CONTACT

"I hope there-s something for me," Heather said hopefully. Angie thought she looked like a school girl waiting for Santa.

"I have something, uh, for you," Mike said softly.

Angie glared at Mike. She was ready to snap and tear him a new one, but something in his look stopped her. He wasn't acting like a pig or his normal condescending obnoxious self. This was different. Until I know what it means, ignore it, she thought, I hope I'm not setting feminism back a hundred years.

The team was sorting through the stuff that Southaven pulled out of the cache that Mark found. There were a couple AK203s. These were old fashion gunpowder and bullet rifles. It was an evolution of the design the Russian made famous. Simple and reliable and cheap. A frontier planet couldn't ask for more. Especially a rebel force that didn’t have much money.

Getting hit by one of those old fashion bullets could be devastating to flesh. It probably wouldn't penetrate the armour. Probably. This is recruit armour, the weakest type and naturally made by the lowest bidder, Angie thought. How could that be anything but great?

There were grenades in the cache too. Old fashion simple, pull the pin and throw grenades. Everybody except Mark had been checked out on grenades during the tutorial and thus had been issued several modern grenades. Mark didn't have time to go through the tutorial and didn't have grenades until now.

Some of the grenades had red bands or white bands. It didn't matter, Mark dropped a bunch of them into his bag. The best part of bags in the game was that you could drop lots of stuff in them. More than you could ever drop into a bag in real life.

When Southaven pulled out a grenade launcher Heather grabbed it. "I can stand further away and drop exbombs on people? That's me."

The food that got pulled out was distributed all around. Most of it... Something Southaven pulled out smelled absolutely horrible. He threw it out into the forest immediately.

"Contact!" XMAN235 reported over the radio.

Everybody froze. Angie responded over the team intercom. "What is your contact XMAN?"

"I have eyes on TU'COns and humans. It looks like..."

There was no video. XMAN must have shut off his video and his transmission was low power. This should have made him harder to detect. It also made it impossible for anyone else to see what was going on.

"Dammitttttt…. I'm taking fire, I'm taking....UH " XMAN's transmission ended.

On the readouts, his frame went gray and his stats zeroed out. XMAN was dead.

"Let's go,"Angie commanded. "Best speed."

"What about all this?" Mike asked, gesturing to the pile of stuff.

Mark was already leading the way through the woods. Southaven wasn't far behind.

"Can you set a booby trap and catch up before we get there?"

Mike smiled a cruel smile at Angie. "No problem."

APPROACHING XMAN’S BODY

The klicks had melted away steadily. Finally, the whole team was arrayed on a hill. They’re destination was 500 meters away. To get there, however, they had to do downhill, across a small valley and back up another hill. But that was where the XMAN235'S beacon was going off.

XMAN had stupidly gotten kilometers out in front of the team and now they had to find his body and figure out what had happened to him. XMAN’S beacon hadn't moved in more than 30 minutes. That was when they got his last message, a warning that he had made contact with the enemy, or somebody.

From the map, and what they could see, the woods ran all the way down this hill and back up the next. The map downloaded into the helmets wasn't great, but it was better than nothing. According to the map, there was a tertiary road on the other side of XMAN's hill.

"Let's get there. Mark you've gotten us this far."

"I wanna be right up there," Southaven said. He belonged to XMAN's team.

Angie supposed that gave him the right to go find out what happened as soon as possible. She nodded agreement.

"Heather you stay here and keep watch. Once we get up there, you close up. If we get into trouble, use that grenade launcher." Heather giggled and nodded enthusiastically. Angie turned to Mike. "You stay with her."

Mike looked like he wanted to argue. She didn't give him a chance.

"Move out." She and Southaven stepped off. Mark was already gone. Behind her there was some grumbling. It doesn't matter, I'm in charge.