“428, report to the infirmary immediately.”
She stood up from her learning terminal and headed toward the exit of the instruction center.
“Freak.”
“Loser.”
“Four two late.”
A snicker. “More like four two ate.”
“Look at her waddling off to fail another physical.”
“If only they had culled her, we wouldn’t be ranked dead last.”
She wasn’t going to cry. That just got more names thrown at her, more elbows in the side, more accidents causing her to go tumbling over when things fell in front of her feet.
428 made her way to the clinic, where she stripped out of her clothing and waited in line with the others who had been called. She tried her best to keep her eyes to herself and not let them wander, but no amount of effort on her part could stop her from drawing comparisons.
The boys in her class were starting to change in ways that were impossible not to notice. Frames that had grown taller and lankier in the past year were starting to fill out in other ways. Stretch marks were forming around major muscle groups. Softness was being steadily replaced by hills and valleys. Hair and quills–dense and thick–were sprouting in new places on their bodies. Voices steadily lowered in pitch from the crackle and squeak of the previous year.
The girls lagged behind. Shorter, less robust, less body hair. Most of her group had gotten their first monthly cycle in recent months.
428 trailed even the other girls, and it was a source of constant bullying and shame.
She was slower than the other girls. She failed to do the same number of exercise repetitions within the allotted time, lifted less, and tired faster.
She was overweight, and when she tried to cut back her meals, the caretaker would make sure she consumed all of her food. She was as hungry as the rest during mealtimes, but struggled to finish some days.
The line moved forward, and she saw one of the caretakers’ bodies inject a series of shots into the person in front of her. 401 got stuck in both arms, both thighs, and both sides of her butt. 428 counted ten injections total.
She swallowed hard. Praying today was the day that she was given injections. The line moved, and it was her turn. A laser swept over her from three different angles. The soft skin on her abdomen was pinched. Swabs were taken from the inside of her mouth, and blood was drawn from her arm.
“Your exam is complete. Redress and return to instruction, 428.” The caretaker’s voice was the same as always. Flat, neutral, almost bored-sounding.
428 hastily pulled on her jumpsuit and shoes and returned to class.
Later that night, she cried herself to sleep when no one else was there to see her tears.
***
It had finally happened to her. She was nearly half a year behind the second-to-last girl to get her cycle, but the caretaker assisted her, and later that day, she was called to the infirmary.
She received her first injection–only one–but it was a bright spark for her. The pinch in her arm couldn’t keep her spirits from soaring. Days passed, and every day, she was called into the clinic and given another exam and another injection. Always just the one. She started feeling tired and was given longer sleeping periods.
She overheard whispered rumors that there was something wrong with her. More teasing. Her belly started to feel bloated and ached constantly. She was given tablets and told to drink extra fluids.
A week passed, and the bloated feeling transitioned into a hot, uncomfortable lump growing in her abdomen. She asked the caretaker if she was sick, and was told that she was perfectly healthy–the same response as always. Every day the lump was larger. It hurt when she moved, and she was put on a lower exercise load. More nasty rumors circulated.
A few of the other girls had similar things happen, but not quite like this.
428’s shame only grew when the rankings of her group rose when she wasn’t participating.
The next week, she was called into the clinic. Her jumpsuits weren’t fitting correctly, and everyone was making fun of her for it. The caretaker brought her into a room that wasn’t like the ones she normally went into. It was all white and extremely bright inside. A bed was positioned in the middle of the room, with a much larger caretaker with many arms standing next to it.
They had her remove her jumpsuit and shoes and lie on the bed. Tubes were stuck in her arms, and she was told to recite the steps for disassembling a service weapon.
Later she woke up in a soft bed, in a different room. A caretaker was waiting by her side and told her that she’d needed a medical procedure and would be returning to her class after a couple of days.
She was allowed to watch holos from her bed, which made the pain in her belly much more tolerable.
***
“Group one, you will be issued a firearm, pack, and supplies. You will take a full inventory of each item, log this information into your dataslate, and sign off on receipt of issued gear. When you are complete, load your gear and board the dropship. This is a comprehensive test of all your training, and you are being issued live ordnance. You will be judged according to your squad efficacy and number of surviving members upon retrieval. Remember your training.”
412 jostled into 428’s side, and she glared at him. He gave her a grin and a wink. “No caretakers during testing. You know what that means.” He proceeded to make a lewd gesture with his hands.
“Never in your wildest dreams, 412,” she growled at him.
He had the audacity to look wounded by her response. “Well fuck yourself then, for all I care. Not like anyone else in the group would ever touch you in a million years.”
She didn’t dignify him with a response, and instead pressed her rifle into the rack on her seat, where it locked into place with a beep. She strapped in and looked over the rest of her group.
It had dwindled with each cycle. Several had gone to the clinic for care and never returned. They’d been informed they had expired for a variety of reasons. Two had Awakened and been removed from their group entirely. Five had died during training. Two had died during weapons drills, both at the same time. Improper handling of explosive material. One had dropped dead in the middle of a run, another while swimming. 401’s bunkmate, 402, had started coughing horrible, wet-sounding coughs, and three days later was found dead in her bunk.
428 wanted to say that she took no pleasure in seeing 401’s tears, but that would be a lie. Years of hazing by the popular light-haired girl had made her bitter.
Their group was now 33, split between rows of seats in the dimly lit interior of the aircraft. 428 kept her eyes fixed forward and went over the details in her head.
Two weeks of survival in the Wildlands. Not just any part of the Wildlands, but an actively hostile area filled with things trying to kill them. It wasn’t just the wildlife that concerned her. Years of collective punishment meant that there was a real and measurable resentment of her among her peers. She expected that one or more of them might confront her. She had to make sure she didn’t become a training accident.
Lights passing by from top to bottom were visible outside the tiny viewports in the sides of the bay they were seated in. A large elevator shaft passed by at a rapid pace. The engines of the dropship rumbled to life, and hydraulics and servos whined as automated preflight checks ran.
The entire vehicle lurched, and 428 caught glimpses of countless city lights as they extended off into the distance all around them.
They weren’t allowed to leave the facility. For all of them, this would be the first time they’d had any level of independence outside strictly controlled schedules and constant observation. It was exciting, exhilarating, and terrifying in equal measure.
