_INFORMATION ACQUISITION 1_ (Patreon)

A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one! I think I figured out what I actually want out of the interludes here, so I might (MIGHT) be over the hump with EVO. Fingers crossed! More RfR coming soon!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Everywhere she looks, there is green.

The ground is green, choked with bushes, grass and vines. The trees are green, covered in crawling creepers and vibrant, wide leaves. The sky is green, the blue of it choked out of existence by the weight of the canopies that fight every moment of every day for as much sun as they can take.

And then there is the glass.

Or maybe it’s the liquid. She never has been able to find out, exactly.

Special Operations Unit Omega-07 has not looked in a mirror in a long time, and through the bright green tint she sees everything in, she would not be able to tell a difference between the glass and the fluid. 

But that’s alright. She doesn’t need color. Tracking movement is enough.

Despite her size, she moves completely whisper-silent through the underbrush, padding and well-maintained joints ensuring that she steps with minimal weight, evenly distributed. Boots that are at once platforms and stilted, insectile supports allow her to step over nearly any terrain, each of the four prongs with rubber on their soles to further limit any sound at all. Even with the weight she carries, they allow her to half-job through the growth without the slightest hitch.

Her operational weigh-in had her at two hundred and fifteen kilos, each one accounted for down to the gram. Ablative plating, thirty kilos. Broadcasting and sensory suite, twenty-seven kilos. High-compression servos and freshly charged heavy-load exoskeletal frame, fifty kilos. Central armor, thirteen kilos. The remaining sixty kilos that have been added to her frame are split perfectly in half: one half goes to utility functions, clips, injector-pumps, additional fueling, and emergency flares and scramblers. The other half lands with her primary rifle, backup rifle, dual sidearms, grenades, and additional munitions.

Her frame, in and of itself, makes up only the final thirty-five kilos of her body, approximately twice her non-operational weight. The servos, battery and mechanical tendons don’t always come with her.

She steps through a thicker part of the underbrush, the things they put in her eyes letting her see the outlines of every object perfectly even as it seems like she is walking through a perfect wall of green. 

Five clicks to the target. Eighteen clicks to the rendezvous.

She checks her chronometer. Thirty-seven mikes for the entire operation. Just barely enough.

Always trust a CO to give you just enough to fuck yourself with, but not enough to enjoy. 

Her prongs press into soft earth and stone in equal measure, the springs ensuring that she only ever puts exactly as much pressure on each structure as can be handled before it might cause sound, and she begins to run.

There is an inaudible hiss of steam and wiring as she begins to move in truth, the slight pause to reorient enough to mark her location. She hears the slight crackle of static on the radio, the minute sound of information crackling through the back of her mind and through a series of functions she barely understands, guiding her on. Positional data acquired. Information updated. Proceed with objective.

She runs, and the world is nothing but green.

Only one thing ever breaks up the green. The only other color they let her see, the only one left in her eyes. 

Her hands fail to restrain the tiniest twitch at the thought of seeing it again, even as something inside her begs to vomit. 

But her stomach has been gone for a long time. So she runs. She maneuvers across fallen trunks, over rocks and ravines, leaping with the slightest whine of servos over boulders and off of trees that sway with the weight of her movement, and never once does she make a sound. If not for the padding on her exterior and the way that her body maneuvers, the jungle would be screaming with noise, writhing against her body and marking her presence exactly, but instead there is only the slight rustling of leaves gliding off her exterior as she blurs past.

Nine mikes. Four and a half clicks. 

Pneumatics move smoothly and painlessly into place and stop her movement dead as she lands, topping over nearly onto her front and allowing her to calmly plant her rifle and its bipod onto the rock in front of her as she places herself to its scope.

She goes from nearly twenty-five miles an hour to perfect stillness in approximately 1.3 seconds. Her mind counts it, even as her gaze and attention focus on the valley in front of her.

The green of the jungle is broken at last by the brown of earth and wood. Pathways have been torn up through the terrain, huts and bungalows built out of the local flora, and she (and something in her that is not her) begin to count moving figures in the paths between them. 

