[Sweeping rewrite #1: 2/11/24]
2031, UNPC universal calendar, somewhere in Africa
---
A9 leaped out of the side of the C-17 Globemaster, the line attached to the aircraft pulling the release on his LALO chute.
He tucked his chin to his chest, and counted the long numbers in his head
One
Two
He felt a sharp tug, the chute was unfolding, and would quickly jerk him into a slowed decent.
Three
here it comes
Four
wait what?
He looked up at his chute, saw it was in a long tubular shape, commonly referred to as a "cigarette roll"
"oh shit oh shit oh shit" he breathed drawing his Ka-Bar from his right thigh, under his pistol.
He brought the knife up and around in a sweeping motion, cleanly slicing through the lines that held him to the parachute.
In a single swift moment, he was back in a free fall.
He yanked the reserve chute's ripcord as the ground rushed up to meet him.
The reserve deployed fully 100 feet before he reached the ground, slowing him down.
barely.
watch out Satan I'm coming through
---
Three months later
---
The whirr-clank gait of his broken left mk1 exoskeleton leg was what they heard first.
Then they saw him.
An augment lumbering towards the encampment. They knew he was friendly, but there was that bit of doubt allocated with a lone augment just walking into their firebase.
The augment paid no mind to any of the UNPC troops, simply marched right through the main gate, and over to the command building, a hastily erected structure of plywood with a large diesel generator purring behind it.
The augment opened the door, and walked right into the commanding officer's office.
"Second lieutenant" the augment said, the man's mouth agape looking at the armored figure that stood before him. The augment's voice was accented. Probably German or something.
The 2nd lieutenant, a man of above average height, with brown hair, and sunken brown eyes behind classic birth controller glasses, had broad cheekbones, and a a tired demeanor. He replied after a long moment of staring at the augment.
"Just who the hell are you?" he asked, sitting back in his black Herman Miller office chair.
"I am Augment Alpha nine, serial number 48601052, I need to know when the next supply shipment will be here" A9 replied.
After that the 2nd lieutenant was all business. "We should have one within the week" he said, sitting back down and sifting through a pile of papers, picking one up and studying it for a moment.
"Friday to be exact" he said, taking his glasses off and laying them on the table. "I presume your mission is need to know, and you want to raid my supplies?" the Lieutenant asked.
A9 nodded.
"Take what you need" the lieutenant said, swiveling idly in his chair. "Drop a note off with what you took if you want to be helpful."
"I'll be back Thursday." A9 said before turning and walking out of the small building. The bottle of used batteries on a rope slamming the door shut behind him.
Well that's going to be one hell of a mountain of paperwork.
He'd been deployed for three months, and had crossed the deadline for extraction, but had completed two of his 3 objectives, even after a chute failure upon insertion.
"Hey you" A9 said to a lance corporal walking out of a tent, a rucksack slung over his shoulder. "Give me that" A9 said to the man.
"What? Why?" the soldier asked while allowing A9 to take the large backpack. Not that he had any say in it, really.
"Because this base doesn't have extras of TA-50, just expendable combat items" A9 said, knowing the soldier didn't give a shred of a damn about anything he was saying, just that he was taking his rucksack.
He opened the zipper of the main compartment, and upended the pack, letting the contents fall onto the concrete.
"That's my shit!" the soldier exclaimed, looking at his items spread out on the dusty concrete.
"You'll be fine, tell your leadership that an augment took it, tell them to contact the UNPC and they'll drop a truckload of brand new stuff on this place." A9 said, making sure each of the pockets was empty, adding things to the growing pile on the ground.
"This po-dunk shithole sure needs it." A9 said, looking around the dilapidated base with the still awestruck infantryman in front of him. Wordlessly, A9 walked away with the sack over his right shoulder.
