The freezing desert wind howled through the rusted heavy beams of the earth-heat pump station. But inside the outer edge bunker formed by Titus’s fiery shell, the air was warm, quiet, and thick with the scent of smoldering dark rock coal. Outside the breach, the surrounding heat on the salt flats had plunged to minus twenty degrees. That turned the night into an icy, crystal-clear void where only the emerald shaft of Beacon Delta-4 pierced the darkness.
It was two o’clock in the morning.
The battle of Beacon Delta-4 had ended two hours earlier. That left the salt flats outside littered with the shattered remains of twenty irradiated Blood-Hyenas. Arthur, Valerie, and Toby had spent the intermediate hours performing careful battlefield salvage. Extracting man-made comms transponders from the alpha carcasses, neutralizing heat wave pockets with bags of dry bitter salt, and harvesting rare stygian gland deposits from the mutated beasts to replenish their medical tinctures.
Now, the camp had settled into the exhausted, vigilant quiet of a frontline trench between artillery barrages.
Toby was curled up in a heavy arctic sleeping bag tucked into the dry concrete corner of the pump station, his glasses resting on a flat stone beside his sidearm, his chest rising and falling in deep, healing medicine sleep. Valerie sat on a raised narrow high walkway twenty feet above, bundled in her sand-camo duster with her night-vision binoculars scanning the dark horizon. She took the first outer edge watch with military stoicism.
