Circa 0900

LZ

Brackett's World

Rose De Clare threw her entire weight against the planets wind dragging on her parachute. She was more than a bit worried that it would push her into the trees at the edge of the clearing. Had she not been busy fighting her chute, she would probably have been plotting her revenge on the Golden Chariots jump master.

After all he was the guy whose job it was to aim their bodies at the landing zone. She suspected that he had done a less than perfect job at programming their landing sequence. Which led to her coming down a good three kilometers south from her planned LZ. She suspected that the others wouldn't be lucky enough to make it even close to it like she had.

She narrowly missed a big branch jutting out from the stem of a giant old tree at the edge the clearing. Her backpack, hanging a few meters under her feet wasn't so lucky. While she passed over the thick horizontal branch, the wire, connecting the backpack to her, caught on the branch, causing it to wrap around it like a grappling hook and causing her to take a sudden turn towards the ground.

Her relatively controlled descent turned into a free fall, when her parachute lost tension and wrapped around her. The only thing that saved her from crashing into a muddy pond unceremoniously was her backpack acting as an anchor.

Which, of course, led to her hanging under the branch headfirst, staring at the ponds surface below her. Not that she could tell what exactly had happened. Her parachute had slung itself over her body like an oversized grayish sack, effectively blindfolding her.

"Takors' balls," she yelled.

"Why the fuck does this crap always happen to me?!"

She started to wiggle around, to try and get her left arm free and grab her knife. After some time spent wiggling around like a caterpillar trying to shed its cocoon, she managed to grab her knife and cut through the bundle of parachute fabric and wire that had been trapping her. The cocoon finally fell down into the pond below her and she started to feel for the wire holding her and her backpack together and both of them to the, remarkably strong, branch.

While she was straining and huffing and puffing she thought about the things she would do to her jump master after making her suffer through this joke of a UHALO drop. 'Felt more like HAULO, high altitude, ultra low opening,' she thought while sawing on the wire. Who makes these things, she thought, snorting to herself when she realized that this was the perfect opportunity for her to turn to the camera and deliver an, obviously badly scripted, testimonial.

'WireX Ultra Strong Wire, strong enough to hold up 120 kilograms of armor, gear and incompetent claimer.' She didn't do it of course. Their sponsors may get to send their products along, but she wouldn't give them the pleasure of seeing her make a joke of herself.

She snorted again, but almost chocked on her own tongue when the wire suddenly gave way and she plummeted into the pond headfirst, while screeching in surprise.

She immediately shot back to the surface like an air filled balloon someone had forced under the waters surface. At least her suit was still airtight, she thought gloomily while paddling to the bank. She looked like a very young and clumsy turtle while doing it. "Good thing the camera is turned away from me", she said to herself ,"I will take my money and run, if this outfit ever decides to introduces cam drones."

She reached the edge of the small pond and dragged herself onto the wet grass of the clearing. For a few minutes she just lay in the grass staring at the sky and catching her breath.

The amber dots of her teammates had disappeared from her HUD and most of the signal indicators flashed the yellow 'NO SIGNAL' warning.

"Fantastic", she groaned, while unlatching her helmet and carelessly discarding it. She struggled to her feet and lifted her left forearm up to her face to look at the smartpad attached to it. Unsurprisingly it said the same thing as her helmet. Except… she was receiving pings from one of the containers!

"ID-002.. Hmm, I think that's the drone container", she whispered to herself.

She straightened and set the smartpads' receiver to position mode. A small green arrow appeared, pointing back into the direction of the pond.

It must have come down in the shrubbery on the other side of this stupid waterhole, she thought, and began walking around the pond towards the chest-high plants. She could use the drones to get her backpack without getting it contents all wet. Although it was supposed to be waterproof, she didn't have a lot of trust into her equipment after her recent experiences.

"What the hell?" She whispered to herself breathlessly when she reached the other side of the pond and looked down at her smartpad again. The little green directional arrow was now pointing in the other direction again!

"Oh nooo…," she whispered to herself in a pleading voice. "Please don't tell me these fucking cretins dumped the drone container in the pond."

She moved closer to the edge of the pond and carefully bent down towards its surface, sticking out her left forearm with the smartpad on it. The pulsing of the arrow quickened rapidly, the closer she came to the surface.

