyone still looking for them or watching them. With a sigh of relief Tads let the spell dissipate, and then found a couple of painkillers from the first aid kit and some water to wash them down, before collapsing into a seat and letting her head flop back with a sigh.
While they waited to make sure the coast was clear and there wasn't going to be a follow-up team of Aztechnology goons arriving by chopper or parachute, they discussed their plans again. There were a lot of unknowns - more than any of them felt comfortable with, but they discussed some general strategies and tactics, trying to plan for some common eventualities. They were still going to open with a magical stun ball at the targets, but now they were closer to the crater and could feel the twisting and warping of the area again, they had misgivings about just how effective that would be.
"One thing is certain though – when you head out, Kai is definitely going to be part of the capture team."
"Why, Marius? I mean, I don't object, though Kai looks like he might as soon as he can get a word in edgeways. And having an extra taser and magically-active person won't hurt at all, but why?"
"Because Aswon, if he's with you – then he's not here with me, whining and moaning and distracting me from my surveillance!"
"HEY! Don't talk about me like that!" Sniggers echoed around the chopper, lightning the mood a little. Whilst they were waiting, Aswon fashioned a few makeshift slings from some old material, and gathered a bunch of rocks from just outside the chopper. When he saw the others watching him, he explained as he sorted through the rocks looking for the best size and shape projectiles.
"We think they hunt with some kind of tremor sense yes? So I don't know if it will work, but maybe we can use rocks to simulate a small creature moving around, or as bait. Or maybe even a distraction. And if we get desperate, to help fling rocks at their eyes. I'll take any advantage we can!"
They continued their preparations, cleaning guns and checking equipment, topping up their supply belts and the UAZ from the stocks used earlier in the day. Just after dusk Tads summoned a fresh mid-force spirit, asking it to wait with them and answer her call if they ran into trouble.
Most of the team had their non-lethal weapons ready and sorted now, and Kai had a few smoke grenades on hand in case they needed them for cover – though with the likely non-visual senses they now assumed the scorpions had, it might prove more of a hindrance to them than their targets. Still, if they ran into some other critter, it could help. Hunter also insisted on having his rifle ready, loaded with Teflon coated armour penetrating rounds. When Aswon had reminded him that they were here to capture, not kill, Hunter just gave him a look and continued to check over the rounds, wiping each clean in turn before loading them into the clip.
"I know, I know. But if they get feisty and we have to kill them and find some more, then I want to have something that will actually do the job! Or if we run into some kind of were-armadillo or some other fraked up creature with a ridiculous armoured hide, I want a gun that will stop it – dead."
"Fair enough – but please, as a last resort. And that's assuming you can even see them, of course!"
"Why couldn't we see them?"
"Well, if they're cold-blooded like a lot of other stuff, they're not going to show up on thermo at all – and they are likely to have colouration that lets them blend in with the environment, to help them hunt. Just might be tricky. So be sure of your targets please, especially if you're firing those rounds. If you miss, they're going to punch straight through OUR armour too!"
Marius had the surveillance drone up the gully now, scanning the ground and looking for targets. With the sun down, the solar charger wasn't functioning but the drone had been designed with extended operations in mind. The large lifting bag counteracted the weight of the gondola and sensor package, so the tiny motors on each side only had to counteract the gentle breeze to keep the blimp in place, and he reckoned he had enough endurance to stay on station most of the night.
He tuned out the conversation of the rest of the team, and then studied the sensor data carefully. The pickups on the drone were not great quality, so he had to use a fair bit of human intuition and interpretation to filter through the data, and it was a slow job. He split the screen full of data up into a grid, then blew each grid square up and examined it carefully, looking for signs of movement, animals, any sign of living creatures or unusual items.
After a while, he still hadn't found anything, so Tads went out of her body to the area, to double check the location. When she manifested, she realised the drone was not quite as far up as she thought it needed to be, so she got Marius to shift the drone a little, and then start his search again.
Time crawled by, and still there was nothing showing on the sensors. Marius bought the blimp down to a height of ten metres, hoping that any roaming critter wouldn't be able to jump that high to attack it. Being that much closer to the ground limited his field of vision slightly – but it did increase his sensor resolution a noticeable amount, and made it easier to see what was going on.