He found the connex container that contained the base's munitions, with sandbags piled around it to make it sort of a bunker, making sure some stray bullet didn't make the entire base vanish up its own ass. He opened it with a drawn out creak, having to push the door along a pile of dirt to completely open it, and found exactly what he needed inside.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
He took 5 m112 demolition charges, 8 blasting caps, and a detonator pack. He also grabbed a crate of 7.62mm NATO ammunition, and two 100 round boxes of 9mm ammunition. He returned to the command building only long enough to grab a folding metal chair and deliver the list of things he'd taken, he started loading magazines.
"Hey" he said to a passing corporal, who just stopped and stared at him as he sat loading magazines.
"Y'all got a shower trailer?" A9 asked.
"That trailer" the corporal said, pointing to a white box like dual axle tractor trailer.
"Thanks" A9 said, sliding the last round into the Glock 17 magazine for his Maxim pistol, and throwing it into the open rucksack at his feet. He picked up both the rucksack and his MK11, then made his way to the trailer the corporal pointed at.
He opened the door, and stepped inside. It was in fact a shower, and he was alone. "Skeleton crew, what's new" he muttered to himself.
The UNPC and it's accompanying array of armies wasn't exactly spread thin, but in low conflict areas such as this, it was beneficial to just have a squad or two spend some time out in an area, and rotate them out every 3 months. As long as they could radio that they were getting rolled on, and had enough shit to hold out until support arrived, they would be fine.
He stripped all of his pouches and placed them in the open rucksack, then turned the valve of the nearest shower to cold, and stepped in, rinsing all of the dust and sand off of his armor. He watched his water level indicator creep up to half, then took 3 mouthfuls of water from his drinking tube, sighing deeply after downing the third gulp.
He stood under the stream for a little while, just until the water rolling off of his armor no longer had a tan look about it. Stepping out of the water, leaving drips across the floor as he did, he moved over to the open pack, and started working. All of his pouches, loaded magazines, and misc. equipment were piled onto his armor.
Back in the sweltering heat, he walked back over to the connex, pleased to find that his armor's joints no longer had a grind to them with every movement, he opened the container once again, and filled his newly acquired rucksack with the 100 and 1 things he'd need.
A9 sat once again in front of the command building, and ate the 3 MRE's he took out of the connex, then stood, placed his trash in the 55 gallon drum just to his right, and marched right back through the main gate, and back into the desert.
---
19 hours later
---
The cache was poised below a large rock outcropping inside the crater-like oasis. A9 crawled belly first up the windblown sand bank, poking only his head over the ridge to get a look.
His helmet, painted in the American 6-color desert pattern held true, not letting the enemy see him, even though he was silhouetted against the horizon. It remained one of A9's favorites because of that, though the modern multicam pattern's versatility in a wide verity of environments couldn't be rivaled.
Popping his MK11 rifle on the edge of the ridgeline, and aiming center mass on a combatant, right in the middle of his dingy grey shirt, he squeezed a round off.
The round impacted the man, and he fell like a sack of bricks, hitting the hot sand in a pile atop his AK pattern rifle, either a AK-204 or AK-74 by the looks of it. No one heard the shot, due in part to the barrel of his MK11 being both integrally suppressed, as well as using a baffle can, which resembled a traditional suppressor, but switched the metal baffles for solid rubber wipers, drastically decreasing noise output, especially with subsonic ammo.
Another combatant in a burgundy cutoff shirt ran to help his fallen comrade. "stupid" A9 thought as he squeezed off another round, taking the man below his left arm, near the top his rib cage as he was struggling to lift his fallen friend.
The entire area was now alerted to his presence, although hey didn't know just where he was, nor did they know how many he was. Inching back, he stood up once he was of ample length from the ridgeline, and moved around a large boulder that bordered the circle of the crater.
He drew his sidearm, and trained it on what may be behind the rock, he moved left, and came upon two combatants, completely unprepared to face him, with their rifles angled downwards.
They laid wide eyes on him, and the two scrambled, and met their fate with six quick shots from A9's suppressed Maxim pistol. Two in the chest, one in the head for each of them, neither of them had yelled, which meant A9 was still in the clear, but not out of the woods yet.
