The silence in the cabin of the rover was heavy as they pulled out of the base and began driving across the baking wastelands.

The gray cloud cover of the previous night had burned off completely, leaving only the merciless sun that so often lorded over the badlands. The mud was already hard again, sapped of any remaining moisture, at least making it easier to drive.

After about five minutes or so of silence, Frost finally spoke.

"I don't know what's going to happen, so I suppose I should speak up now," she said quietly, staring straight ahead. He glanced at her. She had her helmet on, hidden behind her cold, mechanical facade.

"I'm listening," Dalton replied, wondering if she was finally going to spill.

"I wanted to thank you." She paused, then pressed on. "For last night."

"Oh," he said. "Uh...you're welcome."

"Specifically I meant for...making me feel...safe," she added awkwardly. "And heard. The sex was great but...you actually listening to me–that was a lot better."

It sounded so strange to hear this from behind that digitized filter.

"I'm glad I could make you feel that way," he replied after a moment's fumbling. "I...imagine it must be difficult, to find that, as a Ghost."

"Very much so."

"I'm sorry."

She didn't say anything in reply.

He decided to try and press the conversation in the direction he wanted it to go. "Miller thinks you're hiding something. He thinks you know more than you do."

"Do you?" she asked.

He sighed. "I don't know...no, I don't." He groaned and resisted the urge to light up a cigarette. "Hope that's not my dick talking."

She actually laughed. "Has that been a problem?"

"It's a problem at one point or another for just about every guy," he replied.

"Was it that good?" she asked, sounding genuinely curious.

"Uh, hell yes it was...but don't derail the conversation. You said you were going to tell me things," he replied.

"I said maybe."

"Come on, Ari, give me something. Anything."

A long moment of silence passed. "Will this stay between us?"

"If it has nothing to do with the safety of the base, then yeah," he replied.

"Fair, I suppose. I'm...not here on Confederate business," she said, still not looking at him, though he couldn't tell if she didn't want to or if she was scanning for signs of those monsters. Probably both, Ghosts were supposed to be great at multitasking.

"Then why are you here?" he asked. She maintained her silence. "What, is it like, you found out your brother is out here or something? A cousin?"

"No, it's nothing like that," she replied. "I have no family. And I don't mean that metaphorically. I also mean it literally: my family is dead. Anyway, it wouldn't really matter. I don't even remember them. They got me early."

"I'm sorry." He frowned. "So, you're here on your own business, and you don't want the Confederacy to know you're out here. Is it something specific about our outpost?"

"No," she said. "Not really."

"Come on, Ari, give me more than that."

She sighed. "You're trying to push my buttons."

"You said I could call you that if it was just you and me. If you don't want me to call you by that name–"

"No," she said, "I...don't mind. I just don't want to feel like you're trying to manipulate me."

"All right, fair. Sorry. I'm freaked out. This is a bit much. I keep feeling like we're gonna get there and everyone's going to be dead again, and while we're out here dicking around, those things are going to attack my home and slaughter everyone in it."

"Understandable...I'm sorry. I really can't give you anymore than I already have. Honestly, I'm kind of putting myself in your hands by telling you what I have."

That was true, he realized. In fact, he was surprised that she'd told him anything at all. She must really trust him...or really be desperate. That sort of put a few of the pieces into place, though. Why she'd been so vague. She could hide in plain sight by saying little more than 'that's classified', because everyone at a backwater little wasteland outpost was far too scared of a Ghost, and all a Ghost's implied power and connection, to question them.

Was she running?

It was rare that a Ghost turned against the Confederacy, but it had been known to happen.

"I respect that, and I'm not going to screw you over, Ari. If it wasn't obvious by now, I'm not exactly a fan of the Confederacy...all right, I'll do what I can to convince Miller you don't know anything, because I believe you're telling the truth. The only thing I really give a shit about right now is: will you put those skills to use and help us if it comes down to a fight?"

"Yes," she replied.

"Okay then. That's all I needed to know." He paused. "You are good in a fight, right?"

She sighed. "It's insulting that you need to ask."

"Sorry. Like I said: nervous."

"Hmm."

They were coming up on Gamma Nine now. As they came within sight of it, Dalton felt his heart pound in response to a sudden chime over the shortwave.

"That's a distress beacon," Frost said.

"Automated," he agreed, easing up on the gas a little. He activated his radio. "This is Sergeant Dalton of the Confederate Marine Corps, can anyone hear me? Over."

