Carol flared her parachute and instinctively made gentle adjustments to the toggles, moving through the air as smoothly as she used to through the water. She coasted along the curve of the force field and landed dead center on the butte.

As she did so, System progressed the timeline and showed the next objective on her HUD, the heads-up display in her helmet’s visor.

She proceeded to strip in preparation. She had always been comfortable in her skin, and this past year had made traditional ideas like modesty seem inconsequential. Still, she was glad that this high up on a butte in the Nevada desert, there weren’t any people around.

Recently, strangers have taken to pulling out their phones to capture her image, with some even invading her personal space for selfies. She highly doubted that her nakedness would cause them to start respecting her privacy.

The mission called for mobility, so she had intentionally dressed light. She folded the parachute and clothing with care, placing them in a neat pile within backpacks for the recovery team to retrieve. Mama always said the character of a person is determined by how they treat those under them, not how they smooch the asses of those above.

Carol grabbed only her hand blasters and plasma pack from the backpack. But as the sun broiled her bare skin, she snagged her t-shirt and laid it over her shoulders and back.

The recovery team only retrieves stuff from the DZ. But the loss of a t-shirt seemed trivial compared to the loss of skin due to sunburn. The HUD in her helmet displayed the current temperature as 110F, but the noon sun made it feel much hotter.

She walked from the DZ up to where the force barrier intersected the butte and prepared to make the biggest purchase she ever had. Both Henry and Kaycee had donated additional credits to their team fund for this purchase.

She still didn’t understand the former and how he oscillated between extreme selflessness and utter selfishness. And for the latter, Kaycee’s generosity just flat-out surprised her. With Buck absent, the two of them had really stepped up. And now it was her turn.

As the timer counted down to zero, she made her purchase, instantly diverting the resources used to maintain the barrier to constructing the anti-gravity suit. Within seconds, the silver one-piece jumpsuit materialized at her feet.

She quickly put it on, the pliable fabric molding to her body and squeezing out any air once she buckled the clasp at her neck. She moved through some katas, marveling at how unrestricted her movements felt. It felt just like a second skin. Once System notified her that her synchronicity with the suit had reached 100%, she whispered, “Eagle in flight”, referring to herself with her callsign.

Carol ran the five steps toward the edge of the butte and flung her arms out in a swan dive. She whooped as the air rushed past. She wished she could do this without a helmet. As the ground approached, she activated anti-gravity with just a thought and smoothly changed her downward momentum to horizontal. “Haha!” she laughed. She can get used to this!

She banked and flew in a loop around the area of operations. For now, it’s the same as the original containment dome. The HUD provided by her helmet visor helpfully denoted this with overlapping green and yellow borders, respectively.

“No eyes on targets yet,” she subvocalized, knowing that her helmet can pick it up and transmit it to Crow and Mother Hen, the callsigns for Henry and Captain Stigs, respectively.

“Roger, no eyes on targets here either,” Crow acknowledged.

“NOE flying. Combat speed,” she called out as she lowered herself to Nap-Of-the-Earth altitude and decreased her speed. She extended one foot so that her big toe skimmed the sand and proceeded to fly in random patterns in the desert basin.

Unlike most past missions they had as a team, in which she acted as the primary damage source, that role fell on Kaycee, AKA Heron, today. She worried that this placed too much responsibility on the young girl. She was only five years older than the sixteen-year-old, but the difference between them seems more qualitative than the numbers imply.

As the newest member of their team, the teenager had bragged about her accomplishments incessantly in her efforts to gain acceptance and fit in. But it came across as bravado to everyone. Carol hoped that success in this mission would help Heron gain the confidence the latter needed. She knew that the young hero had great days ahead of her once she gained enough experience and self-esteem.

“Up,” she heard Crow say, at the same time the sand beneath her flashed red on the HUD. She pulled up and rotated clockwise at her hips. An enormous claw shot up from where her right foot had been less than a second ago.

The claw rocketed up, matching her vertical acceleration, like a car jumping off a ramp. Her rotation allowed her foot to sweep a half crescent, speeding it between the two fingers of the claw. It cleared their vicinity just as the claw snapped shut. But the pincer closing together had triggered a hidden ability, and a shockwave smashed into her. It disrupted Carol’s controlled spin and propelled her forcibly away in a chaotic whirl.

As she tried to stabilize her flight, a corner of the HUD lit up a worrying, bright red. She could have picked a direction at random and hoped for the best. But that may take her away from the battle. Unable to get her bearings, she just thought “ground”. The suit dropped her, just as a spray of greenish-brown liquid crossed above her.

She intended for something like Mission Impossible, where Tom Cruise dropped and hovered inches from the floor. But she was already too close to the ground. The suit smashed her into the ground at an acceleration greater than gravity. It would have pulverized an average human, but Carol was made of sterner stuff.

Still, she suspected it caused multiple broken bones, along with definite bruising, a slight concussion, and bleeding where she bit the inside of her mouth. She swallowed the blood but had no time to dwell on the pain and injuries.

She thought “vertical” and the anti-gravity suit brought her off the ground. Several parts of her body complained about the movement, but she held onto consciousness. Barely. The team pooled funds together to buy such an expensive item, partly because of the agility provided by maneuverability-by-thought instead of limb-directed propulsion.

