Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

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AR Team

GOCS Crawler, Laptev Sea, NUSSR Jurisdiction, NUSSR

0222 Local Time, November 26nd, 2064

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“Any deets?” ST AR-15 stared out the porthole at the stiff peaks of frost on the other side. This way, she could almost fool herself into thinking they were landborne, riding another humvee through the Ural alpine.

The illusion lasted but a second longer as the peaks smashed into the sea below in a spray of ice chunks. Beyond the veil of aerosolized frost, another wave of seawater hoisted a kiloton slab of ice aloft, like the pristine slope of a ski haunt.

RO635’s grip on her PDA barely faltered as the unmarked icebreaker crested a glacial erratic. Knives of rain and turgid banks of sleet slashed at its hull. The frequent impacts resolved to a hollow din, but the beam held fast, ferrying the quintet through the operation-canceling tempest.

None of those factors gave her as much pause as the briefing before her. “Besides the biological contaminants tag? None. Records indicate that we’re the first team to make contact.”

“Objective?”

“...just to liquidate any contacts on-scene.”

Frowns all around. Not truly; indeed, Sop’s rictus grin engorged at the news. But, Star exuded such potent disapproval that it made up for the placidity or manic glee her compatriots wore.

“Hey, chin up. That means they trust us!” M16A1 crowed, somehow maintaining balance on the precariously shifting deck. She was the only member of the squad not leaning on something, an artefact of her SF holdover parts. Despite the overwhelmingly-inhospitable circumstances, she still managed to exude her assuaging, boyish confidence.

Star scoffed, unpeeling herself from the window as it braced against the jab of a couch-sized lance of ice. “Be serious for a second. That rat Lyons is probably trying to get us killed.”

“Hah! Against this shit? Em, tell the rat that I’m personally hurt when we get back, aye?” The white-haired doll didn’t flinch as the entire underbelly of the craft resonated like a bell from another iceberg impact.

M4A1 nodded solemnly, her chin perched on the stock of her particle cannon as she gazed placidly across the ready room. She also didn’t flinch at the deafening reverberation, though hardly for the same reason as her elder.

Star cast a half-mast contemptuous glare around the room. How her sisters could act so ‘business as usual’ in the face of such a drastic shift in doctrine was beyond her. Griffin was nothing if not a schemer. Such heavy-handed measures, especially in the wake of his promotion, were, conservatively, terrifying. “Accepting that this is suicide is not being serious. Any unofficial deets, Ro?”

Ro’s eyes began to glow as she defocused, extruding her electronic tendrils into any EW-susceptible device in a twenty-kilometer radius. “Mhm, standby… ”

The door to the ready room clattered open on rotted hinges, the flickering fluorescent strips in the hallway framing the silhouette of a crewmember. His voice strained over the din of the sea and the muffling quality of his respirator, fluctuating in pitch in time with each roll of the deck. “Sunhats on! Touchdown in five mikes!”

Star nodded her assent, taking in the minutiae of his uniform as he turned to leave. His visage was obscured by a visor consisting of a cerulescent hexagonal lattice which illuminated his swathe of the corridor. It was perched above a similarly-obscure rebreather, the filters recessed into the polymer mask.

She cast a glance down to her own helmet. Provided by them, naturally. Yet another point of contention. Its design bore the hallmarks of CBRN modification, a clear adjustment of the one the man had been wearing. It certainly seemed overkill for any purpose; her chassis, and all the others’, were far beyond the need for ballistic protection against intermediate munitions, and they certainly weren’t susceptible to biological contaminants, of all things.

In retrospect, not a single aspect of his kit, be it his helmet or his armored vest, even remotely resembled anything she’d ever seen before. His pauldron bore an emblem that harkened to that of the old UN, but its finer details provided the necessary distinction to warrant her attention. “...’ave you guys noticed anything… off, about the crew? Maybe, the gear-”

M16 snorted, curling her long, bichromatic braid around her neck and tugging her helmet on over it. “Star, now you’re reaching. If he thinks he can bump us off with a shitty kit, I might actually get offended enough to do something about it.”

“Besides!” Sop offhandedly slammed hers onto the table, extruded a wrist blade, and drove it at blurlike speeds into the apex of the helmet’s forehead. When the two stopped vibrating, neither a scratch nor a dent blemished its frame. “It’s Sop-approved!”

“Not that! I mean, have you ever seen anything similar? W-who are these people, anyways?”

“Ugh. If they wanted to kill us, they’d have done it before they gave us the Sop-proof gear.”

“But-”

“If it bothers you that much…” M16 caught Sop’s wrist mid-descent in one hand as she prepared to stress-test her reinforced vest, and reassuringly patted Star on the shoulder with the other. “...we can always break into the server room when we’re back, and Ro can work her Ro magic and get you some answers.”

“Ack-” Ro regurgitated the rebreather tube from her pharynx in surprise, spluttering and wiping a few errant drops of synthetic saliva off her face. “I-I most certainly will not. We’re on thin ice with Lyons as-is.”

M16 gave her youngest sister a knowingly-sarcastic stare. “You’ve been on thin ice with him for the better part of a year.” A dry smirk broke through. “He knows we’re indispensable. And if we do good this op…” As if on cue, a dry grinding, and the sound of splintering ice, filled the hold, as the ship came to a stop. “...these spooks will too!”

“Acceptable. Ro, find anything?” It really wasn’t. Measures like that were far too little, and far, far too late. Alas, M16’s intuition had a funny way of being utterly infallible, no matter how improbably the situation. It stilled Star’s thrumming core, at least.

Ro finagled the rebreather tube past her tonsils, pausing to flick a mental switch and activate her Zener line. “Mhm. Abandoned bioweapons facility. Old, and I mean old. Proto-Soviet days.”

Star quirked an eyebrow. “Abandoned? How do you know?”

“Well… no above-ground activity for as long as the satellite’s been in operation, which was… ‘31. Part of the post Beilan-island monitoring project.”

Star was undeterred. “And, below-ground?”

“Oh, c’mon. They’d tell us if they knew about any biohazards for sure. This gear’s just a precaution, right?”

Nobody responded.

“...right?”

Star groaned, fingers digging into her synthskin. “Oh, fuck, we’re gonna die…”

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TF DEFY

MVD FIeld Office, Leningrad, Leningrad Oblast, Neo-Soviet Union

1301 Local Time, November 24nd, 2064

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It takes approximately ten milliseconds for nerve impulses to propagate from any point of stimulation to the brain. AK-15 covered the twenty meters between herself and the mouthy Russian in under half that time. The graceful torpor of her silent approach was broken only by several sequential sonic booms, beating in steppe like a funeral march. Her triceps violently decompressed several Mach ahead of her center mass, propelling with them twenty kilograms of condensed biotechnical marvel.

As the tungsteel knuckledusters coating her biosynthetic fist compressed kevlar and aerosolized meat, flash-cauterizing the inclement ballistic wound with friction burns, his heart rate didn’t even have time to increase a single BPM. The nerve signals doing so were outpaced by the spinal fragments which would otherwise host them. The man was bolognese scattered across eight square meters of ceramic tile before he could even process that he was in danger, much less that he was already dead.

The shotgun pattern of liquified carrion, interspersed with fragments of the offending agent’s plate carrier and crystal-matrix augmented bones, radiated ellipsoid-wise from where once sat his head. In that space now sat a synthflesh arm, proportioned like a 130mm shell and decidedly more deadly.

She gripped shards of the man’s cortical stack and greater spinal column, ripped from his C2 vertebrae. The fragment was intermingled with carotid tissue, still steaming, peripheries already half-carbonized. The stack, the linchpin of any interaugmentary system, was meant to withstand stressors up to and including the proximity detonations of shaped charges. It was also intended to maintain internal homeostasis in the vacuum of space or the bottoms of marine trenches.

She offhandedly crushed it between thumb and forefinger into a granulated dust, its artificial synapses feebly flashing to one another and dying in the billions as they scattered stasis consciousness in the wind. The gold fiber mist formed intricate, spiraling convective patterns before scattering like smoke before a cyclone as the artifuscle complexes in AK-15’s hamstrings tense and exploded. Her explosive pushoff pulverized the fragments of the floor below her like so much sand before her step.

Fire complexes que-zero-one-nine through que-one-one-one and rebalance three two two kilogram square meters moment inertia. Contact danger close approach vector calculation aborted-

The ensuant cavalcade of equidistant shockwaves oriented themselves in the direction of the agent least-damaged by the ersatz buckshot she made out of their colleague. Naturally, she reached them before the thickened surge of atmosphere that comprised her wake had a chance to shred them.

Contact bearing zero zero six, seven meters laterally displaced from target, adjusting approach vector-

The result was more or less the same. Everything north of his mandibular foramen evaporated into a pink mist, pieces bulleting through the ceramide mask of the man behind him whose Kerenzikov had just fired enough transfer medium for him to register her presence. His face, eyes barely widened, turned to hamburger behind his visor. AK-15 had already started moving by the time an exit wound had formed.

Contacts bearing zero three one zero and zero eight eight zero pursuing alternative approach vector calculating fire solution executing-

A round of 7.62x39mm EM erupted from the barrel of AK-15’s namesake, buoyed by 1.4 million kilogram-meters per second of momentum. At such speeds, the purpose of the chemical charge was less to accelerate the projectile to kill velocity and more to serve as the starting gun for the projectile armature. As she drove the barrel lengthwise into the wind, intrabarrel pressure stifled the propellant in its infancy. Lorentz took the wheel, capacitors thrumming and bursting with the featherlight touch of god and overpressuring the uranium KEP’s semiconductive shell, ionizing it on exit to-

She missed. The binary burst atomized nuclear-hardened concrete along a vector three-point-two millimeters removed from his head.

In the zero point two milliseconds it took for her to parse that she had, miraculously, missed, she traveled the length of one of her footfalls. Which was about one point two human footfalls. The man had instinctively begun to react. She hadn’t considered if he had a Kerenzikov or Sandevistan cradling his brain stem or if he had autoflinch fibers worming across his skin or if he was just in the middle of a sneeze when she started moving. But in any case, it was nothing that couldn’t be reified in the precious milliseconds before she reached his subordinate.

