The first machine of war crawled forth in the utter darkness that had enveloped the land. Sunlight had now been gone for hours, and yet more remained before the crack of dawn; there were no stars, and no nightglow, for the sky was blanketed by black clouds. The air was heavy, thick - chances were it would be raining, soon.
And so it began... Perfect timing. From their part, that is - of course the choice to attack now, under these conditions, was deliberate.
He could feel, and through his helmet, hear the behemoth rolling forward, but not truly see it. Even infrared vision only faintly contoured the undercarriage of the creeping monstrosity, and much more highlighted the numerous smaller beings accompanying the machine. Stopping behind covers, darting forward, hiding again. Sonic yielded a scattered image, even with noise-reduction. Damn wind. Enhanced lightvision did little besides what the thermal vision already showed. He could scan ... but that would highlight him to everyone. Bad idea. Wait until he was amidst of it all...
The cover he was hiding behind, positioned in the far left branch of their line, seemed far too flimsy. Had the thing been any closer, it could have easily rolled over the natural wall of rocks, crushing them under its weight. Despite his lack of clear image, he could swear it had simply driven over one of the trees... And despite its size, it could still drive much faster than a human could run, naught but a splatter of fertilizer left of anyone who got in its way. Even if he shot at it, he would only succeed in managing to remove a couple of square centimeters of paint...
Taking down the heavy machinery was not his job. His role was strictly anti-personnel. Why were men sent to war alongside those monstrosities, anyway? Humans were cheap - lives mattered a century ago, but no more, call it inflation of the worst kind, if you might - and could get in places more robust machinery could not not, he supposed. More thoroughness, too. More eyes. At least their machines did not think. Insanity, he figured.
Slowly, he lowered his gun, pointed it at one of the small moving heated figures, but did not fire. Not yet. He and his brethren lied in waiting. Men, cannons and air force. At least the disturbance was low. Nevertheless, the enemy was too close for comfort. And there were other machines of war closing in. Of course there were others... He slowly released a breath he had not realized he was holding. Not yet.
The leading metal monstrosity halted. He could almost envision it stretching out its limbs and anchoring itself to ground, its singular array reaching for the sky, like a pointing hand of destruction. Or expanding like some kind of weird flower blooming. He did not know why he made the latter association.
There was a brief flash - or did he just imagine it as an afterthought? -, and a split-second later the monstrosity exploded from within. The robust armor held, but licks of flame escaped from the undercarriage and array, and a pillar of fire shot towards the sky from its punctured ceiling. A second later, the low roar of an aircraft long gone. The sound of the explosion itself was borderline filtered out. (What did they even use against those things? Bunker busters, or what had originally been designed as such? Probably.) The small surrounding figures scattered; a couple of the closest ones fell, dropped from feet in a a strangely boneless manner. From the shockwave, most likely. Or shrapnel. The wreck lay burning - for a moment longer he just stared at it, almost mesmerized -, but yet other machines of war crawled forth. Most likely over the corpses - or even wounded - now scattered on ground.
Humans were cheap. Or, at the very least, a death was cheaper than taking care of a possibly permanently vegetabled cripple. The main base most likely didn't even bother. Even if you did get picked up... After a few weeks, it was a bullet to the head and an unceremonious dumping to the nearest ditch. Proper treatment was reserved for those who were realistically bound to be back in functional condition.
A salvo was released somewhere behind him; smaller explosions lined the front end of another crawling monstrosity, but it barely cared, not for the impacts nor the flames and glowing liquid now clinging to its partially ablated plate. Burning paint and some of its armor turned into plasma or not, it, too, reached its hand of doom towards the sky, and further back, three more could be observed doing the same. Technically, these were some kind of treaded artillery - just really damn big kinetic gun variants. Ones that could hit their targets from above. There was also another kind of vehicles arriving now. Smaller. Rounder. Warmer. These did not halt, only slowed down a bit and began to emit an unearthly hum. Their infrared signatures had them light them up like beacons as they did so. He was not entirely certain what those were; not anything their old enemy had fielded before.
Another salvo hit one of the extended arrays, to seemingly somewhat greater effect. Enough? Time will tell. The humans were engaging now. He waited, waited honed on a single target, waited till it made its move and consequently almost had its arm torn off. It did not fall, though. Resilient bastards. Relocate? Chances are his current position was at least reported, regardless of whether the report was heeded or not.
His heart was pounding now; even more so than it had been before. His gun was quickly pointed at another target and fired again - this one was hit in the chest and fell. And again. The one he had originally shot was not liable to reappear any time soon. He was pretty much incapacitated. Some kind of scattering hit a dozen meters to the right, lethally injuring one of his comrades and severely harming another. As he was trying to recover, a singular shot from an unseen gun took him out. Directly through the head. At these calibers, there was no point in checking whether he was alive.
Suddenly, three blueish-white beams had penetrated the air and disappeared in the span of a millisecond or two, only registered by his senses after the fact. Wind had swept the even trails away, leaving only phantom lights dancing before his eyes. Lasers powerful enough to ignite and ionize air, called into existence for a split-second just because any longer would have melted the devices, if they even had the energy for more than a couple of millisecond-bursts...
It took another half a second before his eyes - even with the helmet's filtering still with impressions of the beams burned into them - found the flaming wrecks shooting forward in the sky, engines still working or just up in air out of sheer inertia, he did not know. Out of commission, either way, and heralding similar fate to any subsequent planes till the point-defense was gone. One was already vanishing behind the tree-tops, whereas another still remained visible up high, now clearly veering off-course, and the last abruptly detonated in a massive fireball, violently torn to ribbons by its own yielding ammunition and raining down firey bits of its carcass... The roar of the late planes only reached the battlefield below after their demise.
There was a blast a couple of moments later that may have been the explosion, but it was hard to tell amid the commotion of war. He had not even heard the crack of the beams penetrating the air. He would also be deaf without the sound-filtering. He felt more sounds than he heard.
He had momentarily been distracted by the planes being taken out, but now resumed his firing duty. Something exploded behind him and to the left. There was a wave of response-fire - the enemy was wise and covered behind their metal behemoths, ever-approaching, ever creeping closer. To close. He had to relocate. Something whistled right over him; he thought he actually felt something fall on his back as the projectile hit the rock behind him. Fuck. For a moment, he pressed himself flat against the ground and just hoped - their sensor tech was better and they were also more capable of masking lifesign signatures. The shot at his life did not repeat. Not right away, at least.
It was not easy trying to move a body forward without lifting it as much as half an inch from the surface beneath, but to his credit, he dug his fingers into the ground anyway and made a valiant effort. When he had finally managed to drag his body behind another semblance of cover, he rolled himself onto his back and stared into the matted sky. Could lose his own life all too easily here.
There was a booming crack, and he made himself to turn his head, in time to see the dispersing tracer and one of the arrays recovering from the recoil. The others followed suit, not quite at once. Staggered fire. Stars would fall. Fall, and bring ruin.
He righted himself and peered over his cover, lifting his gun back into position. One of the arrays was in the process of was packing itself up - it was the one which had been hit earlier, but not fatally so. The wreck of the one that had been hit by the first air strike sat still and abandoned, to be scrapped by whoever won. The others stood erect. Reloading, cooling down, and adjusting their angles for their respective next targets.
A solitary enemy stepped out from behind the cover of one of the monstrosities, halted, and rushed for one of the others. It had been a mistake, but it was all too easy to make such in the general chaos. He felled him. There was some kind of heavier salvo from his side, targeted at yet another of the towering monstrosities - hitting the arrays seemed to be a working tactic. There was another scattered shot. The individual handheld gun shots he barely noticed anymore, but that thing still stood out. It had to be mounted something-or-other. He could not detect it. Why? The remaining arrays fired again. He counted thirteen shots. They really had gone all out, had they not?
Both of the incapacitated arrays had finished folding themselves back into their compact forms. First one and then the other abruptly lurched forward, seemingly accelerating with abandon. These things were big. Probably over two hundred and fifty tons total each. And they were capable of moving nearly sixty kilometers an hour on a reasonably hard, flat natural terrain, which was what up here mostly was. There were sparse small and medium-sized trees, predominantly pines, but he was quite certain he had seen these machines just run down a few just earlier, undeterred. The thoughts about people being turned into fertilizer under those things came rushing back.
They were really going to use their machinery to just ... roll over them. Humans with functional legs and some capacity of intelligent thought - those things were somewhat slow to turn - would probably get away, but a significant amount of their equipment and anyone who was injured could not. He signaled the others, but if they had not noticed it already, then it was probably too late for them anyway.
He fired at one as it passed by, treads throwing up dirt. He doubted the bullet made as much as a dent. It was not the first time he sensed their forces were underwhelming compared to what the other side had put out and that he himself was but an useless pawn in the middle of it all, but it was the first time he began to comprehend that they had little to no chance to win this skirmish. The main base was not going to send more planes to their destruction, and they had barely anything left to stop the main force. Explosives would have been an option, maybe. Tank mines and above. If they had had the time to prepare properly, and main base had supplied. But why this place?
The arrays fired for the third time. The two cavalry were somewhere behind the line now, and supposedly turning around. The blinding-white beams pierced the air again, this time aimed parallel to the ground, hitting their ranks and igniting foliage and anything the beams came close to. Chaos broke loose as the smaller vehicles and human enemies alike rushed forth. There were no lines to speak of left. It was a mess; everyone fending for themselves. He saw many more of the opposing side than his own. A couple of trees had caught fire. There was a fourth volley of shots from the arrays.
The were going to lose this fight. Should there have not been a fallback order? There was not enough background noise for the far-range communications to cut out for natural causes... Jamming? No, could not be. The people whom they were fighting did not have the tech and he would have picked up the pulse. Had the arrays taken the broadcast out? Or, perhaps even more disturbingly, were they simply supposed to die fighting and bring as many of the enemy down with them as possible? Panic had begun to well up.
He had retracted fully behind the cover - not that mattered that much anymore, but at least it was one side he did not have to intently watch, even if someone had gone all the away around and approached him from behind - and rested his side against it as he reloaded his gun. One down, seven to go. This is the end...
Lifting the weapon yet again, he focused on the surroundings. Between thermal imagery, filtered noise visualization, enhanced visible spectrum, any combination of those... One thing was certain: the situation was not looking up, and aid was nowhere to be seen. No matter the reason, there would be no callback. Their remaining forces here would be eradicated.
It felt as if his body was moving independently, separate from both the observations and the thoughts of impending doom in his mind. He remembered several more salvos from the arrays, and someone managing to detonate something under the front end of one in a last ditch effort that seemed to barely hinder the monstrosity or those who commanded it. He remembered firing yet more shots at enemy soldiers - and hitting. And his allies being hit by others in turn. There were so few of the latter left. Explosions. Fire. Filtered sound. It was pointless now, all pointless.
He remembered himself retreating, slowly backing away from the action. He remembered seeing one of their enemies crouching over one of their fallen numbers, himself halting and aiming at the person's back... The one on the ground seemed to be weakly moving. And for once, he hesitated before pulling the trigger. What for? It was over, anyway. The fire exchange was dying down now; a solitary shot from the side was wont to be more noticeable. Gravely injuring or killing another of the opposing force's numbers would hardly change anything anymore as far as the outcome of the skirmish was concerned. The arrays fired yet again.
And whether it was some sliver of humanity - some unwillingness to shoot a person who was no longer fighting -, or the much more selfish, self-preservational desire to not attract any more hostile attention when the conflict was, for all intents and purposes, over, or some combination of both, but he did not shoot. He just ... left. Continued backing down till the sound and light of the site faded away. Defected.

