1100 Hours

300 Meters South of LZ

Brackett's World

The Falcon-class drones Rose De Clare had started had located all of the teams members within 30 minutes of lift-off. Rose was a bit surprised that the drones' wireless link to her smartpad worked. Their radios were still non-functional after all. While her drones were busy leading the two groups towards the original landing zone, Rose had decided to meet them at the halfway point, because their first task would have to be to gather their drop containers, which were scattered south of her present location.

It took them multiple hours to reach the tiny open space next to an even tinier clear stream running through the woods in a mossy bed.

"Julie! What happened to your arm?" Rose seemed a bit worried when the trio of Harry, Joana and Julie finally arrived at the meeting point.

"Don't even ask! Whoever packed my parachute will be thrown into a nice big gravity well by me! Without a chute! At least if he still works for the Goldenscars, when we're done here in a few hundred years." She carefully cradled her injured arm, giving her best to calm down a bit. The fury was clearly visible in her ice blue eyes.

"I'll take a look," Terry, the teams doc, said, while getting up from the large rock he had been sitting on. He walked over to Julie, guided her to a large fallen trunk and told her to sit down.

Rose turned to the rest of the team. The others had arrived at the glade a few minutes earlier. They were both alright, although they had an air of shock around them. Probably stemming from their landing. It appeared as if all of them had had rather unusual landings and even though Rose was quite experienced in her chosen trade, after all she had spent the last 600 or so years in the industry, she had never heard of 6 parachutes failing at the same time. As soon as they would be able to make contact with the ship, someone would have a number of very uncomfortable questions to answer.

"Okay everyone! I know this hasn't been the best start to our venture and you had different expectations as to how this would work out. As you all know, our comms system appears to be down and even though I can stay in contact with our drones through my smartpad, I don't have a connection to the satellite constellation we put in orbit. This leads to a number of challenges, that we will have to deal with:

1st: As the sat-links aren't working, we are not streaming at the moment. This means that we are not making any money!

2nd: We can't talk to each other, because our comms usually depend on a satellite carrier signal. Freddie, I want you to take a look at our tech and at the satellite connection. Find a way to get our comms working and try to find out why the satellites aren't working.

3rd: Our drones don't have the necessary range for a planetary mapping without their satellite connection. We can only use them in the vicinity and will have to acquire a map from the natives.

4th: Our equipment containers are scattered over the entire area and even though the drones have managed to locate some of them, we don't know their status. This means we will have to split up into groups and collect what's salvageable. But I want you, Freddie, to fix our comms first."

Freddie replied: "I would and I probably could, but our standard smart pads don't have the necessary hardware for that." He looked at Terry accusingly, "and mine broke during the landing."

Rose pulled out a large smartpad and gave it to Freddie.

"Luckily I took the drone controller from the container, it's based on the same smartpad."

"Nice," Freddie said, grabbed the smartpad and walked to a corner of the clearing, where he sat down and started working on it.

"Okay," Rose turned to the rest again," I suggest you check your gear and change out of the vac-suits and into the ground combat uniforms. I want to be ready to go as soon as Freddie is done."

Terry had finished treating Julie Tudors injury. She would need to be careful for a few weeks, but her arm should be as good as new after that. Had he had access to a modern med-center, she would have regained full use of her arm almost immediately. He hadn't passed up on the chance to make everyone aware of this little factum.

After he had finished with her, he walked over to his equipment and grabbed the muzzle-loader he and Morris had found. He then walked over to De Clare, who was sitting on a tiny earth mound next to the stream and checking her rifle.

"Hey Rose! Morris and me found this at our landing location." Rose looked up from her gun, interest showing in her eyes. "I believe it's an old muzzle-loader."

Rose carefully took the gun from Terry and examined it.

"You are correct, Terry." She pointed at the mechanism above the trigger. "In fact it's a matchlock." She looked at Terry who gave her a blank-faced look. She sighed and continued. "It's a very early form of a black powder gun. You see, there is this piece of burnable cloth held by this lever," she pointed at the blackened end of the match held by an S-shaped lever. "You light the match, aim the gun and pull the trigger. The match moves down to this primer-filled pan, lights the primer, which is located here," she pointed at the pan,"which in turn lights the charge in the barrel and fires a ball of led or steel out the front. It's pretty primitive and very slow to reload, but I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of it."

"How do you know all of this?" Terry looked quite impressed at her knowledge.

"This isn't my first rodeo, you know. And… I may have a degree in military history," she winked at him and returned it.

"Julie, can you come over real quick," Rose asked Julie, who nodded, got up from the toppled tree she had been sitting on and walked over to them.

