The desert twilight faded with brutal, unforgiving swiftness, the amber sky plunging into the pitch-black freezing chill of the wasteland night. Within forty minutes, the heat on the salt flats plummeted fifty degrees. That turned the daytime bitter salt dust into a brittle, frost-covered crust that crunched sharply underfoot. At Beacon Delta-4, the green light-projected beam projected into the heavens was the only light for twenty miles in every direction, casting eerie emerald shadows across the rusted iron heavy beams and shattered concrete silos of the abandoned earth-heat pump station.
Inside the outer edge, the squad had formed a tight, timed together combat stronghold.
Titus was parked directly across the thirty-foot gap between two collapsed concrete retention basins. His massive was dark rock shell functioning as an unmoving blast door. The giant tortoise had driven all four of his columnar feet six inches into the salt bedrock. His heavy armor scales glowed with a dull crimson soft glow that radiated underground warmth, repelling the biting frost. Strapped to his ventral breastplate, Toby’s stygian hum scrambler hummed softly on low standby, ready to intercept any corporate broadcast signals that might be routed through the sector.
Arthur Vance knelt on a raised iron narrow high walkway six feet above the ground, his ARC-7 Mag-Carbine resting securely across a sandbag low roof wall. His Monocle Taxonomy Loupe (Mk. IV) was switched to heat-infrared mode, scanning the pitch-black outer edge. Beside him, Toby sat behind a barricade of heavy ammunition trunks, his breath fogging…