The sounds of the engines picked up, and the city fell away below them. A voice came on over the overhead and announced an ETA of two hours. 428 closed her eyes and caught what rest she could. It wasn’t hard; the hearing protection dropped things to a respectable volume, and the occasional jostle of turbulence wasn’t enough to wake up anyone but the lightest of sleepers.
***
An alarm blared to life, waking 428. It wasn’t the expected sound of drop prep. Red-orange strobes flashed, and she could see the rising panic in the eyes of the rest of her group. There was a horrible screech from outside the hull, a bang. A sudden and sharp shift in the sound of the engines resonated into the cabin. A mechanical hiccup of sorts, followed by an explosion that breached the inner hull, sending sparks, bits of metal, and a ball of fire through the compartment. 428 closed her eyes, one part reflex, one part training, and held on to the straps holding her in place as she was crushed into the seat by a punishing, high-G spin.
For a split second, she wondered if this was part of the training course. The caretakers were known to do occasionally cruel and unusual things in the name of building emergency response habits.
She heard and felt a series of rapid-fire clank-thunks, like automatic weapons fire, and then was assaulted by whipping wind and a sudden sense of weightlessness. She was still strapped into her seat.
Emergency ejection protocol.
It was dark, almost pitch black, except for an ominous orange glow rotating around her faster than she could track. Another bang, and it felt like she was thrown to the training mat; her entire frame was rattled by a bone-shaking impact. The spinning slowed, then stopped. Rustling, and a crack of cables going taut.
Her parachute deployed. She checked for loose lines and signs of tearing or failure, then used the opportunity to try to gather her bearings and orient herself. The orange glow was sooty clouds lit from below by volcanic activity.
The Cascades. Unstable and volcanically active since I-Day. That should be west-southwest of the Ark.
Her view of the stars was partially obstructed by the parachute. There was a flash of pale blue light in the distance, and it took a small eternity for the sound of the dropship exploding to reach her. It was barely more than a muffled whump when it arrived. She did her best to try to memorize the rough location relative to the path she was descending on. It would be unlikely that much, if anything, survived the impact and explosion, but if this became an actual real-life survival situation instead of an overly complicated training scenario, every bit would matter. A spare filtration system or medical kit could be the difference between life and death for her squad.
She’d no more than made landfall and started trying to unpack the survival gear from her ejection seat when she was attacked by some kind of tentacled land-squid. It was small relative to her, but terrifyingly strong for its size. Having claws helped a lot, but she wound up having to lift its mass while it was grappled around her chest and repeatedly body-slam it into a tree trunk until it stopped moving. The creature had claws in the tentacles, and getting it fully removed from her gear and webbing was a real bitch.
Her rifle was broken. The barrel was bent, and the receiver was cracked. She still took it and the ammunition; it might prove useful as a parts donor, and the ammo could be used for fire-starting material if she wasn’t able to find another weapon. She had a knife, 72 hours of emergency rations that would taste like recycled cardboard but keep her alert and alive, a parachute, and cord.
Meeting up with the rest of her squad was a priority, but not if it meant getting yourself killed before she could get there. She made a crude but effective spear from a sapling and used some of the webbing from the ejection seat to provide a secure grip. The parachute was repurposed into a makeshift pack for now; it would double as a tent, hammock, or rain sheet later.
Water was going to be a problem. Volcanic ashfall was heavy with toxic contaminants; rain was questionable and based on weather conditions, and both her water bladder and water filter were riddled with shrapnel holes. Hopefully her squad had intact filters. She knew how to make some by hand, but the quality wouldn’t be the same, and contamination was a much bigger risk with a cobbled-together solution.
She sheltered in place until daybreak.
***
There were other survivors, 14 in total, who had managed to link up. Possibly more alive, but either in bad condition, lost, or unconscious. They only had a few working radios and a single roll of PV film. It wasn’t enough to keep the radios charged outside of very sparing use. Five bodies had been found, three partially eaten by wildlife. They were cremated per protocol, and their supplies were put to good use.
The situation they were in had people stressed out, and it took longer for her squad to ambush her than she had anticipated.
428 placed her sleeping spot away from the rest of the group intentionally, as she thought that there might be an incident. It would be better to bait it out and handle it on her terms. Whispered voices and the crackle of dead undergrowth alerted her that the ambush was coming.
Fortune favors the prepared, the caretakers had instructed. It was a good lesson to take to heart.
412, she expected, and 408 was a usual accomplice; the two tended to slink around together most of the time. She was disappointed that 409 was involved. She had been one of the few that hadn’t been purely shitty to her growing up. It was probably peer pressure, or maybe some kind of blackmail.
It was challenging to keep her heart rate down and breathing slow and steady as the adrenaline hit. She’d caught the glint of an unsheathed blade through a cracked eyelid as 412 had approached. When 408 leaned over her to check and see if she was fully asleep, she struck.
The short club had been hidden under her parachute she’d been using as a blanket. 408’s head made a hollow clunk sound as the lump of wood connected with his skull, and he went down like a duffel full of dirty jumpsuits. 409 jumped her as she was getting to her feet, and she headbutted the other woman so hard she thought she’d nearly knocked herself out.
Then it was just the two of them, 428 and 412. She spit blood from her split lip.
“You should have just died, you slow dumb bitch,” 412 hissed at her in the darkness. “Now we can fix that mistake, once and for all.”
She bared her teeth at him. “I wouldn’t give you the pleasure,” she shot back.
412 hissed and lunged forward with a series of thrusts and slashes. He was good: strong, fast, and big, but in the past cycle the previously significant size difference between the two had steadily closed, and 428 was eye-to-eye with him now. What 428 had lacked in talent, she had more than made up for with an almost compulsive need to train. Her entire life she’d been the smallest, weakest, and slowest, and training was the one area she could leverage to bridge the gap.
He got a few shallow cuts in on her arms before she was able to catch him with her tail, and the second she had the opportunity, she took him to the ground, mounted him, and beat him to within an inch of his life with her fists.
She had the opportunity to kill him, to kill all three of them. They’d expected her to be taken off guard by their treachery, but it was painfully obvious and predictable. 412 had begged for mercy when she held his own blade to his balls.
The temptation to geld him on the spot was so strong, but it would degrade their performance as a unit and lower their survival chances if some dumb asshole who couldn’t handle rejection got an infection and/or died.
The rest of the group had drawn into a loose circle around them while they’d been brawling on the ground, attracted by the commotion on the outskirts of the camp. They didn’t say anything when she threatened to cut off 412’s balls and feed them to him, and they didn’t help her when she stood up and spit out a mouthful of blood when she’d decided he’d had enough, blubbering like a baby in the dirt.