Holstering his sidearm, he trained his rifle on the slope of the crater. Just then, a grenade was lobbed in a tall vertical arc, from 10 feet in front of him on the other side of the sandbank. M67 Fragmentation grenade, 14oz, 5m effective kill radius.
A9 dove over the ridge, just in time, landing on his right side, rifle pointed vaguely in the right direction, and fired two rounds, one missing entirely, the other taking the man who'd thrown the grenade in the left shoulder, bringing him to the ground in a howl of pain.
A cascading shower of sand blanketed the area after the grenade detonated. He brought himself to his feet, doing a supine recovery with his rifle up and the last of the sand geyser coming down around him, permeating every crease and opening of his armor. Again.
He put one shot into the chest of the man now laying on the ground with a bullet wound in his shoulder, howling in agony, and the entire world opened up on him.
Bounding back over the ridge, with bullets impacting the sand all round him, he took up a defensive position, exposing only the top of his body, dropping two combatants with four quick squeezes of the trigger.
He brought his legs up under him, scooching back and crouching as he swapped magazines in his rifle.
He dropped the nearly empty mag into his dump pouch, and slammed a full magazine into the flared magwell. As soon as he tapped the mag, his motion sensors lit up with "contact rear."
A9 drew his sidearm, and turned in one fluid motion, firing one round into the combatants head before turning his attention back to his front, poking his head over the ridgeline. He saw no less than a dozen running at him.
He yanked his own M67 frag grenade out of a pouch on his chestplate, pulled the pin, and lobbed it just over the ridge, and ran back behind the rock to his right, stepping over the bodies of the two dead.
Not a heartbeat later, the frag detonated, and A9 turned out from behind the rock he'd used as cover, and dropped the two that'd made it over the ridge, firing on the move, the rest being taken care of by the grenade. He paused for half a second to check for movement before running down the slope, and under the large rock overhang, with a 10 foot tall and 12 foot wide boulder under it, making a tunnel of sorts.
A9 suddenly felt like he'd been hit in the chest by a major league baseball batter swinging a sledgehammer. Without thinking, he returned fire, pinpointing his ACOG scope's reticle on where the muzzle flash came from.
One of his bullets from his five round burst struck home, and he saw a crouching figure topple over. They'd been sitting in the ankle high water, among the reeds in the oasis, obscured by the foliage.
The ultra high hardness AR500 steel of his breastplate caught the steel cored 7.62x54R round in its entirety, but it still hurt like a motherfucker, even with the flexible metal and aramid weave with D3O padding behind the plate.
Not much can completely nullify the 2800 foot pounds of force of a 11.7 grain projectile moving at over 800 meters per second. Might be state of the art by WW1 standards, but by god did he feel it. His armor was already worn and tattered, having taken 100s of hits like that before, and in fact it'd seen far worse, but it'd been a while.
A9 scanned left, and found the objective, A nuclear 155mm Howitzer shell, stolen during a FSTS site drawdown in the 1990's, and sold on the black market, having traded hands dozens of times.
The warhead capable of a 48 megaton yield was useless without a myriad of other components, but they still posed an imminent threat, not only to the UNPC, but the world as a whole. "And it's just sitting out here in the middle of the damn desert." A9 thought.
He planted the four demolition charges on the shell, and moved to the minimum safe distance, and clicked the detonator three times in quick succession. It was at no risk of detonating, but there was still that sliver of doubt allocated with strapping plastic explosive to a nuclear device and clicking that detonator.
Well, if it does go off, it's not going to be my issue anymore.
He felt more than heard the detonation, receiving the pang of dopamine from a job well done. He didn't bother to sweep the area for additional threats, simply because there was no reason to do so. They could keep their anemic stash of ammo, he was there for one thing, and that "one thing" was now a 5 meter wide crater. He didn't need to stack more bodies.
now how the hell am I going to talk myself onto that supply flight?