Course correction zero point zero one one bar repeating degrees firing solution recalculating executing-

This time the rounds found their mark, turning the man in his insulated and sealed exo rig into an oversized can of ground meat and rotten tomato sauce. She shot his perforated, sauce-can form a glare equal parts contemptuous and begrudgingly approving for effort before reverting her gaze to her other query. He, and his battle buddy, had deviated significantly from expectation, model, and prior observation. If her technicians gave her enough nerve function to develop tics, she would have been gritting her teeth. Instead, she almost grinned. Ange forgave imprecision in the field if her prey was unexpected and unpredictable enough.

In a motion that gave Newton’s postmortal infoghost a migraine, she stopped herself dead in her tracks. The hypersonic wind funnel which had been desperately lapping at her heels washed over her back. The Huygen wavefronts wrapped around her form and slammed into the mid-stride agents with the unyielding concussive force of a freight train. Their autobalance and traction implants momentarily froze them, for a fatal second. By this time, their fluorescent sclera, enriched with bleeding-edge implants, were nearly capable of perfectly tracking her, which signaled to her that she was out of time for theatrics.

In one smooth motion, she pivoted around her leading leg, and drove her flattened palm, fingers-first, through the closer one’s ribcage. Her thumb caught the pin of a phosphorus charge off his mangled vest. She exhausted the remainder of her momentum, trailing leg planting itself between his, and drove her slowed fist, grenade and all, into his compatriot’s chest cavity. She tweaked her fingers, and her cochlear sensor detected the dulcet ping of the pin loosening, mediated by damp and decongealing meat.

She swiveled her glare down the slight inclination between her eyeline and his. She was still bullet-timing, but his nervous system had caught up in a lethally short amount of time. His expression was a detached dumbfoundedness, which was the expected reaction to watching one’s entire element collapse in under a second. His too little, too late game of cognitive catch-up was arrested when the charge detonated, shearing him and his wingman’s torsos off at the colon.

AK-15 withdrew her fist from the superheated cavity where the two agents’ better halves once stood, and flicked her wrists with blithe disinterest, scattering actively-cooking viscera and ribbons of burning alkylates off of her.

“Rogue elements eliminated. Awaiting further instruction.”

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Ange watched with glib amusement as her sledgehammer of a subordinate wrung her wrists in a futile bid to reduce the coating of gore blanketing her form. The training sim had no mirrors, so Ange’s view was the only one that existed, but if AK-15 could, she would’ve seen that she was practically up to the mandibles in it.

The other three members of their hodgepodge of a wolfpack gazed on with their own brands of detachedness. AN-94 was business as usual, failing to break her age-old streak of never emoting at a single thing. The only indications that the subject of her gaze was more stimulating than drying paint were occasional microshifts in her expression. Indications of disapproval of 15’s less-than-clean methods. AK-12 made a cognizant effort to decidedly never give a fuck about anything 15 did, or indeed, about 15, though one would never know it. Her poker face was immaculate. RPK-16 gave everyone the same lilting smile, regardless of what they’d done or how they’d done it. Taking after her predecessor.

The six members of Survey Team ‘Skylark’ whose combat ghost imprints 15 had just violently disemboweled in high-fidelity detail didn’t even bat an eye. Ange noted this as an interesting litmus, of both their psychological fortitude, and possibly, their combat experience. The greenest among them took less issue with the gore itself and more the fact that the gore belonged to a simulated copy of him.

Ange’s second determinant factor for newbies in her corner of spydom was usually whichever nook of the bureaucracy they were from. This proved to be an investigative dead end. The most she could glean from their unit patches was that they were from a subgrouping of the Military Intelligence Directorate, which was hardly helpful. A GRU division she’d never heard of, to boot.

Buncha stone-faced, dead-eyed, gore-receptive spooks from GRU. She paused. That’s most of GRU, actually.

“...so, did you lot have anything else in mind, or did you just want to see what your insides looked like?”

The screen went dark as the simulation terminated and 15 began to stir. The moment she regained motor function, she cut the ejection process short and yanked the neural jack out the back of her spine, sitting up in the sim pod. She said nothing, but her flat, unwavering stare was somehow even more offputting in-person, without the smattering of gore.

The team’s lead slowly nodded in approval to himself, before clearing his throat. “Your performance was satisfactory. Expect further contact from our superiors.”

Ange tilted her head inquisitively, knowingly smirking as the man shifted back, as if to turn around. “That all? A few more clues would be appreciated.”

He stared at her with a confused melange of revulsion and confusion, like she was a creatively-horrifying insect he’d discovered in his house, before turning to go. His tone was curt enough to taste. “Yes. That is all.”

And then they were gone.

Ange watched the door shut behind them, spinning idly in her chair. “Well, shit. Worth a shot.”

And then, as if a spell had broken over the room, she twisted around to face 12, leaning forward on her haunches with terrifying clarity. “Ok, hit me.”

On cue, the printer in the corner of the room erupted with a torrential downpour of documents, streaming into a loose pile over the tray. 12’s eyes drifted open, exposing their purplescent depths. “Soooo glad you asked. Broad strokes? Biohazardous package, retrieved from Bratsk reservoir.” She smugly grinned, terabytes of information flooding her neural cloud and flying from every accessible printing peripheral as fast as their throughputs permitted. “Need I go on? Or would you rather read about it?”

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Squad 404

404 Safehouse #[FILL THIS OUT NEXT TIME 45 ASKS], Munich, Bavarian Transitory Yellow-Green Zone, Germany

0425 Local Time, November 21st, 2064

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0425 // SYSTEM: Commencing OGAS Cold Boot…

0426 // SYSTEM: Priority Upload Detected from Verified Sender [Old British Coot who is MALE and NOT GRIFFIN]

0426 // SYSTEM: Commencing OGAS Warm Boot…

A faint rustling, no louder than the shifting of the wings of a dragonfly, was the only indicator that UMP45 was anything more than a mannequin. As her inner eyelid stirred independently of her body, it began to emit a faint yellow glow, visible through the thin vinyl barrier of her eyelid.

0426 // SYSTEM: 20%...

0426 // SYSTEM: 40%...

0427 // SYSTEM: 60%...

0427 // SYSTEM: POST Failed; Priority Diagnostic Scheduled…

She softly groaned as motor impulses forced their ways through aftermarket software and neural antigens alike. Her body was a patchwork of contradictions, of history, of safety, of functionality. She knew that much. She was reminded of such by the centisecond pauses between every intent in her brain and action in her body, symptomatic of the malcooperation, and even incompatibility, between her mind and chassis.

It would be trivially easy to entirely eliminate diagnostics, she reminded herself. She’d pruned with ruthless precision every other bastion of resistance she could, every avenue by which manufacturer and malefactor alike could shut her down. Most after Butterfly, and a few as they cropped up along the road. But it felt good to manually kill each scheduled appointment with her own two proverbial hands. A reclamation of her own order, as it was. No matter how much her neural heat load increased every time she brute-forced her way through her own mental defenses, the feeling was irreplaceable.

0427 // ADMIN: Cancel MDC 072753-22112064

0427 // SYSTEM: You do not have permission to-

0428 // ADMIN: Sudo Cancel MDC 072753-22112064

0428 // SYSTEM: Cancelling MDC 072753-22112064…

0428 // SYSTEM: Resuming Warm Boot…

She also knew that she could’ve answered this call with her eyes closed, OGAS booted to lukewarm, without moving a hair. Nobody rang 404 without a very specific reason, one which more often than not was specific to them. No matter how she presented herself, the caller would stay. Asleep, nude, mid-meal, or any absurd combination of circumstances be damned; prices would not change, the calls would come in, and contracts would flow.

0428 // SYSTEM: 80%...

0428 // SYSTEM: 100%...

0428 // SYSTEM: OGAS has booted with 2451 errors…

0428 // SYSTEM: Recommending diagnostic and/or shutdown and/or maintenance-

0428 // ADMIN: Clear Console

0428 // SYSTEM: Clearing Console…

Her outer eyelids fluttered open, and she arduously pushed herself to sitting, dactylic drivers slowly warming up in languid placidity. Across the room, Nine was still fast asleep.

Unlike her elder sister, she saw fit to indulge in the more human elements of their habitation. Human food instead of biofuel. Wetware neural palette cleanses instead of defragmentation. Even though she had more… capacity, as it were, in her abdomen, she’d still paid good money, personal money, for it to expand and retract when she breathed.

She was the only noteworthy thing in the room. 416, and tacitly, her, autocratically enforced a certain degree of frugality, especially with regards to personal effects. 45 stared for a few moments, watching her sister’s chest rise and fall with each soft snore, each idiosyncratic breath.

After a moment of listening, she also confirmed that 416 and the Beepo were still sound asleep in the adjoined room. 416 was the second-lightest sleeper in the squad, but the lightest was currently awake, and knew every one of her squadmates’ triggers, and how to evade them. 45 flexed her prosthetic experimentally, lightly scooted out of bed, and exited the room without a sound.

The spartan composition of the bedrooms was overcompensated for by the utilitarian flurry that was the common space. At Nine’s behest, they had a dinner table (Like a family, she’d said), and at hers and G11’s behest, they had a television (Like a family, she’d said). The latter shared space with, and was frequently subsumed by, the EW station.

The amalgam of monitors, wiring, and disassembled appliances was the focal point of the room, and one of the few reasons they were even stationary. The rig wound and arched into the floors, the walls, the ceiling, inextricably interlaced with the building’s structural bearings and electrical system like a silicon tumor. When the hammer came down and this domicile’s time came, they’d silently agreed that the reliable beast would go out with thermite rather than in any intact pieces.

Despite its flaws, it was hard to argue with the results. The godlike finesse with which the two could manipulate their electronic peripherals, tapping cameras, locking doors, scraping data, was only distracted from by the range of their influence. Any proverbial ‘hammer’ trying to ‘come down’ would be spotted from eight blocks away, delayed and toyed with to almost no end, and promptly left with nothing but melted slag and scrap as the group made their getaway.

