Greyloch.

Location: Deep space, Scorpio constellation, uncharted planet designated “SX-02”
Colonial Military Sanction TASTRAS deployment.

Mission: Reconnaissance and surface deployments.

- Objective "Arcsine": Locate suitable Forward Operating Base (FOB) position for further logistical supply and increased operational presence.

- Objective "Low sentiment": Possible hostile Holcroid occupation, Special Forces units to acquire intelligence and confirm.

Mission Time: 10 July 2217, 0918 Hours.

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Wind coiled viciously, laying a super frost of surface rime, frozen oxygen and hydrogen cloaking a barren hill scape. It reached into the snow, carrying it far in all directions. Major Meclas Ordlo shifted amongst wet chunks and cryogenic debris, the icy blast of perpetual winter scraping away the body heat within his gear.
Around him, a pale scene of frostbitten waste ebbed off in any direction he looked. Were it not for the compressed snow in his proximity, Ordlo might have believed he wasn't anywhere. The cold tried hard to sap his shivering frame of essence, blood-flow slowing, plates of armoured carbonic steel exposed on his under suit would claim the skin of his hands should he try to touch them. He had no desire to un-glove his hands. He had to move. Pulling his half-buried headgear out of the powdery snow, he shook any excess off and sealed the respirator and goggles back in place over his gorget.
A warm stream of breath issued from the mask's filters and he moved off again.

He scanned the area in front, ahead of him; the blizzard blasted a continuous fog of glare and snow. Ordlo looked down to his left forearm, tapped the control pad on his bracer, and rendered down the goggle filtration by four factors. He tried a second look through the endless white. A small, slouched shape moved in the corner of Ordlo's view, he tried to track it, reaching for the sidearm on his thigh-holster, aiming in the shadowy thing's direction.

~ Twelve meters. ~ He judged the distance between himself and where the shape had been.
~ Humanoid? ~ He stepped closer, carefully sinking each boot into the deep snow. Noise discipline. Inching through the howling gale, Ordlo swept the barrel of his sidearm left and right, pausing to change vision-modes from infrared thermal, to radio-electric, or pulse wave scan for vital sign readings. Nothing. He kept his arm out holding the pistol, scanning, switching vision filters, then returning his right hand to the pistol. ~ Nothing? ~
"Twelve meters..." Ordlo muttered, then, something latched onto his legs. Ordlo's balance was stolen without a second to react, the next instant he was on his back in the snow, a red overlay in his goggle's display outlined a tall silhouette in deep maroon landing on top of his prone form and brandishing an edged weapon held at his gorget.

"Eleven point seven meters Major..." A heaving breathless voice came. The figure who ambushed Ordlo replaced the blade in its sheath and got up off the soldier, offering a hand to stand him up. Ordlo clasped the hand and felt himself hauled up off the snow. He tapped the display control returning it to daylight normal opacity, zero overlay to see clearly, who had got the drop on him.
"Sergeant Tyrone." He breathed warmly. The man in pale fatigues, a snow hood and cape, Senior Sergeant's chevrons, and a service patch with 'TYRONE' stencilled in.

Tyrone dusted snow off his gauntlets. Ordlo looked around for his R-11. Collecting it up he asked: "Risky move, I caught sight of you at twelve meters, you buried in at eleven point eight, did you gamble everything on the idea that, if I was hostile, I would pursue you past that distance?"
"Exactly sir. But more than that, I knew that if you were a hostile contact, you would have either pursued my sighting, or scouted my position, had to give myself an option to give you the slip, or if I had to, lay ambush - and I did."
"You did. But hostiles would have vapourised you for exposing yourself so much for so long." Ordlo stooped to replace the pistol in its holster. Snow curled and shafted upward around the two soldiers.
"Yes sir. Risky, I caught sight of you approximately two hours ago, called out - but the wind doesn't carry. I thought if you were friendly you'd eventually respond. When I lost your tracks I had to make a move." Tyrone wrapped the cape in over his torso and pulled up the visor on the face gear under his snow hood. Ordlo removed his headgear again. The communicator and tac-link remained around his ear.

"Never mind son. We've scoured this ice cube for a month, units are everywhere, scattered, mixed. It's a miracle we can breathe on this freeze box. I ain't telling you anything you don't know already."
"Where's your team Tyrone? Your unit holed up around here?"
"Negative Major, this storm has us spread out and lost, the electro-friction between ice particles is affecting comms, and atmospheric activity is a meteorologist’s nightmare."
Ordlo turned and looked in no particular direction, hopeless two-man search party.
"It's almost like the storm is a perfect short-wave jammer. I had a clear link with three of the nine Cyclops satellites on the way planetside, as we broke the lower atmosphere, comms died. My unit is missing. Lost. I can't contact fleet control, or any ground assets. And I don't like it Sergeant." Ordlo gestured about in dismay, but not expecting Tyrone to have an answer to the problem. They both understood nothing about this planet.
"Something doesn't sit right Major. I agree. Comms being scrambled may lead to more incidents like ours." Janul Tyrone stood firm and expressionless amid the cutting shriek of the snow-saturated wind.

