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“It was an anti armor round, type of shit you use to poke holes in tanks. Look, you can see the first hit right… here.”
Koehler pauses the replay, an overhead shot from the drone that oversaw Teo’s near decapitation.
“A few inches further back and that woulda been it for you my friend. Allah or Poseidon or whoever musta been smiling down on you. The good doc says it’ll only be a few more week before you’re right as rain. Ain’t that right, doc?”
“It is indeed, Private Koehler. But in the meantime it would be best for Private Casias to get some rest.”
“Right, right, doc. We just wanted to catch up with roadkill here is all. We’ll be on our way.”
Koehler, Kikl, Aggin, and Scheppe are standing around the monstrosity of a machine that Teo is hooked up too. Pluripotent drip pumping into every orifice, recent or not. The arachnidian arms of bio-printers laying vast swaths of not-yet-differentiated tissue inside his wounds, hyperdexterous filaments restoring loss biomass cell by cell.
As they turn to leave, Teo motions with his hands—his right at least. With the nerve block he can’t feel anything on his left side.
He sacc’s the letters on the keypad just so. With the predictive algo he can render a sentence only slightly slower than in spoken word. Since his tongue is still being regrown it’ll have to do.
“Good question, man, you’d have to ask the doc here.”
The doctor, Satō, if memory serves, is a tall, thin man with an angular face and rather unfortunate nose. He’s always struck Teo as a very arrogant person, always an eye-roll or disparaging remark in response to any questions fielded by mere grunts. Even now he turns up his nose at Aaron’s comment.
“I’m not that kind of doctor.”
“Oh right right, doc, of course.”
Just then Aaron and the rest snap to attention as Major Arostegui strides into the room.
“At ease, at ease.” And as Teo attempts a salute. “I said at ease Private Casias, there’ll be plenty of time to salute me later, for now you just sit back’n relax while we patch you up.”
The Major turns to Dr. Satō, who shrinks back almost imperceptibly.
“How is his progress looking?”
The doctor clears his throat.
“All his vitals are at 100%. We expect to have him back up and running again within a few weeks, Major.”
“Excellent, Doctor. Keep me appraised of any developments.”
“Yes, Major, I will.”
Dr. Satō relaxes slightly as the Major turns away. Under the reconstructive plating, Teo is smiling. Only when speaking with Major Arostegui did the Doctor ever show any respect. Though Teo suspects it to be counterfeit, it nevertheless pleases him to see the Doc’s interactions with one he is so clearly intimidated by.
Teo eyes the keypad again.
“You want to know how you missed it.” The Major says, turning back to Teo. “How we missed it, yes?”
“SIGINT is working on that. Best guess right now is that enemy forces fielded some dispersion algorithm to—how shall I say—distract our eyes in the sky. Shortly after our EMPs, there was a surge in activity: radio bursts all over the bandwidth, sudden drone and personnel movement across the compound. Basically a bunch of noise in the system, and while it looked random to our techs upon the first few rewatches, apparently it was targeted at us, our drones specifically. They tried to introduce enough chaos—or seeming chaos—to divert our attention, to open up blind spots. I guess they thought they could pull a fast one on a 10 million IQ military drone cloud.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The Major gives a slight chuckle.
“It seems they did.”
“As far as we can tell? You weren’t.”
The Major looks at Teo and chuckles again.
“Oh you thought you were special? You’re the main character and the big bad just had to take you out in particular?”
Evidently Teo’s blank expression conveys the shrug as intended, because Major Arostegui continues.
“You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, Private. For that brief period, you were the most vulnerable Node in the Network, a target of opportunity. And they took that opportunity. I won’t pretend to be an expert, but from what I gather, their system, unable to predict where exactly blind spots would crop up, could only capitalize on them wherever they happened to, so that’s what it did.”
“Yes, at least we think that’s part of it, we’re still working on it. Clearly we had at least one drone with eyes on you.”
The Major glances to the screen on the wall where Aaron has freeze-framed Teo’s jaw atomizing into a haze of pink mist.
“But at that point you weren’t receiving any threat flags or real-time feed, only peripheral inputs. We aren’t sure why. But I have the techs digging through what we could salvage of your SyNAPS, so we should know soon enough.”
“He took out those souped-up motherfuckers pretty well though, sir.”
Saara interjects, replaying Teo’s melee encounter on the screen.
“Good fundamentals I’d say, sir.”
“Private Aggin has a point.” The Major concedes. “Tissue samples from the other biohacks we encountered indicate their mitochondrial counts were augmented to nearly 3 and a half times baseline. The ones you engaged had the element of surprise and it was 3v1. Although I prefer my soldiers not need scraping off the floor, I’d say it was a pretty decent showing, all in all.”