"I hate this sad excuse of a planet," she murmured under her breath while she stood back up and started looking around the vicinity for a way to get the thing out of the pond.

After some careful deliberation, she came to the conclusion that she had only one option. She had to climb the tree and get her backpack, preferably without falling into the pond again. Luckily for her the container weighed only 250 kilograms. A weight she should be able to pull out of the water if she used the 40 meters of wire in her backpack.

"At least I can be sure that the wire is top-notch," she said to herself as she made to climb the tree holding her backpack hostage.

Reaching the branch under which her backpack hung was surprisingly straight-forward. The ancient tree had been covered in groves that she could use to climb it. The thick branch didn't even wobble the tiniest bit, when she cut the remaining wire around her backpack and retreated back to solid ground with it on her back.

She slipped down the last meters of its crooked side, landing on her feet once she reached the ground. Her plan was to build an improvised pulley using the wire in her backpack. After throwing one end over the thick branch that she "landed" on, she fastened the other end to a young tree next to the pond.

"Well," she said to herself, "I probably won't get around jumping into it again." She would have to drag the container to the edge of the pond by hand once she had lifted it to the surface.

Before she started pulling it up, she changed her suit from vacuum to atmo mode. Failing to do so would have let to her floating on the surface like she had earlier.

It took her only a few minutes to hook the wire to the 2x3x1 meters container and return to the wire. She hoped that the container hadn't gotten stuck in the mud at the ponds bottom and that she would be able to hoist it to the surface pretty easily. If that part worked, she would only have to wade into the muddy pond again and drag the container to its edge. She wasn't looking forward to that part.

As the container weighed close to 250 kilograms, she wouldn't have been able to lift it without her Mk13A armor. Not that she was entirely confident that her armor would deliver enough strength. The armor she was wearing didn't have any active strength enhancing system, like the Mk13 Heavy Series had. Instead it relied on the passive support its undergarment produced. The undergarment was made of artificial muscle-like fibers, which would boost her own muscle power by up to 100 percent. At least that's what the manufacturer claimed.

She did hope that that would be enough or she would have a really unpleasant time finding the rest of her team without the drones.

"Alright, Rose De Clare," she spoke to herself, before rubbing her gloved hands against each other and grabbing the wire next to her. She jammed her feet into the wet, grass covered, soil and threw her entire weight into the wire. After trying for about a minute, without much to show for, the container finally dislodged itself from the muddy ground and got pulled to the surface relatively easy.

She tied her end of the wire around the tree to prevent the container from disappearing again, waded into the pond to the large green-grayish box and dragged it to the edge.

She saw no way to get it completely up onto dry ground with the drones in it, so she let it sit in the shallow water. After catching her breath for a minute she pressed her smartpad to the yellow area on the long side of the container. The upper shell of the container retracted and a small display popped up next to the five folded down drones.

She set the drones to scout mode using the display on the box and sent all of them south into the direction she expected the remainder of her team to have landed in.

After the drones had disappeared into the forest she dragged the container to the edge of the forest and covered it with shrubs and leaves. It wouldn't do to have a native stumble upon it and make it their new icon or something. She looked at her handiwork and decided that the box was hidden good enough, grabbed her backpack, slung her shortened assault rifle and headed out after the drones.

Circa 0915

1 km south of landing zone

Brackett's World

Freddie Morris wasn't sure if this was what the jump was supposed to feel like, even though he had only ever trained for it in VR. At first he hadn't been sure, but when he felt the anti-grav kicking in way later than in the sims and his HUD still insisted everything was in the green, he began to doubt it.

Only when his parachute kicked in way to late he was convinced that something was wrong. And while he was still frantically running through everything he had learned over the last months to try and figure what to do, Terry Chambers crashed into him from behind and they crashed down into the thick forest like an out of control aircar. They fell past giant trees, became very closely acquainted with some intriguingly hard branches and finally flattened a bunch of young, luckily quite soft, trees before they made touchdown in the middle of a tiny clearing.

Had they not been lucky enough to hit the clearing, and had the clearing not been filled with young trees, they'd probably have ended up with an uncomfortably high number of broken bones.

"Terry, how the fuck did you manage to crash into me?" Freddie didn't sound very happy, when he yelled at him. "We were supposed to have almost 400 meters of separation!" Chambers looked up at him from where he was sitting.

