• The shot just barely grazed him, but Jason went down, the right side of his breastplate slagged and oozing burns stretching from neck to abdomen. We hadn’t been prepared for this level of resistance from the natives; they were supposed to be barely an industrial civilization, much less possessed of advanced photonic weapons. All we had for armor was crude ceramics, which were nothing but dead weight against this stuff.
    I peeled off my armor as I crawled over to Jason, still lying supine halfway out of the cave’s entrance. The wound was pretty bad, even for the bad angle of it; he could survive, but only if we made it to the dropship. Which was past all the Draes, who didn’t exactly have their weapons set to stun. This had to be sabotage, or just some really piss-poor intelligence. Both had been known to happen, though I’d hoped it wouldn’t happen to me. I left Jason where he lay and slithered back into the cave; he was as good as dead, and so was I if I couldn’t find some way out to high ground, where at least I could set a beacon.
    I drew myself up, checking my Shiv by the dim light filtering in through the gaping maw of the cavern. Thirty rounds in it, plus two magazines of fifty on my bandoleer…. I dropped and crawled back to Jason. He’d fallen unconscious in the short moment since his wounding, and was shivering, likely in shock. Even if we could get to the drop ship, he’d die without someone to run the Medtech devices, and I was no medic. I grabbed his ammo as well, tucking the magazines into the open spots on my harness. As a gunner, he’d been carrying more than I had; but as a gunner, he’d also fired more of the sharp little projectiles, so he only had another two full magazines, and a handful of blades in his gun.
    Shining malevolently, a bolt of blue energy shot over my head, washing the cave in it’s glaring light, then dousing itself against the back wall, leaving a molten crater in its wake. I decided it might be time to go, and scrambled back into the cave, pulling out my IR goggles as I went.
    I drew up slowly to my feet, looked pointedly away from the light streaming through the jagged opening to the brightness of day, and slid the black metal facemask into place, activating the infrared scanner as I settled the lenses over my eyes. The blank stone wall in front of me sprang to an iridescent blue life; it can take a while to get used to the swirling eddies of color that appear on a surface viewed in that spectrum of light. I turned and slowly scanned the chamber, and found what I sought fairly quickly: a small tunnel leading away from the engagement, and with a slight upward slope. The scans taken from the Raven had shown that this mountain was riddled with tunnels and caves, a small world under the tons of earth. I could only hope there was no city under the mountain, like one of the fighter pilots had joked; I may be a stealth specialist, but that kind of infiltration without a light bender? May as well soak myself in barbeque sauce and jump in a tiger pit. But with no better alternative, I dropped and started to crawl along the narrow tunnel, hoping to get at least a start before they finally worked up the courage to follow and found me missing, and then the subsequent manhunt. I'd need as much of a start as I could get; it was their turf, after all, and they knew it a hell of a lot better than I did.
    I needn’t have worried about that, though. It became evident that they wouldn’t find out anytime soon when I heard a clatter behind me, and a blast shortly thereafter. It was loud; some sort of concussion weapon, and the sharp blast reverberating up through the tunnel stunned me for a moment. At least I had gotten out of the first cave; it may have been cramped in the crawl space, but it didn’t collapse from the blast like the ceiling over Jason did. At least it had been faster than the burns and the shock they induced. I said a short prayer to Shiel, asking that she take that soldier’s soul home, and continued my slow crawl upwards.