She saw 401’s eyes in the darkness. Watching. Judging her.
***
It had taken a week and a half to reach the site of the dropship crash, and her initial guess had been correct. Very little had survived. The combination of hitting rocky terrain at several hundred kilometers per hour, cryogenic shock, and the explosive burn-off of the liquid hydrogen fuel had reduced the airframe to chunks of razor-sharp carbon fiber composite, twisted wiring, and melted piles of polymer and electronic scrap.
They’d held a collective funeral with the VI pilot's processing unit and the skeletal remains of the squad members whose ejection seats hadn’t detached.
It was strange, because after she beat the trio to a pulp, the rest of the squad had started coming to 428 with comments and concerns. Even 401 had been oddly chatty, going from never saying anything but thinly veiled insults to terse conversations. They held their position at the crash site for the remainder of their training period. 428 had argued that any survivors would follow the same training and protocols. A pickup had not arrived at the expected time, but a handful more stragglers came in one or two at a time, until all twenty-eight survivors were accounted for.
A working emergency beacon was carried by one of the late arrivals, 404. It was on, powered, and transmitting. It flashed a green status light when the diagnostic button was pressed.
Unease and anxiety rose among the survivors. There was talk of attempting to travel back to the Ark. Supplies were being stretched thin, even using as many local resources as possible. 428 got into an argument that nearly turned to violence.
Just over half the group wanted to pack up and try to make the journey. It had to be close to a thousand kilometers. 428 argued that they needed to stay in the deployment zone, to assume the mission had been extended but was otherwise ongoing. Attempting to travel several hundred to a thousand kilometers on foot with no long-term supplies or knowledge of relief locations wasn’t just desperate; it was suicidal. Poorly cobbled-together plans driven by barely constrained, growing panic.
She thought the group was either going to split or come to bloodshed when 401 spoke up. 401’s position as the head of the pecking order had degraded under the circumstances they were in, but still, people listened. 401 backed 428’s plan of securing the crash site and stabilizing their position.
They made eye contact.
“We need to follow protocol,” 401 parroted 428’s earlier words.
The holdouts who were happy to stick to their poorly conceived plan and to spit on 428’s objections held their tongues when 401 voiced her opinion. They would stay at the crash site and secure the perimeter of the wreck against hostile wildlife and the possibility of other sapients.
Two weeks later, a dropship had come in over the horizon and landed nearby.
The squad passed their final examination.
After the debriefs and the mission information was analyzed, 428 was promoted to group leader over 401. Nobody complained, objected, or called her four-two-late.
***
“The ongoing refugee crisis has caused a panic among the population in X-3. Although Axiom Four and Axiom One are already addressing the gap in food production, the panic has led to hoarding and violence. The hoarding has led to actual supply shortages and failures in multiple places within the supply chain.” The bland monotone of the caretaker narrated over a holoprojection of the mission briefing.
“At 0430 yesterday, the amassed population awaiting the next production run of nutritional bricks devolved into chaos, and the subsequent rioting has been spreading throughout the entire quadrant from 2-3 to 5-3. VBC has invoked their defense agreement with us, but the SecBoard has made the decision to limit the deployment of standard corpsec assets. Your squad is part of a larger K-Type deployment, but will be the only squad deployed to the VB facility. Your mission is to reinforce the VBC security forces that are fighting to retake control of the food processing facility after completing the following primary objectives.”
The hologram shifted to display a number of landing pads, with a neon green branching pathway that terminated in several objective markers.
“Present in location Alpha is a hardened data storage facility. Your squad is to access this facility, deploy the retrieval softs, and secure the proprietary data on the drives located there. The data is encrypted and, as of the last update we have, still secure. Should you be unable to access the drives, the data storage is to be destroyed according to protocol. Once complete, proceed to the seed banks at location Bravo. Retrieval is the preferred option, but if there is any question about the squad’s ability to exfil with the samples, then destroy them.”
Alternative routes through the facility were lit in yellow and included the use of service corridors to avoid potential checkpoints. Wireless codes were already uploaded to their tactical dataslates.
“Only when your primary objectives are complete are you to work with VBC’s forces to retake the facility.”
401 raised her hand.
“Yes?” The caretaker prompted her to make her comment.
“Engagement protocols?” She asked while lowering her hand.
“VBC security forces are designated blue, but only provided they do not attempt to interfere with the primary objectives. All non-security corporate citizens are considered disposable. Anyone present within the facility without a VBC ID code is a valid war target. Once your objectives have been met and the assets secured, maintain a low-profile presence while completing your mission. Should your identities be compromised, you are to terminate any witnesses. This includes VBC-Sec. Do not allow yourselves to be captured under any circumstances. The appropriate equipment is being provided as part of your deployment kit; use due diligence when handling.”
It was SOP, but 428 took no comfort in knowing that the same devices used to secure the objectives would be used to make sure they didn’t fall into enemy hands.
The paradox of having to use valuable intellectual property to secure other, less valuable intellectual property.
The security leadership must have considered the potential for reputational harm high-extreme for their squad to be deployed over standard forces in the first place. Their deployments for anything other than dirty laundry cleaning operations were few and far between, and this was the first time her squad was being deployed within the confines of the city into an active combat zone.
428 looked at the virtual sea of red surrounding and covering the facility and made a mental note to ensure every member of the squad was carrying the maximum load of munitions. She’d be using a few tricks of the trade to stash more in her kit. Survival supplies could be cut down; it was unlikely that more than 72 hours of emergency supplies would be needed, regardless of outcome.
***
They were still two kilometers out, and the jamming was so oppressive that they couldn’t establish a comms link, even on the lowest-bandwidth channels they had available. Wireless space might as well have been solid ink for the level of transmissions getting through. She wouldn’t be able to see her virtual hand in front of her face.
428 made her decision and issued orders to the VI from her seat in the command pod of the dropship.
Two dozen tiny black drones shot out of the belly of the dropship and zipped off in a spread toward their destination, trailing fiber optic cable filaments so fine they were barely visible to the naked eye.
The streets below them were absolute bedlam. There were millions of people in the streets; a concerning percentage of them were armed in some way, even if with simple martial implements.
A disturbing number of them were carrying weapons, some of which were the type and kind that presented an actual threat to her and her squad. Informational popups flooded the screen with the drones identifying the make, manufacturer, and sales history of some of the worst offenders.
