Back when the surface world was still livable and had different climates and environments – that is, before the ancestors in their infinite fucking wisdom decided to nuke everything into a barren hellscape – there used to be forests some distance from here, with the largest trees in the world called redwoods.

Redwood trees as wide around as twenty people linking hands. And some of them as tall as some of the ruined buildings in the outlying areas above on the surface.

Or so I’ve been told. Hard to believe, actually.

One of the Squad Sergeants in Steelbreaker Detachment, ol’ Jilkins swears he’s seen photos of the things, and says he even saw a video of someone in one of them forests taken from centuries ago – but never once in all the times he’s not so subtly bragged about this, and when I’ve challenged him to show us the so-called proof, he says he can’t, the photos got lost. Or he saw them years ago when he was a kid. Or whatever bullshit he feels like spouting at the time.

Call me a skeptic. Or I’m just cynical in general, I suppose.

For all I know, maybe he did see those photos and even got the privilege of watching a video of those happier times such a long and different world ago.

What I do know is, this life and this world will never be like that again. There won’t be any trees making a comeback. They’re all dead. Wiped out, scorched to a crisp, choked under the fallout dust, and all of that many, many years ago. Centuries past, like I said.

And I guess I can’t speak for the rest of this godforsaken continent, but never in my years of patrolling the surface have we seen anything remotely resembling a tree. Anything organic, even.

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There’s a reason why we have to wear our biohazard suits with the filtration rebreather helmets when we go out.

And honestly, I wouldn’t want to meet anything organic out there in the wastelands – that would have to be some seriously fucked-up mutated shit to be able to survive out in the dust. And speaking of which, what the fuck would something like that even eat? There’s nothing out there.

Only ruins of what the ancestors built, and the neverending kilometers of contaminated dust.

The only thing out there are the skrags: the metal ‘versions’ of animals that used to exist, now being used like soldiers or predators by the AI in its war against us. Plenty of those damn things when we go out on patrol.

So, I guess in my philosophical musing mode of good ol’ Tech Sergeant Mychols, what I’m just saying is: it’d be nice to see a real, physical tree while out on patrol – something to remind us of what human life and the world was once like, before this misery took hold on everything.

Of course, I can’t really voice any of this. It wouldn’t be considered becoming of a senior NCO. And who would I even mention it to? Maybe the Intel Sergeant, but I don’t know how that would go, he being such a rules-obsessed idiot.

And so I’m keeping my thoughts to myself and thinking of pointless things like this to occupy my time during these occasional breaks in our patrol. We have noise discipline in effect, anyway, of course.

But effectively being second in command of our section at the moment, I have the privilege of rank to tell just about everyone in my platoon to just shut the hell up anyway. Maybe I’m just a grumpy bastard like that.

And so, as it turns out, on an otherwise unremarkable day of our patrol, we get a message to reroute to another rally point some distance away from our present location. Sounds kind of urgent.

We arrive, and I’m still thinking of the damn trees for some reason, and strangely, there’s no other sign of our other patrol members.

And then the ambush begins.

Skrags. Hordes of them.