Helios' Partisan-class Escort, The Cat's Pajamas, emerged from hyperspace as close to the planet Home/Click-*-Click-*-Click-Click as was safe. The tiny silver dot began to make its way towards the shimmering globe. The planet almost looked pretty from this high up.

It took about five standard minutes before the ship was caught by the passive sensors of the planetary defences. They came online immediately. The natives weren't in a position to identify friendly starships so they just shot at everything.

High-speed surface-to-orbit missiles began to slam into the defence field of the Cat's Pajamas. The primitive weapons barely coerced so much as orange sparks as they detonated. The ship was almost entirely unaffected.

Eventually the Cat's Pajamas broke into the atmosphere and the bombardment ceased. It came in for a landing in an area of yellow, rocky desert. The four rangers emerged from the ship already suited up. Their backs bulged with packs of supplies and their cloaks draped behind them.

"You're just going to leave your ship out in the open like this?" asked Aranarth.

"Sure," replied Helios. "Why not? With the engines off and the cloak engaged it's basically a sensor ghost. Even if someone knew it was here somewhere looking for one Partisan on a planet is like looking for a needle in a haystack factory. Anyway if someone does find it it's programmed to flee into space. If that happens it'll come back once a week to meet up at pre-programmed rendezvous locations that are impossible to predict without the encrypted program in my implant."

"Oh," said Aranarth.

"Remember I've been doing this stuff for months while you were off doing Tellus knows what," Helios teased. "We're not just hiding from the gug-gug-gugs or even the Old Ones down here. What we're really hiding from is the Parliament. I'm not too keen on the Successors of Inxon showing up in some kind of two dimensional triangle and blowing us all to theoretical particles. So, yeah, I've got it covered."

"I get it, I'm an idiot," said Aranarth.

"Well just as long as you get it."

With Helios leading the way the group began to trudge through the uneven desert towards a resistance safe house that she knew about. Usually higher gravity worlds like this made Decker feel sluggish but the suit compensated fantastically. He barely noticed the difference.

Helios parked her ship quite a ways away, so as not to give away the location of the safe house. It took the better part of the day for even the suited rangers to make their way there. By the time they arrived it was pitch dark.

The safe house was accessed by a hidden stairway covered with rocks. Helios moved these out of the way and then replaced them once the group had entered. Sometimes the low-tech solutions were the best ones.

Decker was shocked by how long the stairs were. The safe house needed to be quite deep underground to confound enemy sensors. There didn't seem to be any air shafts, apparently the alien air was replenished with a life support system of some kind. This deep underground it didn't really matter what kind of tech you ran, nobody was going to detect it without at a minimum 5d hyperspace sensors.

<Hey Suit,> thought Decker, <Do you have hypersensors?>

<Well naturally,> replied the Suit, a note of pride obvious in its voiceless voice, <My sensors are literally located in hyperspace. I can see into a 3d shape like it was so many lines drawn on the ground. Presuming of course that nobody with equivtech cloaking technology is trying to stop me.>

<Good to know,> thought Decker.

Finally they came to the bottom of the staircase.

"Gimme a sec," said Helios, in front, "These people do love traps."

"Gee I wonder who taught them that?" Ophelia asked. Her tone gave away the answer.

Helios deftly disabled a few laser tripwires, a pressure sensor, and a magnetic trigger. She almost missed the last one. She felt a parent's pride swelling up in her chest. She really quite liked these people.

"Should be clear now," said Helios.

"Should be?" asked Aranarth.

"Nobody's perfect," replied Helios. "You go in first."

With Aranarth in front the rangers entered the simple high-ceilinged stone complex. It was designed for creatures non-trivially larger than humans which made them all feel small by comparison.

There were no decorations or flourishes here; everything was utilitarian. There was almost no furniture and even less technology.

There was no one here.

"Sprell," said Helios. "I really had a feeling about this place. Well they have to be at one of the safe houses. Let's head to the next one."

The other three groaned.

"You mean you didn't know?" asked Decker.

"If the resistance was that easy to find they'd all be dead already," replied Helios. "Use your head."

Helios scratched a message into the wall in case anyone else came by. The group unpacked some of their supplies and had supper before they went back up the stairs. Helios replaced the traps behind them.