"It wasn't my fault, Morris! My anti-grav felt weird and even though my parachute deployed my backpack wouldn't unlatch! It was still hanging around my feet when you suddenly appeared!" Terry didn't like it, when some young idiot, who obviously didn't even bother to learn the emergency procedures, attacked him. He turned away from Morris and continued assembling his rifle.

Freddie was a bit surprised. He hadn't expected Terry to actually fight back. The old shit had obviously found his balls before he jumped out of the starship. Chambers looked more like Freddies former boss now, than like the unworldly academic he had gotten to know him as.

Freddie quietly snorted to himself at the thought of his boss sitting in the forest and cleaning a rifle and decided to go find a quiet spot to check on his gear.

"Fucking hell!" Freddie yelled into the forest, while he looked down on the smartpad in his hands. Terry came racing through the shrubs within seconds. He looked a bit ridiculous, with the half-way assembled rifle in his hands, holding it like he was prepared to swing it like a baseball bat at whatever had attacked Freddie.

"What happened? Are you okay", he asked, as he came to a sliding stop near Freddies kneeling form.

"You BROKE my smartpad," he accused Terry, while holding up the cracked device like a lawyer presenting incriminating evidence to the jury.

The tension in Terrys shoulder visible eased, he lowered his make-shift club and said: "Damn, I thought it was something serious!?" Freddie exploded to his feet and stopped with his face only millimeters away from Terrys. "You piece of shit! Think you are better than me, don't you? Better than all of us?"

"Calm down, Morris," Terry pleaded while holding up his left arm in front of him. He was still holding the disassembled rifle in his right hand. At that Freddie pushed him backwards into a patch of chest high grass.

"Wait, wait,…!" Terry yelled at Morris from the ground at the top of his lungs.

"Why? Not so calm now? Are you?"

"No! I mean yes! I fell onto something! I thinks it's a gun!"

Freddie stopped his charge. "What?"

"A gun. I think it's a muzzle-loader."

Terry rolled to the side and pointed at the ground.

"What in the world is a muzzle-loader," Freddie responded while carefully stepping forward to look for whatever it was Terry had found. "Are you making fun of me, Doc?"

"No Freddie. I would never, okay almost never, make fun of you."

They both looked down at the long metallic shape laying on the ground next to Terry.

"So what is it?" Freddie asked while examining it.

"Already told you," answered Terry while rolling his eyes,"it's a muzzle-loader. You know? A really primitive gun. You put black powder and a ball of lead or something similar down the barrel, ram it home with a long rod and make a spark by pulling the trigger." He pointed at the barrel, the rod under it and the trigger.

"How can you know that?" Freddie gave him a skeptical look.

"Well," Terry answered, "I once sat in a lecture about the history of firearms."

"So.. How do you think this muzzle-loader ended up here? In the middle of a forest?" Freddie waved his hands at the clearing around them.

"Well, I don't know, but I think it's not been here for very long," he mused, while looking at the grass. "It's pretty clean and it looks like someone just dumped it here in a hurry. It was just thrown on top of the grass. I mean it would probably have been easier to tell, if you hadn't pushed me on it!"

"Yeah… sorry. But we wouldn't have found it at all, if I hadn't pushed you!" Freddie gave Terry a winning grin. "Let's get going, old man!"

"Hey! My aging was stopped at 35! I only look ten years older than you!" Terry yelled after Freddie and quickly grabbed the strange gun before following him.

Freddie grinned over his shoulder. "That's true, old man. Doesn't change the fact that I know how old you really are!"

They grabbed all the rest of their gear and began walking towards the planned landing zone.

Ca. 0930

2 km south-east of the landing zone

Brackett's World

Julie Tudor was pretty sure that her landing had been the worst in the Goldenscars entire 638 years long history. While her anti grav had, as far as she could tell, done an okay-ish job at slowing her down, her parachute had deployed way to late and given her the questionable honor of being the only person, she knew, who had survived falling close to 200 meters and crashing through the canopy BEFORE it even deployed.

Well, she thought, at least it did deploy. She could see what remained of a foodstuff container, whose parachute hadn't deployed, a good 20 meters below her. It's contents were strewn over an impressively large area of the forests floor and she could see a bunch of small, furry, animals gathering up her teams ready-food packs.