But she was getting ahead of herself. No callers ever wanted to hear about the capabilities of the ragtag PMC. Nor would 45 ever volunteer that information without some implicit, self-serving intent. She nestled herself into one of the rig’s seats, humming with content as the pressure-activated coolant systems hummed to standby. After confirming that her neural cloud was synced with the rig intranet, she leaned into the electrical monolith’s microphone.

“You are attempting to access a restricted channel. State your authorization and identification token.”

“Lima lima golf zero nine nine, mike charlie delta zero zero one, aasur ums et datrer, madivit sesn ut dafromic.” The voice on the other end intoned as such without so much as a breath interposed or a syllable of variance. Of course, that was no indication of authenticity. 45 did not let her impassive guise slip for even a moment.

“Brilliant. Memetic keyphrase, please.”

The audio visualiser pulsed with a sigh. The figure on the other end of the connection murmured a sequence of incomprehensible syllables, expunged from the mind of any unapproved listener. “███████ █████████, ██ █████ ███████.”

45’s lip curled into a grin. Not a soul on the planet could conserve that last passphrase in their memory for more than a nanosecond, nor could they speak it without a myriad of unpleasant side effects. That, in itself, was reason enough to trust the caller. Although, nobody would fault her for extra caution… “...and, for extra assurances… How about an embarrassing anecdote. One only you would know.”

The man on the other end huffed and massaged his nose bridge, kneading the pliant connective tissue between gold-plated fingers. This ritual was neither commonplace nor did it come easily. She was either in a foul or exceptional mood. No exceptions. “...I once accidently returned a spadeful of bat droppings for my coal quota. I received twenty lashes for my failings, the inconvenience, and my perceived ‘poor humor.’”

He was met with a dry smirk and a slow, calculated shaking of the head. “Oh, pity… you’ve already given me that one. Though I could do with another recorded confession, if you don’t mind.”

The painful undulations of blood in his temples intensified. Someone had to cast away caution and break the diplomatic deadlock, and they both knew it wouldn’t be her. He hesitantly keyed his camera on. “Miss 45. I have neither the time nor the patience for your games. This is an urgent task.”

45 gently tutted. Not an iota of her face shifted in response to his advance. “How rude, Herr Marshall. How presumptuous. Who’s to say I haven’t found my special someone yet?”

Skitter Marshall did not emote back. His unamused scowl merely deepened. Just out of view of his camera, his augmented fingers buckled the maple of his desk, carving centimeter-deep grooves in the imported wood. “If you haven’t the stomach for business, I can always find another contractor.”

“By all means. We have scant few qualities that distinguish us from any other crew. I’m sure you could find an adequate replacement.”

Her capacity for a negotiated riposte was impressive, even by corporate standards. She was right, naturally. 404 didn’t offer any exceptional qualities by Sub-Veil standards. With his breadth of connections, Marshall was sure he could find a crew more than capable of outshooting, outsneaking, and outscheming the motley doll quartet.

Alas, what he required was none of those. What he required was a service few besides them could provide.

“...is that a yes?”

“It most certainly is not. Just need to unknot your balls for you, Herr Marshall.”

“Good. Let’s get down to business. I have a proposition for you.”

“Do tell.” Marshall never offered bad business. He never overtly clued her into Sub-Veil affairs, or, indeed, the existence of a ‘Veil’ to begin with, but 45 was no slouch when it came to intel. Every job he sent them on, regardless of how vague and clean it was, left behind a crumb, a morsel of data. And that data was resolved to a picture, slowly but surely.

Of course, that was her forte. Nobody else in the squad had been similarly let in on the grand secret. And unlike her clientele, 45 did not leave crumbs.

____________________________________________________________________________

Scant minutes later, the quartet was gathered around the dinner table. Nobody would be caught dead in admission of the fact, and certainly not in Nine’s presence, lest she lord it over them for all time, but the table had been a worthy purchase. Little other surfaces in the apartment had space over which blueprints, plans, and photographs could be spread in such a theatric manner.

“Nnnnn…” Across the table, 45 heard something firm (likely a head), mediated by a padding of something soft (likely hair), bump into the table’s edge.

Whack!

She nodded in tacit approval. At least in the department of waking G11, she and 416 functioned with watchlike precision.

“Uwah! You-” G11 raised one hand to rub the back of her head, where 416 had struck her, and her forehead, where the blow had forced her into the table hardwood. “...’s soooo early…”

416 scoffed, yanking her junior by the ear into a standing position. Her gaze remained inscrutably fixed on her superior. “As much as it besmirches me to agree with her, could this not wait until morning?”

“Nope. This one’s a direct request. Time sensitive.” 45 gave her peeved riflewoman and the tuft of grey hair slouching behind the table an impish grin. “You, of all people, should be familiar with those. Lady of the night and all…”

416 held her tongue, and manually tamped down on the bulge that threatened to expose her throbbing temple coolant vein. “Continue.”

“Oh, no. If you have further complaints, I’d be happy to hear them.”

‘Holding’ her tongue was starting to feel more like ‘chew through the fiber and sever it.’ Nonetheless, 416 withheld her retort, and her coolant pressure. “None applicable. Continue.”

____________________________________________________________________________

“I didn’t think of you as capable of incongruence in your paperwork, Herr Marshall.”

A hairline crack wormed across the screen of Marshall’s PDA as 45 interrupted him. Again. “I. Am not.”

“But, you are! And to think, such a fault, when the provision of documents is your sole function as a human…”

“Enlighten. Me. Where is this so-called ‘incongruence?’”

“Oh, only…” 45 theatrically twirled her finger over the assembled documents before her, before planting her digit firmly on a passage in the briefing. Simultaneously, Marshall’s screen flickered to highlight her query. “...you cite this operation as a biosynth-contamination threat, yet your only precautionary provision is a post-operation decontamination.”

Marshall blinked, simultaneously taken aback and relieved at the minute nature of her observation. “Oh. Given the… general quality of your chassis, I believe you will find that aspect of the contract to be a triviality.”

45 frowned. “Herr Marshall. Nothing about our squad is general.”

Marshall paused, spreading his hands expectantly.

45 frowned deeper. Her initial malcontent, coupled with being made to emote not of her own volition. “...tactical designation ‘HK416.’ Her score on the biosynthetic fidelity scale is sufficient to make her susceptible to certain contaminants.”

“This contract will provide you more than enough capital to indefinitely bring aboard another subordinate. Is she not expendable to you?”

“Oh, whatever gave you that idea?”

“You speak at lengths of your distaste for her. The degree to which your mission transcripts consist of verbal sparring errs on efficiency-compromising.”

This time, it was 45’s turn to gesture expectantly. She let a calculated amount of indignance show in her expression. Recognizable, but impossible to point out to any degree of certainty as a sticking point. Check…

After a tense pause, Marshall sighed, leaning forward. “...I merely presumed-”

“Ah! Oh, Herr Marshall… presuming? In our line of work?” 45 leaned back in her seat, pitching her voice histrionically and covering her eyes in mock horror. And mate…

“...what point do you intend to make of this?”

____________________________________________________________________________

416 drummed her fingers on the financial statement before her. “45. What is this?”

“Hm?”

“This. One set of light environmental protective gear. Who needs this?”

“Oh!” 45 smiled, all too cheerily. A surefire telegraph of an imminent backhanded insult. “Special-ordered, just for your concern. We wouldn’t want our resident princess getting another frame deep clean, would we?”

416 extended a rude finger towards her boss, crossing her arm, statement and all, under her chest. “Sod off. Those come out of my pay.”

“Are you refusing it?”

“No.”

____________________________________________________________________________

Daybreak

US Paranatural Warfare Command, Bethesda, Maryland, NUSA

0944 Local Time, November 20th, 2064

____________________________________________________________________________

Click.

“Hey, Abby! Priority upload. Give it a read.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

____________________________________________________________________________

CDRUSS SOCOM OPLAN 2064-8822 COMPILATION ‘BACKWASH’

Compiled by joint initiative of:

Dr. M. Meitner (Director, USPARACOM¹);

Lt. P. Jankowski (24th MEU 2nd FRC, FORECON USMC);

PURPOSE: The retrieval of CBRN Asset ‘POORWILL’² from within the borders of the contiguous Neo-Soviet Union before its retrieval and exploitation by maligned Sub or Sur-Veil elements³. The prevention of the exploitation of information held by and possibly gleaned from CBRN Asset ‘POORWILL’ by the Neo-Soviet Union for the purposes of furthering the production of anomalous and non-anomalous Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs).

^{1. Colloquially known as the PENTAGRAM; the Sub-Veil branch of the Department of Defense;}

^{2. See attached documentation;}

^{3. Of note, Interveil Neo-Soviet Special Operations Command (KCCO), Sub-Veil Neo-Soviet Military Intelligence Directorate (GRU-P), Sur-Veil Neo-Soviet Internal Intelligence Directorate (MVD), Sub-Veil URNC Normalcy Preservation Organization (URNGOC);}

Supplementary Documentation #1: Dossier, CBRN Asset ‘POORWILL’

POORWILL is a prototypical specimen from Stem Cell Line No. 57 (Cp57), known colloquially as a ‘Shrike.’ Cp57 was the functional terminus of ‘Operation AURORA,' a concerted effort by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create sustainable, autonomous, Collapse Radiation (C-RAD) based weaponry during World War 3.

Specimens derived from Cp57 are characterized by their abnormal mitotic rate, their capacity for biological mimicry through the spontaneous reformatting of genetic material, their high tolerance of extreme adverse conditions, and their capacity for spontaneous, conscious macroscale reconfiguration according to the desires of the specimen itself.

POORWILL was notable among Cp57 derivatives for its ability to spontaneously adapt to, assimilate, and, to a degree, manipulate, foreign microbiotics. This property was intentionally induced as part of Clandestine Initiative ‘Operation ASCLEPIUS FORGE.’ ASCLEPIUS FORGE was a concerted joint effort between DARPA and USPARACOM to create sustainable Cp57 derivatives capable of assimilating and exerting control over foreign microbial agents, with the ultimate goal of a specimen or specimens capable of manipulating microorganisms on a pathogenic scale.