"If your team is anywhere nearby, we have to be alert for them if we locate any sections in the area we make for high ground, get above the storm and try to establish contact with Cyclops and Fleet. I'm sending you a dee thirty of my original mission directives, explains why I came down here alone. You might be curious?" Ordlo glanced up from his tac-pad and waited for Tyrone to confirm receipt. Tyrone replaced his face visor and read the D-30 outline on his display. Ordlo placed his mask over his head and face, pressurising the seal.
"Shit sir. A deep cover op? Within the division?" Tyrone quizzically roamed through the text and powered on the night-vision suite of triocular goggles from a webbing clasp with a shrill whine. He attached them to the visor plate at eye level, locking them secure.
As per combat state protocol, Ordlo disclosed only mission critical information.
It appeared to Tyrone that Ordlo had been sent to investigate behavioural patterns, efficiency and combat coherence patterns and observe any micro discrepancies in division operators measuring against unknown parameters and for what reason, Tyrone expected he would get to know, on a need-to-know-basis.

Ordlo checked ammo, knelt in the snow and humoured Tyrone's concerned requests to learn more about what the hell his assignment was: "Classified Sergeant. I'm alone with a blank check on this one. Can't say if I like it. Brass is bitchy. They want me to make you feel like you're all hiding something, like you should always worry... Like you're being assessed." "But unless anyone within the division looks like they have something to hide, I won't be stalking and staring..."
"We may find ourselves, stalked and stared at by Holcroids if we're lucky..." Ordlo added humourlessly. Pulling Tyrone into focus. His blood flowed slowly and he began to feel numb in places. "We should move Sergeant." Ordlo declared. Both to keep warm and to increase the likelihood of finding other units, high ground, and perhaps shelter. "Holcroids... Sir?" Tyrone worried now. Up until this comment, Tyrone hadn't concerned himself with the Major's subsequent op... But did he know more than he had said? Had he seen Holcroids on the ground? "No sign of them where I landed. No other reports. But with this weather and environmental phenomena, who can say for sure? Let's move." Ordlo was brief and blunt.

The pair fanned out and began a slow but steady march in a direction they hoped was North, (hard to say with magnetic fields being tormented by the extreme environment) at a small ravine, the Major leapt into the wild wind and disappeared beneath a shelf of frozen carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Sergeant Tyrone scanned and tried to make contact with the Major, several minutes passed before a mound of snow rose up and out popped Ordlo's arm, hauling himself upward through the deep powder. Ordlo wiggled and tried to swim toward Tyrone's position. Clasping Tyrone's outstretched hand he heaved him out and stood the Major up for the second time that day. "Fucking silt! We'll have to go around it. An Orbiter could survey this place... Find a better route."
"A-twelve-hundreds are cutoff still, storm ain't letting up." Said the Sergeant unconvinced, and unhappy with the predicament they were still in. A few hours ago he had arrived in system and watched as several teams boarded Hydra’s in the launch bay of Fleet warship Aeneas. They landed on a frozen hell at predetermined drop zones with specific mission times to complete reconnaissance and patrol areas for setting up a forward operating base.

The atmosphere played havoc with visibility, the drop craft had to halve the drop time of Tyrone's unit to be able to make orbit again. The weather was just too dangerous. SX-02's storm system engulfed the entire planet. It cut off communication, and isolated the sections and platoons who had rotated in earlier. Tyrone had been on the planet, now called: 'SX-02', for approximately seventy-two Earth hours. Part of a hastily assembled search and recovery outfit to reconnoiter and regroup some missing sections and a Fleet pilot (if alive) who's Hydra, crash landed hours ago. But without a Topographic Positioning Satellite (TPS) map, and nav points, hell, a situational awareness beyond half a meter in the snow-blind terrain, their progress would still be limited. They weren't going to find anyone in conditions like these.

Ordlo and Tyrone tried heading along the ravine edge surrendering triangulation to the inevitable. Several minutes passed, both the marksman Sergeant and Major Ordlo stumbled, slipped or staggered through thigh-deep snow, trying to find a means to navigate around the gulley piled high to the edges. For a kilometer there seemed no passable outcrop, rocks or land bridge. The snow actually felt like it was getting deeper even up on the walls of the gulley.
"We can't tell if we're climbing up or down, 'the fuck?!" Ordlo hissed. His frustration vented in the form of a hurled fist of snow. Open landscape ran far in all directions beyond the gulley, but the churning blizzard obscured any mountains, or higher rock formations to scale above the storm. Tyrone collapsed in the snow. They had walked, squelched and skidded through dense snow for hours by this point. He pulled an M.R.E from his rear pouch and drank the half chilled vitamin sachet through its icy spout. Skin peeled off his lips as he took the spout away, he grunted.

The two soldiers sat in the wind and snow, then finally decided to lie in and sleep off the remaining hours of light seeping through from SX's blue giant star sixty light-years away. Ordlo slept. But Tyrone lay awake for some time. Scanning and re-reading Ordlo's dee-thirty. The mission parameters where obviously doctored to appear like they wouldn't arouse a lot of suspicion if read by other division operators. But Tyrone didn't like what the Major had briefed him on about being assessed. He decided he wouldn't fully trust Major Ordlo until he could see the back of him. Tyrone had nothing to hide. But that wouldn't stop Ordlo documenting his acumen and prowess out here under pressure and in a survival situation.
~ Why would brass sanction a dee-thirty for such an op? A hell of a time to be fishing about profiling operators... ~ Tyrone questioned the motivation behind this obscure mission and the Major assigned to it, but refused to speculate on it more. He couldn't decide whether he really cared or not. ~ Ain't going to find out until this current situation un-fucks itself anyway. ~ He thought.