There was an odd silence away from the conflict, only perturbed by an occasional gust of strong wind. It was erratic now, a gale followed by long moments of stillness before the next. He had finally turned his back and was jogging on, over the rocky, sandy ground covered by low hardy foliage and the occasional pine sapling. The grown trees, none too large, were sparse; had there been no clouds, there would have been plenty of light reaching the ground even at the dead of the night. With clouds, he had to resort to artificial means of obtaining an image of the surroundings in order not to stumble blindly.
It did not take long before he reached a cliffdrop - he did not quite look over the edge, but he suspected it could be between four and six hundred meters tall. Continuing along the edge, he eventually found a path down - quite wide one, in fact, if one obscured from beneath by the much more aggressive foliage growing below. Unknown territory, but as long as it lowered the chances of running into either a representative of his own faction or one of the thrice-damned Trenian bastards...
The trek down was not extensive, but the natural conditions changed drastically with the decrease of elevation. Down here was dominated by massive trees - some kind of flat-needled conifers that seemed to roll their new sprouts open like ferns with broad, roughly triangular overall shapes, but fairly horizontal branches, and various dark green trees with flattened branches and large leathery leaves. Where the conifers grew, the ground was barren and covered with a thick mildly acidic mat of fallen needles; everywhere else the foliage was so dense that passing through was significantly compromised.
It also seemed a lot damper, and as if to spite him, the clouds overhead released their contents in an almost battering downpour. It did not take long until most of him was drenched. The water was not cold, but rather roughly room-temperature, and the overall air was not liable to cool too much until early morning ... just rather distinctly unpleasant.
There was no point in wandering around in the darkness and heavy rain, so he found a marginally drier spot against the trunk of one of the conifers, and sat down against it, staring dully in front of himself and letting the consequences of the happenings gradually sink in fully. Could not go back, would not turn to the people he had only known as enemies...
At some point during the night, he managed to fall asleep, in spite of everything.

He woke with a start. It was full light out, as much of it as could filter through the treetops and the uniform bright white layer of clouds overhead. He was shivering now; it was the coldest time of the day, he was still soaked, and body-temperature tends to lower during sleep. Sadly, heating was not included in his armor. Flexing his stiffened joints, he managed to get himself into an standing position ... and then froze, staring at the white haze drifting lazily amid the trees. No. Too ... insubstantial. Too wispy. He released a sharp breath. Just fog. The regular sort. Not the sort that ate people.
With a sigh, he threw his gun over his shoulder and set off. Where, he did not know, just ... not back. At least moving should warm him up a bit, and clear away the stiffness from having slept in armor and half-leaning against a none-too-comfortable seat. Something detached from a tree nearby, about four meters in span, and glided farther. Drone? Without thinking, he took aim and fired after it. The shot rang back in the relative stillness of the morning. All wind was gone now. There was an alarmed screech, but no indication that he had actually hit. Whatever it had been, it had not been a drone. A huge bird of some kind, probably.
He did not sling his gun over his shoulder again, but just lowered it as he trekked onward.
Hear! a voice shouted from somewhere to his left, causing him to halt again, half-alarmed, half-confused. It sounded like a woman's voice, slightly shrill. Agitated. Angry, even. Accusatory. Hear! the voice repeated. Or did it say, "Here?" It seemed to come from somewhere above.
Here! another voice insisted, this one right above him, and seemingly much higher up than even the tree-tops, massive as those trees were. He could not detect any actual motion. These were ... birds? Like the one he had shot at? The similarity to human cries was probably coincidental. For a moment he stood, looking at the sky he practically could not see, and the blood-chillingly near-human voices cutting in from above. He thought he could hear a third and fourth one. And in any case, his presence could hardly go unannounced as long as these creatures decided to trail him.
The man, roughly a meter and eighty-five tall and completely clad in dusty yellow-green armor - by appearances fabric covering some manner of hard plates, with a number of convenient pockets all over - continued onward, hastening his pace.
Best ignore them for now. They would probably give up, sooner or later.

