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Chapter 32 - The Wind at my Back, Stars at my feet[]
Haven...
Ibrahim led his point into the area identified as a concentration of Blood Spirit civilians. Thermal showed minimal heat signs. A few tents stood under camouflage netting, a few ground vehicles sat abandoned. There were identifiable signs that someone had been here, recently.
But they were already gone.
Wary of mines and IED's, he signaled his warriors to spread out.
Bags piled on pallets, full of personal goods, a few feral dogs wandered past.
He turned a corner and found a small graveyard, the shallow graves dug in haste and marked with wood and string crosses, a large tent with tables, left behind with a mobile kitchen truck, but when he sent his Elementals in, the truck had been emptied.
it was an orderly move-out from an emergency position, but it was definitely a move-out.
It was also the fifteenth site like this since the night their warships dropped contact, and nearly every useful thing in the camp had been taken, except the shelters, furnishings, and ground transport.
Which struck him as bizarre. Even more bizarre was the tank they found-the fusion powerpack had been stripped, as had most of the NBC gear and hostile environment equipment, but there was nothing objectively wrong with it. Installing drives and motive parts and it could move, even fight.
They even left the armor on it.
a search revealed a lot of stripped equipment, and a few IEDs and booby-traps, but it was an orderly move-out, leaving only the husk of an encampment with a few timed thermal flares laid out to look like the place was occupied to overflights.
The relative silence gave him the creeps-there should have been an attack by now, or someone hiding (there is always someone hiding or left behind).
Nothing.