Eliso never thought he’d be doing the job of an infantryman. He signed up as a pilot precisely so that he didn’t have to trek through several kilometers of urban terrain, fearing for dear life whether or not his next step would trigger the start of an ambush.

For fuck’s sake, he’s had to step over four—four—tripwires by now.

He was inside an old school. It had four stories, centered around a grassy quadrangle with a flagpole in the middle. The flag was at half-mast, just hanging there, lonely and unwaving. Children would have filled the quadrangle and even the halls overhead to conduct their morning ceremonies.

There was something about this place that pinged his memory…ah, right. There was that history course about “schools,” ancient institutions established before the Enlightenment Age had come around about 5000 years ago. Galactic humanity didn’t use these sorts of places anymore.

It’s not like they could just download information straight into their brains, either—though he’d heard the Cyberians were making progress on that front. No, he’d gone through the same education as the other kids: having a teacher GAI connected to their neural interfaces. If they so much so as had an inkling of a question about anything at all, the AI would prompt them if they wanted to know more about it.

In a way, it was impressive that it took the power of a GAI to bridge a human child’s curiosity with all the knowledge of humanity.

…And in a way, it was sort of an amazing allegory to put so many fucking death traps in a school. This place would definitely kill your curiosity, along with the rest of you.

“The morning is bright. The wind is calm,” Eliso repeated for the nth time, wandering down the corridor. “Is anyone here? I don’t wanna fucking search every room!”

An Alpha replied by crashing through the principal office’s glass door and rushing him. He swung around and leveled his new-and-improved N9-mod-1 Extreme Survival Rifle at it, happily discharging 1-kilojoule beams 10 times a second into the Alpha, exploding it into giblets.

Alright. He could accept Coronel’s apology if the performance was this good.

Coronel had also recommended overkill as the most conservative option, so exploding anything that exhaled the wrong air was just fine. He had a 300-kJ battery pack, besides, which he could recharge practically anywhere there was sun. It was heavy enough to warrant a backpack, but he’d rather lug this around than be caught energy-dry. His very clothes being impregnated with sun-catching nanowires also meant that he always had a little bit of energy trickling in.

He ordered a Wolfbot to stick to him, just to watch his back a little better. There were five other Wolfbots securing the first floor at the moment. He also had a pair of micro-drones entering rooms with opened doors, but most of the doors here were closed, so…doorkicking he went.

He went up the stairs to the second floor, his companion securing the way ahead. They swept all the rooms, finding nothing of note.

Well, nothing but boobytraps. There were nineteen of them on the second floor alone, concentrated in areas near the stairs. There was a system of strings that would make noise in each room, and then falling axes or pipe shotguns would lop or blow off limbs. Most of them were at head level.

He took short breaks—mainly for his mental health—taking in the air. The hallways were open-air, thankfully, with rooms only to one side, and a wide view of the quadrangle to the other. Wasn’t it possible for a child to just climb over the railing, though?

The same thing happened on the third and fourth floors. There was just no one there, no evidence of battle, and just too many boobytraps. He shouted the passphrase several times, but there was no reply.

One thing he did notice was that the system of strings all eventually bundled up towards the roof. On top of that, he was picking up weak digital radio signals on the SHF band, originating from the roof.

So, to the roof he went.

It took him a while to actually find the roof access. One of the micro-drones spotted a ladder hidden behind a stack of boxy air-conditioning units on the outside face of the building. He had to enter one of the classrooms, sort out the boobytraps there, and climb out the window onto a two-foot-wide ledge to get to it.

He climbed up the ladder, and the scene over the edge surprised him.

There were just…so many spikes pointed in his direction. Sharpened stakes were layered together, then propped up on plastic chairs that were strung together, weighed down by sandbags. There were a few air-conditioning units scattered about, and sharpened pipes strapped to them, too.

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The way here had been a ride. He had had to cut through five padlocked chains just to get through the school’s gate, then traverse four floors of boobytraps, and then finally meet with this array of pointy sticks staring him straight in the face.

He was still hanging onto the ladder, unsure as to whether he should fully commit to getting on the roof. He could be met with a shotgun to the face the moment he stepped foot on it. As advanced as his implaneted medical facilities were, even a shotgun to the face wasn’t something one could recover from without losing a few million brain cells and all the data they encoded.

So, he sent up a micro-drone from the far side of the quadrangle, silently thanking the god of drones and advanced recon, if he existed.

Sure enough, there was a man hidden between two air-conditioning units, aiming a shotgun through the gap between them, straight at where his head would’ve popped up.

One inch. If he’d stuck his head out even an inch more, he’d be, at the bare minimum, suffering from amnesia when he woke up. His SMR’s could’ve repaired the brain damage, but it’d be a blank slate.

