• Addel let out a loud, hacking cough as she stood up and looked around. The rest of her squad were strewn about like rubble. The missile had been a total shock to all of them, but only she had been lucky enough to be standing afterwards. Some tears rolled down her cheeks, and caught on the edge of the helmet's sealed face-mask. She couldn't let them out, because the air in the badlands was toxic, and draining the water would mean breaking the vacuum seal.

    She checked her equipment. Her flight gear wasn't in working condition anymore, but the suit was only a little tattered from the fall. She dug around in her pack for some sealant for the holes in her suit. After a few minutes of searching and taking inventory, she found it.

    As she sealed up her suit against the hard conditions of the badlands, Addel though about her situation. I've only got two days worth of food, my flight gear doesn't work, and worst of all, I'm unarmed. I need to find a way out of this, and fast. "Radio on," she muttered into the suit's voice-command microphone.

    The sound of static filled her ears. "Base?" Addel said nervously over the airwaves. No response. "Base?" she asked more urgently. Still no response. "Radio off," she said, more frustrated than she'd ever been in her entire life. The static in her ears faded quickly.

    Suddenly, a blip on her HUD appeared. Addel commanded her radio back on and brought up the details on her mask's screen. There was an abandoned military base a few miles away! And the blip wasn't just that it was there, but it was sending her a signal. A cautious voice on over the static of her speakers. "To which base are you referring, Miss?" it said. "Because there are two possibilities. You're one of yours, and you've lost your way, or you're a city girl, and I can't abide by you being in my territory. Seeing as you're at the crash site of that squad I shot down, I'd conjecture you're a city girl."

    Addel jumped a bit at how casually he talked about killer her entire squad. Her friends. "That was you?" she yelled into the microphone.

    "So I can assume you're from the city then? I'll give you an hour to get the hell out of my territory."

    "I-I can't..." she said dejectedly. "My flight gear isn't operational right now. Could you patch me through to the city?"

    "And why would I do that? So what if you can't fly? You've got to legs, right? The satellite imaging I've got here says you look fine. Hurry, you've only got fifty-nine minutes to get home before I blast you back to the Stone Age." Addel could practically hear the smug grin he was probably wearing right about then.

    "You don't have the guts," she challenged.

    "You don't need guts when you can peg someone with a mini-nuke from miles away. You need a button and a hand to press it," the mystery man replied. "Fifty-seven minutes, by the way."

    "If I agree to leave and not bug you ever again, will you just let me go without a timer?"

    "'Fraid not. If you survive, then that right there will be a mark on my spotless reputation for annihilating you city patrollers that go through my territory. I'm not going to go soft on you just because I already beat you thoroughly. What's you name, anyway?"

    "What's yours?" Addel asked.

    "How rude of me! I never introduced myself! I'm Graham. I would give you my last name, but if you run for most of your remaining time, which is fifty-three minutes so you know, you might make it. I can't risk you giving out my info."

    "Alright, Graham, I'll get moving." On her HUD, Addel set a new mission timer for fifty-three minutes, then started running in the direction of the signal.

    "Hey! You never gave me your name!" he said before a brief, ominous pause. "Wrong way, sweet thing." Graham said menacingly over the connection. Addel terminated it.

    "I don't appreciate being hung up on, Miss," Graham said coldly after starting an "emergency" connection to get through her blocks. "Don't do it again. And turn around. Fifty minutes is cutting it close for getting back to your base from where you are."

    "I'm not going to the base, Graham. You gave me an hour, and I'm using to get exactly where I need to go."

    "And where is that? If you don't get back to your base, you'll get blown to smithereens," he said with a laugh. Addel checked her HUD. She was going in the right direction. Graham's abandoned outpost was within easy reach as long as she kept moving. As she ran, she took stock of what other systems were working in her suit. The Sprinters were still workable, so she turned them on. As she rocketed forward with more speed and power than a normal person could ever hope for, the battery-life indicator started approaching zero a little faster. Her mission clock read forty-five minutes when she was halfway there.

    "Woah! How you runnin' so fast, girl?" Graham said over her now unterminatable connection to him.

    "Trade secret," Addel said with just the slightest hint of a smile. Internally, she was grieving for her lost squad, but outwardly she had to appear as though she wasn't even slightly afraid.

    "Well, it's obvious now that you're trying to head my way. See you here, sweet thing," he retorted. After the remark, he finally terminated the connection from his end.

    Addel arrived outside the base and zoomed the map on her HUD a little closer to get a better look. There was a door nearby, but it had been updated to prevent against badlands air getting in. She turned off the Sprinters in favor of the Arm Fortifiers/Strengtheners. She wound up and took a massive swing at the door. It flew inward with a burst of compressed air and a satisfying clang.

    "They don't teach you to knock in the city anymore?" Graham jokingly asked over the radio. But Addel wasn't fooled by the unfazed attitude, though. She had heard the slightest hint of a cough. The air in the badlands worked fast.

    Addel walked down the hall of the ruined airlock and into the base proper. The tracers on the signal told her that Graham was down the left wing, which was the missile bay in most bases of that era.

    Graham hadn't been kidding when he said he could launch a mini-nuke at her. As she walked through the missile bay to the control room for the entire base, her Geiger counter on the HUD ticked off rapidly. She wasn't afraid, though. She walked into the control room and saw Graham's face. He was already looking paler than when she'd seen him over the transmissions. The badlands air would take him soon.

    Addel didn't take any chances, though. She turned up the Arm Strengtheners, and subdued Graham. He didn't resist, even as she tied him to his own chair. After she was done, Graham tested his strength against the bonds. He couldn't have broken them with ten years of effort. He sighed, then looked up at Addel. "Do they teach you any manners in the city, Miss?"

    "Not to jackasses like you," she muttered as she strolled over to the console on the control room's desk. She immediately saw why Graham had be so forceful that she not come near him. The missile was set to launch at the end of her thirty-three minutes she had remaining. It was locked in. Whether she made it to the city or didn't move at all, the missile would've launched. He had been trying to get her to be a target to draw a bead on so the missile could sneak through the scrambling field around the city. If he had launched it straight at the city, it would have been deflected. With a non-scrambled target to lock onto, the missile could follow her right to the city.

    She connected her in-suit computer to the console with a cable on her wrist and activated a Data-Wiper. It did its work, but its estimated time of completion was forty-five minute. If it hit the missile-launching program, she'd live to see the next day. If it was towards the back of the computer's files, she'd be dead. As the computer deleted everything, it simultaneously uploaded the files to her HUD for review. She looked at Graham's dossier. Apparently he was some big warlord in the area, and had partially responsible for the various wars and feuds in the badlands. She wasn't even remotely surprised.

    Her mission clock and the launch clock had both reached one minute remaining. She hope the delete function would hit the launch program in time.