They waited, listening to the siren call of the automated distress beacon, pulsing slowly over the airwaves.

"Great," he muttered, rolling to a stop when they got close enough to the exterior wall. The front gate was in much the same condition as they had found the other outpost, only this one seemed even more worse for the wear.

"This is bad," Ari murmured.

"Yeah…"

"What are you thinking?"

"I'm trying to decide if it makes sense or not to just cut and run," he murmured. Then he sighed and keyed his radio. "This is Sergeant Dalton, can anyone hear me?" He waited, listened. More dead air, just like usual. "I repeat, this is Sergeant Dalton of the Confederate Marine Corps, I am responding to your distress call, can anyone hear me?"

Then, something new. The distinct sound of a new radio hooking into the channel. "Sergeant...help…"

"Where are you?" he asked, his whole body going rigid.

"Command...Center…"

"What's your condition? How many are you? Are there hostiles in the area?" he asked, knowing he was going too rapid-fire with his questions but unable to hold back. Whoever it was, they sounded in pretty poor shape.

"Help…" was all the response he got.

"Shit," he muttered, killing the engine and grabbing his Gauss Rifle. "We gotta get in there."

"Something's not right…" Ari murmured, staring through the windshield.

"There's a lot not right but if we don't get in there he's dead. You heard him, he sounded bad. There could be others. I'm not leaving people here to die," he replied, opening the door. "You can wait here if you want."

"I'm not letting you go in there alone, Erik," she replied, doing the same.

They secured the rover and moved around to its front, slowly approaching the gate. It was torn open, same as the other.

"Remember," he whispered, "they can hide under the dirt."

"Were there any visible signs? Any tell?" she replied.

He sighed. "Not that I could see."

"I'll try a few scans," she murmured. "Wait a moment." She looked around them while he ached to get inside the gate and rescue whoever was in there. He could hear a very soft electronic whining sound coming from her helmet as she ran her scans.

"Nothing," she said after a moment.

"Come on," he replied impatiently, making for the twisted remnants of the main gate. She followed in his footsteps, silent as death.

If anything, Gamma Nine was worse than Four.

Two of their Supply Depots were completely destroyed, reduce to sparking scrap heaps. Their Barracks was a bloody ruin. Bullet holes covered every surface and the mud was churned up with blood and spent shell casings, just like before.

He could see no obvious signs of anything beneath the dirt.

"See anything?" he whispered, his voice harsh.

"Nothing," Frost replied. He couldn't help but think of her as her Ghost name, her emotions already having bled away, nothing left but the human machine.

Dalton imagined he was much the same.

"Let's move it. Double-time."

"Got your six," she replied tightly.

He let his Gauss Rifle lead him in through the ruined gates. Still no clear signs that there was anything hiding under the dirt, but that might not mean jack shit. It was a relatively clear run to the Command Center though, it was set in the far back left corner of the outpost. He could see the entrance from here, the doors peeled open like the other one. Deciding it was now or never, Dalton began loping across the open space.

Frost was almost perfectly silent behind him. He could just barely hear her footsteps, and only then because of the amped audio he was getting piped to him from his suit. It surprised him how confident he felt with her at his back. He'd worked with Ghosts a handful of times before, and he'd never fully trusted them.

They arrived at the Command Center ingress without seeing or hearing anything.

Only the eternal wasteland wind, whispering through the dead outpost.

Dalton tried the radio again as he slipped inside, checking the three ways into the structure. The right way was barricaded, the left closed off, the way ahead, down the central corridor, seemed to beckon.

"We're in the Command Center, what's your status?" he asked.

"...help."

"We're coming, just hold on," Dalton said.

"Wait," Frost said, making him freeze up.

"What?" he hissed, looking around again.

"Something's wrong," she said.

"What do you mean?" he pressed impatiently. His own combat sense felt like a jumbled mess right now, grease bouncing on a hot oven or a sparks bursting from a damaged livewire.

"This is a trap."

"How?"

"I don't know, Dalton, but it's a trap."

He tried to make himself relax, but it wouldn't come. There were lives on the line. "We have to get in there," he said finally.

She sighed. "Just stay sharp."

He grunted in response and headed off, boots banging hollowly as he began moving down the main corridor, her following in his wake. He made it maybe a quarter of the way down, knowing that the likeliest location of survivors would be the Control Room at the core, but skidded to a halt as an awful reek hit him.