The group renewed their journey across the desert. They had to move in great sweeping arcs to avoid any of the population centers, which were firmly held by the gug-gug-gugs. Luckily these were scattered thinly across the desert so it was easy enough to move around them. Every now and then they saw smoke rising in the distance.

Helios held her hand out, indicating they should stop.

"Wait," she said. There was a beat of silence. "Does anyone else sense that? Five o'clock, about twenty clicks off. Disturbances in the sand without any detectable source. Like something cloaked is moving."

<Suit?> thought Decker.

<Well now that she mentions it...> replied the Suit. <That would explain some of the input I'm getting.>

"The Old Ones haven't provided the gug-gug-gugs with cloaking technology, have they?" asked Aranarth. "That would be tipping their hand a little too much."

"No," replied Helios, distantly, "no they haven't. So they've either changed their minds or..."

She didn't finish the sentence. Instead she motioned for the others to follower her. She led them around a large rocky outcropping to get out of sight.

"What would you wager with me that those aren't Old One battlesuits?" asked Helios. She was trying hard to suppress a smile, but not quite hard enough.

"You think the Old Ones would risking landing soldiers on the planet itself?" asked Aranarth.

"It's no more dangerous than supplying the gug-gug-gugs with cloaking technology, which is the only other viable theory. And the Old One leadership are many things, few of them nice, but they aren't stupid. If the gug-gug-gugs get caught with Old Ones cloaks that gets them in as much trouble as if they were caught on the planet itself. In for a day, in for a year."

"What do we do?" asked Decker.

"We wait to see if they noticed us," said Helios. "The last thing I want to do is lead actual Old Ones to a resistance safe house. If they have, we're going to have to fight them. If not we keep going."

"If we defeat them we might be able to acquire proof of their presence on this world," said Aranarth.

"Yeah," Helios agreed sarcastically, "and if they defeat us they'll have proof of our presence."

"It's still worth it," said Aranarth. "They're cloaked. It's a fluke that we found them this time. We might not get another chance."

"Well don't worry, we might not have a choice but to fight," said Helios. "Don't mistake stupidity for bravery, Dane. It would be pathologically reckless to intentionally attack when we don't even know how many there are."

"We could scout them first," offered Aranarth.

Helios wanted to lower her helmet and risk the atmosphere just so Aranarth could see the face she was making.

"What did you think my plan was?" she asked, incredulous. "It's going to be a lot easier to scout the Old Ones with a base of operations, don't you think? Some kind of house that we could hide out in, one that's safe?"

"If we lose them now what do you think the chances are that we'll find them again?"

"What's this 'we'? You didn't find anything I found them. And I'll do it again. That was the plan: you advise the resistance, I scout. I won't butt into your business you stay out of mine."

The two rangers stared at each other for a moment.

"Alright, I trust that you know what you're doing," said Aranarth.

The group waited to see what the Old Ones would do. Having a lock on their location made it much easier to scan for the subtle signs of their presence. They moved about inside a relatively small radius, disturbing sands with their AG modules. It was hard to guess how many of them there were but it wasn't a small number. The rangers were probably outnumbered.

The Old Ones were certainly up to something.

What's going on? wondered Decker, The Old Ones are notoriously risk averse. Why would they expose themselves this much just to annex a few piddly little planets on the edge of human space?

Decker wished he would see what was going on. All they had to go on was little clues in the sensor data, circumstantial evidence of the presence of something that was otherwise undetectable. It was like trying to follow an invisible man based on his footfalls on the grass.

They had no idea how many of them there were. It was impossible to tell if one or more had peeled off from the group to confront them. All they could do was wait and listen and sweat.

After several hours of tense waiting the Old ones finally left the area of effect of the group's short range scanners. By this time it had grown dark.

"I think we're good," said Helios.

"If we could see them, why didn't they see us?" asked Ophelia.

"It's likely they were using their 5d sensors for something besides looking for enemies," replied Aranarth. "Our suits won't show up on anything else. I wonder what they were looking for?"

"Who knows," said Helios, dismissively. "Come on, we've got to get moving."

The rangers continued to make their way deeper into the desert.