Mygeeto's Open Terrain

The soldiers, who at this point had suited up, made heir way outside to confront the Muuns, made their way carefully down the treacherous, sheer cliff face. As they did this, using rock climbing gear to not slide off the smooth crystal to their deaths, they heard a families sound off in the distance. A shuttle. And a blizzard.
“Dammit, blizzard incoming. We gotta get off this cliff.”
And the men scrambled to do just that, quickening their pace. Those higher up knocked off chunks of crystal that narrowly missed those beneath them. At one point, one man almost slid off the cliff in spite of the safety gear. The last man just barely made their way to the bottom before the first blast of chilly air hit, and the first white specks began falling from the sky. They had made it. Luckily their uniforms had been adapted for use on the cold planet of Mygeeto, and so came with a full faceplate to protect against snow, rather than an open one. The white and black specks began to move across the treacherous ground. Sure, it was beautiful from above, but the shards of crystal were lethal if somebody fell on them. Erhard surveyed the area using the infrared scanner on his helmet. Visibility was down to next to nothing. Nothing. As they picked their way across the surface, he thought he heard something over the howling wind, but couldn’t see anything through the soupy mix in front of him. He shook it off as interference. Suddenly, however, shots rang off towards him.

The men disengaged the safety’s on their weapons and began running to cover from their highly exposed positions. The Muuns were shooting at them! But how could that be possible? He hadn’t seen anything on his infrared sight. And then he remembered the strange, reflective suits. They must have been insulated to prevent infrared from picking them up. Very clever. However, the shots that were being fired towards them more or less gave away the aliens’ general positions. To the North and slightly above them. Setting his weapon to single fire mode, he peered down the sight. They shouldn’t be too hard to hit, given that now the infrared could see the weapon’s heat signatures. He took careful aim at where the talll head of one of the opponents should have been, and then, squinting down the light blue sight of the weapon, finger gently resting on the trigger, he exhaled and let off a shot.

—*—

The Muuns, equipped with infrared sights and envirosuits, complete with microrepulsors, found it no trouble at all to scale the mountain to get a better shot off at the interlopers. As they say there, firing off round after round at the crystal that the men hid behind, they knew that they had to hurry, lest their bunker be discovered, and their plot be revealed. There would be no point in any of this if that fell apart. Suddenly, noticing that one of the men was taking aim, he ducked down to avoid the shot, and casually glanced to the left and right above him. Call it force of habit. He only had a moment to stare, eyes wide and mouth agape, as he raised his arm above him, before the wreckage of a tri fighter slammed into their position, instantly killing both of them.

—*—

Erhard was just as puzzled when he saw a strange explosion atop the mountain. There shouldn’t have been any bombers out here. Looking up, he thought he could make out the shape of a bomber, then froze. That wasn’t a TIE fighter. That was a Lambda Class shuttle. Hurtling towards him like a guillotine. He only had time to call out to his men to run before he was knocked 10 metres away by the impact of the shuttle onto the crystaline ground.

—*—

When he came to, he saw that the skies were no longer grey. In fact, they were clear blue. With a soft snowfall drifting down towards him. Heh. He felt content to lie there for a while, trying to forget that nightmare. He must have thought the snow was a blizzard and that they were fighting somebody, and that a shuttle had crashed...

Suddenly, he jolted back into the present. That was no dream. That had really happened. Looking around, he could see the remnants of the morning’s battle. Shattered crystal was all around him, and his blaster lay a meter or so away from him. As he moved to grab it, he winced. He had broken something. Probably a rib and an arm. He could feel his suit applying something to it to staunch the bleeding from the multitude of cuts he had received due to his... not so elegant landing. That would have to wait. Reaching out, he was just barely able to grab his blaster, and with even more pain, managed to pick himself off the jagged surface. The suit, by this point, had started applying bacta to his broken bones, and he could feel the pain subsiding. He had bought some power armor frame off of some shady merchant, a Mark VII suit, and had modified it in order to save him from situations like these. He could still feel some pain in his arm, but he could breathe without incurring the wrath of his rib. As he carefully made his way across the ground, he could see a small fire on the lake, probably the result of leaking hydraulics. And there it was. The shuttle itself.

The wings had all been broken, thought the left one was lying a few meters away from the rest of the ship. Good to know. The glass on the front viewscreen of the ship had been broken apart. The ship was evidently charred by the fire that had broken out on landing, though it appeared that the interior cabin had been preserved due to the fireproofing it went through. Good, meant that some of the occupants might still be alive. But as he passed around the back of the ship, his heart sank. There were a handfull of buzz droids scattered about. Some were destroyed, but others were active. Stabilising his carbine, he fired off a few bursts, destroying the flimsy droids. Quickly making his way around to the entrance of the ship, he found dozens more droids skittering about. Leveling his weapon once again, he switched to full auto mode and unleashed a steady stream of fire from his carbine, the green laser bolts cutting into the hordes of droids as they began rushing him. He hadn’t had a chance to mount the rotary cannon and rocket launcher on his shoulder mounts, meaning that this would take a little time. No worries though. After clearing away the droids, he walked into the shuttle. It was eerily quiet, almost like a tomb. The red emergency light winked on and off, with a quiet alarm going off. Novatrooper corpses and officers lay on the ground, dead. As he checked the pulses of these people, hoping to find one alive, he stopped dead in his tracks. He saw a rear admiral’s plaque lying on the ground. Picking it up, he stored it in his suit, and tried to find the wearer of it. Sitting through the corpses, he found an odd sight. A young woman with steel colored hair, and a lithe form, lying on the ground. Without a rank plaque. This had to be the rear admiral.

After cleaning the corpses up, laying them in an orderly fashion, the about dozen men were covered in sheets. Sealing off the cabin from the cockpit, he lay the rear admiral on the floor. She still had a pulse. Taking an extra power cell from his suit, he plugged it into the shuttle. Activating the heating, lights, and temperature insulation in the cabin. As he did this, he took an extra bacta field projector from his suit and placed it on Jenia. The field immediately went to work. Now all he could do was hope and wait tha the warmer temperatures and the bacta would be enough to bring this woman back from the brink of death.

Erhard noticed that Jenia had begun to awake, and was already trying to sit up. The Novatroopers had evidently faired better than she had due to their armor. Standing up, he tentatively approached her. Not wanting to potentially expose himself to danger, he kept his rifle on his back, but instead had his sidearm ready in case a fight broke out. As he approached Jenia, he gave a salute before replacing the bacta field already on her with a fresh one. Evidently there was quite a bit of damage that needed fixing.

“Try not to move, you’ll reopen your injuries. Captain Erhard Bechtold, COMPForce. Your ship must have come under attack by that tri fighter we saw crash, then you guys landed here. My squad and I were doing some recon when you guys came in out of nowhere.”

His voice sounded mechanical, masked by the speakers inbuilt to the power armor’s helmet. He had turned off the audio scrambler so that the rest of these people could understand him, but nonetheless he would have sounded alien to the Rear Admiral. He placed the rank plaque on the ground next to Jenia, and carefully walked back, trying not to draw the ire of the Novatroopers. He could maybe beat them, if he had all the modules for his armor in place, but he didn’t.