“Indeed.”
“Why’d they have so many anyways?” Aaron has turned away from the replay. “Place was absolutely crawling with Amped. There’s no way they were all kosher. Had to be backally hackjobs. How they found so many willing to undergo those procedures is beyond me.”
“Remember where we were.” Saara says. “There’s not too many options when you’re coming from the slums. Imagine the Cartel comes up to you one day and says ‘hey work for us and you can make some money, buy a car and some women, maybe get out eventually, oh and by the way you’ll get to be a goddamn supersoldier too’. I could see the appeal.”
“But man, everyone knows how bad those blackmarket augs are for you though. I don’t care if you’re living smack dab in the middle of the Mbuti preserve and have never seen a PrimeFeed in your life, you’ve still heard the stories. Yeah maybe you get out the projects and go drink kinda clean water and fuck kinda clean girls for a bit, but 3 years later you’re shitting out your intestines while your insides turn to jelly and painkillers don’t work for you anymore and you can’t sleep because your thalamus looks like Swiss cheese and you spend the last few months of your life in an endless hell. There’s absolutely no way you’d find me volunteering for that.”
“Maybe not all volunteer.” Elcko offers. “Cartel has whole region in chokehold. Could just round up poor bastards and say ‘you work for us now’. Boom, now they have army.”
“Nah, they’re definitely volunteers. Or do yall just not pay attention to world events?” Jakob joins in. “Islam is the fastest growing religion in the region. And the Islamic State has heavy ties to the Cartels now, at least the one whose refinery we just busted up—“
“Do you not pay attention to our briefings, Sergeant?” Saara jeers. “We were there for the Vertex Pharma plant beneath. The Cartel refinery topside was just a front, purely incidental to the mission.”
“Yeah yeah, that’s not my point. My point is that Islamic State imams are the de facto politicos there.”
“Okay, and?”
“And they can spin everything however they want. Pull whatever justification they need from their little book. ‘Hey do this for us and you’ll be in God’s good graces’. Those ‘poor bastards’ lining up to become supercharged cannonfodder are doing it because they want to. Because it’s a holy duty. And if they die in service of the cause that’s even better. That makes them martyrs. And martyrs go to straight to drinking milk and honey in the afterlife with their hundred virgins.”
“Virgins?” Aaron blurts out. “Who the fuck would want a virgin?”
“At any rate.” The Major cuts them off and faces Teo. “Good work, and get some rest.” Then glancing at Elcko. “And I suppose Private Kikl here owes you a debt of gratitude. Very thoughtful of you to sacrifice yourself like that so that he could haul you out of an active engagement and earn himself a commendation.”
The Major grins.
“Oh no, Teo, Private Kikl here was offline when he got you out of there—again, for reasons currently unknown—but extracting you from immediate danger and then administering emergency aid while fending off damn near 4 dozen amped combatants, a hail of dronikaze, and some hardened exos to boot? That was all him, no help from SyNAPS or the cloud there.”
Elcko winks as he puffs his chest. “Maybe Jakob has point. Oldschool not so bad.”
“No no no.” Jakob adds, sideeying Saara. “All the bugs have been worked out, remember?”
The Major gives them a sardonic look.
“I’ll be sure to forward your concerns to Colonel McClelland. 5 more minutes with roadkill here, then everyone report to mess. Chow ends at 13:00 sharp. Make sure you eat up because it’s debugging and calibration after that.”
They collectively sigh even as they salute the man striding out of the office. Dr. Satō follows quickly behind, eyes darting about the room everywhichway except into those of another.
Aaron groans as he sits against the cabinetry.
“Christ, I cannot wait til we get leave. I’m sick of the slop they’ve been dishing out. You’d think with all the money they’ve put into us that they could at least get a printer from this decade in the canteen. The mush it spits out all tastes the same.”
Saara smirks at him. “To be fair, that mush is the only thing keeping us on our feet right now. You think it’s easy to cram a week’s worth of calories into a single meal? I’m just happy they’ve gotten it to the point that we don’t need enemas everyday just to take a shit.”
“Just you wait, next week we’re going to El Chalupacabras. I’ve been craving a chimichanga like you wouldn’t believe, and on Friday nights they actually fry those bad boys up, don’t even print em’. You’ll never stomach the slop here ever again after that.”
“Let’s just be sure to get some for roadkill here.” She says, turning to Teo. “That sound good to you?”
Teo imagines them eating—chewing—real food, and not without a fair bit of envy, as his jaw will be wired shut til month’s end.
Teo listens to his mate’s laugher as they spill out of the room, and in that moment he is content.
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