As Bokep kicked the door one last time it flew open, sending bright orange-yellow rays of light into the darkened building the Scavs were inside. Rifle, raised, Bokep cleared to the left, and then to the right of their exit then motioned with his hand for the others to follow him as he took point. They were back topside of the hab-plex looking for the Uplink Cortex which was issued to the 409th before their assault began into the plant proper. He hadn’t known this as it was very much on a need to know basis, but the uplinks they were given were not connected to a central algorithm, rather, each brigade had their own disconnected and decentralized iteration of it which was curtailed to their given operational objectives and available assets.

The Brigade leader communicates up the chain of command and that command can use their algorithm (sometimes just being the algorithm itself) to find the best way to move their pieces up the board.

Regardless of how it worked, the Scavs had their objective. They had been contracted by the Europans to recover as many as were possible in exchange for water filters and some machined goods and components, all of which were immensely valuable and hard to come by in such a seizable amount. Bokep had suspected that the Cortex attached to his unit was either already seized, or destroyed, but Samantha said it was worth a shot regardless as the front-lines had shifted forward into the Rust Bed. He had no clue how they knew this, but didn’t argue with their logic. Besides, he wanted to get his mens’ dog tags. They didn’t deserve to rot and rust away… he wouldn’t let them.

As the five man unit crossed the street, Bokep was surprised at how clear it was. He was fairly certain that this was where fourth platoon had been engaging Europan Exos with tanks… but none of them were there. Continuing forward, Bokep knelt down and got into a covering position at the corner of a building and watched down the street at the others continued on. Once they crossed, they gave him overwatch as he caught back up. He couldn’t deny felling especially nervous as he crossed that road, he had taken a round last time and though it had inadvertently saved his life, he wasn’t eager for a second helping. As they moved down the empty streets, they began to find burnt out vehicles and dead bodies. At times checked the wrecks if they looked particularly promising, but what few weren’t fully compromised were picked clean by either Europan ground forces or other scavs.

Reaching the base of a particularly high building, the team moved up its internal stairwell up around eight or nine floors until they found a spot they would survey what was the 409th’s command post. Taking out his Euruskan-issued binoculars, Bokep peered over the still charred zone and didn’t see any movement.

“Looks, clear… but I don’t know if we can expect it to be like that forever. Based on what they told us before we deployed, the actually active portion of the plant uses this road a fair bit, or at least it did until we took it over. If they’ve pushed back up again, it might be in use…”, Bokep said taking his binoculars down from his eyes.

“We’ll have to be quick then.”, said Quaz, another member of their team. He hailed from the United States, a Europan technical specialist who deserted at the first opportunity. He was an average height African-American of a slightly muscular build. He carried a P90 Submachine-gun and a Glock 45 sidearm.

“You know what this da*n thing looks like?”, Asked Bokep.

“A big ass backpack, probably with or near whoever the top brass was for your unit Bokep”, Quaz replied, turning to go back down the numerous flights of stairs. Bokep hated stairs…. They were just a pain in the as*. If only there were a moving platform that let people go from level to level of a building with only a press of a button… that would be nice…

As they made their way to the second line, the team found themselves navigating an extensive trench-line of concrete and heshco barriers. It was hard to trenches into hard rock, much less rebar so a lot of the 409th’s defenses were sandbags filled with assorted rubble and heshco barriers. There were come trenches which actually breached the ground, but these were positioned to air the Europans in fending off their initial assault, not so much for their attackers.

There were still bodies in and amongst the defenses, it appeared that the Europans had pushed through the access tunnel and into the Rust Belt pretty soon after the 409th was eliminated. Bokep checked faces for members of his platoon but found none. As they made their way into the above ground Euruskan communication trenches, the corpses became more sparse. It was here where Bokep found the first of his fallen comrades, a machine-gunner of whose name Bokep didn’t know. Knelling down, he cut the young man’s dog tags from his neck.

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“I’m sorry… I can’t offer you anything more than that…”, He said standing and rejoining the others.

Soon trenches and barriers turned into buildings as the access tunnel was reached. Something Bokep had never noticed about this part of the hab was the “towny” appearance of it. He had spent his time fighting through smoke, dust, and ash for the first little while, his memories of that first hour or so was a blur. No words, not really at least. It was just him barking orders and firing his weapon. He felt like in those moments he was as machine as the algorithms which ordered him around were, yet another small part in the Euruskan organism of war.

The place itself was made up of a fairly long straight away followed by a round-about with a small green space in the middle for visual appeal. The dirt was either exploded, or excavated to create defenses, and the road was full of potholes from the prolonged combat. There were a collection of gray buildings along the few roads leading off the roundabout, there wasn’t any paint, but there were windows… on some… I mean most of them were shot out… but he saw a few that were intact as well, its the small things. Of course now there were holes in just about half of the buildings, and what wasn’t covered in rubble was charred, but aside from all that it was kind of nice.

“Hey Bokep, you know where the command post is?”, Quaz asked, placing a hand on Bokep’s shoulder, snapping him back into reality.

“Ya, it’s just over here.”, Bokep said nodding with his head towards a square looking building with windows on all sides.

Stacking up at the cube of a building’s main entrance, Samantha took point as they made their way inside. The entire first floor was riddled with bullet holes as bodies from all sides lay strewn about, several atop of another. Checking the bodies for the 409th’s Captain, they slowly made their way from the first floor, up to the third. It seemed that by the time the first floor was lost, most of the defenders were already dead as the number of corpses and bullet casings decreased dramatically as they ascended.

On the third floor, they were met with a hallway, at its end was a long dead Euruskan with a machine-gun, he had probably fired too soon and then got fragged by the Europans. The three corpses on the other end of the wall to the dead man’s left seemed for confirm his as all three of them had excessive amounts of shrapnel wounds. Amongst them was the Captain.

Taking the Cortex’s container from the dead Captain, it really wasn’t anything more than a big metal box with a couple antennas. It was certainly heavier than other radio backpacks of similar appearance, but it was nothing out of the ordinary.

Slinging the pack around to his back, Bokep added it to the amalgamation of field rations, medical supplies, ballistic plates, and other items he had scavenged and thrown into his rig’s storage platform. The rig itself was made up what amounted to a exosuit for his legs which Bokep had to wear beneath his outer layer, a large backpack with enough carabiners to hang himself with, and a back brace. I shouldn’t need to explain that last one. The “exosuit” made up of stripped down and modified exo components which dampened the load on a Scav’s legs by using servos to aid in movement. It wasn’t enough to negate the weight’s impact on movement, but it helped.

“Alright, now we just need to remove the operating system and we’ll be good. These things have trackers so we can’t bring it with us.”, said Quaz, beginning his cut into the hardened surface with a small, mechanical metal saw.

A stream of sparks flew from the backpack as Bokep took a position watching down one of the three main roads connected to the roundabout. As Quaz finished his cut, Bokep looked over and saw him remove one side of the Cortex’s metal covering. The whole thing was filled with wires, drives, and other computer components. It looked like colored spaghetti to Bokep, but it clearly made sense to Quaz as after several clicking noises, he seemed to have found what he was looking for.

“Got it, we’re good to go”, Qua said, securing what looked like the body of a radio to the inside of his own metal container.

Suddenly a lound alarm began to sound. Bokep jumped and looked around frankically as he found the source of the noise.

“Heh uhh guys… we probably need to go… now!”, Bokep said moving back to the hallway.

From behind him, Bokep heard the sound of Quaz bashing his weapon’s stock into the Cortex’s circuitry.

“Motherfuc**r, die already!”, Quaz said, standing and pointing his P90 at it.

About half a magazine later, the alarm stopped.