It was no coincidence that serial identifiers of corpsec and military-grade hardware were missing. Digital records would likely show that they were lost and stolen goods, with a conspicuous concentration of activity in recent weeks and months.
Their own hardware was biometrically locked with multi-factor authentication and security measures in place to prevent tampering and misuse. The average human wouldn’t be able to use it in the first place unless they were extensively augmented. The ergonomics alone would be wrong. Grips too large, triggers too stiff, mass too high, and balance too far forward to be wielded effectively. The gear was purpose-built and tested for use by K-types.
Typically, they used large-caliber linear accelerator rifles for the types of work they were tasked out for. Due to the circumstances, 428 had requested that squad automatic weapons be issued. Largely a similar design of electrically driven rifle, the automatics used small-caliber, supersonic ammunition rather than the massive subsonic ammunition their standard rifles used. They were purpose-built for defeating armor, overpenetration, and featured active cooling for sustained automatic fire.
The coolant tanks would run out before the magazine or battery did, but it only needed to be cooled with either bad trigger discipline or really serious and sustained firefights.
The latter seemed inevitable. The armory issued everything she asked for without further comment. They had non-lethal options available as attachments: lasers, strobes, and acoustic weapons, but the standing orders were the same as always: their low wake doctrine:
Complete primary, secondary, and tertiary objectives based on priority.
Minimize presence and outside awareness.
Leave as few witnesses and as little evidence of operations behind as possible.
Secure any company assets, including casualties, and exfiltrate.
She wasn’t sure how difficult it was going to be to complete their main objectives on this mission, but she wasn’t deluding herself into thinking that extraction was going to be a simple matter under these circumstances. They were flying unmarked and without any identifying beacon outside bare minimum safety transponders, and even with that, small arms fire had been almost constantly pinging and bouncing off the hull of the dropship.
And pickup operations were inherently more challenging than drops.
They had their work cut out for them.
***
They started taking sustained fire as they entered the airspace over the production facility. Their dropship was disguised as a heavy cargo hauler, and the ceramic armor plates were painted up in bright industrial colors.
The hull was rattling with impacts, and the occasional harder hit was causing percussive cracks to echo into the crew compartment as armor plates were overwhelmed or failed under heavier impacts.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The squad was in position to jump as soon as the skids touched down; they were simply waiting for the indicator light to change color and the ramp to fall. Everyone was performing last-moment checks in their heavy armor.
A loud boom shook the entire airframe, and a spray of ceramic and polymer shrapnel clattered harmlessly off their armored suits. There was a head-sized hole in the side of the crew compartment; some kind of focused explosive took out both the outer armor, hull, and spall liners.
428’s squad status display showed green across the board. No injuries or fatalities.
The status light changed to standby for drop.
“Activate camo,” 428 calmly spoke into her helmet. The black, angular shapes of her squad shimmered and distorted in two stages. Their cloak first, then the exposed shoulders and helmets.
The optical camo wasn’t to make them invisible. Such systems weren’t compatible with their mobility requirements and tactical doctrine. Instead, it distorted their shape, disguised their size and mass, and scrambled digital sensor equipment. Each of their helmets had state-of-the-art multispectral jamming and network intrusion hardware built into it. On friendly ecosystems, their presence would be rendered as heavily armored and armed but otherwise mundane corporate security exo forces. On other systems, a mix of VI-generated imagery would be inserted and overwritten to file. On truly ancient camera systems, they just looked like hazy, indistinct blurs and sensor artifacts.
The status light changed to deploy, and the ramp fell with a tremendous bang. The squad moved out and started taking fire from a gun emplacement just under a hundred meters away. Incendiary tracers were restricted access due to the fire and contamination hazards they presented. It didn’t seem to stop the local gang authority from unloading a solid green stream of fire on their location. 401 and 404 were designated marksmen for the operation. They brought their rifles up, and the gun crew was turned into colorful spray patterns rendered in high fidelity by 428’s helmet displays.
They were buffeted by the intense downwash of the dropship taking off. It was listing to one side; one of the main exhaust ducts had taken so much fire that most of it had blown out.
428 keyed her transmitter to address the entire squad. Tight beam optical encoding circumvented radio jamming, but would only work here while everyone was in direct line of sight. Each set of armor operated as a relay to alleviate the inherent problems with this method. “Teams one and two are with me. We are proceeding to objective Alpha. 422 will command teams three, four, and five and handle objective Bravo. Rendezvous at Charlie in 15; fallback to Delta in 25 if you can’t make the first checkpoint. I want us prepared to load the objectives for extraction in 30, and then we will switch to our secondary mission. Follow the briefing, avoid chokepoints, and keep those ground sensors on high. Move out.” Five groups of five blurs each split into two different directions and made their way to access points.
428 was taking her squads down the heat exchanger stacks; it was the most direct route that avoided most potential foot traffic and would get them within 25 meters of the server rooms. 422’s squads were silhouetted by false-color images in her helmet; she saw them hook into the side of the building and rappel over the side.
She followed her own advice and switched modes on her helmet with a rapid flurry of eye movements. Structural faults and damage were now being highlighted in her helmet, displayed as a surface heat map ranging from green to red. Her squads, with their full armor, weapons, and tools, were heavy. Very heavy. Their armor used mixed sensors located throughout their suits to scan for potentially dangerous areas for them to travel. Under ideal conditions, the entire structure would be green, but a mix of small arms damage, explosions, fire, and disrepair made the reality much more challenging.
Harmonics were a major concern. A couple hundred kilos going down a staircase wasn’t a problem, but multiply that by 10 or 15, with boots hitting in steady cadence, and you could run into serious problems.
It was all part of the training.
The heat exchanger stacks were oppressively hot and had zero visibility, with the steam escaping into the atmosphere. Echolocation rendered their surroundings in crude resolution, and 428 had to get a second squad member to help her breach the bulkhead door to the floor they wanted. It had been hastily welded in a few places to try and secure it. It might have been quieter to use a breaching charge, given how badly the door screamed on rust-caked hinges.
The space was quiet and empty of occupants. Squads one and two made quick work of accessing the server rooms; the doors there had been tampered with. It looked like someone took a sledgehammer to the digital locks just to disable them. It didn’t stop the doors from functioning once a datalink was connected to recessed high-security ports and access codes were authenticated.
