Story Seed - Scout

Image Source: http://fenris31.deviantart.com/art/Sending-The-Signal-496176288

*Optical uplink established.*

 Agent 37 tapped at the microcomputer's holographic control display. The data and images from his suit's sensor suite were compressed into data packets and transferred into the laser comms unit. A flickering beam of light, each pulse actually a high speed burst of data, lazed out from the sphere and into the sky. The narrow beam of coherent light would be intercepted in low orbit by the the waiting scout ship.

The whole process of data transfer took less than a minute, but Agent 37 felt grossly overexposed. The alien ruins were remote enough that it was unlikely any of the Hegemony's scouts would find him, and the carefully modulated green laser would be almost invisible to the enemy base's sensors, but those almosts and unlikelies made him nervous. Agent 37 hadn't survived the war for as long as she had without being careful; discretion was the better part of valor, as the old saying went.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, she thought as she waited for the tight beam return message with her new orders. The heads up in her helmet displayed the feeds from her half dozen remote sensor drones as little windows overlaying her field of vision. They were each about a thousand feet away, circling her position in the sandy ruins, keeping their electronic eyes and ears open for Hegemony troops or scouts that might make her position.

A beam of green light began to strike the receiving lens of her comms as her new orders began to download. Agent 37 found herself holding her breath, waiting for the feed to terminate. The beam ended just as one of her drone feeds cut out in a burst of red light. Panic stained the edges of her mind as she set to shutting down the comms unit and getting it buried in the sand once more. When the second and third of her drones died that panic bloomed as a deep seated dread roiled in her stomach. The Hegemony was onto her location, and at best she had minutes to figure a way out.