Operating Company : Blumhagen PMC

Contract Holder : Kodiak Company

Iris cut the regenerating spawn of the blighted beast in half.

That made two of the things, each half the size.

She focused on one and sliced it enough times to turn the squirming imitation crocodile thing into paste. That got it to stop moving, but when she repeated the process on the other, one lump wouldn’t stop squirming.

“What the hell is this thing?”

She leapt from rubble to root to rock and over to the cabin. A portion of the cabin roof had landed on top of the scavenging thief, and a preliminary scan of his body showed half a dozen broken bones, internal bleeding, and more implants than she had expected a rural farmer to have. He wasn’t dead yet though. Wasn’t even unconscious.

Before the seemingly unkillable monster could get over to her, though she wasn’t sure it could do more than bite her ankle at its current size, Iris grabbed the roof panel that was pinning the man and hauled it off of him. He groaned in pain as fresh, for certain values of fresh, air filled his lungs. Before he could do something useless and groan with all that air, she grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him up. “What the hell is this thing?”

He coughed up blood. Iris rolled him halfway over so he could clear his throat. “Emergency… protection…”

“It’s a fucking blighted is what it is. Since when are there mutant blighted in Siberia?”

“To fight monsters like you. What’s a human supposed to do when things like you get sent in? To rob us of our hope? You don’t even have your skin on anymore…”

Iris froze. All she could do was stare at him and listen to the way mud and water trickled off her metal body. She couldn’t smell the blood, the filth, not even the sweat off the dying man in her grasp. The scents were just displayed to her mind as inputs. When the blighted monster bit onto her leg, there wasn’t even silicon left for it to chew on. The immature teeth simply broke against her sub-dermal plating.

She chopped the thing in half as the scavenger faded from consciousness before her. She let the body drop limp and stared at it for a moment. In the background, all manner of alerts and concern inquires automatically fired off, but she suppressed them all. When she glanced back at the creature, it was regenerating once again, but not so quickly that she couldn’t deal with it.

She reached into the water and grabbed it with her metal fingers. It squirmed like a fish in her grasp as she lifted it from the swamp and glared at it. Then she used her hands to rip it in half. The larger portion kept squirming while the smaller half went limp.

Half an hour later, backup finally arrived to rescue her from the silo. Silvy had given her a heads up that it was the Arctic Cutters, a PMC based out of an old super-carrier they kept north of Alaska. Quick to respond, slow to fight. They were really more like the PMC equivalent of a towing agency.

They rappelled down from a roto-jet set to hover above the silo. All the passages for maintenance had been clogged by debris over the years, and the tree that fell down the slope didn’t reach the top, so she had been stuck in the middle of it all, ripping the blighted monstrosity apart every few minutes.

Most of the rescue team looked like a cross between a spider and a bombardier beetle. Eight legged and sliding down cables with enormous sacks of combustible chemicals where the abdomen would have been. The special operative landed first, walking over to Iris with her mag-rifle unholstered. Holly Smith looked her over, smirked, and said, “Well at least you kept your face pretty. But you could probably get better makeup than swamp water, you know?”

Iris stared back at the brunette. Looked over her chic faux military fatigues, the camo jacket that didn’t even reach her waist, and every other bit of fashion the woman had. “Catch,” she said, and tossed the blighted thing at her.

Holly’s reactions were no slower than Iris’, and the woman snatched the leech-like thing out of the air before she even realized what it was. “Fuck! What the hell is this thing?”

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Iris gestured around the pit of water, where thousands of the things floated inert. “You tell me. Get some nerds down here to figure it out.”

Holly sighed and produced something that looked like an evidence bag from her pack to drop it into. The plastic looked tough, but not indestructible. “Alright Miss Naked, let’s get you out of here, and the cameras in here,” Holly said, stuffing the sample back into her pack and pulling out a reverse rappel motor.

Iris got to her feet and looked herself over. Being in the things mouth and slapped through walls had nearly stripped her down to her sub-dermals, which were on full display with her skin torn off. She looked like one of the chrome boys. “Just get me out of here, would you?” she asked, and took hold of the motor. The moment it grabbed Holly’s cable, the gears grabbed hold and yanked her up. Before she reached the plane, she jumped off and landed on the exposed lip of the silo.