It took them less than five minutes to connect their hardened dataslates, copy all the data to their local storage, and execute the master burn order. The data wasn’t simply erased; the drives were physically destroyed by overloading and rupturing the storage cells, and all the controller hardware was melted into slag with excessive currents. The air filtration system sucked up the acrid smoke billowing out of the racks.
Primary task complete. Now it was time to make their way through the facility to the rendezvous and wait for the other squads.
428’s squads made it out of the server room and resecured it behind them, and were moving down to the next floor when a series of massive explosions shook the facility. The lighting flickered, switched over to backup power, and then that failed a moment later with another series of explosions. The confined and cramped corridors were like a rat’s nest bathed in red emergency lighting. Her two squads showed green, and she was about to ask for a status update when another explosion hit, and this one was both directly above and directly below them.
The suit took the brunt of the polycrete hitting her and compensated for it, and active protection systems deadened the blow to her nervous system, but it still felt like getting pistol-whipped in the back of the head. She stumbled, took half a step backwards, and found the staircase wasn’t there anymore. Her gear screeched across twisted rebar, and she was left dangling by her hands above a smoke-filled void. Echolocation was returning only static below her.
She attempted to pull herself up, but each time she started to hoist herself, the edge of the staircase she was holding onto crumbled under her weight.
If she could hang from one hand briefly, she could get a line from her belt and hook onto some of the bar sticking out of the wall, but she wasn’t confident that either handhold was secure enough to not instantly fail if she doubled the load on it.
412’s helmet broke through the smoke and dust above her.
It had to be him, of all people.
They made digital sensor contact and held it, neither one moving for what felt like minutes. Neither spoke.
428 assumed that he’d finally have his revenge for being humiliated during graduation. He was a scheming sort, and nobody would be the wiser if she fell to her death here and now. He knelt and bent over, lower than he had to be to grab her hands and pull her up. She expected a brief message, a shove, or a boot to the helmet.
Instead, he reached down past her, and a heavy carabiner clacked over the rescue harness attachment on her back. He stood and motioned over his shoulder, and she was hauled up and over the edge by a cargo strap.
She tight-beamed him a message. “Not what I expected.”
The response came back almost instantly. “Get us out of this bullshit mission alive, and we’ll call it even.”
She bared her teeth inside the helmet. “Already planning on it.”
They regrouped on the next landing. 408 had been hit by a piece of the steel beam that served as the main structural member for the staircase, and had been torn in half. They bagged both halves, scooped up the entrails they could, and sprayed concentrated base solution over the blood and small bits. They shifted some gear around to strap the two halves to their armor and moved on.
Two floors down, they had a hallway they had to pass down to get to Charlie. There were a lot of dead VBC corporate security forces scattered in bits and pieces. 428 used one of their limited observation drones to scout the hallway. There was a heavy gun emplacement at the end of a long corridor; the crew manning the gun was equally dead, and the barrel cold. They went to move down the hallway, and 414’s head was taken entirely off with a deafening blast.
Their armor was good, but it wasn’t good enough to stop a 30mm cannon round. The fucking crew was dead and cold on the ground, but whatever targeting and fire control system the cannon had was still active and shooting anything that didn’t have the proper codes. 401 sent a high-explosive drone down the hallway; it was barely bigger than a small bird, but the tiny warhead it carried was perfectly suited for the task of rendering the hardware non-operational.
They bagged and strapped up 414 and moved on.
Most of the people inside the facility were dead and at ambient temperature. One hell of a battle had torn through the place; corporate security had mulched anyone who wasn’t a VBC citizen and rigged traps virtually everywhere. The locals had assaulted in what looked like multiple waves staged a few hours apart, just going off the places where the bodies were congested. It looked like the locals had taken most of the building at one point, and then corporate security had deployed reserve forces and retaken it.
The result was that the halls were slippery with organic fluids, spent shell casings, and decaying biomass.
The protein vats will be well supplied when cleanup crews finally make their way through here.
It was grim, but this fighting was tackling the food riot problem from two different angles. Reducing the population that needed feeding, and supplying the insect farms with feedstock. There was a beauty to it, in purely logistical terms.
The building continued to get rocked by major explosions and near-seismic activity originating from below them. 428’s suit sensors told her it was just about where the other squads were expected to be. She wanted to try and hurry to reinforce them, but a lack of due diligence had already cost one life. It wouldn’t do to lose more just to arrive battered and burdened with corpses.
They missed the Charlie time and rerouted to Delta. The activity was getting closer, and as they entered the storage facility that was their backup meeting spot, 428 saw the source of the problem.
There was a heavy industrial loader that had been weaponized, covered in weapons and tons of added armor, and it was quite literally marching through walls and structural supports alike, pursuing and killing remaining corporate security forces.
The structural damage it was causing was worse than the directed weapons fire, but the heavy autocannon rounds it was sending on ricocheting paths through the structure really weren’t helping. Every so often, a floor would collapse down on it, which only slowed it down temporarily while it dug itself out and continued on its rampage.
The six-legged monstrosity was some kind of heavy industry bot, but in the present circumstances, it might as well have been a War Walker.
428 caught the UV beacon strobes of the other squad and sent a message over to them on tightbeam.
“Status?”
“Bravo completed. 3 fatalities present. Pinned in place. Corpsec is refusing our IFF codes. Loader thinks we’re corpsec spec-ops. Low on ammo, numerous wounded. 422 Uncon. Please advise.”
428 cursed under her breath. The idiots called for backup, but then were shooting at them when they finally made contact.
“Stand by,” 428 beamed back.
She took stock of the current situation, which was fairly dire.
Their main mission objectives were met. Alpha and Bravo were both handled. They’d taken a twenty percent fatality rate, which was doubly problematic, since they couldn’t ignore orders to leave bodies behind, so unit performance was further degraded.
The loader-turned-walker was in the process of dropping a million tons of polycrete and steel on top of their heads. The worst part was, the damn thing would probably survive that exact scenario just fine.
They lacked the proper weapons to take out something of that size. They could handle the corpsec firing on them, but then the main distraction keeping the loader occupied would be gone.
This was a no-win scenario; the best they could do was try and salvage the situation. With wireless comms down and only minutes before exfil arrival, there was a zero percent chance that they’d make extraction.
“401, find me a hardline connection.”
“Scanning. Three meters northeast, on the opposite side of that pillar, there’s a utility junction box.”
