Khait nods slightly, a heavy sigh filling the inside of her mask.  She surveys the charred field, the farm, plots a path.  She looks at Thud, and he can see the pale blue glow of her eyes from within the unflinching, sneering ram's face of her helmet as she looks up at him.<br/><br/>"They're going to try to hold us up.  If we stop on that field, they'll be scraping up what's left."  She holds out a small, carved-onyx talisman of some kind, hollow, with a bored hole in one end, a string at the other.  She spins the black object in a few swift circles, producing a high-pitched whistle.  "I'm guessing that you plan to go through the middle."  A howler's freakish, reptilian cry sounds, and the spine-bodied beast emerges from the rocks nearby, lumbering toward them-- a saddle on its back.<br/><br/>"I'll weave in, they'll focus on me.  You charge, plow through the stragglers.  We kill every last motherfucker in that colony."<br/><br/>The howler waits a stone's toss away for her to head for it, where she mounts it smoothly by swinging one long, armor-clad leg into the stirrups and hauling herself up.  She draws her lance from its strapping on the saddle.  "Let's go."