The moment radio connected again, Silvy burst through her ears. “Oh my God, Iris! You look like a wreck!”

“Oh come on, Silvy. It’s an occupational hazard. Not like I’m actually damaged.” She watched quad copters circle through the air like buzzards, half of them swooping into the festering silo to get more film angles. She just shook her head and went looking for a hose. Almost the entire field had fallen into the silo when the strike hit, but the actual farm infrastructure had survived. While Silvy complained about how long it would take to regrow the synthetic flesh, Iris hosed herself off.

“Light it up!” Holly screamed, dangling from the rappel cable. On cue, the insectile drones belched their volatile loads and sparked it. Fire erupted from the silo like a blast furnace as the smell of napalm reached Iris. The orange and red hues danced across Holly’s figure as the media drones soaked it all up.

“They’re trying to steal the credit, aren’t they?” Iris said, twisting the spigot shut.

Silvy sighed. “We’ll manage that. They’re just clean up crew. Obviously we didn’t dispatch with a burn kit like that. Once we get a direct download of your vision and the combat drones, our press team will take the lead.”

Iris frowned and watched the robots climb out of the blaze. They radiated the light of the fire, crawling through the smoke to return to their hovering craft. All their storage tanks had been drained, enough to vaporize the swamp water just for a good show on the news cycle. She turned her gaze across the scarred forest. The two scavengers that hadn’t run off with the GPS receiver were on their knees, hands behind their heads. “What’s going to happen to them?”

“We’ve got a slower speed helo coming in to pick them up. They’re collaborators, of some kind. We’ve gotta interrogate them. Maybe this silo was why the bomber even flew this way?”

“Too bad they didn’t nuke this thing. Would have saved me a lot of trouble, and my clothes… But, also, how did BISON chemical goods make it out here?”

“Second hand? Black market?” Silvy offered.

Iris made her way to the farm shed, the only remaining structure in the area. The truck was somewhere in the blaze, cooking off and adding its own fumes to the napalm. “I’m thinking we’ve been underestimating the ability to offroad out here. We thought there would be nothing here because we couldn’t see any roads, but with trees this big, you can fit an entire house beneath their canopy. They’ve probably got dirt highways all over the place out here.”

The shed was padlocked. A flick of her micro-blade broke the bolt. Just as she suspected, they had barrels of fertilizer and soil nutrients stuffed inside, fighting for space with a little chemistry lab. Looked like a soil pH testing system, but what she cared about was getting her hands on a piece of evidence. The easiest thing with the right logo she could grab turned out to be the lid from a tub of bacterial seed colonies. Vat grown stuff from somewhere in the Rockies, but originally engineered in California. The stuff wasn’t top secret, but it was illegal to export just the same.

“Just, bring that back and we’ll do some looking around. I think the giant monster is going to be a more pressing concern on everyone’s minds than a bit of smuggling, don’t you?”

Iris stepped back out and shaded her eyes. She could hear the distant chopping of blades through the air, the helos on their way. She didn’t look up at the swaying trees though, she looked at the two farmers getting cuffed. “Wouldn’t be so sure about that. They knew what was down there, so someone else knew too.”

“We’ll report it all to our contract holders. Don’t get too involved with it, Iris. Okay? We’re not in the business of nuclear war.”

“But we are in the business of collecting nukes…”

The helicopters eventually swung around, descending between the trees. Only one landing zone had been identified as safe, so they had to queue up one at a time to take everything out. Iris made sure to get on the first ride out. The pilot had to stop and take his tinted visor off to look at her. “Jesus, Iris. You’re a little too naked, don’t you think?”

“Not by choice.” The hummingbirds flew into the cabin with her, grabbing on and powering off. She retrieved the GPS receiver as the pilot picked them off the ground. The two prisoners remained below, waiting for the next helicopter. The one who had spat at her seemed to be glaring up at her. She kicked off her boot and let it fall at him. The leather had been destroyed anyways.

With one foot dangling out the side, she looked at the GPS receiver and wondered whether it was even the most important thing she had gotten from the trip. It was either that, or the monster sample she hadn’t told Holly about, hiding in the empty magazine of her mag-rifle.