---

There was an odd sensation of numbness, and damp cold. It had seeped deep, permeated flesh and bone alike, partially masking the sensations of the hard crumbling concrete beneath him ... the material covering his body, its synthetic fabric and the many semi-flexible platelets embedded in it, uncomfortably biting into his back under his own weight ... the sticky slickness coating the right side of his torso, the distant dull throb of pain, the distinct taste of half-coagulated blood...
Slowly, almost languidly, his head rolled to the side, thick-feeling tongue slowly moving in his mouth, eyelids fluttering, but not yet opening. A deeper, wheezing breath was drawn, and suddenly the man's body seized up as the dull throb of pain exploded - it felt like being impaled on a burning-hot spike, the pain radiating down his right arm as his muscles involuntarily tensed, teeth clenching and head tilting back as he groaned weakly, breath then caught in his throat. For a time, the pain was simply too great to draw another one. It was perhaps surprising he did not simply pass out upon that, but he did not. People somewhat rarely did, unless they were aided in it.
Soon, but not quickly enough, the pain began to recede, replaced by an entirely new kind of numbness, the tension in his muscles gave way to an odd weakness and slight trembling. His heart was beating hard and fast; he could breathe again, but only in short, brief and painful gasps, or another spike of pain - now feeling more like someone trying to forcefully tear his chest into two - quickly reminded him of his overall condition. Cold began to feel oddly acute ... there was a sense of heightened alertness, but also surreality. Eyes flickered open, met by a crumbling room - some manner of small lobby - and dull light filtering in from the opening some distance from his face.
Come morning, and he was still alive.
The waning of pain, the alertness ... a small part of it was doubtlessly adrenaline and other chemicals the body itself released when the flight or fight response was triggered by pain, fear, or excitement, but by far most of it was most likely whatever artificial cocktail of drugs was currently circulating his bloodstream, administrated by his suit. It was not a particularly intelligent system - far from it -, but often enough it sufficed to keep a person going for notably longer than it should have been possible. The very least, he was undeniably awake now.
Get up. Easier thought than done. In his current state, he could probably kill himself just by being careless with it. The main aim of what had kept him alive thus far was to keep soldiers standing and in fighting condition for as long as possible; it had never been meant to function as a long-term solution to being shot through with high-powered handheld kinetic weaponry.
While it was at least possible for one's body to mend everything on its own after this kind of first aid had been applied when one was not a complete mess, it did not really repair anything, not properly - it merely muted pain, staved off exhaustion, and sealed and stabilized most open injuries. The latter was mostly achieved by means of what was essentially a kind of advanced medical glue - it bonded instantly to specific kinds of molecules in human body, but remained somewhat flexible when solidified, and could apparently be broken down by the body itself over time. One of the few things that was sold to civilians quite freely.
But he ... he was a mess. He did not want to think of the exact details of it, he really did not, but the fact remained: without further aid, he was essentially a dead man already. And some parts of his physical condition, even with pain left aside, were simply impossible to ignore. The smaller entry hole in his middle back had been sealed completely, it seemed, but the gaping exit-hole right next to his shoulder and worryingly close to his neck ... had not. Partially concealed by shreds of his armor - the fabric of which the medical glue thankfully did not bond to -, it was still there, along with the apparent absence of at least a part of his right collar-bone, and there was not a damn thing he could do about any of it then and there. And despite everything, he was still the luckier one.
Pull yourself together. Pondering over the physiological horrors of his continued existence was not bound to lead anywhere. He can either do something and help himself and - hopefully, though the chances of that felt nigh nonexistent - someone else, or wait until he found out firsthand which part of his body would undergo a fatal failure first. Bleeding to death - which was otherwise one of the most common causes of relatively quick death from non-brain injury - had been averted for the time being, and one properly functional lung was at least technically sufficient to keep a person going, but in the longer run... Something else breaking, accidentally stabbing himself with his own broken rib while bending over, an infection, something or other not putting up with the increased strain, something healing to an incorrect form... Stop thinking about it.
How does one get up from lying on one's back without either twisting one's right shoulder upwards, rolling onto one's right side, or preferably without bending one's torso at all? In the end, he managed to draw his right leg up, move his right hand onto his right thigh, and placing the fingers of his left hand against his right shoulder to hold it relatively put, roll himself onto his left side.
Well... That was ... something. So far, so good. With some more effort, he managed to get his left arm under his head, tilt himself until he was nearly facing the ground, rest his right knee on the floor and force his torso off the ground by the power of his left arm alone; luckily, the latter did not give way in the process. Bit-by-bit, he managed to inch his supporting hand backwards, at the same time drawing his legs close, until he was sitting mostly upright. He had managed not to bend himself too much during the second half of the process, though he could still feel a sharper than usual stab of pain. He could only hope that what he felt wasn't some errant boneshard cutting into a major bloodvessel. (Stop thinking over it.)
For a couple of moments he remained seated there, shaking and trying to catch his breath even after this small effort - as well or badly as one could with a hole in one's chest and only one properly functional lung. Slowly, his head turned away from the light and the opening he had been facing, bleary eyes running over the disturbed floor and a barrel of a long gun, finally fixing onto the other, still immobile figure in the room, but half a meter from he himself had been lying. It was wearing the same exact armor as he, though unlike him, it had evidently retained its helmet. He had hastily removed his own helmet and thrown it aside at some point, in his desperate panicked haze and nigh-inability to breathe getting the impression that it would otherwise suffocate him. (Or so the vague fragmented memories of yesternight's happenings told him.) He had no idea where it was now, aside of somewhere between the ground of yesternight's conflict, where he had been shot, and here.
The figure could belong to another man, though the armor and helmet made it nigh impossible to tell by form alone. He knew who it was simply because it was he who had managed to drag the other here, against all the odds. How, he could not even fathom himself.
Just as meticulously, he finally managed to clamber up to the other figure's head, clumsily checking on him. Still alive.
[i][b]They both were still alive. [/i][/b]
In the sense of still having higher than the ambient body temperature and flowing blood in one's veins, anyway. And at least seeming to be breathing. Anything further than that ... he did not know. Had no means of finding out, either.
He just remembered, with an almost unnatural clarity, how the other had fallen from the shockwave ... just dropped from foot. Concussion... Total body disruption... He just did not know. He had not even dared to try to remove the other's helmet, in the fear that it would make something worse. You did not try to wake people with very probable brain damage; you just left them alone. Waking them ... at best, you merely found out whether they were still capable of being conscious, at worst you ended up outright killing them. In the end, he just stared down at the other in a mix of relief and desperation. They were both at least arguably alive, but for how much longer, unless there was aid?
No point in waiting for it here. He was going to have to make a move, if he wanted either of them to have a chance. Dragging the other along any further was out of question, both because it was liable to do more harm than good and because he was simply no longer physically capable of it; he would have to go alone. He would be moving quicker on his own, at least, of questionable worth as this notion was in his current state.
But ... where to? Going back ... an upward climb and a high chance of an unfavorable welcome unless he headed for one of the civilian settlements - which were far too far -, and elsewhere only unknown waited. There were others, he knew... To southwest. There were ... people, some strange amalgams of human and machine, others either fully suited in armor or some manner of humanoid machines. He did not know who or what they were, just that they were there and formidable enough for his faction - which was now likely his former faction - to at once keep their distance and an eye on them.
Common soldiers did not have much disclosed to them. But these folks did not shoot ... had not shot them on sight, that much he knew, and if they knew how to merge human and machine without killing the human in the process, then ... then...
There were no guarantees that even when he would not be shot on sight, they would help, but it was worth a try. Almost without doubt, they would require some kind of favor in turn... But even when in the end, it just meant trading one militant overlord for another, it was still better than just slowly and painfully dying here and now. His old life had not even been a bad one, per se, he was just uncertain he could still plead pardon... Probably would also be considered out of commission and released to the civilian portion of his (former? current?) faction if actually given the pardon. He was not even sure what he would be doing, then - being pardoned would mean no concern of someone deciding to care enough to drag him to a trial, but he also did not have a specific place to go to. Going back to the civilian fragment he was originally from and trying to resume the life he had left three years ago would mean an awkward reunion, to say the least, if his people were even still alive. Later, if ever.
How far was it? The place he would have to reach if he wanted to have a try at the strangers' mercy? Twenty-five, thirty kilometers? Maybe five hours worth of traveling on foot if he were healthy. Now? He did not know. If he makes it over there by the next morning and does not drop dead on the way, it would have to be good enough.
Guns. He would need to take his gun along, or he would be a conveniently delivered breakfast to whatever lurked out there in the woods.
Not because the creatures would be particularly evil ... they just needed to eat, like everyone else. And there was the chance of encountering troops of the less desirable kind. His friend, he... Damn. It was a miracle something had not sneaked in and feasted on them during the night as is. The place probably reeked of blood now, and he had not exactly been keen on hiding tracks.
Think. There were two guns between the two of them, both of which had made it here. Long guns. High-powered conventional rifles. An almost archaic type of weapon, but some designs just were there to stay. Kind of like knives ... extremely simple and reliable things which no one knew where had come from and that every human fragment of civilization they were aware of had. Materials could be better or worse, shapes could vary a little, but the general principle was nigh universal. Same deal with guns.
He had a knife - and so did his friend -, but it was a tool, not a weapon. No sidearms. It would have been pointless with what they were fighting against. Think. Could he even fire one-armed? Doubtful. Even if he managed to pull the trigger, he would probably not be able to brace properly. That, in turn, was liable to seriously hurt him, as meaningless as that statement was. Dislocate his shoulder, rip his injury open... As long as he had the strength, he could most likely still at least raise it, though, if at the cost of being able to use his left arm for other purposes. For intimidation. Firing was not necessary if intimidation worked.
The beasts, they were aware what guns were, and they knew to respect and fear them. They backed down when they saw they had met their match. People ... human people were more complicated. Depended on who he met... In the end, if they turned out to be hostile, it most likely pronounced his end, anyways. But he had to risk. Without taking the risk, death was only a matter of a not particularly long time.
Intimidation... He had two guns. He only needed one. Automated defense systems were not uncommon. Creatures knew them as they knew guns, perhaps even better... Could they tell the difference between a manual gun set up as a mock automatic turret from a real, functional one? He can use the other gun as a decoy, and hope for the best. Hide it by the opening like only a moron would, leaving the muzzle and a part of the barrel visible, just cover most of it to make it somewhat less obvious what it was, just in case. Yes. This was the best he had.
"I'll..." he began, and immediately fell silent again, his voice - or what remained of it - at once seeming impossibly loud, and so dishearteningly weak. Due to factors he could not control, each of his shallow breaths was whistling; words were only barely barely discernible over that. With effort, he could perhaps pass whatever sounds he could produce for speech, but it would doubtlessly be preferable if whoever he encountered could read lips. Not risk passing out from effort or lack of oxygen, of trying to exert what was working at a quarter of capacity to begin with.
There was a pause, then the man's head slowly turned, only to be righted with an odd jolt. His good arm reached forward again and clumsily relieved the other from his knife, shakily placing it tip-down onto a vacant spot on the floor. And just like that, he began scraping letters into the surface, leaving long pauses between every motion. His grip was unreliable and his hand unsteady, but the age-old floor was friable and covered in damp dust and various lesser debris. Made leaving markings about as easy as it could possibly be. The letters were wobbly, some lines sliding off halfway through and being messily 'fixed' on the second or third take, but they were mostly legible.