"What the hell is that smell?" he whispered. It smelled like the dead alien thing he'd hauled back from Gamma Four, only both worse and somehow different.

It made his instincts scream so loud that it gave him a genuine hesitation.

"I have no idea, but this is-we're walking into a trap," Frost said.

Dalton forced himself on, activating his suit-mounted flashlights and peering into the various open doorways as they passed them. Just room after room of death and destruction, blood and bullets, guts and gore. All things he was far too familiar with. The closer he got to the Control Room, the worse the smell got, and the more his senses began to hone and focus…

And warn him that Frost was right.

But he'd heard someone on the line, they both had. Someone calling for help.

The glare of the flashlights pushed back the gloom, revealing only more slaughter. Finally, they arrived at the Control Room.

Something was deeply wrong. The smell was overpowering now, and at this point his nose was picking out the familiar scent of human death: freshly spilled blood and bowels, exposed meat, ruptured organs.

Something spilled out into the corridor. At first he took it for blood, a lot of blood, but as his flashlights focused on it…

"What in the name of hell is that?" he whispered.

A strange gray substance, shot through with red, grew out of the Control Room. Along the floor, the walls, the ceiling.

It pulsed gently.

"I don't know," Frost replied quietly.

Dalton slowly moved forward, his light revealing more of the stuff in the room beyond, a lot more. It covered the floor. It covered the workstations. It covered the walls.

Except, no, there was something else on the walls…

"What...what is that?" he whispered, terror stealing into his soul. Because he knew what he was looking at, with an abrupt and sudden clarity, and it made him want to run from this place as fast as he possibly could.

"We have to get out of here," Frost said softly. "Dalton!" she hissed.

He couldn't stop staring, felt frozen in place.

Bodies. There were bodies against the wall, held in place by the mushy gray substance. They looked like some kind of nightmarish work of art, men and women, over two dozen of them at least, pressed up against the walls of the Control Room.

He couldn't tell if they were alive or dead, but they looked beyond saving.

Abruptly, with a cold, clenched certainty, he knew what had to be done.

"Call in a nuke on this place," he said.

"I can't," Frost replied.

"Why not?"

"Even putting aside the fact that I don't want anyone knowing I'm out here, there are no nuclear launch facilities in range that I'm aware of, and even if there were, the comms is obviously screwed up. I might be able to cut through whatever's causing the problems, but I doubt it."

"Shit...all right, fine. There's a way of setting a Command Center to overload, but I don't know how to do it. Do you?" he asked.

"How do you know about that?" she hissed.

"You do this job for long enough and you learn some things, now: can you or can you not do it?" he asked.

"Yes, but I need access to the master workstation."

"Well, it's right there," he said, pointing to the left of the entrance. She was silent. He didn't dare take his eyes from the horrors on the walls, still unsure if they were alive or dead, a threat or not, but he spoke a bit louder. "Frost, we have to deal with this, and now. I have no goddamned clue what's happening here, but it has to have something to do with those aliens. God alone knows what the shit they're doing, but it's bad. We can take this out, whatever it is, right here and right now. If we leave, who knows how bad it's gonna get."

"Dammit," Frost whispered. "Fine. Cover me."

He took the first step into the room and grimaced at the spongy give of the creepy substance beneath his boot. Even through the armor it felt disgusting to walk on. He took another step in, then another, expecting something to go wrong at any moment. But nothing happened. He led Frost over to the master workstation, tucked away in a back office between sets of corpses (were they corpses?) stuck to the walls.

"Wait here," she said, and slipped into the room.

He grit his teeth as he studied the nearest body, realizing that they were, in fact, still alive. Though their eyes were closed, they were still breathing. But how? Some of their skin was melted off, and there were uncertain lumps beneath the flesh that did remain. Some of their mouths were covered with the substance, and on one of them, a Marine who was still partially in his suit of power armor, it almost looked like he was growing a trunk where his mouth should be. And a few others, their shoulders were sporting bony, sharp protrusions.

Somehow, the gray substance was changing them, morphing them, twisting them into something else. But what?

This was getting worse, way worse.

Little hopping, chirping things he could deal with, but this?

They had to blow this place, it was going to be a mercy killing.

"Frost?" he asked.

"I'm getting there," she said.

One of the bodies stuck to the wall shifted suddenly, then jerked.

"Frost…"

"I'm getting there, Dalton."

He raised his Gauss Rifle. The decaying man's eyes snapped open, and they glowed with a malignant crimson light.

