The twinned suns—one red, one blue—loomed over the open sky of Canicus IX, beaming down upon the dusty world for hours on end. The heat was all but unbearable for Forward Detachment Theta, who kept their eyes pointed down to the brown rock and dust at their feet, lest they be blinded by the glare of the horizon. Most had shed their fatigues to try to stave off heat stroke, which was a reprehensible choice were their superiors around. Luckily for FD Theta, they could see the way to headquarters just fine, and no such officers seemed to be making the approach toward them anytime soon.
Jack Harr sat in the half-cover provided by one of their two autocannon installations, shirt off and wrapped around his head. “Let my hand wipe the grime from your perfect form,” he murmured to himself, passing a cloth over his lasgun. “May you purify with your bolts of light.”
A shadow overtook Harr, partially obscuring his head from the view of the twinned suns. “A battle prayer? Didn’t think you were that devout, Jack.” Harr looked up and squinted, a glimmer of the sunbeams still shining past his new guest. Bliss Carmichael was standing over him, still dressed in her full combat fatigues, the only one of their squad to be doing so. Harr understood why; she was a vision of a woman, and did not want to distract the others of her squad from their duties by being so revealing. This was a consideration that the other women of their squad—Pliskoska and Starkene—were not so thoughtful or careful about.
“Litany of Cleanliness,” Harr nodded to her, still squinting. “And it’s not about being devout—not that I’m not, by the way. It’s just good practice to keep one’s armaments and attire in good condition.”
“I don’t disagree. But we haven’t exactly seen enough action for them not to be in good condition, don’t you think?” Carmichael offered.
“In these conditions, with the heat and the dust and the sand, I disagree. Environmental effects are just as capable of inflicting wear and tear on a weapon as anything else. When was the last time you cleaned yours?” Harr replied.
Carmichael thought for a moment and then shrugged. “A week or two, probably.”
“Well that’s no good at all. Sit with me, Bliss,” Harr suggested, scooching aside, slightly further into the sunlight, to make some shady room for Carmichael to join him. She grinned, chuckled, then shrugged and did so, bringing her autogun before her and resting it in her lap. They cleaned their arms together for a time, though Carmichael did not recant the Litany Harr had. Harr ran through it in his head, silently, for her instead. “Aren’t you hot?” Harr asked her after a few minutes together.
“Sorry?” Carmichael asked, blurting out a laugh.
“Oh, I mean—”
“From the heat?” she asked, laughing. Harr nodded sheepishly, grinning. “Of course. But that’s the gig. I like to think I’m hot in the other way, too, but I assume you don’t need to ask about that,” she winked to him.
“I surely wouldn’t,” he chuckled.
Carmichael laughed a bit more, then leaned further back into the shade provided by the autocannon and stretched her arms over her head and yawned, partially exhausted from the heat. In the process of doing so, Harr could not help but to stare as she puffed her chest out, but averted his eyes back toward his lasgun as Carmichael finished stretching. She knew he had stared at her, though—she did not mind; in fact, that had been the point of the motion. “Watch where you point that, Bliss,” a third voice approached them in response to Carmichael’s stretching.
“Get a good look, Sly, I hope?” she asked with a chuckle.
“A great angle, yeah,” Sly Burkowitz nodded, stepping up to the duo sitting under the autocannon. “Say, have you two seen Graer?”
“Wasn’t he on patrol today?” Harr suggested.
“Well, yeah, but his shift should be ending,” Burkowitz noted, and looked around the scene, his eyes safely obscured behind a pair of dark goggles. He, too, was without his shirt. “He should be in plain view of us, but he isn’t. I hope the heat hasn’t gotten to him.”
“Graer’s a big guy, I’m sure he’s fine,” Carmichael shrugged.
“It’s his size that worries me. He’ll suffer the heat more,” Burkowitz suggested.
“Fair,” Carmichael nodded, then rose to her feet. “Do you have his planned patrol route? We could look for him in a Tauros.”
“I was thinking that, but I wanted to send both out—one team driving the start of his route, the other in reverse from what should’ve been the end,” Burkowitz explained. “Jat already agreed to join me for one trip, would you two be up for the other?”
“Did you confirm with Star and Plis about holding the fort while we’re out?” Harr asked.
“I did,” Burkowitz nodded.