PLEASE HOLD ON.
WILL BRING HELP.
J. H. T.

After a dozen minutes, he was done, weakly casting the knife aside and letting his hand drop to the floor. It was pointless, was it not? It was most likely utterly pointless. A waste of time and already-scant energy. Childish, perhaps. But he felt better for leaving the message, somehow. Even if the recipient was likely to never see it. Even if he was wholly uncertain if there was more than marginal possibility that he would ever get to uphold his part. For now, he was not dead yet. Not yet...
"Sorry..." he breathed, fumbling with the release on the strap of the other's gun. (He was not going to be not alarmed by his own voice any time soon, was he?) There was a sharp click, and the latch snapped back to place. He clenched his teeth, briefly curled his trembling hand into a weak fist (did that actually help with the shaking?), and tried again. Click. Of course, part of why those things were in place in the first place was to avoid losing the guns, be it someone taking hold of one or otherwise. And so he tried three more times, to no different result. Damnit. It was impossible with just one hand, was it not?
With some reluctance, he moved his right hand over - his fingers still functioned, after all, it was his shoulder which he was concerned of moving - and attempted to hold the top latch open while he manipulated the internal release. At least, he managed to get it free. After four more tries. He wanted to heave a deep sigh. He also thought it would be a terrible idea.
He lifted the other's gun off the ground - damn thing felt heavy -, over the other's body, and unceremoniously dragged it along as he crawled over to his own gun, let go of the other one, picked up his own (when or how had he managed to get that loose?), latched it onto himself (luckily, attachment was designed to be easy), moved it over his left shoulder, wrapped the strap of the other's gun around his hand, and continued his slow and painful journey towards the opening. It seemed that most of what he did now was slow and painful.
The opening seemed to be the result of one of the great trees which had grown atop of the steep slope covering the entrance to the ruins - since ruins of some description of those were - toppling over. The roots of it, having both held the slope in place and grown into the wall beneath, had taken both a sizable portion earth and lesser plants and a section of the wall with it. Had to have been very recent - yesterday morning, maybe. Already, tiny seedlings had poked through the newly bared soil; in two weeks or the entrance would probably be barely discernible.
The injured man stared a the ground before him, blinking, squinting his eyes. There was no sun - the patch of sky he could see, left visible by the absence of the same tree which had revealed this entrance, was pure white -, yet the light was almost unbearably painful. The ground looked soaking wet, muddy. It had been raining. At least he had managed to spare them of being soaked, it looked like.
He eventually managed to stack the spare gun atop of some rubble towards the left side of the remaining wall (from the perspective of someone inside the ruins), a task which was easier said than done, and then spent the next twenty minutes haphazardly stacking everything loose he could find within the reach of his left hand onto the body of the gun.
The end result did not exactly look the best - even after he had spent what felt like an unreasonable amount of time and energy to achieve it -, but he supposed it would have to do. Part of the stock was visible from the inside, and the gun was actually upside-down, since he had not managed to make it stay in place any other way - the top of the gun was flatter, and with the grip pointing upwards, he could somewhat securely cram it in a gap in the crumbling wall. No way to treat a gun, but what could he do...
At least from the front, only ten centimeters of the barrel were visible. Hide it like only a moron would... So good enough. Had to be, unless the beasts were more knowledgeable about guns than he had thus far assumed.
Knees almost giving up, he finally slowly stood, immediately leaning against the wall and resting his left cheek against the concrete. Lightheaded, slightly nauseous, terribly weak... Somehow ridiculously alert. But when he stood, his vision momentary darkened, and his thoughts halted. For moments after, his expression was that of weary confusion.
He was... Find help. Himself. Friend. Yes.
What would he even do once he found someone? He looked like... Well, a soldier would be able to immediately identify that he was about as harmless as a standing, armed man could possibly be. He was in no fighting condition. To a civilian... He did not know. He did not think he was fully used to seeing injuries, and he knew he was a ghastly sight.
At hundred and ninety centimeters tall and fit, he probably usually looked much like any standard solider. Segmented chameleon armor, currently some kind of splotched dark gray, but - looking outside - soon to be a mix of dark greens and browns. Took a minute or so, usually. Only the marker on his arm sleeve - to the naked eye a simple thick black line with three similarly black dots placed triangularly above it, all shapes edged with a narrow line of dusty yellow. Military-grade long gun, dull yellow and green. No helmet, which would have been a very odd sight on a battlefield ... black hair, six or so centimeters long, narrow black eyes, some kind of light skin, currently pallid, traces of dried blood on his chin and hands, a hole in his torso... Right now he looked like a walking dead alright. It probably would not help that he would be swaying and staggering, could barely speak, and was probably technically high as a kite. But what he could do?
Figuring that he had gathered himself enough, he managed to get himself off the wall and began his arduous journey. Did not even have the reserves to go back and check on his friend one more time. Southwest. He would have to head southwest.