428 waited for an opportune time when the fighting between the loader and corpsec picked up, snuck over, and patched in. Encryption was established, and a comms channel to C&C opened.
She transmitted her identity handshake codes, then a brief situation report.
The ping came back to verify completion of primary tasks. She responded with an affirmation.
The activity light blinked, but no message came for long moments. A rocket of some kind was fired at the loader, and her helmet was struck by a piece of shrapnel. It barely registered as an impact, but a chunk of her visual field went offline.
“Confirm Condition Epsilon readiness.”
428’s hearts felt like they dropped out of her ribcage and onto the rubble-strewn floor.
She peeked her helmet out from around the pillar and sent a beam over to 401. “Need inventory of current HE stocks, all teams.”
A few moments passed, and 401 beamed back a response: “50%.”
It would be more than sufficient. She relayed the number to command.
The response was very quick. “Execute Condition Epsilon. Maximize destruction potential of local assets. Confirm receipt of orders.”
428 swallowed the bitter wad of bile that had risen and coated the back of her tongue. “Order confirmed. Wilco. 428 actual over and out.” She unplugged from the utility box and made her way back over to her two teams.
For the first time in her life, 428 was faced with a situation for which she had no solution. She’d been ordered to bring as much of the building down as possible, and with the extent of destruction it had already withstood, it was likely barely hanging on as it was.
In doing so, she was to ensure that no members of her squad were allowed to be captured, in whole or in part.
She relayed the orders to 401 to plant charges on intact beams and load-bearing structural pillars. There was a steady rain of polycrete and steel debris, along with some of the larger industrial machinery which was beginning to fall through the building.
Her second in command relayed the orders, but she knew as well as 428 what it meant for them. She and the other teams got to work moving through the local floor and placing explosives and setting fuses. 428 fumed in the isolated environment of her helmet.
A metal cockroach landed on her helmet, and she swatted it away. A minute later, two more landed in the same spot.
What the hell?
She looked up from her tactical display to see a trail of tiny red lights leading off to a remote corner of the facility. She checked her watch. Six minutes. She followed the obvious trail of insects to a large metal hatch set into the side of a drainage gutter. There were more on the hatch, and they were arranged in a downward-pointing arrow shape.
The hatch was the kind used for infrastructure and utility tunnels. Huge bolts retracted, and the door swung open. Strobing lights fired off in sequence, leading down a hallway that went nearly as far as her helmet optics could see, and one that was angled fairly steeply downward. Filthy black water ran down and over shallow stairs leading down into the darkness.
428 was presented with an option she had never truly considered viable.
There was a good chance that if she did this, she’d be branded as a traitor to the corporation, and hunted for the rest of her life.
You’d have to be considered a person to be a traitor, though. And officially? We don't even exist.
401’s voice came from behind her and to her left. “Charges planted. Fuses cooking. Want to shoot some people before the building comes down?”
428 half-twisted, and 401’s helmet turned to look down the tunnel where 428 had just been staring.
“What’s that? Utility tunnel?” She asked.
The insects crawled and clicked their way down the door, across the threshold, and then marched down the sides of the tunnels off into the distance.
“Change of plans. Get everyone here, now.”
401 stood motionless. “Are you sure about this?” she asked after a beat.
“No, but maybe dying tomorrow is a hell of a lot better than dying in… five minutes. Dump the casualties behind firing positions. Tell the squad to ditch all non-essential equipment, dump their armor and most of the weapons with them.”
“And if they refuse?” 401’s voice was the flat tone they’d been taught to use in command.
“Terminate them and add them to the pile. We’re leaving.”
401 slammed her fist against her chest armor so hard that 428 could hear it over the cacophony of automatic gunfire.
***
428’s squad was through the first and second hatches–both of which sealed behind them–and double-timing it to the next one when the echoing booms sounded from the distance. The tunnels they were in were extremely over-engineered; they barely gave a shiver as an entire production complex fell down above their heads.
They left the insects behind, although they were heavy in presence overall in the tunnels. Hundreds of tiny red eyes tracked their every motion. The strobing of the lights in the tunnels guided them at every intersection. And there were a dizzying number of them. Dozens. No rhyme or reason to what direction the lights directed them in, but always trending downwards. The place was otherwise utterly devoid of any sapients; some of the doors were caked in dirt and grime so thick that 428 doubted they had ever been used since their initial construction.
Deeper and deeper they went, and the depth felt oppressive to 428. She wasn’t sure if this was some kind of practical joke, a bored matrix jockey playing games, or what, but as she had told 401, uncertain death was an improvement over being reduced to biowaste spatter.
It felt like forever; the chronometer in her helmet told her it had been an hour and a half. They finally made their way through another heavy doorway; this one was a huge door on rollers, all polycrete and steel, and nearly a meter thick. Radiation warning symbols were both painted and etched into the surface. She braced for CBRN alarms to go off on her suit when it opened, but her suit sensors didn’t make so much as a chirp.
401 confirmed it wasn’t just the damage to 428’s helmet that was the cause.
They entered a vast underground facility that looked like it had been gutted decades ago. Massive conduit tunnels were welded over and pipes capped and sealed. The lighting was poor; it was filthy, and there was water dripping from dark recesses in the vaulted ceilings.
It was built like a survival bunker; everything was excessively robust and over-engineered. 428 wiped dust off a metal plate on the wall. Tarnished brass lettering was revealed.
4-4 Primary Fusion Reactor Hall #3.
They weren’t taught much in the way of Ark history, more history as it was specifically relevant to the company. She knew that the dust reactors that powered the city today had come from Sul’vari technology and were built after the city had initially been founded. This must have been laid down with the initial construction of the Ark.
“We’ve got motion, left flank,” 412 reported, and shouldered his rifle. The harsh tactical light illuminated a motley assortment of humans who looked like they were in deplorable condition. Many of them had some level of visible mutation; all of them looked to be of Asian descent. They were filthy, clad in ragged clothing, and looked very malnourished.
They raised their hands in the air and shielded their eyes from the light. A few had pipes and rusty pieces of rebar, but 428 didn’t see a credible threat among them. She placed her hand on the handguard of 412’s rifle and gently pressed it until he lowered it.
She switched over to external audio channels so the others could hear. “I don’t know how they got here, but they’ve got to be from the refugee wave. Check to see if any of them speak English and break out the purifiers and emergency rations.”