“Then sure, if Bliss wants to,” Harr agreed, also rising to his feet.
“I’m driving, Jack,” she winked to him, sheathing her autogun, and making for the garage that had the FD’s two Tauros.
“Hey, Bliss, wait,” Burkowitz called to her. She turned around. “Just gonna head out without the route?” he laughed, making her blush. “He planned to patrol from here to Fortune Bluff, then to Harkolan Crag, and lastly to Eagle’s Mourning before returning here. Why don’t you take Eagle’s Mourning first, while Jat and I start from the Bluff?”
“Works for me,” Carmichael nodded. “What do we do if or when we cross each other?”
“Keep going, maybe one of us will see something on the same route but from our different angle,” Burkowitz suggested.
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“Roger that. Drive safe, Sly,” she told him, again turning away for the garage.
“You too, Bliss!” Burkowitz called to her while she and Harr entered the garage, Harr throwing his shirt back on, covered in sweat though it was. In the garage, Carmichael slid into the driver’s seat with her usual agility, hopping into the vehicle with grace. Harr, meanwhile, needed to use the great big ‘I’ on the side of the vehicle to help himself up to the gunner’s compartment. Carmichael began revving the engine while he got situated.
“Not a race today, Bliss,” Harr reminded her.
“You’re no fun,” she grinned, dropping her goggles over her eyes. She noticed Burkowitz and Jatizo Kilgar now approaching the garage together as a pair, too. “Say, altar boy, got one for finding lost friends?”
“I got one, though I can’t say I’ve ever shouted a prayer over the sound of a Tauros engine,” Harr replied.
“No time like the present,” she said, still grinning, and then revved the engine once more before lurching the Tauros onward.
Harr did not think Carmichael was a particularly good driver. In fact, he thought Carmichael knew she was not a good driver, which is why she wanted to torture him with her own driving. As the sandy world whipped around him, he gingerly lifted his fatigues over his mouth, keeping it a bit more protected. His goggles would suffice for his eyes, at least. In the meantime, he murmured another prayer to himself, though it definitely could not be heard by Carmichael over the engines and the wind. “O Eternal Emperor, Who alone watches us, And rules the tides and storms, Be compassionate to your servants, Preserve us from the perils of the galaxy, That we may be a safeguard to the Domain of Men.”
It was a ten minute drive out to Eagle’s Mourning. Upon arrival, Carmichael drove up to the base of the dilapidated, rusty antenna array and parked for a moment. “You see anything up there?” she called to Harr.
Harr looked around for a bit, then shook his head. “Negative. You’re a shit driver, you know that, Bliss?” he asked, a bit weary from the drive.
“Of course I do!” she laughed, and then revved the engine again before moving on. The twinned suns were finally beginning to settle beyond the horizon, and things were beginning to cool. Fifteen minutes from Eagle’s Mourning to Harkolan Crag. Carmichael did a lap around the large rocky outcrop while Harr looked up at its various features, looking for signs of Graer, but finding nothing. On the exit of that lap, Burkowitz and Kilgar passed by with a wave. Harr and Carmichael carried on.
Twenty minutes later still, just as they reached Fortune Bluff, the vox receiver on the Tauros Harr and Carmichael were driving buzzed to life. “Tauros-1 to Tauros-2, we found Graer. Return to camp, over,” Burkowitz reported.
“Tauros-2 to Tauros-1, receiving, returning to camp, over and out,” Carmichael responded.
“How’d we miss him?” Harr shouted.
“Guess we’ll find out!” she yelled back, tugging on the steering wheel of their Tauros and turning back to camp as night fell. She pushed her goggles over her forehead and flicked their vehicle’s front lights, four cones of yellow beaming ahead onto the dark and dusty world before them. They rode on for another seven minutes before arriving at camp, backing the Tauros into the garage. Burkowitz’s had already arrived, sitting idle in the garage. Harr and Carmichael disembarked from theirs after parking it, and strode into the camp proper. “Where the frig are they?” Carmichael muttered, looking around.
“Hey, Bliss, Jack, over here!” Kilgar shouted to them, peeking out from the men’s residence tent. Carmichael and Harr hurried over.
“Where the heck was he?” Harr asked as they neared.