POORWILL reached maturity on 23 October 2050, and was employed alongside elements of USASOC in a clandestine proving operation. After making landfall on the Northern border of the Krasnoyarsk Krai Administrative District, POORWILL and its escorts made contact with a local garrison conducting a CBRN preparatory exercise. After initial reports of engagement, contact was lost with POORWILL and its escort. After forty-eight hours of sustained, unsuccessful attempts to reestablish contact with the unit, it was declared missing and presumed eliminated.

Through HUMINT assets stationed within provincial MVD departments, it was discovered that POORWILL had been recovered by unidentified GRU assets in a state of suspended animation on 16 November 2064. It is highly likely that these unidentified assets represent the interests, either explicitly or implicitly, of Sub-Veil Military Intelligence Directorate GRU-P. Despite initial complications, determined to be a result of POORWILL’s potent and latent biohazardous capabilities, it has since been determined that the subject will imminently be ready for transport.

Supplementary Documentation #2: Retrieval Assets

Due to the sensitive nature of the subject and retrieval operation, it is near certain that information pertaining to Sub-Veil affairs will be readily apparent to any participants. In the interests of maintaining absolute OPSEC, this matter will be handled entirely with USPARACOM ‘Internal’ or ‘Clean’ assets; i.e., assets which are already sufficiently aware of Sub-Veil affairs, or those whose knowledge of said affairs can be eliminated or constrained from propagation (e.g., autonomous assets).

The following assets are either highly likely or certain to participate in the operation:

- Lt. A. van Kann, 23rd Paranatural Operations Group, USASOC;

- SSgt. ‘Aliana,’ NGAD Group ‘Daybreak,’ USASOC;

- LCpl. ‘Amaris,’ NGAD Group ‘Daybreak,’ USASOC;

- PMOO. ‘Emory,’ Paramilitary Observer, USPARACOM;

SSgt. ‘Aliana,’ LCpl. ‘Amaris,’ and PMOO. ‘Emory’ are based on NGAD wetware-based neural cultivation protocols, and as such, perform optimally using their imprinted firearms. They are, respectively, the SCAR Mk.16 and SC, SCAR Mk.17 and Mk.20, and Mk.22 PSR.

____________________________________________________________________________

“God, that was…”

“Mhm.”

“Why the short notice?”

“They didn’t realize it needed this discretion until just now.”

“Discretion? You know me.”

“Yeah, I do. Poor choice of words.”

“...wait, so does this mean-”

“Oh! Yup. Ya dust off in like an hour.”

“Oh.” Abberline van Kann blinked once, twice, thrice in stunned contemplation, before abruptly snapping up. “Oh, FUCK YOU-” He was off as fast as his augmented legs would carry him, carrying his closing remarks off in a gust of wind in his wake.

Chapter Text

____________________________________________________________________________

AR Team

GOCS Crawler, Laptev Ice Sheet, NUSSR Jurisdiction, NUSSR

0228 Local Time, November 26nd, 2064

____________________________________________________________________________

M4 watched the crane lower the armored snowcat down the side of the ship, to the ice field below. Her squadmates had already rappelled over the deck with their supplies, leaving just her. Without turning, she elbowed the deck officer with her. “Is this the closest we can get?”

“...yes.”

“Why?”

“...that is classified.”

____________________________________________________________________________

“But I wanna run! They really couldn’t have dropped us off closer and kept the truck?” Sop had been complaining about their circumstances for the better half of the last ten minutes, boring the ears off her elbowmate. Who, at the moment, was Star.

M4 was placid as ever about every change of fate, M16 found her younger sisters’ mannerisms eternally-endearing, and Ro was still jacked in, scraping more intel from overhead satellites. Which left Star to entertain their most hyperactive member. Or at least occupy her attention.

“No, they couldn’t have.”

“Aw, but whyyyyyyy?!”

“Em?”

“Classified.”

Star snorted, leaning back in her seat. M4’s response seemed to placate Sop, which she suspected was because of her younger sister’s chronic fear of bureaucracy. “Classified? Lyons is rubbing off on you.”

“Hardly.”

“He is, too. I mean, that last bit certainly-”

Her words were devoured by a sudden, dull rumble. The ice sheet seemed to reverberate beneath their feet.

“...what was that?”

M16 waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, ice does that. ‘S shifting or whatever. Saw some seracs that did it all the time, back in… Karakoram, ‘58-”

The same pattern of growling washed across the empty expanse. Star paled. “Ok. Did they do that?”

“...no.”

Star was already in motion; she leaned back over her seat, and gave Ro a pat on the cheek. When the absent glow in the EW doll’s eyes did not abate, she escalated to a firm slap. “Ro! Get on the sonar!”

“AHH! What’re you- was that really necessary?” Ro reflexively batted her sister’s hand away like a gnat, slowly regaining consciousness.

“Yes. This is urgent. 16, does this thing go any faster?”

Even through her eye patch, the sly glint in her eyes couldn’t have been overstated. “Thought you’d never ask.”

“The sonar? Really? Star, there’s nothing-”

“Just, do it.”

Ro sighed, mentally carding through the various vehicle utilities until she found the ice sonar module. It pulsed, and the undercarriage of the vehicle shook. She inspected the readout as it flitted across her eyelid, before booting up her tablet and shoving it blindly into the front seat, without care for position or convenience. “See? Nothing at- wait.”

“Wait? What’s that mean, ‘wait?!’”

“...sonar anomaly. Bearing south-southeast. 2.1 klicks out.”

Star slid the sunroof open, shouldering her rifle and cranking the optic up. Despite the howl of the wind across the flat plane outside, she made her breathy mutter heard. “Shit. Where the hell…”

“Emphasis on ‘anomaly,’ Star. Probably nothing. I’ll do another one.” Star squeezed back into the cabin just in time for the snowcat to shake with another pulse. She sighed, pressing her nosebridge and turning back again. “How’s it?”

Ro cleared her throat, staring at the screen like that would somehow change the inexplicable readout before her. “Huh. That’s f-funny. It’s still there.”

“Dammit- again!” Star shot a glare out the window. Her optics increased visibility in the snow-blinding storm tenfold, and even still, nothing resolved in the endless storm. After the next pulse, she turned back to Ro.

She was paler. Much paler. “Uh. 1.4 klicks out. It’s big. Really big.”

Sop cheerily, detachedly chimed in, fidgeting between settings on her visor. “Whale?” Quieter, as if in contemplation amidst the thickening tension, she spoke to herself. “Do they even get whales up here…?”

“NO, they don’t get whales up here, and in any case, it’s WAY bigger, and WAY faster- shit, 0.5 klicks-” As the vehicle accelerated, the rumble of each sonar pulse seemed to increase in amplitude.

Star jammed her head back out the sunroof, narrowing her eyes and oscillating her optics through every spectrum available in a futile bid to penetrate the opaque haze. The dusting of snow in the direction the phantom contact was approaching from seemed to thicken near the ground, buoyed by some invisible current of air. “Where. Is it. Ro! Another!”

Ro pulsed the sonar once more, and this time, as the chassis shook, the entire ice field shook with them. “W-what the hell, it’s-”

Every sensation, every conscious thought not devoted to raw instinct was subsumed by an earsplitting crack, as several megatons of ice splintered beneath their treads. The pane under them recessed a meter into the frigid sea, before erupting vertically in a geyser of helical ice shards and water vapor.

The frame of the vehicle shrieked with exertion as the rear was launched up with several hundred kilonewtons of force more than the front. The assembly lifted off the ground, tumbling into a lateral spin as it flew a dozen meters across the snow-stricken ground and ground to a halt. A second later, a mist of disturbed ice and water washed over the wreck, cutting visibility hundredfold.

After her internal diagnostics confirmed that nothing was critically damaged, M4’s muscle drivers fired enough for her to regain her bearings. Outside the windshield, one half of her vision was dominated by an unperturbed, semiopaque cyan sheet, and the other by a swirling cloud of white. She could hear the swirl of water as something stirred in the new fissure in the ice.

Also, her hair was flowing sideways. No, she was sideways. That much became clear as a green clump of it draped over her face.

She groaned, unbuckled herself, and tumbled out of her seat, swiftly righting her orientation. “Echelon, sound off!”

“I TOLD YOU!” Star was half-draped over Sop, hanging precariously from her harness. Her grip on her weapon had not faltered in the crash, and she was more focused on maintaining it than grabbing onto something.

“AND I WAS BEING CAUTIOUS!” Ro had been spared the brunt of the impact. The mess of wires snaking into her brainstem had braced her, drawing taut against the impact and holding her mostly still.

“All here, sis! Lemme just…” M16’s voice came from above her, in the driver’s seat. She shimmied out of her seat and rotated herself ninety degrees to stand on the console, before punching the driver-side door. The hinges came free on the second blow, and the armored slab went flying several dozen meters up and into the distance.

“WHAT WAS THAT!? RO! WHAT’D IT LOOK LIKE?! CAN I KILL IT?!”

Sop, naturally, was entirely unaffected.

M4 nodded slowly, tossing her particle cannon upwards. “Sixteen! Warm up the cannon, and get it outside. Sop! Fuel check!” Her elder sister caught the boxy implement in one hand, deftly coaxing the machine’s power grid to life.

“I- huh? Oh! Right!” Sop clamped a clawed hand into the floor panelling, which was now the wall, and peeled it back in one fell motion. As soon as the cavity was large enough, she fit her head in. “Uh, fuel line’s dented to hell… and leaking.” She sniffed. “Smells like fuel’s in the air. It won’t blow, unless we-”

The underside of the vehicle peeled away with a deafening screech, exposing Sop and the vehicle’s interior to the frigid external air. Star and Ro momentarily abated their bickering, snapping to attention at the source of the noise. On the other side was…

“CONTACT! What the hell what the hell what the hell is THAT-” Star laid the rail of her rifle across Ro’s shoulder, narrowing her eyes as she aimed at the center mass of the thing on the other side.