***
Things had been difficult from the onset. There was a language barrier, multiple, in fact. The squad’s equipment had only been preloaded with simplified Mandarin for the mission, but most of the people spoke other languages with only a small overlap in understanding. There apparently wasn’t a lingua franca in Ark 2, for whatever reason.
She’d instructed her squad to cut down on survival supplies to optimize combat endurance for the specific mission goals. They’d rationed out their routine medications as much as possible, but they were totally exhausted of all but emergency care supplies by the first week.
They also ate and drank a whole lot more than the refugees did. The water wasn’t a problem; they had all the potable water they’d ever need, and a number of the refugees were operating hydro farms and breeding fish in cobbled-together setups. They made the decision they couldn’t impose upon the refugees, but it didn’t change the fact that they needed several times more calories per day.
They couldn’t risk peeking their heads out at the surface level, either. They’d done what they could to gut the transmitters out of their suits, but there was no telling what sorts of hidden bits they might have missed, and the safest place for their suits was to remain in the underground wireless void. At least until they could get some kind of expert to root through their kit.
412 brought an idea forward, and it was an intriguing one.
They couldn’t risk exposing themselves if they were going to retain their newfound freedom. There was one part of the city that they could potentially enter and work in without discovery.
But the job would be shit. Literal shit, that is. Waste management in 11-3. The workers there wore heavy, sealed suits with no faces and no exposed skin whatsoever. The caustic chemicals that they used for waste management would strip the flesh off your bones, and the parts of the sector that handled hazardous materials processing were even worse.
After reviewing the options, it was decided, collectively and nearly unanimously. Extensive precautions would have to be taken. They’d have to find or get suits custom-made to fit. And they’d have to find a way to get their hands on valid Citizen IDs, which was going to be hard, because not one of them technically existed, and they couldn’t register for a CID with immigrations. Genomic data was part of an individual’s unique CID, and the second that one of them was swabbed, there would be a task force deployed to their location.
Problems, but solvable ones.
Weeks passed, and progress was made on the project. They were having to work through intermediaries and translation software, but slowly, a couple of suits had been procured and modified. The CIDs were proving much more difficult. Their most promising lead currently was to procure CIDs that existed on a black market, and hardware to produce those CIDs for people who wanted to hide their true identity.
Anything involving citizenship was difficult to forge; the real trick was finding people who brought ghosts to life. Corpses who had their IDs yanked and maintained through active use, as the CDA had automated processes to purge the deceased from the books, regardless of whether a body was found or a death certificate produced.
In some ways, things were looking up for her squad, but every victory was hard-won.
Some of the squad weren’t doing well. Physical health issues had started becoming a recurring issue. A cut that didn’t want to stop bleeding. Blood in the urine. Fatigue, aches and pains that persisted or grew worse.
428 wished she knew what was in the routine medication they were used to taking, but there was no way of knowing. They were never told anything that wasn’t essential to training or a mission. Their health education had been specific to trauma and emergency medicine, and routine hygiene and self-care, with few exception.
Weeks turned into months. Work had become a thing. Earning paychecks–and what was considered fairly good ones, at that. It was impossible to get enough CIDs for all of them, even as their numbers had dwindled. Demand with the refugee crisis was at an all-time high, and they didn’t have the luxury of offering their own to trade on the black market. 412 had, once again, come up with a solid solution to the problem.
They just lied about who was inside the suit. It was simple in retrospect, but needed a high level of attention to detail. They formed groups of three or four to a single identity, and each group was assigned a continuity expert. The rest had to catalogue and record their notable interactions for the rest to learn about after a shift. The best layer of defense was the simplest: they were simply extremely antisocial in their personas.
In some situations, this would be a problem, but the culture of 11-3 promoted “the two-face identity.” There was the outside face, which was the shapeless suit outsiders saw, and the inside face, which was the person under the suit that talked in private chats and cracked jokes on encrypted chat channels. The beauty of the inside face was that it could be logged and recorded, if desired, perfect for maintaining a running log for others to familiarize themselves with, or refer back to. Meanwhile, the outside face was often cold and dismissive, which was absolutely perfect for their needs.
428 had lost three more members of her squad. Two had died from agonizing tumorous growths, and the third was from the return of the wet coughing.
She was concerned about her squad, her people. They looked up to her for guidance and decision-making. While nobody had complained–not once–that they should return to the corporation, the fact that they couldn’t go to an automated medical clinic was a problem, and to make matters worse, what medicine they were able to procure either didn’t work very well or didn’t work at all.
Without the corporation, there simply wasn’t a good solution other than to try and endure, treat things to the best of their limited ability, and mourn those who passed away.
401 had been increasingly distant of late. 428 had become quite close with 401 over the years, and had feared the worst for her friend. The symptoms were ones that she recognized: 401 was eating more, sleeping a lot, and was lethargic and low-energy when she was awake. She’d put on weight with the added food, and was constantly in a dour mood.
The symptoms were almost exactly the same as the two they’d recently lost. 428 gave 401 part of her food, but it felt like someone was clawing at her organs inside her chest every time 401 ate and then curled right up to sleep afterwards.
Several days later, 428 was woken up in the middle of the night by pained grunts and wheezing. It was 401, and 428 grabbed her medical kit. Inside was a bundle of injector pens. Two for pain, three if it was very bad. Four would put them into a sleep they might not wake up from, and five ensured it.
She’d injected 409 herself when the pain got so bad that she’d begged for it to end.
401 heard her approach and turned over in bed to make eye contact. She was drenched in sweat, her hair was matted to her head, and her breathing was irregular. 428 could smell blood. Blood, fear, and something else she didn’t recognize. Something distinctive and unpleasant.
“It hurts, it hurts so bad, 428,” she said.
“Worse than being shot?”
A nod. “Way worse.”
428 swallowed, but did her best to keep her face calm and composed.
“Show me where.”
401 pushed bedding off herself, and 428’s eyes narrowed. 401’s shirt was soaked in her sweat and had ridden up to just under her breasts. Her abdomen was horribly bloated and hard-looking.
428 placed her hand on the swelling. It was hot and hard to the touch. It reminded her of 409 immediately. 401 let out a whimper as her belly hardened further under 428’s touch, and 428 reached for her medkit.
They might have been bitter enemies for most of their lives, but 401 was now 428’s oldest–and only–friend. She didn’t want to see her friend get to the point where she screamed her vocal cords raw and bloody.