He noticed a scrawny looking rabbit like creature hopping across the gulley, emerging from the rocks and bounding across the sandy expanse. Then it just…disappeared. He adjusted the sensors a little, and checked again, actively steering the drone over a little to get a cross bearing on the location in case there was some weird shadow or hole he couldn't see in the flat washed out electronic view. But no – the rabbit was just gone. He called out to Tads, who once more headed up to the location astrally to check it out.
When she got there, huge scorpions were clearly visible to her in the sand, their claws holding the struggling rabbit high off the ground. She thought they were easily as long as Hunter was tall, and had a long sinuous curved tail held high up in the air. A barb thrust out of the end of the tail, a bony protuberance that was perhaps thirty centimetres in length. She dashed back to her body then peered at the display again, which showed only the empty desert below the drone. They had a faint aura of magical energy around them, though it was hard to see much past the bright flare of distress and fear given off by the creature trapped in their pincers.
"That's got to be some kind of magical concealment power, or perhaps some kind of adaptive colouration or spell-like ability. Clearly very effective against technology – let's hope it doesn't work so well against people!" Aswon muttered as he checked his gear quickly. "Come on – if it's just a rabbit, that's not going to take them long to eat!"
They piled into the vehicle and Shimazu headed up the gully, trying to drive quickly, but smoothly and avoid too much noise – though the clanking and thundering of the cheaply-made Russian diesel engine gave little hope of that. He stopped about two hundred metres north of the drone, and they looked ahead, struggling to spot the drone at all against the night sky – the stealthy material blending in well to the dark sky, and only being visible by the stars that it occluded.
They looked hard, scanning the ground ahead and watching astrally, though gun scopes and with binoculars – but it was all quiet. It looked like they'd missed their chance, so they relaxed a little, and waited, sitting quietly in the UAZ and letting whatever creatures and critters were around relax after their arrival.
They waited for nearly half an hour, sitting in the quiet vehicle. The cold night wicked away their body heat, making them shiver and wishing they'd bought additional layers of clothing – but they'd expected to be going into combat and hadn't wanted bulky layers of material slowing them down.
"Heads up, I can see a snake working its way down the gulley, leaving a trail behind it. Looks to be about the length of an arm, so might make a decent meal." When the team head Marius call over the comms, they bought up their guns and binoculars again, and started to actively search the area, until they spotted the sinuous form of the snake moving across the sand. It rippled from the head down to the tail, describing an S shape that lifted part of the snake forward at a time, slowly progressing over the sand in their direction.
Without warning the sand erupted underneath it, a showering of sand bursting a metre up into the air. There was a shimmer of movement and they saw the snake lift up into the air, writhing and flexing explosively. When they looked physically, it was like there was nothing there – just a rippling in the darkness, ghost like phantasms of movement. In astral space, the two forms of the scorpions were clearly visible, holding their prey aloft, their pincers holding the snake up off the ground to impede its attempts to escape and in position for the stinger to strike if need be.
Tads pushed her door open and focussed her mind on the targets, not hearing the other doors open as well as Shimazu, Aswon and Hunter also piled out of the vehicle and readied their weapons, leaving Kai inside. She tasted the air as she started to gather the power in her hands, wincing at the unclean taint that pervaded the area, leaking down from the crater. Rolling the mana up into a ball, she flung it at them, watching the sphere of energy crash into them. The snake went floppy, stunned into unconsciousness, but neither of the scorpions seemed to be affected at all.
She gasped, surprised that simple creatures would be so resistant to her attacks – though the choking mire of pollution made it much harder to cast than usual, and for her to dissipate the magical backlash and drain from the spell.
They released the unconscious snake and scuttled towards the vehicle, their legs propelling them swiftly across the sand. The pincers were raised towards her and the tail thrashed back and forth as the creatures body swayed with the motion of the legs – but the massive barbed stinger remained pointing unerringly at her.
She summoned her energy once more and flung another ball of power their way. She remembered taking out a dozen or more people with a blast like that, scattering them like wheat that had been harvested. But the critters shrugged off her second attack just like the first.
The two blood red scorpions closed on the team, accelerating across the cold desert sand and the team prepared to engage their foe.
