Only sometimes.
—Unknown
—
Their eyes bolted to the live camera feed, which had just reconnected to the screen.
Instead of a nighttime palette of visible-spectrum light, it showed the distinct black, gray and white of thermal imaging equipment. And though humanity hadn’t achieved all too many breakthroughs these last few centuries, legions of scientists and engineers had iterated on previous discoveries to hone them in every way imaginable, one bolt, dollar and line of code at a time.
One beneficiary of this constant drive for technological evolution —no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential— was camera tech. From radio telescopes that could point out the head of a pin on Terra’s surface from geosynchronous orbit, to thermal imaging cameras so accurate, optimized and high-definition that you could make out the veins on a leaf as you might on the visible light spectrum.
With accuracy like that, it was trivial to spot a few tens of thousands of bodies lying just out of visible-spectrum sight. Hidden behind piles of refuse and debris, of which the city was full of. Under abandoned carts, in collapsed slum houses, inside overgrown manor gardens or just wearing gray enough clothes that the previous drone’s faulty camera had mistaken them for a part of the road they were lying on.
“Are these all…bodies?” Strumman asked.
McRiley spoke. “Looks like it. Missing limbs, deformations, torn clothes..yikes. Those are bodies, dead men and women, no doubt about it.”
“Then why…” Archer muttered. “Why do they have heat signatures?”
“Umm, sir?” The signalier interrupted them. “The drones have spotted movement among some of the…erm…dead. Not much, but it’s definitely there.”
“Oh…” Victor’s breath hitched. “Oh, no…”
—
Under normal conditions, each of the Victoria’s three massive cafeterias could comfortably fit a battalion. That was good enough for feeding the regiment and its support personnel during space travel, where the day-night system was replaced by three eight-hour shifts of equal size, making the logistics of feeding everybody far simpler.
All that was gone now.
Instead of the well-orchestrated transition from space to land logistics that occurred when the regiment arrived on a new ‘jobsite’, they were forced to work with what they had inside the Victoria itself…with active combat occurring just beyond the open garage door. So instead of a calm chamber full of men and women in their uniforms, Lieutenant Nick Gray and his platoon were met with a cramped, chaotic affair. Organized, yet chaotic.
“Juniors first, let’s grab our spots in the line, people.” Staff Sergeant Greene ordered the platoon, individual squad, and section leaders making sure the lower ranks got fed first.
If there was food or seating to be found. After two hours of non-stop shooting, every trooper and their mother was hungry enough to eat the cafeteria benches. The cooks knew that, which was why they were serving dasht. The tasty, filling stew with eggs was simple enough, and you could cook it from raw ingredients to finished plate in five minutes. Not the best meal they could be eating, though everybody would start getting real worried if the cooks started serving volturnian lobster and centaurii steak.
The line was long, but the service was lighting fast; no serving sides or carefully adding the main course. Every man got a tray with a box of crackers and two big scoops of dasht. The only problem was actually maneuvering around the cafeteria in full battle-rattle. Greene seemed to feel much the same as Nick did on the matter.
“At least we aren’t loaded up like the damn crabs.” The staff sergeant quipped, moving along with the line.
Nick chuckled. “Yeah, the poor guys are barely going to fit in the benches.”
Just imagining the image of a shock trooper from 3rd Cavalry, wearing his full carapace armor alongside a backpack and battle-rifle, trying to take a seat inside the infamously thin benches, was enough to make the growing headache subside. He couldn’t help but pity the ‘black knights’ of the regiment, who needed powered exoskeletons just to run with all their equipment. Not even double combat pay could get him to add another twenty kilos of gear to his kit.
“Say, el-tee.” Greene asked.
“Yup?”
“Do you think we’re on one of them forest planets, or just a small forest on a big planet?”
Nick shrugged. “Hell if I know, Greene. But I bet the brass—”
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
The shrill tone of a klaxon overshadowed his next words, followed by a voice on the PA system.
Greene looked up at the nearest PA speaker with a blank stare.
“Shiiiiiit.”
…
“I fuckin’ hate wearing this thing.” A trooper muttered as he checked the seals on his respirator.
“You’ll hate not wearing it correctly even more, kid.” Greene shouted from the other side of the armory, tightening the seal between his sleeve and chem gloves. “Make sure your seals are tighter than your pucker. The worst way to find out if the enemy is using tear gas or aeropox is to feel your skin bubbling under the bug suit because you forgot to zip up the right way. If you aren’t sure, ask your seniors.”
Nick watched from the side of his eye, half a mind to his platoon while he triple-checked the last of his uniform’s seals. The poly-form was a fantastically versatile item of clothing; wearing a mask, hood, gloves and special socks turned the seemingly normal field fatigues into a Tier C hazmat uniform that could block out chemwar and genewar munitions, as well as light radiation.