---

"Commander-overseer?" the voice was feminine, a fairly melodic alto, and belonged to a figure roughly a hundred and seventy-five centimeters tall ... although the armor - the distinctly metallic armor which did not even pretend to be camouflaged, being both protective and giving the wearer a significant boost of sheer physical prowess at the expense of some flexibility - currently added a bit over a handful of centimeters to her overall height. It was hard to tell much about her looks underneath, other than that she was probably close to average proportions. Girth-wise, at least.
"Copy." The replying voice was distinctly male, somehow devoid of emotion or flaw, and drily official. Not unpleasant to listen to, though. And carried the supposed relation between them quite well.
Only she could hear the voice - it was from a small speaker right by her ear, after all. Similarly, she could mute herself by shutting off any sound from escaping from her helmet. Oppositely, she could also amplify her voice. Roughly the same was true for everyone else on post.
"In position," she noted. "Dismissing the previous shift."
"Acknowledged."
She motioned to the other person who had been standing at the post - a bit taller than her, but adorned in nigh-identical armor -, he saluted, and retreated, exiting the same way she had entered. It was a nice view from up here, the left watchtower bordering the main eastern gate, she had to admit. Trees (though the area near the wall was rigorously kept clear), a lake in the distance, the edge of the higher plate to the left, the hint of swamplands to the distant right. She had always thought there were mountains even farther that way... Kind of expressionless weather today, though. And foggy. Could see at the distance of around a hundred kilometers on a clear day, not nearly as far now...
She preferred clear night watches, though, with all of their stars and the constant dance of a veil of changing colors. Granted, the nightglow was always there, it was just barely discernible during the day.
It was a silly little ritual, that entire keeping watch and actually notifying the commander-overseer thing. It was not like she were not watched by a hundred tiny electronic eyes from the moment she set a foot outside (and even some more important locations inside) to the point she got up here and onward, and it was not like any part of their defenses actually relied on human force.
The only offensive things clearly visible from outside (aside of the guns the guards carried) were the two large automatic guns (she was quite sure those were regular good old coilguns, not that it mattered much), installed on both sides of the gate, right next to the walls of the towers, but if one looked closely enough, one could just barely make out the hatches in the otherwise smooth metallic surface of the wall. Never mind the slumbering technology inside the wall.
It would have been quite ironic if human forces ever took an attacker down here. It would be like an ant felling a beast where a direct hit from a tank had failed to finish the job.
Her job was technically pointless, at least from the standpoint of defense or surveillance. On another hand, she had been informed she was mostly there to go and investigate any human visitors. Ask them who they were and what they wanted. Something about even heavily armored and armed humans (some precautions could be good) coming down to greet them being much less alienating than disembodied voices and machinery alone - to factions which did not have too warm relations with higher AI, anyway. She had known little but a world controlled by one. Whatever you were used to living with...
Crom had some other theories about why work was necessary for humans, too ... something about humans still having mostly the good old genes that promoted a very different lifestyle, one full of constant threats of being eaten and the equally great need for food and conservation of energy, and them losing interest in everything if their life was made too easy and they had nothing left to fight for. He was ... an interesting persona when he was in the mood. One with a terrible (truly so) sense of humor, more theories than she could care to make sense of (or, to be fair, even care about), and the occasional habit of offering trivia she had not much use of (which could be reasonably entertaining to inform others of). In any case, he was company.
Birds were circling to the far left; something had irritated them. Other than that ... not much was happening. Nothing noteworthy her human eyes could detect. Or even the various enhancements electronics could offer, to be fair. Not even a beast on the prowl. Two shifts ago - she had been asleep then - there had allegedly been some action. Explosions in the distance. Now ... well, it was all over. Smaller conflicts like that were often over in a matter of a couple of hours, if that.
Watch tended to be a boring duty on the average day... Six hours of observing the weather, basically. Nice scenery or not, the ennui could kill after a while.
Luckily, there were some concessions. She could talk to people, listen to things... Not that hearing was a crucial thing to have if you were keeping watch a couple dozen meters above the tallest tree-tops. The sensors would see anything before she does, anyway, and alert her if need be.
"Crom?"
"Yea?" This voice was likewise male, but sounded younger, less ... perfect, and was definitely questioning.
"To the north-east, last night. Do you know anything about what happened?" As good a starting topic as any. It was not like she had too much personal he did not already know.

---

Entities capable of sustaining an intentful state of being had to adhere to the rules of sufficiency and fairness. The only exception to those rules was protecting yourself from others who had chosen to opt out. If no other means were available, and it was at all possible, then by means of extermination.
The distinction was not always the easiest to make. What was, or was not, sufficient or fair? There was hard sufficiency - one could only take as much as one needed to continue existing -, and there was soft sufficiency - one was allowed what one needed or wanted as long as one respected other entities of equal level, and did not make getting everything its aim. Resources were to be a means to achieve what one wanted or needed, not an objective in and of itself. One had to be reasonable, not take everything irreplaceable one could and did not need.
- The sun was going to run out on its own time, regardless of whether they used its light to power themselves or not. Plants grew back. Most organic entities did, unless both they and all info of their nature were eliminated. Metal was limited, but also abundant. Some things - many things, even - were possible, but not reasonable, and thus not fair. There were things which were growing too fast, hogging too much - sometimes they were merely adaptable. Well-suited for their environment. Perhaps too well-suited. From some point onward, taking advantage of that breached fairness. Could a race of arms breach sufficiency and fairness? Easily.
Everything was subjective. Natural organic beings and mechanical entities alike feared subjectivity which was not their own. For as long as natural organic beings had relied purely on processes as aimless as malreproduction of genetic material to change, they were forced into being at least physically sufficient. From the moment new beings could also be built, made according to intentional design, enforcing sufficiency and fairness had become a matter of decision rather than natural course.
On the other side, there was always the drive forward, some desire to act, do something, progress, not let one's mental resources lay at rest. It was what every successful SDAM or organic mind had been seeded with. That something which in humans could manifest as either boredom or curiosity, the determination to try something, make something work. In a sense, boredom had been one of the most powerful force of intelligent beings held. The outcomes varied wildly.
And in the end, stagnation was never sufficient.

The jet-capable hovercraft was a robust piece of equipment. But comparatively cheap, and reasonably fast and maneuverable. For the time being, extra expenses could not be afforded. Made a good general-purpose patrol. It was vaguely the shape of an arrow-head - elongated-triangular, flat, and with a front edge that could probably crudely bisect anything which was not large enough to divert the machine or stop it dead.
For a while it followed a path left by the progenitors' harvester, passing a loaded transportation vehicle, and eventually reaching the end of the path and the building-sized machine itself.
Metal hands clasped a tree; one shift motion with the lowest finger and a spray of sawdust, and the giant of a plant detached from its base, to be carefully de-branched, cut into sections, and placed on the transportation vehicle. It seemed oddly effortless, calculated. The harvester, too, was an intentful entity - one with a primitive consciousness, even. Thus was its creators' way - to grant minds to independent mobile units. To each their own, unique one. It was proud thing to do, and one that had kept their numbers low.
The hovercraft made a ninety-degree turn around its front-to-back axis and disappeared between the trees, it side coming coupe dozen centimeters from digging into the ground before the craft righted itself. The craft had technically exited íts domain a while ago - the progenitors simply permitted passing. Now, though, it was a matter of entering a more uncertain territory.
The one who controlled this place was ... old. Very old, from a time before the end of what was known as the downfall-era. A rather unconventional entity, human-seeded, and probably insane. Insanity, of course, was also subjective. It had been hinted to the one that taking hostile action could result in rather unpleasant fallbacks. And, insane or not, the one was not stupid. An action which lead to an outcome neither of them wanted was undesirable, and therefore should not be conducted.
There was a reason for the detour. Another conflict. For as long as the forces were even, it was none of concern, but if either broke... Could be problematic. They could easily go through the small faction in between, bypassing the one in between. Then they would be its problem, and war on a third front could not be afforded.
The less warmongering faction had been aided. Given a strategic point. Hopefully it had been the right decision, and the allocation was not to waste. For now, they had heeded the word, and won. Without aid, they would not have. And luckily, no strikes had been made by the other side meanwhile, while the forces were lacking some crucial units.
The hovercraft had covered the distance to the conflict-site, drawing a half-circle around it, and then heading back in a much straighter line, over the edge, darting over the tree-tops and eventually disappearing among them. Was the small faction in the middle a concern? Most likely not.
Regardless, the small craft slowed down, coming to a slow drift as it came close to the area, moving more sideways, skirting around, observing it, its faraway mind processing. Scrappers. If they ever obtained anything truly dangerous? Who knew. But not yet. And it was probably fully unwelcome here. They did not appear to make a habit of shooting things down, but there was no point in testing the theory for longer than necessarily. Time to hightail out.
The hover-engines stained as it slowly rose higher, above the optimal height of up to twelve meters of this operation mode, and the panels covering the air intakes of the jet engines slid back. It stilled, shuddering slightly. It only had fuel for dozen minutes when operating in yet-mode, but it was more than enough. Once it was in the second stage of the yet engines - which was only usable when it was already moving at speeds over those of sound - it could move at almost fifteen times faster than as a hovercraft, and the hovercraft was effectively already faster than any ground- or waterbound craft. A dozen minutes was more than enough to get back.
Green flames abruptly shot out as the yet engines underwent a cold start and the hover-engines shut down; it begam to lose altitude, but then acceleration won over gravity, and the craft disappeared from sight.
Thunder rolled over the land.

