Lima Foxtrot Delta

Ghost ran down the narrow canyon, his heart pounding in his still ringing ears, Bulldog's barely conscious bulk hanging off his shoulder like a dragging anchor. Looking up, he could barely make out the purple sky through the black haze of cordite and ash. Coming to a shallow cave, he ducked inside and laid Bulldog down as gently as he could. His sergeant immediately curled up into a ball, blood dripping out of the small jagged holes in the metal armor over his stomach. Pulling off his helmet, Ghost knelt down over the older man.

"You're alright, Sarge. Your armor took most of the shrapnel. Just hang in there while I figure out where we are."   Marcus said. Lance Corporal Marcus Grayson, "Ghost" to his squadmates was a little more worried than he let on. The tritanium armor the Marines wore was bulletproof and rated to withstand grenades, mines, and even heavy machine gun fire, but Sergeant Bill "Bulldog" Johnson had taken a mortar explosion full in the body from just a few feet away. He had stepped in front of Ghost as the mortar had landed right next to them, the blast knocking them both over the edge and 30 feet down into a narrow ravine. Ghost had blacked out for a few seconds or minutes - he wasn't sure - then hoisted Bulldog to his feet and started running as fast as he could away from the explosions and gunfire. He had run so fast that he hadn't even noticed when his helmet's navigation system had stopped working.

Marcus opened up the panel directly to the left of the visor to make sure nothing was shorted out. Status lights inside the panel glowed green, assuring him that everything was in working order. Just to be sure, he pressed the inset red button, resetting the software. He slipped the helmet back on his sweating head and waited for the system to reboot. The various heads-up-displays came on one at a time in front of his eyes; first his vital signs, transmitted wirelessly from the skin-tight, biometric suit under his armor, came up in the top right corner of vision, showing an elevated pulse but otherwise all ok; next came the targeting reticule for his assault rifle, grayed out because it was currently somewhere a few miles back where he had dropped it; finally his gps navigation map on the left side, showing a black circle. With a yellow dot in the center and a green dot almost on top of it, representing the Sarge. No other dots showed up to represent the locations of any of the other 10 members of his squad, nor did any topographical or navigational information to give him some idea of his own.

"Sarge, I don't understand. My system is all in the green, but I'm not getting any navigation info." Marcus said to Bulldog, who was now sitting propped up against the wall of the cave.

"Our nav systems get all their information from our ships in orbit," Bulldog replied, pain barely registering a quiver in his gruff voice. "If the system's in the green and not getting any intel, then either the signal is being blocked or it's not getting transmitted in the first place."

So, we're either not getting signal because we're in this canyon, or the ships have been destroyed. Great. Marcus thought. Then another thought occurred to him: Or...we've been left for dead.


"I don't think I can climb out of here with my stomach all tore to hell. You're gonna have to climb up, see if you can get any signal." Sarge said, grunting as he leaned up to pull his rifle off the magnetic plate on his back. "Here, take this, but if you see anyone, best that you hide instead of fight. Got it?"

"Aye, aye, Sarge. Sit tight, I'll be right back."

Ghost grabbed the M-23 rifle and held down the blue button right above the stock, syncing the weapon to his helmet. His target reticule lit up red and immediately swept down and out of sight, as he had the weapon pointed down. Strapping it to his back, Ghost stepped out of the cave and started looking for handholds in the rock wall of the canyon. He quickly found some and began climbing. The armor looked heavy, but tritanium - an alloy of alluminum, steel, and tungsten - was actually very light in spite of its extreme density, making it the perfect armor for light infantry troops like the 5th Marines. It only took Ghost about two minutes to climb the thirty or so feet to the lip of the canyon. There was a small camera mounted directly at the crown of his helmet. With a few rapid eye-blinks, Ghost turned it on, and a short, panoramic view filled up the top third of his visor, showing the scene directly in front of him over the edge of the canyon. What he saw nearly made him lose his grip and fall back down.