The area is lush, but here and there are signs of overgrowth consuming human construction. Half buried, half-collapsed, what looks like a genuine mansion, holding (204) over a hundred rooms and collapsed marble columns. The windows are all broken, vines and trees growing all through the structure, but some of the rooms have the glow of artificial lighting to them as voices come vaguely over the wind towards her position. The remains of what might once have been a manicured lawn and pool, entirely alien to the jungle around them, are overtaken by the ravages of time, nature, and human need, most of the property completely overgrown a decade ago and recently remade into something approaching an operational encampment.

The ticker in her mind finishes its work, the final number appearing on the little rotating counter in her head. She knows there are new and shinier things that do the same thing, but her mind still returns to one of those rotating things, numbers flipping up and down and glowing with cathode-red. Except it’s not red anymore, is it? She doesn’t remember red. It’s just green pretending to be something else.

57 hostiles visible. Eighty-seven weapons noted: 54 AK-47s, 13 Berettas, 7 Uzis, 9 Shotguns of varying make, 4 RPGs. Grenade count, unknown. Knife count, unknown. No civilians noted. 25-28 potential further hostiles in the dilapidated manse.

25 minutes remaining.

The counters tick down to 24 before she receives the mild caress of radio-waves providing her the geas and blessing and vomit-inducing agony she craves and despises.

Orders Confirmed. Engage.

The crack of her rifle is muffled through the glass, or the liquid, or the suit. It would be muffled without either, reduced to a sharp cough rather than the harsh bark of proper gunfire. It pretends at silence, just enough to feel like a scream with each impact against her shoulder as she fires.

They gave her rifle a name. It is not her rifle, so it doesn’t deserve a name, but it flicks through her mind no matter what she wishes for. Argos Pattern Mark 31, her minds ticking devices click to her, whispering of ideal ranges, ammo-count, rifling pattern and alternate munitions.

She does not listen. It is not her rifle. They do not let her bring her rifle. There is no reason for this rifle to have a name. It does its job.

Like her.

Special Operations Unit Omega-07 keeps track of the kills. The clicking, whirring, mechanical things inside her do it for her, but as she can with fw things in life, she takes a bit of control to count for herself.

The rifle makes that muffled cough, and tickles her shoulder and its bipod ever so lightly, and with each cough, someone dies. 

Cough. 56 hostiles.

Cough. 51 hostiles.

Cough. 37 hostiles.

She wonders, at first, if the difficulty of killing is another thing they have taken from her. Which they have, yes, but not to this extent.

They should be running. They should be panicking now, moving with discipline at best. Instead, they react slowly, twitching in place and turning, all as one, to face the ridge she fires from.  

Even still, they do not begin to return fire at nearly the reaction-time she expected.

Cough. 29 hostiles.

And then all 29 begin to fire simultaneously. 

The clicking things in her mind tell her that the numbers they provide should not be. AK-47s, still reliable in format even two centuries past their original design, are not known for being particularly accurate. They are not, in nearly any case, a marksman’s rifle. And yet, from hundreds of meters away, up a ridge, hidden out of view, bullets begin to ping and ricochet around her, whole magazines of ammunition unerringly finding their way to her location. Her position is secure enough that there’s no true danger, especially not with her armor plating, but still, there is a proper procedure to these things.

She prepares to relocate, taking a few final shots to disrupt the strangely accurate fire-patterns raining on her position.

Cough. 35 hostiles.

She blinks. Or tries to. The action is unconscious, even if the movement can no longer be completed.

Cough. 41 hostiles. 

The bodies are getting back up.

Not all of them. Most of her headshots stay down, as do a few with some of the more dramatic chest wounds, but the majority of them are back on the move, picking up dropped weapons with disturbing synchronicity and adding to the weight of fire coming towards her.

This means, of course, that those who took target priority, the RPG wielders, are once more a threat.

She can survive a direct shot, in theory. One.

Three aim in her direction.