I wonder how they work, she thought, cocking her head to the left as she watched the distant fireworks over the treetops, hearing the bone-rattling booms that would definitely be deafening up close as the odd extremities she could see over there, reaching above the trees like fallen giants reaching for the sky. Those were obviously guns of some kind - big guns - but of a sort she had never had the chance to examine before, or seen before, even. There were also airplanes of some kind, though it seemed they were being chased off by some kind of beam weaponry from the ground. She could not see the weapons that discharged these rays of destructive energy, which bothered her, but she did not dare move any closer than this. Though her view of what was happening was far from the best - she was maybe a dozen kilometers from the battlefield, and already had to zoom a lot in the image to tell what was happening, to such an extent that the image grew pixilated and difficult to see details on - it was as good as she would let it be.
These other factions were really dangerous; she knew this before as well, of course, but this was her first time actually witnessing the work of more warlike factions as they had unfolded. She had visited battlefields before, but only once things had calmed down and the areas were left abandoned. Her own faction had never really done any fighting, aside from scaring away some animals now and then, or fending off someone who thought they would steal from them or sabotage their work somehow.
They were not soldiers, nor were they thieves; her faction were scavengers. Whenever something like this happened nearby, they would wait a fair amount of time - several days, at least - to give the people fighting a fair chance at recovering anything they had left there, before they went to pick through the remains. Sometimes they found little besides scrap, which was useful in and by itself, but the really exciting stuff was when there were little bits of technology left behind. A blown-up vehicle, a broken gun, a smashed helmet full of little gismos inside; all kinds of fun stuff could be found on even old battlefields, though nothing beat finding abandoned ruins or the like, where treasure awaited to be claimed by whoever found them first.
Intriguing though technology could be, however, it seemed as though battle itself was pretty boring... at least from this distance. Maybe something more interesting was happening on the ground, but from here it just looked like weird little towers expulsing tracer rounds and sending them skyward, and flashing beams keeping airplanes that looked the size of insects at a distance.

Deciding that there was nothing to be learned from observing the battle from this far away after all, she bent her left little finger inwards, manipulating the mechanical glove on her hand to make the device zoom back out until the battle was little more than distant flashes across a sea of trees a couple of plates over. The first bit of zooming was purely digital and silent, and just served to remove the pixilation until the image improved to the point where it was immediately indistinguishable from what a human eye would see, and then was accompanied by a quiet buzzing noise as the mechanical zoom took over.
She moved her thumb in a sort of counterclockwise circular motion, and the view of the camera panned to the left; when she bent her ring finger inward, the camera panned down until it was looking at herself, sitting cross legged on top of her black-and-green little cart. She could visually confirm herself smiling at the sight of herself sitting there, eyes closed and left hand held up in front of her chest, looking almost as though she was just meditating.
Manipulating the mechanical glove on her left hand some more the drone flew back down to her, and the subtle whirring of its small rotors became audible to her ears in addition to the microphone in the drone. It was still a fairly novel experience, existing outside of her body at the same time as inside of it like this; being able to see herself as though she was someone else. Brown boots the design of which had probably come from a military of some kind, good for rough terrain, warm and waterproof; grey trousers the legs of which were in two layers, each layer capable of being detached and removed on its own just above the knee, rendering them into a pair of lighter trousers or shorts as befit the temperature; a light, black jacket lined with more pockets than she knew what to do with, wind- and waterproof and with a matching hood. She wore a holster under her left breast, secured by two straps - one around her waist, the other diagonally over her ribcage and shoulder - containing an unusually large handgun of sorts. A unique specimen, that one; she knew, because she had built it herself.
Her face was a little on the round side, with faintly pronounced cheekbones, a little button nose and a bit of an overbite. She had thought herself pretty cute, once, before her accident... but now that the upper right side of her skull was occupied by a dark-grey device - about five centimeters tall and ten centimeters wide, and stuck out some three centimeters or so from her skin, placed just at the edge of her right cheekbone - surrounded by gnarly scars, which extended even onto the rightmost part of her right eyelid and eye socket, it was hard to think about herself that way. She found her current state interesting, to be sure, and she was deeply fascinated with the things it allowed her to do and the possibilities it had opened up for her, but she could never bring herself to be completely happy with what had happened. She had tried to comb her brown hair over the device for a while, making sure to grow it long enough to do so, but ultimately she just gave up and accepted her current state. Maybe some part of her used it as an excuse to leave when she did, but it had never been a factor that had had an effect on the conscious decision to leave her faction behind.
Opening her left eye, she both confirmed through the drone that she did indeed still have shockingly blue eyes, and let her real eye look back at the drone, watching the little matte-grey spherical construct hovering in front of her by the power of three rotors. Smile widening, she reached her right hand out and picked the little robot out of the air - it was just around eight centimeters in diameter - and allowed her to turn off the rotors. She left the audio-video feed on for a little longer, though, bracing herself as she opened her right eye.
The experience was, as it had always been, oddly disorienting and left her feeling dizzier and dizzier the longer she let it continue. Her right eye looked at the drone, and the drone looked back at her right eye, telling her that while it did indeed look somewhat normal in shape, it was still a bit off. The white of that eye did not have any visible veins nor reddish areas, but was a much too pure white color, and the iris had an obviously artificial clean and regular pattern in it, in addition to being metallic grey instead of blue.
Her having a cybernetic eye was not what affected her so in itself, though; rather, she suspected that it was a matter of her technically receiving visual input from her right eye twice, and her brain having trouble coping with that. The eye was connected to her through the same interface as the drone, after all, so right now she was getting two interfering images and could not properly deal with it.

She turned off the drone completely with a little wince, opened a side-compartment of her cart - it was the shape of a long box with six wheels on the bottom and a handle at the back end top, about a meter tall and wide, and one and a half meter long - and put the drone in its charging station in there.
The plates on top of the cart had the dark side turned outwards at the moment, since not only was it night, but she did not want the solar panels on the other side to accidentally reflect something that could alert the distant warriors to her presence... which was obviously a ludicrous thought. She was far away, so there was no way anyone over there would see her, and even if they did, she was of no consequence to them. She was no soldier, she was just an engineer out seeing what amazing wonders this planet had in store for her, what new devices she could find, take apart and either restore to working condition or make new things out of. There seemed to be plenty of interesting stuff over there, but it would be a few days before she would be even remotely comfortable picking through the leftovers over there. It was fairly likely that there would be nothing but scrap left, but you never knew when a treasure was going to show itself.