“Pretty close to camp, actually. Collapsed in a ditch,” Kilgar explained, leading them into the tent. Graer Millart laid still in a cot pulled to the middle of the tent, with everyone else surrounding him. He was unconscious and his tanned face had reddened. “As Sly suggested, given your angle of approach, it makes sense that you didn’t see him. He was hidden pretty well if you were looking from the camp.”
“Hidden? You make it sound intentional,” Harr suggested.
“Bah, I don’t mean to. Poor choice of words, I guess,” Kilgar admitted with a shrug.
“Not necessarily,” Pliskoska Kratz suggested, waving the trio further inside. “He had a head wound.”
“He does? Where?” Carmichael frowned, joining her squad in standing over Millart.
“Back of the head,” Burkowitz reported. “We’ve wrapped it up now, but it was bad enough for blood loss.”
“Could he have gotten it when he fell?” Carmichael asked.
“Not likely. We found him on his face. Unless he retained consciousness enough to turn himself onto his front, but that doesn’t strike me as being too probable,” Burkowitz replied.
“So, what then?” Harr asked.
“Either some wildlife struck him in the back of his head, or someone did,” Starkene Hicketz replied.
Kratz glanced at Harr and Carmichael, which made the former lurch away in disgust. “You don’t think one of us did?” Harr exclaimed.
“Not with any surety,” Kilgar shook his head. “But unless we have an intruder, or unless it was just some wildlife, there doesn’t seem to be another possibility.”
“It wasn’t Jack,” Carmichael started, but he interrupted her.
“Or Bliss!”
“No one’s pointing fingers at anyone, gang,” Burkowitz laughed, shaking his hands dismissively. “Not yet, anyways. But how confident are those claims?”
“Completely,” Harr insisted. Carmichael shook her head.
“Jack shouldn’t be able to be so confident,” she grinned. “I spent the day tuning up the autocannons. I joined him when working on the second, but he has no idea where I was while I was working on the first. I can confidently say I saw him fiddling with his lasgun the whole day, though.”
“I wasn’t fiddling, I was—”
“Yeah, it’s a joke, bud,” she chuckled. “What about you four? I saw you all sporadically throughout the day, but where’ve you all been otherwise?”
“Running water reserves from the well,” Hicketz answered. “I figured if this heat is sticking around, it’d be best to top off on drinkable water sooner rather than later.”
“Can anyone corroborate that?” Kilgar asked.
“No one should be able to. But the well’s out the opposite direction from where you two found Graer. You can check the water reserve level log and note that it’s higher now than it was recorded yesterday. I couldn’t have domed Graer and gotten the reserve to where it’s at,” Hicketz explained. “Of the rest of you, I saw Plis the most, on the voxcaster.”
“That’s right, I was making sure the vox was working and getting weather updates from headquarters. Speaking of which, there’s a sandstorm blowing in from the south. Should arrive this time tomorrow evening. We’ll need to spend much of tomorrow making sure everything is strapped down,” Kratz explained.
“Fantastic, a possible intruder or impostor and a sandstorm to boot,” Burkowitz grumbled. “I was tuning up and refueling both of the Tauros. Run into any fuel problems, you two?” he asked Harr and Carmichael, who shook their heads. “Didn’t think so. You’re welcome. Which…just leaves you, Jat.”
“Which sucks, because I, like everyone else, have an alibi,” he replied immediately, then bit his tongue. Silence followed while the group waited for him to elaborate.
“Well?” Harr asked.
“I, uh…I…” he stammered.
“You were installing a pict in our tent again, weren’t you?” Hicketz asked dryly. Kilgar went flush, grinned, and shrugged. “Throne, you know we have to tell the Inquisitor about this, what the frig is wrong with you?”
“I don’t think I should answer that one,” Kilgar shook his head, backing away from the trio of women giving him the stink eye.
“Well, at least it’s an alibi I can believe,” Carmichael sighed. “Where is it?”
“Your bunk.”
“Oh, I’m so flattered,” she said dryly, rolling her eyes.
“Which means either one of us is lying, or we have an intruder,” Burkowitz reminded everyone.
“Or it’s a bird or something,” Kilgar added.
“Just go remove the frigging pict, Jatizo,” Burkowitz growled. “Accompany him, Bliss.”
“My pleasure,” she sneered.