It had no distinct features, but was studded with teeth, leather, and exposed flesh. Polyps and suckers in equal measure pockmarked its writhing surface. The thing squelched as each contraction squeezed out a fresh deluge of hot pus and black-speckled blood. Several pronounced cuts and contusions peppered its hide, likely from slamming into the snowcat’s underbelly. Some of the festering wounds still hosted thick shards of ice from when it had broken the surface.

M4’s eyes widened as Star reflexively lined up her shot. “Hold your fire! She JUST said the fuel-”

The creature reared back its most obvious prominence, preparing to ram the fleshy, enamel-coated extremity through the underbelly cavity. M16 sighed, reached down, and hoisted M4 out of the vehicle, flinging her a safe distance away. Sop bolted out similarly with Ro and Star in her arms, but not before the pink-haired riflewoman squeezed off a solitary shot.

Sop carried them an appreciable distance between the striking of the firing pin and the shot leaving the barrel. Nonetheless, they were still in the human-scorching heat zone as the superheated barrel gasses intermingled with the fuel and sparked an explosion.

The wreck violently ruptured outwards in a spectacular fireball. The ice beneath it buckled from the shockwave, and a few small fragments of the vehicle’s moving parts bulleted outwards at supersonic speeds, embedding themselves in the ice.

As M4’s cochlear implants swiftly tamped down on the post-detonation tinnitus, another sound, or rather, melody of sounds, became known. Intermingled with the crackle of the gaslit flame, a hot bubbling, that of flash-cooked flesh, filled the air, followed by an unearthly shriek. Within the column of rising smoke, the amorphous, but unmistakable contour of the thing undulated in the heat.

“Sixteen?”

“Hm?”

“T-the cannon. Is the cannon-”

“Yup.” M16 lifted the decaled box off the ground, jamming the handle into her waiting junior’s arms.

____________________________________________________________________________

TF DEFY

Armored Train Mokra, Ust'-Lenskiy Zapovednik, Sakha Republic, NUSSR

0101 Local Time, November 26nd, 2064

____________________________________________________________________________

“Actual to Lamprey. How copy?”

“Lamprey copies all. Status?”

The broad marshes of Zapovednik proved to be deceptively concealing. Despite coordinates down to the hundredth, it had taken an appreciably long time to discern the sleek countenance of the Mokra, stark and still against the rolling plain.

“Contact, on grid… Pavel eight. On station and holding at two klicks.”

“Copy, Skylark. Kill vehicles are up and loitering. Go wheels down when ready.”

The whine of the Mi-17’s rotor assembly sharpened as it began its descent. A chorus of dulcet mechanical clicks and pneumatic hisses filled the cabin as weapons were checked and suit seals repressurized. Which was to say, the plurality of pneumatic hisses came from the starboard side of the craft; Skylark’s side. Save Ange, DEFY was packed light.

AN-94 chanced a peek out the port-side window. The uniformly-matted, drab shade of the decrepit machine’s hull accentuated its presence like a string of stuck pixels, monolithic in the wastes. Nary a single sign of habitation marred the pristine sheen of the reserve; the storm which had precluded earlier action had also surely obliterated any trace of the incident they were being sent to investigate.

“Twelve.”

Ange did not make a habit of whispering. When she spoke, it was because someone needed to hear it, and because she needed to speak. Neither motive elucidated whispering as her preferred means of communication.

Nothing about that supposed anomaly stirred AK-12.

“Psst, Twelve…”

“Ah. Hm?”

Ange shot her a sidelong glance and a half-smirk. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”

“Have I?”

“Yeah. Not even hazing our new arrivals.”

Even with her perpetually-shut eyes, Ange knew her enough to recognize the tell of her ‘blink.’ The slight undulation of her synthskin eyelid when her mesolid shifted. In that motion, a heretothen-absent presence returned to her face, filling the guise of presence she had put up. “...well. Seems so.” She paused, and her rictus smirk returned. “I’m sure the opportunity will crop up. Eventually.”

____________________________________________________________________________

“Lamprey, arrived at LCC. No contacts, but there’s been a… complication.”

“Complication?”

As violent as the derailment had seemed to be, the Mokra was still mostly upright. Yes, the 100-meter behemoth had been pruned several times along its length and scattered in a forty-degree cone radiating from the crash site, but upright nonetheless.

This position made the obstruction all the more apparent.

“Most- scratch that, all carriages have an… unidentified organic mass on ‘em. They’re more developed closer to the cargo carriage.”

“Alive?”

“Negative. Frozen. Hard. Man-portable tools aren’t cutting it.”

“...copy. We’ll send a sapper team. Stand by for-”

The air went sharp with the shrill shriek of metal on metal, meat-clogged hinges torn wholesale from their housing. The multi-ton flesh-encrusted slab of metal, barely recognizable as a door, soared across the expanse before crashing into the ground several hundred meters off.

“...”

The human personnel watched the deformed door sail away with tangibly trivial exertion from the taciturn pointwoman; Ange with glib amusement, Skylark with bug-eyed uncomprehension.

AK-15 wrung her wrist, flicking her gunlight on and making a cursory headway into the darkened doorway of the opened car. “Lamprey. Ingress achieved. Standing by.”

Ange waited in Lamprey’s silence for all of five seconds before refocusing. “Effective entry accomplished, is what we’ll call that. Echelon! Assault posture. Diamond up.”

15 stood by obligingly as the remainder of the squad filed into the dim precipice, RPK after 12 after 94, all before their grey-haired leader.

Ange cocked her head to the side as she passed 15. She was always reticent, but she never passed up an opportunity to lead. “Hey. You’re not taking point?” She jerked her head towards 15’s vulpine partner. “She’s… probably the least-qualified to take over. Kinda the point of the dynamic.”

They both stared at the back of RPK’s head a terse moment. The looming, panoptical sway of her inscrutable cerulean eyes could be felt, even with her attention wholly on the interior of the carriage.

“...I trust her.”

Ange blinked in detached surprise, arching an eyebrow. “Really?”

15 nodded.

“...well. You know her best.”

15 seemed, in that moment, to almost falter in her unflinching posture, the faintest hints of something contradictory mustering at her lips. Whatever it was, she arrested its spread just as quickly with a curt nod. “Yes. In a manner of speaking.”

____________________________________________________________________________

“Spent casings, .45 ACP.” It seemed impossible for 94’s soft voice to so thoroughly fill the space, no matter how small. Save for the sound of RPK rustling about the recessed nooks of the room, it was silent. But the omnipresent darkness, and the lingering essences of decay and absence seemingly compressed the room and magnified 94’s presence.

The interior of the cart strobed purple as 12 inventoried the scene, the locus of the glowing cone flickering between each discreet shell in quietude. “Fourteen.”

Click. A camera shutter fell, capturing the frozen brass, grouped against the edge of a cabinet.

Click. Click. Click. Bullet holes, bores dreadfully consistent with the medley of weapon ejecta in the cabin. Each cluster suggested a tactical scenario more absurd than the last. This song and dance had persisted for the better part of the last half-hour, and still no elucidating details had been uncovered in the wreck.

“Spent casings, 5.56 NATO. Two discreet groups, numbering…” Twelve picked up where her partner left off in perfect sync, eyes darting to the distinct clusters immediately. “Twenty-two and fourteen, respectively. Black and tan STANAGs, respectively.”

RPK laughed softly, humming out the first couple notes of some aged scale. “Heh. Twelve, is that not-”

12 cut her off with a flaccid grin, packing enough subdermal distaste to flash-curdle dairy. Whether she got RPK’s reference was beyond her capacity to care. “Yes. I’m sure it is.” She pivoted on her heel to the remainder of the group. “So. We have some options here.”

RPK sighed wistfully. “Do we, now? I hadn’t noticed…”

The intensity of 12’s subcutaneous glare spiked. “...we’ve gleaned all we can from the site, with no sign of the mark.”

RPK raised a hand. “Might I volunteer an alternative-”

“Not now, RPK. I’m in favor of going on for a bit, widening the cordon.”

15 shook her head. “Signs of conflict have been discovered, and the site has been cleared. These findings are sufficient to report back.”

“Ange, I do believe I-”

12’s fingers clenched, and the trigger guard of her eponym creaked in protest. “RPK, now is not the time.”

“Commander…” RPK was singsonging now, and 12 was visibly coiling into herself. “RPK. Not now.”

“Haven’t you wondered… where the bodies are?”

Four pairs of eyes swiveled to focus on her. RPK took that as her cue to look as disinterested as possible. 12 slowly panned her arm, as if cueing the riflewoman.

RPK blinked exaggeratedly, like she had just processed that she was meant to speak. “Oh? Me? Well, now I’m not so sure I should-”

“RPK.”

“-after all, you all seemed to have your own op-”

“RPK.”

She paused for effect, before reaching back into her coat. “Spasibo.” She chose the least cluttered flat surface, and onto it slammed a hermeneutically-sealed jar. Through the sheen of condensed blood, one could vaguely discern the outline of an avulsed vertebral artery.

____________________________________________________________________________

“Skylark?”

“Copying.”

“Check the uplink. Needja to run a biosig scan with these parameters…”

____________________________________________________________________________

Squad 404

Armored Train Mokra, Ust'-Lenskiy Zapovednik, Sakha Republic, NUSSR

0110 Local Time, November 23rd, 2064

____________________________________________________________________________

As the UH-60’s door parted a hair, an opportunistic gust of icy wind pried the port the rest of the way open, ruffling the riggings of the interior compartment. 416 held fast in the updraft, and caught the door handle at the zenith of its path, preventing it from listing back and forth between open and shut. Where snowflakes ingressed past the peripheries of the hull, the glassy sheen of the optical camouflage flickered, as if evaporating into the brittle air.

A hundred meters below, the slate-gray carapace of the Mokra jostled like the ill, draconic beast that it was, making unsanctioned headway deep into the Siberian wastes along its stretch of necrotic track. Its heart had been resuscitated scant but a week ago, and the signs of its inclement failure were writ across its bellowed protests.