"Frost!"

"What?!"

"Contact!" he snapped, and opened fire as the thing yanked itself free of the gray goo. All around him, eyes and mouths opened, shrieking and wailing.

"Cease fire!" Frost snapped as he blasted away two more.

"What?! Why!?"

"This thing is barely functional as it is! You hit something and we lose the ability to blow this Command Center!"

"Shit! Just hurry up! These thing are coming off the walls!"

They moaned and wailed as they stumbled towards him. He was more disgusted than worried, as they didn't look particularly strong or dangerous. He had the idea that whatever metamorphosis was transpiring had been interrupted. Growling in frustration, he slung his rifle, letting it hang over one bulky shoulder, and then drove his gauntleted fist into the malformed face of the nearest...whatever the hell they were.

The former terran's head exploded in a plume of pulped gore. Some of it sprayed onto his visor, which immediately began the automated process of cleaning it away. He drove an elbow back into another growling, stained mouth and heard many bones break. Soon he was surrounded by grabbing hands, and he was startled to find them strong.

"Any day now, Frost!" he called, twisting hard and throwing several of them off. He brought his fists together and crushed another skull between them, brains spraying out, mixed in with blood and bone fragments.

Frost said nothing, just worked the console with a cold concentration.

He smashed his fist into another desiccated chest, sending the former terran flying back, knocking over several others. A weight came onto his back and a hand slapped over his visor, smearing it with gore. He reached up, grabbed it by the wrist, and yanked hard. He let out a startled sound of disgust when the arm snapped off in his grasp.

Something grabbed his leg and something else grabbed one of his arms. Even with the suit-enhanced strength, he was finding himself overwhelmed.

"Frost!"

A loud shot sounded and suddenly the weight on his back was gone. Another two shots sounded off, muzzle fire flaring inside the CO's office, and the things grabbing him disappeared with sharp jerks.

"Let's go!" Frost called, stepping out, Canister Rifle in hand.

"I thought you said no shooting!" he snapped, raising his foot and planting it hard into the chest of another groaning terror, sending it flying back.

"I told you not to shoot," she replied, "now let's go! We need to hit a minimum safety distance of three hundred meters in two minutes."

"Shit!" he snapped, and started running.

Like a linebacker on steroids, he smashed a path right through the writhing mass of monstrous things, Frost right behind him. Dalton didn't stop running. He expected more of them to be in the hallway, waiting, but it seemed that all of them had been brought to the Control Room.

They burst back out into daylight and he skidded to a halt as he saw half a dozen of the hopping bastards waiting for them.

"Don't stop!" Frost shouted, and fired off a perfectly aimed round from her C-14 that punched right through the skull of the nearest critter, dropping it.

He took her advice, whipping out his Gauss Rifle and opening fire as he ran right through them. The things chirped and shrieked as the bullets chewed them up and forced them to back off where they didn't wound or kill them. They kept going, pushing hard, and as soon as they reached the gate, he turned around and kept firing.

"Go! Get in the vehicle!" he snapped.

Frost did as he commanded, disappearing through the gate. He heard no shout or gunfire, so that meant there was nothing waiting for them beyond the gate at least. He emptied his rifle killing off the rest of them, or at least wounding them enough that they couldn't easily follow, then automatically reloaded as he hustled for the rover.

Frost was already in the passenger's seat and she was turning it on. As he opened the door and tossed his rifle into the back, he paused as something caught his attention up high. Glancing up, he stared in open shock.

Something was booking it towards them from the skies above, something unlike the strange creatures they'd seen so far.

It was smaller than the other thing he'd seen, though not by much. It had stretched skin, like a membrane, held taut between bony limbs and forming almost a kind of umbrella body. Tentacles wavered from the top and a long, sinuous alien head seemed to be staring right at him.

"What is that!?" he cried, getting into the rover.

"Drive!" Frost yelled as she leaned out the window with her rifle, aimed, and fired.

The explosive round she sent out landed perfectly, blowing off one of the tentacles and doing enough damage to cause the thing to at least stop.

Throwing the vehicle into reverse, he backed up, whipped them around, threw it into drive, then stomped on the gas pedal and got them away from the outpost as fast as he could. He was wondering if they'd made it across the minimum safety threshold when the entire base went up in flames behind them and the earth shook all around them.

"Is anything following us?" he asked after a few seconds.

"No," Frost replied, "nothing."

They drove on.

This had just got a whole lot more complicated.