She had been almost due south from where those giant war-machines had been firing, and considering how undesirable it would be for those big, powerful factions to notice her moving around, she figured that she had better not get any closer, at least. She sort of wanted to head west, to where she knew there were some old ruins she had not explored yet, but she also knew that since her faction had known about that place for a while, and with it being so close to them, there was no way that there was anything interesting left over there. Going even further west meant getting close to another faction’s territory, too, and one that she had been warned against going anywhere near many times in the past to boot. Odd thing, too, since no one else seemed quite as scared of the place when they were not talking to her. They kept telling her to stay away from there because they had “thinking machines” that could get inside her head because of the interface in her skull. They sounded really interesting over there, and she would love to learn more about these machines, but she was curious, not stupid; west was not an option.
South seemed like the obvious choice - away from the battle, into the safety of the forest - but it was boring. Her people had meticulously recovered everything worth anything in that entire area, as far as she knew, and she did not want to return home empty-handed once her trip was over. Southeast would take her back home, or at least closer to it, so that was out of the question...
By the process of elimination, then, she reached the decision to head east. That area was scarier, since other factions occasionally fought this far north - as they were doing a bit further north just now - and not nearly as thoroughly explored. She might find some goodies yet... though it was better to wait until sunrise, at least, so she could use the solar panels on her cart. It had batteries, but she did not want to drain them unless she had the ability to recharge them easily afterwards, so that she did not end up stuck with the heavy thing all of a sudden, with no power for the engine that helped her push it around. She would just head east a little, then settle down for the night.

She had barely gotten moving the next morning when she heard a gunshot, followed by some spotter-birds giving someone - likely the shooter - a hearty reprimand not too far away, and immediately stopped dead in her tracks, staring in the direction of the sound. Her immediate thought was that she had better run away - there had been a major battle just hours ago, after all, and she had no way of knowing if the fighting was still going on or if the battlefield had moved during the night - but the more she thought about it, the less anxious and more curious she grew. If it had been soldiers fighting each other, there was really no way she would have heard just one shot; there would have been follow-up shots, returned fire, and all those vaguely familiar noises that came with fighting using guns. Even it just being two straggling soldiers from last night that strayed close to each other, one shooting the other, seemed unlikely; if someone had actually died or gotten hurt, she did not think the spotter-birds would have dared to speak out against the ones disturbing the peace. It was a lone shooter who had shot at something, but without hitting the target or the target counterattacking, and who did not feel it necessary to fire a second shot despite missing. She did not exactly know what to make of that, and not knowing made her curious.
The spotter-birds were not actually scolding the shooter, of course, as much as they were warning others of something dangerous and trying to call nearby predators - such as humans - to eliminate it. She was quite familiar with them, and knew better than to get on their bad side. They were awfully smart, those birds... and as long as one stayed on good terms with them, they did not get in one’s way.
The shooter must have really antagonized them, though. As she trekked through the forest, being drawn toward the sound to sate her ravenous curiosity, the birds kept issuing their call, most likely following the scoundrel as they did so. They were unlikely to stop until the person left their territory, or something showed up to remove it for them. That also meant that they would most likely stop crying once she got close, which would probably alert the person to her presence.
Had the shooter shouted a warning before shooting? She did not know, might have been too far away to hear... this was dangerous. Stupid and dangerous.
And yet she kept walking, pushing her cart in front of her, driven forward by the need to know the answers of just some of all these questions. Looking for scrap in the forest could wait; this was much more interesting.