401 panted hard and gripped 428’s forearm as she was reaching into her kit. The grip was intense, painful, and sure to leave a bruise. 401 squeezed her eyes shut and her voice caught in her throat.
There was a wet pop and sudden gush of body fluid between her thighs. 428 reached down to check the wound, and…
401 gave another keening grunt, and the mass in her abdomen shifted. She panted several more times, then the process repeated. 428 kept her touch diagnostic, but there was a shifting and growing bulge forming down there. After gently prying 401’s hand off her arm, she retrieved her tactical light from her medical bag and moved downward.
She gently prodded and inspected. There was blood, but less than expected. Another roll of 401’s abdomen, and 428’s eyes grew as wide as manhole covers.
“401, I–” her voice trailed off as the process repeated itself.
“What… What do you see?” 401 asked between gasps for breath.
428 looked up at 401, and her face was still pale, eyes wide, mouth slack. “I think you’re pregnant?” 428’s voice was uncharacteristically uncertain. “I’m going to call in Ms. Nishimura; she would know better about this, okay?”
By the time the older woman arrived–and it wasn’t long at all–428’s expression had cycled between shock, disgust, awe, and violent nausea. Any question about what might have been happening was immediately answered by Ms. Nishimura breaking out in expletive-laden, barely contained screeching, and she instantly started issuing both demands and orders.
428 followed the commands of the expert on these things. Things peaked five minutes later; umbilicals had been tied and cut, and there was now a very, very large baby pressed against 401’s chest. She had the same honey-blonde hair as her mother.
***
“You can’t be serious. I thought you were going to use condoms after you said never again after the last one!” 428 was barely keeping her voice level, addressing 401, and she was glaring death rays at 412.
He couldn’t keep the shit-eating grin off his face. 401 at least made an effort to look apologetic while rubbing her hand over her swollen middle.
“You know what they say, sixth time’s the charm!” 412 said at the same time 401 admitted: “I don’t like the way they feel; it’s awful.”
428 dragged her calloused palm over her face. 401 had been popping out children more or less constantly after the first, and was currently brewing her sixth child in almost half as many years. They’d cohabitated for the first couple of years, but 428 had to kick her out recently. Not because being a stepmother was horrible–although she did cheat by using her old suit’s helmet for diaper-changing–but because she couldn’t take being regularly woken up by 401 rutting into the small hours of the morning.
It seemed like that wasn’t something that was likely to change.
“You know, I still have a nice, sharp combat knife. We can make sure you don’t have to worry about birth control,” she helpfully offered 412, who took a reflexive step backwards and winced.
“It’s really not that bad after the first time. You should try it; I think you’d make a great mother, 428!” 401 was gushing to 428, who was still glaring at 412. 428 turned her steely gaze to 401. “In case you haven’t noticed or somehow forgot, I have an entire colony to ensure has food, power, and medicine. You think I have time to be lifting my tail?”
401 dared to smile and nod.
The first time she had become pregnant and given birth, it had been a miracle. After number three, it seemed to be an ongoing trend.
Then 404 had gotten pregnant. The thing was… nobody was entirely sure how that was possible, exactly. 401 mostly tended to satiate her insane lust with 412’s eager assistance. 404, on the other hand, had several baseline human lovers they suspected could have been the father, but none of which were like them.
Still, her belly rapidly grew, and a few months later, she’d given birth to a healthy baby boy.
A baby boy that had claws and a tail, just like his mother and the other K-types.
There weren’t many of them in their steadily growing refugee colony in the bowels of the city, but there had been numerous eyebrows–and quills–raised when one of the female Tokh members of the colony had also become pregnant and given birth to a pair of K-types. It was highly unusual, because it had been a partial live birth, with the children born in fleshy sacs instead of the expected hard-shelled eggs. 422 had privately admitted to being the father.
They had figured out a few things. Normal hormonal birth control didn’t work for them. Condoms did but presented a bit of a logistical problem. Female Tokh could carry a K-type pregnancy to term, but human women didn’t result in a viable pregnancy. And K-type females could seemingly get pregnant from either a full-blooded Tokh or human sperm donor. In every case, the result of a pregnancy was another K-type.
Ash Kik dun Roch was happily in an interspecies relationship that 422 was a member of, and was expecting another child, or children, in the coming months.
It made 428 genuinely happy to see her former squad transitioning into a new and different stage of life. Initially, she had assumed that it was just a matter of time before the rest of their remaining numbers died from various illnesses and injuries, but now the numbers weren’t going down, but up. They had a lot of challenges and problems to solve, but the colony was doing well for itself; their system of disguise and identity was intact and working, and they were collectively investing the money they made back into improving life and living standards for the colony as a whole.
Space certainly wasn’t an issue. The fusion reactors and energy infrastructure that had once densely packed the space had long since been dismantled, leaving it mostly empty and hollow. The only people who came this deep below the city were the automated maintenance bots and the odd hopelessly lost person or snooping utility worker. Those were easily handled problems.
The thing that made 428 want to grit her teeth was that the rigors of pregnancy and post-birth childrearing meant that the mother was effectively out of commission and out of the labor pool for at least six months. They were working on ways for them to get back to working and earning in a shorter amount of time, but it was a scheduling nightmare, and breed queens like 401 being almost entirely absent from her work group meant that stress levels for that group had steadily risen.
They were going to have to have another squad meeting to discuss it. Maybe some kind of shared parenting arrangement, as the Tokh did. 428 didn’t want to tell people how to raise their children or keep their tail tucked, but something had to change before the pressure exceeded safe margins.
428 stood up from her desk. She’d just cleaned and cleared it two days ago, and it was already buried under layers of messages, dataslates, and reports.
“So, I was thinking about–” 401 was talking about birth planning, but 428 cut her off as she stood and pulled her old helmet on.
“I’m going to patrol the perimeter. I need time to think. See yourselves out. Congratulations,” she hastily added. 401 knew her well enough to simply hug her and grab her boyfriend’s arm.
She’d apologize later. She was happy for the couple, and she was happy that 401 was happy. The other woman was practically glowing. Being a mother suited her quite well.
Right now she needed some time alone to think and to try and solve the pressing challenges of the day. She grabbed her rifle as an afterthought on the way out. The coils had developed a nasty buzz, and the battery had to be trickle-charged. She wasn’t sure how long the status light would continue to show green. If she was lucky, maybe she’d run into a tunnel snake or giant rat. Some fresh meat would cheer everyone up.