Her arms move with inhuman speed and precision to grab a smoke grenade and flick off its pin, flooding the ridge with white smoke and obscuring her position. The gunfire remains perfectly, annoyingly accurate for a few seconds, but when no further coughing comes from her ridge, about half of them cut off in sync, the remaining weapons firing around her position as if searching. They don’t waste the rockets, not without a clear line of sight, and she tries to smile at the fact that if they’d maintained their hyper-aggressive munitions use, they might have gotten her.

As it is, she pushes her machinery to its higher stress tolerances and launches herself down the ridge, following the smoke as it drifts down. Some of the gunfire follows her, but not with the synchronicity of before, and the loss of the ten kilos of Argos Pattern Mark 31 makes her even faster. She hits a maximum movement of 37mph before her system starts clacking and clicking about stress limits, and the remaining five-hundred meters begin to vanish beneath her pronged feet.

Four hundred meters to their perimeter.

Three hundred meters to their perimeter.

250.

200.

125.

73. 

34.3.

21.2

She bursts out of the underbrush and begins to paint with the only color she has left.

The blood looks black against her visor. It is the only thing that is truly, deeply black anymore, the crimson coming away as midnight sable against the green that is all she can see. 

Her secondary rifle also has a name, though this one she respects enough to acknowledge. It is long and awkward, but it is more honest in its brutality, and more direct in its application, and she respects the beast far more for this fact.

The DS Arms SA58 Mini OSW roars in short, clipped bursts, three and four-shots making bloody meals of the bodies in front of her. Those with gut wounds and limb injuries keep moving, even when they should be simply dying, simply bleeding, and she forces her servos to adjust in turn. No more standard deviation allowed- headshots, spinal taps, and overwhelming damage to the heart and rib-cage are required.

She’s curious. The clicker in her mind is not, it never is, but she is. And it doesn’t matter. Battle does not allow for curiosity. It does not allow for any thoughts beside the practical and immediate.

She fires. She reloads. She throws the occasional explosive, and mops up the wounded. When someone appears holding a weapon, and she has no bullets in her SA58, she uses one of the handguns on her waist and underarm holster, varying as needed. Her clicker tracks bodies, tracks bullets, tracks every screaming thing demanding her attention.

She does not stop moving until her clickers track 0 hostiles.

She becomes a person again, just the smallest bit, inside the mansion.

There is a table in front of her, full of words in a language she cannot read. There are seven bodies that used to be people around it, in different phases of holding guns and attempting to defend themselves. 

None of them look right.

Even for being painted in vibrant black and neon green, they don’t look right.

Their shapes are… wrong. Bulging. Messy. They ooze pale pus as much as the true and gorgeous black that is all she can see. 

And they all continue to watch her. Continue to track her movements, even from ruined skulls and exsanguinated bodies. Even as their heads are mashed into pulp or blown apart by gunfire, they still whisper-scream of attention onto her.

17 minutes remaining.

16:52, now.

It is not Special Operations Unit Omega-07 job to ask questions. And she can’t anyways. Not aloud. Not anymore. 

But she is curious.

And just a tiny bit sad that none of them managed to gun past the visor that lets what’s left of her see out into the world.

The tickle of radio transmission shivers up and down her spine, as close and as violating as a thing can be. Her brain does not know her skin is gone, doesn’t know that there is no muscle and nerve whispering to her of sensation anymore. Nothing to protect her insides from that which is already inside her. Reaching fingers of static and electricity whisper words behind her ears and trail their attention up and down what should be protected, what should be her, and tell her what she needs to hear.

Mission Complete. Orders Reconfirmed. Exfil Immediately. 16 Mikes. Over And Out.

16 minutes. Half a click to recover the rifle she does not name (Argos Pattern Mark 31) and eighteen clicks to the rendezvous.

Always trust a CO to give you just enough to fuck yourself with, but not enough to enjoy. 

She had laughed at that joke when she heard it.

Before they put her behind the glass.

But she is a good soldier still. There’s not enough left of her not to be.

So she moves, and leaves behind nearly a hundred bodies.

Her clicker doesn’t counts down, not up. A different clicker speaks to her for operational numbers, and that one gets reset after each mission.

So she counts instead.

87 more hostiles total. 87 more dead.

16,765 total.

15 mikes.

No time to think. Only to move.