"You told me that you shot two guy with matchlocks earlier," Rose asked her.

"Yeah, looked just like this one, I think. We didn't take that close of a look, you know."

"Alright thanks, Julie. Tell Harry to recall one of the drones to provide overwatch over our position. I suspect that it's not normal, on this world, to have so many people with guns running around in the forests."

Julie nodded and retreated towards Harry and Joana.

It took Freddie Morris until late in the afternoon to get at least their comms back up. At least partly.

"Commander De Clare," he approached Rose unusually formal. Rose looked up from where she had been dozing and shot him a questioning look.

"That doesn't sound good," she answered after hearing his greeting. When he didn't immediately continue she quirked her left eyebrow and said, "What is it? Spit it out, Freddie!"

"The good news are that our comms do work again. Although only for a few kilometers."

"What? Why?" Rose didn't seem very amused.

"Well, that gets us to the bad news. The satellites, they aren't connecting."

"Well, we've had that before. As long as the smartpad is in a line of sight, it should automatically connect, but you know as well as me that that's often a problem. Just restart it and select the satellites for connection. You should be able to get their signatures from the GOLDEN CHARIOTs comms officer."

Freddie didn't reply anything and just looked at her for a few seconds.

"That's the thing. There are no satellites and no GOLDEN CHARIOT."

"What?!"

Rose almost yelled at Freddie and jumped to her feet.

"That's impossible! Why would they have left orbit?! You are not getting any EM signature from them?"

"No EM signature at all, Commander. If you would ask me to tell you what is in orbit, I wouldn't hesitate to tell you: Not a single thing. No satellites. No ship. No nothing."

Next Morning 0400 Hours

Meeting Place

Brackett's World

Joana Austin walked around the small fire slowly and gently nudged the sleepers in their sleeping bags awake. She was just about to nudge Rose awake, when she noticed that Rose was already awake and staring into the night sky.

"You're already awake," she asked Rose, "not an easy situation the sleep in, isn't it."

Rose appeared turned her head and looked at Joana. Joana was sure that she had looked very worried for a split second.

"Yes, Joana. But that's not why I'm awake. Well, at least not entirely." Rose crawled out of her sleeping bag and pulled her smartpad out with her. She touched the screen to turn it on and pulled up a data sheet on it.

"See," she asked Joana, while pointing at it with her right index finger. "The satellites broke off within minutes after we jumped, but see this little data package?" She pointed at a different data entry.

"It was sent a few minutes later, but not by the sat network. It looks like a message from the GOLDEN CHARIOT to me. I'm pretty sure that they sent it to the container with the relay station before they disappeared."

"Where is the container? We should go and see was the message says!" Joana looked almost happy at the chance to do something.

"That's the plan," Rose said and began packing up her gear.

"Listen up, everyone!" Rose walked to the middle of their small campsite and motioned for everyone to gather around her. All of them looked worried and tired. It was quite obvious that they had expected this entire venture to be relatively straight forward.

"I know that this is getting worse and worse every single day! But it doesn't matter. There is no way for us to change whatever happened up there. But what we CAN change is how this plays out down here!" She let her eyes wander over everyone while talking. She did feel like the fighting spirit was returning to some of them.

"The GOLDEN CHARIOT has sent us a message before they went silent. I don't know what it says, yet. But I do intent to find out. It was sent to the container with the long range transmit-and-receive-station." She gave everyone a tiny grin.

"And, for once, we are lucky and know where it came down! It's in one of the containers the drones found yesterday and it is my intention that we will continue with the plan and retrieve it, together with the other containers. I have assigned one container to each of you. We will head out, gather what we can carry and hide the rest. We wouldn't want anyone to find them, would we?" Rose grinned a bit and was more than relieved when she saw the others grinning, at least a tiny bit, too.

"Grab you gear and head out! We will meet up at the drone container in two hours! I want to know what the fuck is going on in this god-forsaken system, before sunrise so that we can get going today!"

A few acknowledgments answered her and people began pulling up the containers they were responsible for on their pads.

They had changed out of the combat suits yesterday evening, after they had decided that they couldn't risk defects on something that was now so important for them. The suits artificial muscles were notorious for collecting small defects that could turn the suit into little more than a fancy piece of armored clothing if they worsened. Normally this could be prevented by regenerating the suits in the armory, but they were pretty sure that it had sunken to the ground of the large lake to the south-east. They would keep the suits in their packs until they needed them.

The combat fatigues they had changed into made them all but disappear into the brush. A few minutes later they all left the clearing in different directions, suits in their backpacks and guns in their hands.