He made a mental note of adding more micro-drones to his loadout. He should’ve scouted everything from top to bottom before even coming here.

Man. These scouts are just brutal.

“The morning is bright! The wind is calm!” he shouted, hoping the scouts would trust him just a little bit.

Karlson blinked. He thought he’d been hearing voices a while ago, but it turned out to be this same guy who was hanging on the ladder right this second.

He’d been dilligently monitoring the few camera feeds he’d managed to set up. Smartphones weren’t the best IP cameras—lasting no more than a few days even when bundled with a power bank—but it was the most flexible solution. Smartphones were everywhere, after all. Nearly every zombie had one.

That’s how he saw Eliso hesitating to go up the ladder—which was reasonable, because only an idiot would assume he was out of the woods after passing through four floors of boobytraps. Why wouldn’t there be more?

Then he heard James’s passphrase, of the “In case I have to rely on strangers to deliver a message for me; by the way, these guys are a 7/10, they won’t shoot you on sight, at least” variety.

Karlson rolled to his side and bombarded Dianne, seven meters away and hiding behind an A/C unit, with a confused cacophony of hand signals that only James could have understood.

“What?” Dianne signed back, because that’s the only sign she knew.

“Green,” Karlson signed in repeat, but Dianne’s sign knowledge did not extend to colors. She regretted not taking the lessons seriously.

She tied a string to a cup and tossed it over to Karlson.

“Dude, what the fuck,” Dianne said.

“He said James’s passphrase and it checks out.”

“So what, we let him up?”

“It’s not salted, so it should be fine.”

Dianne shook her head. This guy spoke English but somehow still made it sound so alien to her ears.

Eliso watched them stand up from the micro-drone’s feed. They walked over with guns out, so he completely expected it when he looked up and saw a shotgun and a handgun pointed at his face from the edge of the roof.

“G’afternoon,” he greeted.

“Yeah,” Karlson said. His coat flapped in the wind, and his silhouette was all that Eliso saw…which was weird, because he could see Dianne’s face clearly, and with perfect lighting.

“You—uh—gonna let me up?” Eliso asked.

“Yeah,” Karlson said. He rested the shotgun on his soldier and backed away, out of sight. Dianne backed away as Eliso pulled himself up over the edge. Her gun was still in her hand, but the finger wasn’t on the trigger, and she wasn’t raising it at him, at least.

Eliso looked around. “Where’d the other guy go?”

“He does that sometimes,” Dianne said. Eliso got a decent look at her and noticed the steel arm.

“What’d James send you for?” Dianne asked.

“It’s a little complicated.”

After Dianne found a few plastic chairs that Karlson hadn’t converted into anti-infantry obstacles, Eliso spent some time talking about Earth’s unique circumstances in the eyes of the wider galactic community—a kind way of explaining, in painful detail, just how fucked the planet was, and how it didn’t really affect the scouts’ day that much, at least not while the Alliance was still kicking.

Karlson spent a good minute reviewing the details in his mind. Dianne had been saying “wow” for that whole minute, with an increasing time delay between each “wow.”

Of course, Eliso extended the courtesy of telling them about James and Aurelia, and Aurelia’s own special circumstance. “Just don’t be surprised,” he said. “Please.”

Karlson made a disappointed sound. Now he owed James 500 Pesos because the “People can turn into sentient zombies or something like that” theory was instantly confirmed. Just like that.

“Damn, they went through the blender…” Dianne remarked. “Now what, though?”

“I’ll need to relay our rendezvous back to the network, then I guess we can start moving to the rally point, and you can all meet up with your people. Give me a moment.”

He stood and picked out a ball from a hardcase bag strapped to his hip. He threw it up, and it unfurled its propellers. It flew up about 10 meters, then spun around, orienting itself against known landmarks.

It guessed the position of the nearest visible laser relay and flashed a handshake signal at it. The relay replied with a handshake of its own. Connection established.

It only took a few seconds to send and receive the necessary data, and it floated back down into Eliso’s hand. Fresh intel entered his HUD.

“Looks like two of my friends found some of your people,” he said. “Four in the first site, and three at the second.”

“There’s two of us here,” Dianne said, “and then James and Aurelia… Wait, that’s everyone.”

“Eleven? There’s just eleven of you?” Eliso said. “I’ll tell my CO he doesn’t have to haul ass to the fourth location anymore, give me a moment.”

He threw up the relay drone once more.

Meanwhile, Karlson observed his drone—and the micro-drone that had been circling the perimeter for a while, too. Once he’d guessed that Eliso might’ve had other little helpers, it was easy to guess where he might’ve had them idling.

He wanted one to play with.