She sighted the crab, now completely surfaced. The monster looked as big as a ranch house. And like a fiddler crab, it had one main chela, with the other arm ending in a stub. She suspected the latter functioned as some type of plasma disruptor. But she had no time to study it since the rhythmic pounding of its eight legs thrust it forward faster than its size would suggest.

Her HUD helpfully indicated that the enemy scuttled toward her at the speed of 57 MPH, with an imminent collision in 2.6 seconds and acid spit readiness in about 2-4 seconds. She quickly thought of a route that will accelerate her around the crab in an arc, with her big toes tracing along the sand, back toward the center of the area of operations. Towards Heron.

She did not fly up; she did not back away.

For her role today was bait.

***

Henry crouched on a butte, almost diametrically opposite from the one Carol had landed on. He quickly averted his eyes as Carol started stripping, not that he could see anything through the shimmer of the force field. But just the thought of her out there naked caused him to flush. It made the already unbearable weather even worse.

Stop it, he thought to himself. Like her, he also had tasks to complete before the barrier went down.

He reached into the backpack in front of him and activated three drones and the battlefield scanner. Unfortunately, most of their credits had gone towards the anti-gravity suit, and it did not leave enough for additional drones in this mission.

Unlike most containment spheres, this one centered around a point somewhere underground, such that he could only see the top third of the dome. Even then, the size of this containment area bothered him. The drones only covered about three-quarters of the area.

The monster, maybe even monsters, could hide anywhere below the sand, whereas their team had no such luxury. They couldn’t even hide behind Buck, who usually took the role of tank on the team.

Stop it, he thought to himself again. This is not the time to think about Buck.

“Pai,” he said to his personal artificial intelligence, “highlight the original area of operations in green and update as needed.” In the past, the battles mostly took place within containment fields, but this one required tracking where the monsters were and might be.

“Will do, Henry,” she acknowledged.

It suddenly dawned on him that his thoughts were so scattered because he did not have a chance to decompress. He’s used to his thoughts jumping all over the place and following it to the end to reach interesting conclusions. But he usually did not have issues focusing during missions. While people had left him alone on the flight over, he spent all of it optimizing the drones for subsurface detection instead of resting. It exhausted all of his willpower.

He quickly found the PB&J sandwich Libby had packed for him and stuffed half in his mouth. Somehow, she always knew what he needed. And even though he had firmly said no when she first presented it, he saw the umbrella hat she had snuck into his pack.

Sheepishly, he placed it on his head, feeling like a dork. He was glad that Jack was not around to film him. Even though it did not lessen the heat, blocking the glare of the sun made the battlefield scanner much easier to read.

Libby really did know what he needed. He wondered if all the times that she stopped by his room to chat meant something. As a kid, any time a girl talked to him would send him into a spiral of wondering why a girl would want to talk to him and trying to decipher the meaning behind their word choices. He grew out of that cringy stupidity years ago but may have over-corrected in treating all conversations as platonic.

Stop it, stop it, stop it, he thought to himself. Even though the mission required him to sit physically outside the battlefield, he still needed to keep his eye on it, making tactical decisions and manually overriding the drones sometimes.

“Pai, remind me to thank Libby about the hat and um…”

“I’ll put in a reminder to ask her to dinner, as thanks for all the PB&Js.”

“Yes, good. Do you think she’ll–”

Just then, he saw the sand shift and quickly called out to Carol. Thankfully, his reprogramming of the drones had also paid off and the battlefield scanner highlighted the ambush in red.

Henry commanded one of the drones to harass the monster as he saw Carol gracefully dodge the surprise attack. He cursed as he saw Carol flung from the claw. Fucking Nevada Command. This was not in their briefing notes.

He hated this mission. He hated the politics surrounding the mission. He hated that he understood why it was necessary. Above all, he hated that he had cast the deciding vote in accepting this mission. This was all his fault.

As Carol rose from the small crater in the sand, Henry winced as the battlefield scanner relayed the extent of her injuries. He opened his mouth to call off the mission and just let the military raze this area. But before he could get a word out, she zipped back in. Her internal wounds, exacerbated by the g-forces, caused massive blood loss. The scanner changed her icon to an ominous dark gray, signaling the loss of consciousness.

Even after all this time, Carol constantly surprised him with her bravery. He ordered all his drones into kamikaze mode, interfering, however possible, against strikes toward Carol. He vowed to protect her, no matter the cost.

***

Kaycee leapt from the plane 5 seconds before the containment dome breach. The desert heat made the parachute harder to control than she expected. She had to land on a small rock in the middle of the desert, while both Carol and Henry got a big butte all to themselves.

She hated this mission. She hated the heavy pressure of the sun on her black skin. She hated how she was supposed to lie here on this rock and wait for Carol to lead the monster to her. She hated how small Carol makes her feel. She hated how Henry didn’t even need to get his hands dirty.

She hated how it was all her responsibility to deliver a lethal blow to the crab’s underside so that it can’t hide or run away. She hated how radio silence for her part meant she can’t complain to Henry and Carol about how much she hated them.

But mostly, if she was honest with herself, she hated how Buck wasn’t here. She hated why Buck wasn’t here.