"Hah, poor things," she laughed to herself, the laugh turning into a groan, as pain shot through her right arm. "Ow! Fuck! Crap! Shit! Fuck!" Judging from the pain, she thought while gritting her teeth, the arm must have done the chutes job. She carefully felt over the it with her left arm, searching for some indicator of its condition.

"Why am I even trying? I'm not Terry!.. And thank the gods for that!" She chuckled again, immediately following up on it with a groan. After waiting for about a minute for the pain to subside, she decided that she should try to be less of a funny person and started the very, very slow one-handed climb down the tree.

It took her nearly 15 minutes to climb down the 20 meters and reach the ground. She looked around and noticed, a tiny bit surprised, that the furry little beasts had used the time afforded to them by her slow descent to make off with almost all of their food.

"Little fuckers will probably spontaneously master tool use to bury that disgusting stuff, once they try it," she mumbled while taking off her helmet. She sat down her backpack and took out the pistol that she had stored in a small compartment on its side. The ancient handgun was half-automatic classic from her first claimed world. Its magazines took twelve 8.9 mm projectiles each. Even though it relied on explosive filled casings that were ejected after every shot, other than their assault rifles, which ate caseless ammo, it would more than suffice on a world were the natives were still riding horses into battle.

She loaded the gun with one hand and placed it back in its holster, before she fastened it to her left side.

"Good thing I'm left handed", she mumbled to herself, while she struggled with getting her backpack on. Before she managed to get in on her back, she heard a noise coming from behind her, towards the south. She dropped her backpack and turned towards its source.

As she craned her head to listen into the forest, she thought that it sounded a bit like breaking branches. Her hand crept towards the holster and clicked open its cover, placing her hand on her guns grip. It's definitely coming closer, she thought, as the commotion grew louder.

Suddenly the bushes between the two large tree trunks in front of her parted and Harry Wells came bursting through. The surprise and relief of seeing her still in his face he narrowly avoided running into her, while Julie almost as narrowly avoided turning his head into fine red mist with the gun she had already drawn and aimed at him.

She was just about to turn her head at Harry and lower her gun, when two men came bursting through the bushes.

They were dressed in dark blue uniforms, made up of blue coats with dark gray leather-like webbing over it that held various small pieces of equipment. Both wore pants in the same dark gray, with knee high black boots. One of them was carrying a long gun with a bayonet on its end, while the other one had a slightly curved sword in one and a primitive looking pistol in the other hand.

Both had stopped dead in their tracks and were eyeing Wells and her. It was pretty obvious that they were a bit unsure of what to make of the two strange humans in even stranger clothing.

Before they could come to a decision two loud cracks broke through the momentary silence and their heads snapped back, as Julie painted the shrubs behind them red with blood and brain matter.

Wells hadn't even had the time to stop breathing hard, when he asked Julie, "weren't you supposed to be the PsyOps gal? I thought you'd talk them down or something." Julie holstered her pistol and said, without moving her eyes from the two dead natives: "Sometimes I find myself in need of stronger arguments. How did you manage to stick your head in the hornets nest this fast?"

They walked over to the bodies of the two unlucky natives and Wells explained:

"I landed right on top of them, something went wrong with my parachute"

"Yeah. Tell me about it," Julie answered pointing up at the remains of her chute with her uninjured arm. Harry looked up, "I can imagine, but at least you didn't land right on these guys campfire." He nodded towards the two bodies.

"I know this is my first time doing this and I'm only going off my training here, but I'm pretty sure they were scouts."

"I agree," added Julie. "Probably military, judging by the markings on their coats." She pointed at the stripes on the left sleeve of one of the coats.

"We should get going. The others will make their way to the landing zone, too."

Wells took the time to assemble his shotgun, helped Julie shoulder her backpack and they prepared to leave towards the LZ, when they heard more steps from the south.

"Why didn't you tell me that there were more?"

"Because there weren't," Wells answered, while raising his shotgun.

"Don't shoot me, please!" Wells and Julie looked confused for a second, before they recognized Joana Austins voice and shape as she stepped out behind one of the trees to the south-east.

"Where did you come from?" Wells let out the breath he had held.

"Saw the two guys racing past me and thought that whoever they were going after has to be interesting! Looks like I was right! You headin' to the LZ, too?"

They left the two bodies under the bushes they had come through and headed for the landing zone.