The behemoth rumbled as it struck a microscale imperfection on the track. The crests of the ensuant vortices of sleet peppered the inner walls of the chopper, forcing 416 to brace against the flooring.

“Are you done presenting yourself theatrically? Sooner or later, the hired help will start to drool.” 45 crisply snapped her PDA shut, resplendent and unmoving against the hundred-kilometer winds.

416 exhaled dryly, watching her breath condense as it passed the barrier. “They were your picks. That would be your cross to bear.” She absently clicked her fingers. “Nine! Get G11 up.”

“Oop! On it!” UMP9 had been helping the narcoleptic markswoman entomb herself in a cocoon of insulating riggings ever since they’d crossed into the subarctic latitudes. Convenient, because that gave her the lion’s share of experience in extricating her from it.

“Hardly something I’d have to bear if I enjoy it, no?”

45 was back on the line with Marshall before 416 could muster a retort.

____________________________________________________________________________

“Call out targets as you see them.”

“Whaaaaaat? But why?”

Nine’s whined protests were usually half-fanged when directed at someone she liked, but infallibly so when directed at 45. Nevertheless, her elder sister still saw fit to respond. “Orders.”

“If something with a pulse somehow manages to get onto the train-” Nine waved her free hand to the howling din, already consuming the feeble noselight of their retreating helicopter. “-I think they deserve to get us by surprise.”

“Nine…”

“Ugh. Okie…” Nine flicked down her visor, bringing up a complex overlay of thermal and EW readouts which blanketed their surroundings in short order. “Three cars, twenty-six heat sigs, and eight slaved automatons between us and the mark.”

“Good. Keep count.” The faintest ebb in the immutable stream of wind signified Nine’s nod. 45 caught the gesture in stride, before relaying it to 416. “Princess. You take point.”

____________________________________________________________________________

Corporal Victor Vasilyev flicked away the newest nub of ash from his smoke, and brought his lighter to the freshened end. The mechanical spark lived for all of a single second, just long enough for the adolescent flame to leap to the refuge of his cigarette. That ember, too, faded in short order.

He scowled, flicking the cigarette into the wind. The dying glow vanished just beyond the safety of the train lights. He’d wasted three in a futile bid to make this consignment any more bearable, and it was starting to feel counterproductive.

The justification for this posting had been as incomprehensible as ever. The ambient weather, along with the inherent difficulties associated with boarding a moving train, were more than sufficient security for their enigmatic cargo. Not a single pirate would consider pursuit on foot, much less by air.

He lazily glanced up at the roof of the car across the flatbed. Hah. Like any pirate’s gonna be able to-

The remains of that thought was chased out of his head by the blade of a serrated combat knife. They pooled around the entrance wound, along with an unhealthy smattering of blood, before they, and he, keeled forward. A hazmat-clad hand arrested his fall momentarily, yanking the blade out from its hilt-deep entombment.

“Showboat.”

45 hit the deck to her subordinate’s side, lazily stepping over the dead man’s body as 416 rolled it off and into the snow below. She wiped the slick blade against her pauldron. “It worked.”

She was summarily ignored. “Nine, status.”

“Siiiis… it’s one guy. You know the status!”

“Yes. And?”

“...Two cars, twenty-five heat sigs and eight slaved automatons between us and the mark.”

The blood-smeared door Victor had been guarding slid open with a screech, silhouetting his burly partner, rifle at low-ready, in the frame.

416 casually brought her rifle up at the hip and fired a single shot. The man’s throat exploded in a bloom of ruined meat and bone, ejecting the spindly labyrinth of blood vessels out the back of his neck. The spurt of blackened blood swallowed his gruff protests and scattered them the tempest. He went limp and fell through the intercar connector gap. A moment later, the cart jumped up a hair as its wheels punched through the token resistance of his spine.

“...make that twenty-four.”

“Good. Showgirl, lead on.”

____________________________________________________________________________

Crack. One green-tip leapt across the cabin, leaving a trail of sonic booms in its wake.

“Twenty-three.”

Thump. A muffled, surprised scream, trailing off as the train sped past.

“Twenty-two.”

Brrrt. Three-round burst. The ribbon of fire tore open as many men by the sternums.

“Nineteen.”

Shlink. 416 hooked the back edge of her knife around the man’s ruined neck, precautionarily dragging him off the side of the carriage.

“Eightee- ow-” Nine clamped her trailing hand around the temple brace of her headset, tugging it up an inch. As it pulled away from her face, the audio seal broke for a moment, expelling a piercing trill of feedback.

“Report.” 45 peeled off of 416’s shoulder as their formation halted halfway down the hall. A dozen meters further lay the side compartment which the transponder indicated as their query. Double that distance away lay the door to the adjoining car. Even within a hairsbreadth of their prize, 45 was nothing if not thorough.

“...uhhh… just feedback, looks like.”

“Caused by…?”

“Hang on! I’m getting back online now.”

The unit waited for the customary troubleshooting second. That second stretched to two. Three. Nine’s eyes raced under her visor. “...uh. That’s funny.”

416 narrowed her eyes in frustration, but did not turn her head. Every elapsed second, the door on the other end of the corridor looked more and more threatening. “What’s funny.”

“There is- well, was, some thermal flux thingy on the scope just now. Most of it’s dissipated, but we’re still reading like four new contacts’ worth of the stuff.”

That warranted attention. The absurdity of the statement overrode her concern with the door. “T-that- what? Where?”

Nine shrugged, tilting the visor back up. She jerked a finger over 416’s shoulder, at the connecting door. “Dunno. ‘S weird. Says it’s coming from the other side of that do-”

____________________________________________________________________________

Daybreak

NSF-Redzikowo, Redzikowo, Pomerania, Poland

0601 Local Time, November 23rd, 2064

____________________________________________________________________________

Abberline winced as the plunger compressed, shunting two milliliters of mildly-fluorescent medicament into his epidural space. He counted half a second, before the medical harness clicked. In the clinic mirror, he watched placidly as it ejected the spent needle and cycled in another syringe.

The apparatus was built like a spider, all spindly limbs and rigid-body tools protruding from the cynosure of its construction. The device pressed against the small of his neck was built like a revolver, and he was four out of six rounds through its cylinder. Each needle contained another psychostatic or cognitive filter or stimulant. The regimen of drugs had been hastily slapped together in advance of his arrival. Each was tailored in a sterile lab to bypass one layer of the lasagna of protective wards and memetic seals surrounding the bowels of the base.

It was above his paygrade, but he’d been through enough operations to call them what they were: mnestics.

As the last needle punched through his cervical site, the full weight of the cocktail bore down on him with frightening magnitude. He groaned softly as the pulsing of his chronic migraine met the tempo of needle jabs, and sagged slightly in his seat.

The procedure was automated, of course, but he had half a mind to presume some kind of AI operator behind the device’s impassive lens. Without moving, nursing his throbbing eye, he called out. “...will that be a- ACK-”

The dexterous manipulators of the frame clamped around the circumference of his jaw, locking it into place. His knee-jerk reaction, to reach up and tear the cold metal from around his neck, and the machine from the floor, inexplicably failed. The moment that impulse formed in his brainstem, a cold, prickling numbness sprang from the root of his prostheses to the tips of his fingers. In an instant, his limbs went as rigid and still as a chunk of balsa wood.

His instinctual yell of protest died halfway up his gullet as the machine tightened around his neck. A surge of error messages, each a more eye-gouging shade of red than the last, raced across his vision, warning him of the increasing totality of the wave of prosthetic failures. His eyes flew open in a primal frenzy, only to be met with the sight of a pair of rubber-padded spreaders. He recognized the devices, and began to retreat, but without his cybernetic ligaments, the motion was arrested with trivial ease and speed by the tool. In a flash, his eyelids were spread to their elastic limit.

A surge of bile clambered past his many, many failed protests. It seared his throat as the constricted passage strained the solids from the acidic slurry. Not out of surprise and fear, but anticipation. This was hardly a new experience, but, he suspected, he would never acclimatize to it.

A gangly proboscis, resting on a micrometer-precise appendage, emerged from somewhere beyond his cone of vision. Three barely-perceptible calibration lasers oriented the needle perpendicular to his left eye, until it was but a menacing point poised over the surface. He spied a fluid sack, feeding the spear, opaque and turgid, in his peripheral vision.

Without hesitation, the needle sheathed itself to its base in the wet recesses of his left orbit with a gut-turning squelch. As the syringe ejected its contents into the intraorbital space, he felt his eye socket strain against the confines of his skull. For a brief moment, his migraine crescendoed to a perfervid inferno, like someone was fracking his head for its cerebrospinal fluid. His vision darkened in tandem with the shade of the fluid, pockmarked with patches of black and red, and then it went dark.

His Adam’s apple bobbed, his tonsils throbbed, and the rivulets of disagreed bile crabbing his esophagus escalated to a flood. A trail of it breached the seal of his lips, and the familiar, clinical stench of acid and burnt meat filled the room. That of his cheek sloughing off in layers.

As the pain plateaued from its exponential increase, the proboscis folded radially outwards to reveal a series of laser projectors. With mechanical grace, uncountable lances of collated light carved a spiralling, searing pattern onto his sclera.

All at once, the device retracted from his eye socket with a sickening schlick, and feeling returned to his extremities. The last conscious exertion he made was to ensure that his limp tumble kept him face-down, such that he wouldn’t aspirate on his own vomit.

He laid there for a few moments in a puddle of his own sick, twitching and watching as the vision of his left eye strobed like a kaleidoscope. Occasionally, he would paw at the aching hemisphere of his face, scratching at the numb and most-certainly swollen skin.

After some time basking in the needling burn of his floor-facing cheek, he arduously pulled himself up, wiping off his fresh sheen of caustic stomach contents. He traced the damage in the mirror. The splatter pattern of raw skin gave way only to the occasional patch of corrosion-resistant synthvinyl, half a millimeter down, forming a polychromatic speckling of damaged tissue.

