The sound of slamming car doors followed and the two vehicles roared off, leaving him sitting in the massive field of trash.
Letting out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, he allowed himself to slump against the shipping container.
He could activate his comm link and try contacting command, or the rest of his squad, or… someone. That would be dumb. If anyone had a rudimentary triangulation apparatus, they'd be able to find him if he sent out an undirected transmission. Without knowing where to send a narrow-beam transmission, that would be his only option.
No, until he figured out what was happening, where he was, and who he'd just narrowly avoided being hit by, he had to play it safe.
First thing's first, he had to get out of the trash heap he was sitting in.
The problem with that plan was as soon as he didn't have something else to focus on he remembered most of his body was one massive ache. Pain came rushing back to the front of his attention and a groan made it past his clenched jaw. Falling 100 meters and slamming into this damn shipping container wouldn't help whatever injuries he had.
With a thought, he pulled his diagnostics up. The armor was largely undamaged. Besides a redundant comm link in his helmet, everything was fine.
What surprised him was he was also fine. Mostly. Other than some pretty good bruising throughout his torso and left arm, he had a clean bill of health. Why did it feel like that was wrong?
That thought can wait. For now, if I'm not injured, I need to get moving.
So that's what he did. After a quick check confirmed he had his M6 on his hip, but no Commando on its sling, he pushed himself away from the shipping container and started crawling toward the city-side of the trash pit.
He could see what looked like a dam a kilometer in that direction. Was he between two dams?
A quick look back at the concrete wall he'd fallen down confirmed that was the case.
What the hell was this structure? Two dams a klick apart? And now they're a landfill? Besides the oddity of two dams bracketing such a small span of, what had probably been a river, why had two incredibly expensive pieces of infrastructure been left like this?
That's a question for another time.
Without knowing if there was any surveillance in the area, he tried to keep as small a footprint as possible. Low-crawling through the field of trash wasn't perfect, but there were enough mounds and larger pieces of debris to keep him hidden. At least he hoped.
As he made his way toward the other side, his mind returned to the question: how had two massive pieces of infrastructure been abandoned like this? And, while he wasn't much of a car fan, hard to be when you spend most of your time on starships, those vehicles looked nothing like modern cars. They were too angular and, from the short glimpse he caught of them, they seemed closer to something they would have made a century or two after cars were invented than modern ones.
He paused after half an hour of crawling through the seemingly endless ocean of trash to take another look around. There was a gentle slope up to his right. That was better than trying to climb a dam.
Then there was the city. The outer colonies didn't have the resources to build something like that. Where… had they been fighting the FLP? Had they established a base in the inner colonies? And this close to a major city? There's no way, if that was the case, command would have only assigned his squad to the mission. That would be a major threat to the population. Any FLP cell that warranted his team operating this close to a population center would be a full scale assault.
Which then begs the questions… Where the hell was that cell? Where was the rest of his squad? How had he ended up on top of a dam? Why were there civilians there participating in what he could only imagine was a street race?
None of it made any sense.