This was just his second time using it to its fullest extent. The last time it had been to deal with jessomite ‘chemwar’ —homemade riot gas mortar shells— but this time it could be a lot worse. Could, because he knew fuck all about what they were dealing with. He’d yet to talk with company or battalion command, and there had been no further PA announcements.
“All sealed up, sir.” Greene reported two minutes later.
He nodded. “Good. Come on, lads; let’s go see if the damn shadow wolves discovered how to cook up tear gas.”
—
“Vic.” McRiley spoke up.
“What’d they say?” He asked, turning around from the screen to look at his XO.
The man looked positively pessimistic, though that was hardly different from James’s usual demeanor. The lieutenant colonel was a seasoned front-line officer, and all the experience had burdened him both physically and emotionally. Now, though, Victor could see new wrinkles on the forty-five-year-old’s face.
“Physics munitions are going to take at least twenty minutes to get ready, but Gorski’s men are already working on getting the vault open. The thermobarics are en route to the hangar, there are crates of HE ready to be moved out…and they are getting the guns ready for outside. We’ve got a platoon of mortars set-up in the perimeter, and another is being mobilized from 2nd Infantry’s lineup.”
Victor nodded. “Best we could hope for. Archer?”
The ops officer turned up from his tablet to look at him, his earpiece buzzing with noise.
“What’s the ETA on the 3rd?”
A thin smile formed on the lieutenant colonel’s face. “Not long. Singer tells me he’s got an infantry company rushing out to reinforce the 1st at the perimeter, seven minutes on the tanks. He’ll have a platoon ready for when we make some actual space.”
‘Space.’ Victor repeated in his head. ‘If only we had more damn space.’
It must have sat neglected for at least decades, growing into a full-blown forest. Their crash-landing had created an initial clear zone, yet the sailors’ exemplary handling had actually worked against them where space was concerned. A thin band of cleared space surrounded the Victoria on all sides, but it was hardly enough to move out personnel carriers, artillery pieces and panzers simultaneously.
He sighed. “I just got off the horn with Engineering. Samter says she’s scrambling every Demolisher she can find a crew for, and they’re going the explosive route to save time. It’s going to wreck hell on the perimeter defenders’ hearing, but we need space for the damn artillery yesterday.”
Without those howitzers and mortars, and with their maneuver elements trapped as they were by forest on all sides, the regiment was little more than free dinner for the zombies stirring around the city.
Zombies.
Victor thought he would never see one of the damn things even again. He’d actively prayed to his ancestors that he would never have to go within a hundred light-years of an outbreak, but it looked like he’d finally ran out of luck. Just like he had nearly two decades ago on Victrix III, stranded on the death world with a division of heavy armor for three weeks until air assets could breach through the AA and evacuate them out of that living hell.
Thankfully, this one at least appeared to be a genewar manifestation, unlike those undying daemons his soldiers had fought and bled against. He still had nightmares from the nights when they wouldn’t stop coming, when DIVARTY would have to fire a fifty-kiloton atomic into the horde every ten minutes just to stimy their advance.
“Status on the zombies?” He asked Major Hossier.
His intelligence chief looked up from the table in his lap, turning his wheelchair slighty to have a better look at him. By all accounts, especially those of the physicians overseeing his recovery, Nikolai shouldn’t be up and about. The senior most intelligence officer of the regiment had been an unfortunate victim of bad luck, when his transport had stumbled upon a forgotten anti-tank mine.
The anti-IED vehicle upgrades had protected him from the worst of it, but he would never get his left hand back. Even with the mioelectric prosthetics the regiment had on hand, it would never be the same.
Alas, for better or worse, Nikolai was not one to ‘chicken out’, though everybody except him would’ve taken their millions and bought themselves a villa on Terra, spending the rest of their days fondling tits and sipping on iced mimosas.
So here he was, doing his job instead of recovering from an injury that could’ve taken his life and should’ve taken his sanity. Fortunately, Nikolai was not quite sane enough; he’d joined the Regiment long before Recruitment did psych evals on freshies. What he did have was loyalty, the kind that people would kill for. That Victor had killed for.
“Most of them are still hibernating, though there are a few lurkers around the park. We’re tracking all of them in case any try to scale the fence, but I doubt they are that energetic. These don’t seem to be of the nanobot variety; their behavior matches genewar viruses, where initial outbreaks originate from an aerosolized viral package deployed via artillery or air assets, with additional infections occurring from bodily fluid exchange.”
Victor let out a sigh of relief, though he did not dismiss the danger the reanimated could pose one bit. He was just happy to know that they weren’t some undying robot that looked like a human; the…durability of a nanobot neuro-hijacked body that had time to adapt was frankly terrifying. Both of them were on the New Geneva Conventions’ list of banned weapons, though the latter was so terrible that it was cheaper to glass the entire continent or planet rather than try to clear the outbreak zone of every last nanobot breeding pool.
Not great...not terrible.
Tread and Sword? Join the Regiment, see the stars!