He gave the exposed meat an experimental prod, winced, and let his hand fall to his side. His eyes traced up the contours of his face, before meeting their reflection. Against his better judgement, and his cognitive resistance training, they traced the memetic sigil the machine had clinically engraved into their left surface.

After a moment of uncomprehending, dead-minded introspection, he wrenched his vision free of the grip of their mirrored counterparts. Instantly, every mental byte of data created in the past hour began to drain from the basin of his skull, scrabbling at the peripherals of his memory in a bid to escape the trap of his mind. It was only through every iota of mental fortitude that he conserved their broadest strokes.

To a lesser man- the regular base staff- he surmised, the data would’ve sieved out of their brain in a heartbeat. Alas, the impetuous river of mnestics, and his conditioning, mercifully spared him that fate. Instead, his migraine fractionalled magnified.

He watched the patch of bruise-purple, gelatinous flesh where the needle had pierced his eye bloom to its requisite maximum. The throbbing pulse, the occasional ebbs in consciousness, the fluctuating field of visual artifacting, faded almost as quickly as they had arisen. In their stead stood a lasting, physical detachment, as if he was above, and slightly to the right of, his own body.

He sighed deeply, hoisted his measly kit away from the machine as it began to bathe itself in antiseptic, and strode out the door.

____________________________________________________________________________

“Awful plan.”

“Only plan.”

The plurality of symptoms had abated once he’d made it down a few sublevels. A few soldiers had cast inquisitive glances, suspicion easing into the backs of their minds, but the spiraling fractal engraved into his eye had swiftly expunged those impulses. Not that he wasn’t ordinary, but each layer of memetic obfuscation made him even more so.

Finding the appropriate access tunnel and fighting through the haze of mental static that obscured it from the commonfolk had been significantly more difficult. Each step in the process felt like wading through thicker and thicker mediums. When the time came to find the classified, antimemetically-redacted sublevel key in the lift, reality felt like molasses, and his head felt like it was being split with an excavator.

Fortunately, the facility’s engineers had removed the memetic and thaumaturgic wards a good way into the bunker. Unfortunately, within sat something- no, someone- who could evoke migraines almost as potently as they could.

“My criticism is made no less invalid by your lack of creativity.”

Barrett MRAD scoffed, patting the corridor shutter controls before resuming their march. “My creativity? Try the aggregate of every analyst we could get on call. Trust me. Thaumic insertion is the least-awful idea on-file.” As she spoke, the derelict mechanisms ground to life, exposing the clockwork intestines of the bunker.

“...I doubt it. Including the-”

“Yes, including narcoprophets, natural precogs, autonomous precogs, diviners, Sub-Veil analysts, Sur-Veil analysts, and just about every external consultant we could reach.” She spun on her heels at the end of the corridor, fixing him with a withering glare. “This op’s already cost us an unreasonable amount of diplomatic capital with the GOC. So you can zip it, because I doubt you’re in your depth here.”

He paused. A modicum of truth in that, there was. “...yeah, definitely. I’m still going to bitch about it. I just don’t expect anything to change.”

All he got was a rude finger in return as Emory resumed her inspection.

“How much EVE are we expending for this jump?” He ruefully patted a thaumic conduit thicker than his waist. Even through the ontokinetic insulation, the artificial frigidity of the exotic alloy could be felt in force. That, alone, provided more than enough of a response.

“Fifteen gigawatt-hours. Give or take.”

He gawked. “Fifteen- that’d be noticeable, even if we weren’t sandwiched between two superpowers. Are we trying to get noticed by the Gocks?!”

“They noticed when one of their wagies got an external consulting call about a totally hypothetical operation. Discretion’s already fucked.”

“T-the Ruskies?!”

“They know where the package is from. It’s not like they’re not expecting us.”

“Then why not choose a quieter means of ingress?! Don’t we need all the discretion we can spare?”

“Consider the following.” She jabbed her PDA, blanketed in barely-safe energy consumption calculations, into his chest, before working past him. “We gain an infinite surprise factor if our method is too stupid to be anticipated.”

____________________________________________________________________________

Abberline had stifled his own smirk when the two third-party dolls had their own misgivings about their ingress method. They were far from the same as his - complete with its own, bizarre and very conspicuously-incorrect pronunciation of ‘thaumaturgy’ from the one with the baseball cap - but it was solidarity. No matter how irritating.

“Explain it to me, sir.”

“Yeah, boss. But concisely. I’m burning charge here.”

“Amaris…” Aliana’s elbow met her subordinate’s ribs. “Impressions...”

Abberline was seriously starting to consider that maybe the two were bicameral components of some major memetic hazard, evidenced by the simmering rage he was threatening to expel verbally. “That, I gathered. Do you really need to know things to do your job?”

Aliana, again, did not move, but he gained the palpable sense that she was judging him for saying something monumentally stupid. “...naturally, your authority on this matter is superseding. But, consider that, while I may accede without the provision of an answer, my… subordinate, will not, sir.“

“Sir-” The word was acrid all the way up Emory’s throat, but she still managed to roll it off her tongue without gagging. “...if I may?”

“No, you may not… may.” He diverted his attention to the sisters. “It’ll… make sense when you see it.”

____________________________________________________________________________

“That made even less sense.” Amaris cast a squinting glance up at the misting of esoteric compounds and blood from which the quartet had apparated. She cast a squinting glance down, at the frost-caked train roof which had supplanted the sterile lab floor from but a second ago.

“Amaris. We’re on the clock.” Aliana hit the deck next to her, rolling to a lithe stop. “Ask questions later.”

Even through the snow-blind din, her sister’s dead, unimpressed stare was scathing. “You don’t find that even a bit interesting? Who’m I kidding, of course you-”

“Highground, we are boots down. EVE levels nominal, aaaand…” Emory gracefully landed on her feet. She looked one way, then the other, counting cars from the front of the locomotive. “...within twenty-five meters of the target.”

Abberline landed next to her. The argument between the other two, though barely audible, told him that the unit was in one piece. “...Highground, hold checks. Echelon is status green, and ready to initiate.” He beckoned to the two. “Oi! Fall in!”

Aliana swung to face him, processed his words, and responded instantly. Amaris spent a moment glaring, revulsed, at her, before doing the same. “Sitch, boss?”

Emory breezed past the two, leaning over the edge of the roof before easing down onto the intercar platform. “Three automata, and one doll. Should be a breeze.”

Chapter Text

<ATTN: The following file has been slated for IMMINENT DELETION. Retention, in part or in whole, of mission-critical details contained therein is an offense punishable by summary termination.>

Debriefing 2064-8822 Operation ‘BACKWASH’

SUMMARY: Operation ‘BACKWASH’ was a clandestine military operation conducted by USPARACOM in Ust'-Lenskiy Zapovednik of the Sakha Republic, Neo-Soviet Union. It was carried out from 23 November 2064 to 27 November 2064. The operational zone extended from an initial insertion point along the Trans-Siberian Rail Line (see appendix for geographical data) to a heretofore-unknown, decommissioned research and development facility, operated at some point in the past by elements of GRU Division ‘P.’

Operation ‘BACKWASH’ was conceived by USPARACOM in collaboration with sanctioned observers from FORECON USMC. It was primarily executed by elements of the 23rd Paranatural Operations Group, but involved the assistance of support units and assets requisitioned primarily from elements of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

The express purpose of Operation ‘BACKWASH’ was outlined in its Operational Plan (OPLAN) file. In brief, the mission force was scrambled into the Area of Operations via thaumic insertion, with the objective of capturing and/or killing CBRN Asset ‘Poorwill.’

The successful execution of the operation was significantly complicated by the unplanned and obtrusive intervention of assets of several maligned Sub-Veil groups. These include, but are suspected to extend beyond, the Union of Rossartrist Nations Global Occult Coalition (URNGOC), GRU Division ‘P’ (GRU-P), and Marshall, Carter, & Dark (MC&D).

PURPOSE: To establish a comprehensive timeline of the events of Operation ‘BACKWASH,’ in spite of:

- the near-total failure of established mission protocols.

- the intervention of several heretofore-unplanned factors.

- several anomalous effects which pervaded the AO.

____________________________________________________________________________

221 Pages Truncated for Brevity;

____________________________________________________________________________

Appendix Item 2315:

An excerpt of the footage captured by Mission Asset ‘Amaris,’ of NGAD Group ‘Daybreak.’ The footage depicts the first appearance of assets of Marshall, Carter, & Dark in the AO. Any measurements concerning these unidentified assets are purely visual or the best approximation of intensive video analysis.

[ A/V Transcript PCOM-04-231164 ]:

Date: 23 November 2064

Parties Present:

- Lt. A. van Kann, 23rd Paranatural Operations Group, USASOC;

- SSgt. ‘Aliana,’ NGAD Group ‘Daybreak,’ USASOC;

- LCpl. ‘Amaris,’ NGAD Group ‘Daybreak,’ USASOC;

- PMOO. ‘Emory,’ Paramilitary Observer, USPARACOM;

- Unidentified Doll #1 (Gray hair; 155cm approx; appeared to occupy leadership position);

- Unidentified Doll #2 (Silver hair; 163cm approx);

- Unidentified Doll #3; (Orange hair; 155cm approx);

- Unidentified Doll #4; (Gray hair; 137cm approx).

<BEGIN TRANSCRIPT>

<00:00:01: The element is assembled in front of a doorway. LCpl. Amaris and PMOO. Emory split on the entry point; SSgt. Aliana and Lt. van Kann cover the doorway.>

<00:00:02: Percussion; the footage polarizes as LCpl. Amaris’ sensor suite automatically compensates for the detonation of the breaching explosive.>

[00:00:04] Unidentified Doll #3: -or, but that doe-

[00:00:05] Unidentified Doll #2: CONTACT FRO-

<00:00:05: Audio consistent with sustained intermediate-caliber gunfire. Footage captures SSgt. Aliana and Lt. van Kann firing through the doorway.>

<00:00:06: Recording party (LCpl. Amaris) exchanges a signal with SSgt. Aliana before rounding the doorframe. All unidentified parties are assuming defensive positions using the assorted structures of the interior of the carriage. At the center of the carriage, a door into a side compartment can be seen. This is the containment unit the element has been sent to retrieve.>

<00:00:06: LCpl. Amaris sweeps the room’s left quadrant; PMOO. Emory sweeps the room’s right quadrant. Audio indicates the remainder of the element follows shortly thereafter.>

[00:00:07] SSgt. Aliana: 5.56. Contacts are-

<00:00:07: A round impinges off SSgt. Aliana’s left shoulder. She returns fire, striking the attacker (Unidentified Doll #2), who retreats behind their makeshift cover.>

[00:00:09] Lt. van Kann: Say again?!

