18 - Aftermath“You heard him,” Mathews echoed through her command channel. “Run!”Hector hadn’t waited for permission; he was already charging away from the mules, putting distance between himself and the encampment. He could hear Paige gasping and grunting as she sprinted in his wake, but Perry had either run in a different direction or he was still back there.When Hector heard and felt a concussive report, he knew what it was; the big merc had dug out one of the high-caliber rifles—brought along in case they ran into a hook titan or similarly large rift denizen. The gun thundered again, and Hector turned to watch, wondering if Perry could hit the drone and, if so, whether its armor would make the effort futile.He scanned the sky, spotted the rapidly descending drone, streaking straight toward the center of the earlier battlefield. Most of the harvesting team was still there, clumsily clambering over the uneven, corpse-strewn ground. The gun thundered again, but the drone didn’t so much as wobble. Hector grabbed Paige’s collar and yanked, pulling her to the ground with him.The flash washed over them first, then the rolling peal of thunder that didn’t quit, and then the ground began to misbehave, bucking and rolling beneath them like a living thing. Hector wasn’t sure what kind of bomb the drone had been carrying, but when the shaking stopped, he was relieved to see he was still alive; he hadn’t been flash-fried by a wave of super-heated air or radiation or something like that. Considering all the horrific weapons of war humanity had come up with, he felt positively fortunate.“Ungh!” Paige groaned, and when Hector glanced at her, he saw her lower half was pinned under a section of plasteel tread—a piece of one of the harvesters’ tractor-like cargo containers. The realization sparked a momentary flare of anger, a wash of hot blood that ran up his neck and into his scalp. He might not have been the target (...)