<div class="floatleft">(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/f/fa/Mars_test.jpg)</div><table class="bbc_table"><tbody><tr><td><strong>Character name:</strong></td><td>Lt Colonel Louise Cotter</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Location:</strong> </td><td>Outside</td></tr><tr><td><strong>With:</strong> </td><td>Those on the surface</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Doing:</strong> </td><td>Almost doing a Ret Butler (Or would that be Scarlett O'Hara?)</td></tr></tbody></table><br/><hr/><br/>"Okay, okay everyone ins....." My words were drowned out by a sudden hiss and the ground shifted under my boots. Time up!<br/><br/>My faceplate went opaque orange as the dust caked it. I took a couple more steps in what I knew was the right direction, the airlock was only three metres away and my boot hit something. I scrubbed the perspex clear and tried to see what I'd bumped into - a stack of crates that were to the down-wind side of the airlock. Dust swirled and obscured my vision.<br/><br/>I panicked, for a moment. I was disoriented, lost in the opaque maelstrom of swirling orange sand, just metres from safety. "Okay, Louise", I spoke aloud, knowing that my words were not carrying even to the open mike that was picking up just the raw rasping of the dust against my helmet, "Calm down. Radar." Military Command grade E-suit and military command grade implant. I used the latter to interface with the former's on-board systems, even though I couldn't see the manual controls on my chest. Activate the suit radar and get it to relay the imige directly to my optic nerve. This was no different, in fact it was a lot easier, than flying a combat drone over Burma and shooting down those damned British drones during OW3. There was the stack of crates, there was the hangar dome, there was the airlock, standing open with a single figure peering out.<br/><br/>Laser. The beam of coherent radiation stabbed out of the helmet's emitter, locked on to the receiver on the other suit. "Laura, you jackass, get that fucking door closed. I'm fine, I'll be there in a second!"<br/><br/>I trudged through the shifting orange mist, ignoring its pathetic attempts to blow me off course. Now I could "see" a weird green "matrix-like" outline of everything, I had no trouble finding the airlock door, keying it open and stepping inside...