Desert Treasure

[t0l]

Tal sat once more in the driver's seat of an unarmed, lightly armored transport vehicle, motoring along discontentedly through miles and miles of unoccupied desert, with only the occasional sand dune passing by. Layers of tinted bulletproof glass and lightweight synthetic composite armor panels surrounded him with an intention of protecting him and up to three other soldiers from the elements, but served only to turn the vehicle into a sauna, powered directly by the never-ending rage of Delta's three suns.

His black, tattered carbine rifle, propped up against the driver's side door, gradually leaned over and brushed against his leg. He gave it little more than a quick glance before forcibly nudging it back into place with a swift jerk of his left knee, sighing as the constantly vibrating vehicle shook his weapon back onto his sand-scarred pant leg.

With the exception of a short, 2-day journey to Durban Station as part of a routine supply operation, today marked the start of the fourth month of his six-month deployment on Planet Nauru, and he'd been eagerly counting down the days until he could finally take a hot shower.

Dan Wheeler, who sat in the passenger seat, was combing over a somewhat large tablet, with a map of the region splattered across it's cracked screen.

"Right up here is where they want the first one," he declared, pointing at the nothingness that presented itself directly ahead of them.

Oddly enough, in the two days that he had been gone for, most of the Core marines previously stationed at the FOB had received an order from the Guildmaster himself to relocate, leaving only a handful of support personnel and roughly a platoon's worth of mercenaries. Such a sudden decline in manpower required much more effort from everyone that was left, dragging previously bored men from their now personalized living boxes into the field, however unmotivated they were this far into the campaign.

Tal pulled the vehicle to a screeching halt in the middle of a flat patch of sand, overlooking more of the nothingness that he'd come to know as home. Cursing, he fumbled around with all types of clutter on the center console, empty bottles, papers, plastic cases, until finally he extracted a long probe with a box on the top end, better known to the public as a deployable camera, from underneath a pile of small bags and useless equipment.

It was a direct order from Guildmaster Nodtviet; to catch any remaining Corsair forces, which by now had to be either highly mobile or dead, cameras would have to be placed in key strategic locations planetwide, marking points of interest that none of the Core's tacticians had even bothered with visiting first.

At least everyone else had to suffer too, thought Tal, stepping out from his vehicle into the sunlight, squinting as he set a course and made his way towards what vaguely must have been their intended target, shovel in one hand and camera in the other, carbine dangling freely from his lower back. Once he swore he was close enough to the big red X, he squatted down, heels planted firmly into the sand, and jammed his shovel into the sand, excavating a small hole for him to sodomize with the pointy end of his camera stick. Once the stake was impaled into the hole sufficiently, as denoted by a bright red line, he took a large shovelful of sand and dumped it at the camera's base, packing it in like some kind of crude, crappy sand castle erected at a beach without any water. Or scantily-clad women.

The camera let out a few beeps as Tal punched a very specific series of buttons on it's topmost control panel, giving one, final prolonged confirmation beep before going completely silent with only an occasional red flash of a small LED light next to its infrared lens flaring up intermittently. He firmly shut it's lid and recovered from his squat, retreating back towards his vehicle as quickly as possible without actually running.

One down, only twenty-two more to go.

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