[00:00:10] PMOO. Emory: They’re not the guard-

<00:00:10: A burst of gunfire strikes the corner of the wall Lt. van Kann is covering behind. The shots impact the wall in rapid succession, thought to be in excess of 1500 RPM.>

[00:00:12] Unidentified Doll #3: AH- Thermal anomaly, thermal anomaly!

[00:00:13] Unidentified Doll #4: NINE! You-

<00:00:14: The barrel of PMOO. Emory’s weapon emerges in the top-left quadrant of the video feed; PMOO. Emory appears, at this time, to be using LCpl. Amaris’ shoulder as a firing platform. The audio fluctuates wildly over the next two seconds due to the high volume of the ensuant shot.>

<The round impinges harmlessly off the cover behind which Unidentified Doll #2 rests. Audio consistent with PMOO. Emory hot-swapping ammunition type.>

[00:00:16] Unidentified Doll #1: -ll back, fall BACK-

[00:00:17] Lt. van Kann: Highground, unidentified pax, say again, unident-

[00:00:18] Unidentified Doll #2: -an’t! The [unintelligible; cargo?]-

<00:00:18: Behind cover, Unidentified Doll #2 procures a grenade launcher from a sling and assumes firing stance. Unidentified Doll #1 speaks unintelligibly; suspected to be an order to stand down. Unidentified Doll #2 hesitates.>

<00:00:18: PMOO. Emory fires a round at Unidentified Doll #2’s center of mass. The round’s trail and luminosity indicate it to be an armor piercing/incendiary munition.>

<00:00:18: As Unidentified Doll #2 draws back from her firing stance, PMOO. Emory’s round penetrates her cover. Positional analysis indicates that the round strikes the chamber of Unidentified Doll #2’s grenade launcher, triggering munition cookoff.>

<00:00:19: Percussion. Several undifferentiated frames, suspected to be that of the blast, are registered before SSgt. Amaris stops transmitting.>

<END TRANSCRIPT>

Appendix Item 2316:

An excerpt of the footage captured by the body camera of an unidentified soldier stationed on the Armored Train Mokra. The identity of the recording party could not be discerned, nor could their body be retrieved. The camera was recovered from the wreckage of the carriage directly succeeding the transport carriage.

After the events described therein, it was unanimously presumed by the coroner’s committee that the recording party was incorporated into CBRN Asset ‘Poorwill.’ As such, it is highly likely that they were rendered KIA on 27 November 2064.

This transcript has been translated from Russian.

[ A/V Transcript GRUP-22-231164 ]:

Date: 23 November 2064

Parties Present:

- Recording Party;

- Unidentified.

<BEGIN TRANSCRIPT>

<Footage begins at midnight on 22 November 2064. The first hour, thirteen minutes, and four seconds are unremarkable. During the subsequent nineteen seconds, sounds consistent with the engagement described in the above transcript can be heard. A series of violent camera shifts occur, likely due to the violent derailment of the carriage.>

<01:27:01: The camera has been static for the preceding fourteen minutes, facing a uniform grey surface. No sound can be discerned beyond that of the ambient weather, and the shallow breathing of the recording party. Several penetrative cracks can be seen on the surface of the lens.>

<01:27:02: The uniform surface shifts, revealing itself to be a structural member of unknown composition. It is covered with deformations consistent with blunt trauma.>

<01:27:03: The pained, muffled vocalizations of who is presumed to be the recording party can be discerned. Several inorganic cracks can be heard.>

<01:27:06: The structural member slides forward, exposing the camera to the remainder of the carriage’s interior. The lights have been disabled. Most decorative and practical features of the room have been violently overturned, consistent with the derailment.>

[01:27:07] Recording Party: Son of a bitch-

<01:27:11: The camera perspective shifts as the recording party sits up. The carriage appears to be slightly inclined along its longer axis. On the ground, at the far end of the car, a gas mask and rifle can be discerned.>

[01:27:15] Recording Party: Sasha?

[01:27:20] Recording Party: Roman?

[01:27:24] Recording Party: Artemy?

<01:27:13 - 01:27:25: The camera pans around the carriage. No figures or bodies can be discerned in the darkness.>

<01:27:25: The camera shifts slightly upwards, consistent with the recording party attempting to stand, before abruptly jerking downwards. Percussion, consistent with something heavy hitting the ground.>

[01:27:26] Recording Party: [Unintelligible; profanity?]

<01:27:30: The recording party stands. Damage to the recording device has dramatically reduced its capture rate. The angle upon which it is mounted on the recording party’s body has been severely skewed by the crash. Despite these impairments, it can be discerned visually that the recording party’s left hand has been irreparably damaged.>

<01:27:32: A series of laborious breaths can be heard. The recording party starts towards the opposite end of the carriage. The slow rate of progress, and the uneven rise and fall of the camera with each step, indicates that the recording party has been injured in one or both legs.>

<01:27:44: The recording party reaches the gas mask and rifle. With their right hand, the recording party retrieves both, and appears to don the former.>

<01:27:49: The audio abruptly peaks. In surprise, the recording party, and the camera, jerk violently. The low capture rate of the device renders this footage indecipherable. When the camera stabilizes, the door to the adjoining car has fallen away.>

<01:27:51: The recording party activates their helmet-mounted headlight after several failed attempts. They approach the door cautiously, rifle raised.>

[01:27:53] Recording Party: Hello?

[01:27:56] Recording Party: Identify yourself!

<01:27:58 - 01:28:16: The recording party repeats the prior two phrases in English, German, and French.>

<01:28:20: The recording party cautiously enters the carriage. Despite the events of the previous recording, there remain no traces of the firefight. However, the door at the center of the car is now askew. The recording party’s breathing accelerates fractionally.>

[01:28:24] Unidentified: [Unintelligible.]

<EDITORIAL: Post-incident spectral analysis indicates that the unintelligible vocalization is 97% consistent with the morphology of human vocal chords.>

<01:28:25: The recording party’s breathing accelerates significantly, apparently in reaction to the contents of the unintelligible vocalization.>

[01:28:26] Recording Party: Come o-out! Slowly!

[01:28:28] Unidentified: [Unintelligible.]

<EDITORIAL: Post-incident spectral analysis indicates that the unintelligible vocalization is 95% consistent with the morphology of human vocal chords.>

[01:28:30] Recording Party: W-what are- do not-

<01:28:31: Minute shifts in the camera’s positioning indicates that the recording party is tensing and drawing slightly backwards.>

<EDITORIAL: The cause of this is unknown; the central field of the video recording is entirely static at this time.>

[01:28:33] Recording Party: Raise your hands!

[01:28:35] Unidentified: [Unintelligible; questioning inflection.]

<EDITORIAL: Post-incident spectral analysis indicates that the unintelligible vocalization is 89% consistent with the morphology of human vocal chords.>

[01:28:37] Recording Party: S-stay back!

<EDITORIAL: The cause of this is unknown; the central field of the video recording is entirely static at this time.>

[01:28:39] Unidentified: [Unintelligible; questioning inflection.]

<EDITORIAL: Post-incident spectral analysis indicates that the unintelligible vocalization is 77% consistent with the morphology of human vocal chords.>

[01:28:41] Recording Party: Your hands! Let me see them!

[01:28:39] Unidentified: N-none. Applicable. Hands. None applicable. I need applicable. Right?

<1:28:40: The recording party sharply inhales, as if preparing to speak. A wet cracking sound fills the carriage.>

[01:28:42] Unidentified: Hands. Hands hands hands hands. Here.

<1:28:43: Several palms emerges from the darkness. Their direction and proportions are inconsistent. The camera slowly retreats. The breathing of the recording party can be heard.>

[01:28:49] Unidentified: T-that’s not. Regulation.

<EDITORIAL: Post-incident spectral analysis indicates that the vocalization is 64% consistent with the morphology of human vocal chords.>

<1:28:49: One of the palms shifts to point directly at, and slightly below, the camera lens. Spatial analysis indicates the subject to be the recording party's gas mask.>

<1:28:51: The camera angle shifts down a few degrees. The rubber seals of the recording party’s gas mask are being degraded. The nature of the degradation process is unknown, but appears to be bacterial.>

[01:28:54] Unidentified: Might w-wanna. Get that c-checked.

<EDITORIAL: Post-incident spectral analysis indicates that the vocalization is 42% consistent with the morphology of human vocal chords.>

[01:28:55] Recording Party: [Unintelligible; screamed.]

[01:28:56] Unidentified: Out.

<EDITORIAL: Post-incident spectral analysis indicates that the vocalization is 7% consistent with the morphology of human vocal chords.>

<1:29:59: Sounds consistent with choking; wet tearing; the camera angle violently pitches upwards. The final forward-facing frames captured exhibit minor fluctuations in the central space.>

<1:30:00: Percussion, consistent with a heavy object hitting the floor. An unidentified liquid begins to cover the lower half of the camera lens. Its composition is unknown and inconsistent; approximately 40% of its surface area is translucent and pink. Approximately 35% of its surface area is opaque, pale, and speckled red. Approximately 23% of its surface area appears to be blood. Approximately 2% of its surface area exhibits inconsistent coloration and non-newtonian properties.>

[1:30:23] Unidentified: [Unintelligible.]

<EDITORIAL: Post-incident spectral analysis indicates that the unintelligible vocalization is initially 2% consistent with the morphology of human vocal chords. The terminal syllables of the vocalization are 100% consistent with the morphology of human vocal chords.>

<END TRANSCRIPT>