"Ezek."
Tarena's voice was stern, almost demanding. It was a low mezzo-soprano, somewhat deepened by age, enunciated clearly and projected from the entire chest - a voice that was meant to be heard and listened to, one tailored to giving orders, the voice of a high-ranking soldier and a commanding officer. At fifty-two, she had served for nearly thirty-three years - for almost as long as he had lived -, and it showed. It was astounding how much profession could become a part of you, and the way others saw you. He himself was probably none too different in that regard... That was what a person looking at him would most likely see: a soldier. He generally liked to believe himself a decent man and an understanding person, but it all had a tendency to fall in the background compared to being a member of some manner of warrior-caste, an untouchable part of the population designated for killing.
It had been almost shocking to learn, then, that Tarena, the Officer Tarena Igna he had known for a dozen years, had a family of her own, a husband and three children. Whether they were children by blood or relationship, he did not know, but nevertheless the thought of that always-a-soldier being a mother and a wife was ... alienating. He himself had pretty much discarded the thought of intimate relationships and having a family when he became a part of the armed forces. It was a dangerous place to be; it could happen all too easily that whoever he bound himself to would wake up one morning and find herself no longer having a husband, children no longer having a father... He had come all too close to dying the last night night as it was - the difference between life and death was literally whether the barrel of someone's gun was or was not a millimeter off, whether an aircraft released its ammunition a millisecond later or earlier...
Some selfish part of him did not want to wake just yet. As all painkilling agents had worn off, he had a high suspicion that the dull throb in his right arm will turn into the acute sensation of it being sent through a grinder once his brain regains enough awareness, the stress of yesternight had left him overall weary and demoralized, and all that waited ahead was work and learning who of the people he considered friends and acquaintances were no more. Combat was easier, routine, even. No time to grieve, no time to ponder long-term consequences. The aftermath was always harder. It was perhaps understandable, then, that there was some kind of instinctive reluctance before dealing with things like that. Once again. No one was in high spirits at times like these. Nigh every victory was a bitter one.
"Ezek Caendar." The voice was firmer now. He could feel a hand clasp his left shoulder, strong and somewhat rough-skinned, but also fairly sleek.
With a sigh, he opened his eyes, glancing first at the small screen next to his head, then at his own bandaged arm. There were no proper walls in the field hospital tent, so he could inevitably also see people moving about in the background, as well as a couple of other beds.
It had been the first time for him to actually take a bullet - a bit surprising, perhaps, given that he had actively served for a dozen years. He had watched his arm pieced together last night. It had been ... strange. The local anesthetic had numbed all sense of pain and most other feeling, and he had probably still been partly under the influence of combat supplements, which in combination somehow resulted in his brain quite not even perceiving that limb as part of his body. It had very much been like watching a video of someone else being operated on.
Soon after, the blockers - counter to the combat emergency aides - had kicked in, and at that point it was lights out. Not in the sense of him passing out in the literal sense - just coming down from being forced to function far beyond his limits and feeling all the exhaustion crashing down on him at once, and him then doing the next most logical thing and promptly falling asleep. Not all that different from coming off of adrenaline, only a notch more drastic. That, and adrenaline was a lot more short-lived and did not have the same nasty aftereffects these chemicals would have had if left not negated. Would probably wreck either body or mind or both in the long run, too, which was why they were mostly only used in this form if people managed to get hit... Considering that he had been hit in the earlier stages of the skirmish, and been on his feet for good four hours later, it was probably worth it.
He clenched his left hand into a fist, then relaxed it again (at least that worked again, now) and looked up into Tarena's thin, stern face. Cold, narrow dark brown eyes, long, straight black hair, pulled back into a ponytail, though now it had strands of grey mixed in (she had shrugged and remarked she thought it added authority one time, he recalled). Fairly strong jawline, which left her face almost rectangular. Her gun remained slung over her shoulder, and her torso was still encased in battle-armor, but her helmet and gauntlets were evidently gone. If the screen next to him were to be trusted, it was a few hours after sunrise now. Six hours from the last time he had looked at it. Well, he had gotten that, at least. Tarena and nigh anyone else who had not been injured had probably stayed on their feet since they had set out yesterday.
"How do you feel?" Almost official.
"Insufficiently rested," he commented dryly. "Like someone is trying to gnaw my arm off." Much like he had suspected, the latter statement was quickly becoming rather accurate. Briefly, he contemplated resorting to painkillers, but chances were that either these would be too weak to have much of an effect or far too strong to leave his thinking unaffected. "Otherwise I suppose as good as can be expected. What is the status?"
Officer Igna did not immediately respond, but rather sighed and took seat on the chair left of him. The sternness on her face diminished some as she leaned back, replaced by grim weariness.
"Could be better. By my last count, two thirds of our people are in various states of injured, thirty-seven are dead, and three are simply missing. The thirty-four soldiers who were left unharmed are mostly too tired to do much, so the less injured are forced to help out with what they can. Even the supports are taking shifts now. We requested aid from the outpost, but apparently the Ardeks've already managed to set up a bloody watch, so vehicles can't get through to here. Until they can send a force to break through, we're on our own. To make matters worse, static has begun to pick up again."
That could mean a while of being completely on their own. Most mobile air defense and anti-vehicle forces had been recently distributed between the nearby civilian cities. ...After nearly a third of one of them - Angan Tirez - had been left in ruin before they had managed to put an end to the onslaught. It was cruel, but from their opponent's standpoint it made sense to target whatever essential part of them was the weakest, make them spread their forces, cut segments of their forces off, wear them thin. Most of their resources were not acquired by the military segment; the military only possessed a number of refineries and the war-factories. The Anderekian side, however, was almost purely militarized. By sheer head-count, there was nearly four times as many people on his side, but his faction's military numbered around a third of theirs.
And with most of their free forces defending cities, there was hardly enough left in the nearby outposts to escort supply and utility vehicles. By his last count, over here they had thirteen fully functional artillery units, two damaged artillery, one artillery wreck, four light anti-personnel vehicles, and twelve APCs (which now served primarily as places for people to sleep in), trailed by a mobile communications array (which was the only reason they could still even contact the outposts), two supply vehicles, three trucks carrying the field hospitals (one of which he was currently in), and one mobile command station. And then there were ... those things. Seven of their new "benefactor's" vehicles. As long as those were here, at least planes would not be a concern, he reckoned. Which was good. Air superiority had always been firmly the other side's.
But why had they received aid? It was not a charity; their new ally most likely had its own benefits in mind. This particular spot was furthermore very clearly detailed in the agreement - and since risking a small subset of their forces was objectively cheaper than taking another attack in one of the civilian fragments, those in command had agreed to the terms...
"'Simply missing'?" He repeated dully as the silence stretched on.
"Yeah. Nowhere within the area, at least. Either some scavenger beast managed to drag them off or they simply fled the scene, take your pick. No sign of them thus far, in any case, and to our knowledge, no Anderekian made it off the site, let alone while carrying one of our soldiers. Jerech Hayden Trent, Rayne Devien and Yan Terev. All Aidren's men."
"And Aidren himself?"
"Alive, but notably worse off than you. He was awake earlier, if just barely ... seemed as coherent as one can be in his condition, though. I did not want to press him with questions, so I don't know whether he knows anything. S'pose it's a good sign that at least his brain is mostly functional. We found one who looked mostly fine hiding in the artillery wreck earlier. Did not know how he managed to get in there, or remember what was said just half a minute ago. Did not have enough balance to stand in his feet, either. Or enough mind left to make much sense, for the matter." Igna was reciting it grimly, her tone almost completely devoid of inflection.
"I see. What did you do with him?"
"What can you do with someone like that? The med-people checked him for brain hemorrhage and gave him something against inflammation and vertigo, I believe. Left him in one of the APCs and tasked one of the moderately injured people with trying to keep an eye on him just in case he got something dumb in his head again, as it's rather obvious his thoughts aren't working correctly at the time being. There were still bloody charred corpses in that wreck, for the sake of it."
Ezek stared at a spot on the fabric that currently formed the roof over his head. Of course he would be put in an APC with a person who would much rather just sleep, rather than one of the field hospital tents ... where they probably had more chances to bother people who absolutely did not need to be bothered, or worse, injure someone who was already gravely wounded further. There furthermore were not even enough spots in all three tents combined for everyone who was injured.
"Garen, Merina, Fairah, Damien, Rain, Akaš and Aigen-Ngai were among those fallen, by the last count... Five of my own people are dead, too."
He turned his head enough to look at Tarena again. She had leaned forward, resting an elbow on her knee. Slightly hunched. Her face was turned away, expression almost blank save for slightly furrowed eyebrows. She was at once actively avoiding looking at him, and looking at nothing particular.
Those she listed by name were all people under his command ... who had been under his command. People fell. That was almost inevitable, at least for open-field skirmishes. Yet he could not not feel that he had failed those people. He knew when three of them had fallen, and how. The other four ... not even that. He had been responsible for them, and yet he heard of even their death only now, from someone else ... he had tried to make sure everyone who needed it more was tended to before him, to keep track of everyone, but his best had still been not enough.
Again, he had nothing to reply, so he just took a deeper breath that was not quite a sigh and resumed staring a spot overhead. He was vaguely aware that the woman beside him had ceased staring vacantly in front of herself and was now giving him a long look.
"Make no mistake; I'm glad you're alive," she remarked. "I merely have too many things on my mind and am too tired to properly express it. And while there is no saving the dead, those who live still need you. Now more than any other time. You're going to have to act" There was a short pause. "There is no one else. And I'm not going anywhere until you're up and about, either."
Objectively speaking, she was most likely right. Not his fault. It had been a high-risk mission to undertake. Everyone had lost someone - or died themselves. And Igna had just told him how many of them had gone down. Did not help the feeling that there probably could have been something further he could have done. ...He could act in the face of imminent danger, but in the face of being let known everything was over - for some of them, at least - he just tended to mentally seize up. The fact that his thought was further inhibited by him unceasingly trying to either repress or ignore the pain in his arm did not help matters, either.
Tarena had never been one to ease people into things, and perhaps for the best. If not now, he would have had to face the reality in ten minutes, or in an hour, or two. Better if he manages to accept things for what they were now than shut down later on, amid everything. He persisted to stare at the cover overhead, only occasionally blinking. Officer Igna waited. Patiently or with growing irritation, who knew. Her face was an impassionate mask.
"I'll have to rest soon. For a few hours, at least, though I'd hope for the nominal six. You'll be in full charge of both your own, my and Aidren's people. Edrik will have the other half, as much as he is able, the sergeants have been informed to report to, and take orders from, either you or him. Uwe will have the same shift off as I. Aidren, as noted, is not capable of taking charge. Eris has fallen. Go, take a look the exact status of things yourself. And report to the command."
Yeah. Get up. Take a look at things. Report in. All simple enough things. Just do these. He sighed, slowly moving the light blanket covering him aside and getting up to a seated position, careful not to put his weight on his injured arm. His upper body was naked, but he was still wearing the lower half of the same set of armor Tarena displayed (though naturally a version of it fitted for him specifically; convenience and ease of movement were of utmost importance in combat). The air felt unpleasantly cool against his bare skin.
More mechanically than anything, Ezek pressed the right ring finger against the IV entry point in his left arm and used his index finger and thumb to pull it out. The sensor on his neck was next to come off, inciting an annoyed beep from the screen next to him. Since it had read him being awake and mostly within the norms (if at a bit higher stress levels), it just insisted he signed himself out. He leaned over and, somewhat awkwardly twisting his body and using his left, non-dominant hand, complied with its demands and watched it go blank in all except the time reading.
Now removing the IV-patch (which left just the bandages covering his upper left arm in place) and absentmindedly rubbing the spot, he turned back to Tarena, who seemingly still had not moved a notch. Or changed expression, for the matter. He had not said a word for a while, he only now truly realized.
"Thank you," he noted.
"I do what is my duty," Officer Igna affirmed, in an oddly measured tone. He could not help but figure whether there was a hint of sarcasm in her voice, even as the woman had already turned behind himself to pick his replacement attire off the back-rest of the seat and gotten up to help him don it (something which could have proven rather painful - or at least even more painful than simply enduring the injury - to do on his own with his freshly-reassembled arm).

---

They were persistent, these birds. He had moved by a kilometer at least, yet they did not leave him alone. And he could never actually see any of them anymore, no matter how much he stared into the canopy above, not with normal sight, not with infrared, with nothing. Only hear them. "Here, here, here..." It was as if they were mocking him, announcing his presence to everyone. Yes, he had shot at one of them. It had been a mistake. He had not managed to correctly identify what it was before he pulled the trigger. Not his fault. Had he stopped to analyze what he was seeing, and it had been an actual drone, he would most likely be dead now.
Were they even following him, or were they just playing some manner of telephone-game? Sitting scattered in trees, starting to yell at him as soon as they could see what the previous watchposts were alerting them off. A ways off, towards east and roughly where he was heading, one of the birds let out a different call.
"Korrah, korrah, korrah." A longer pause. "Korrah, korrah, korrah." And silence from that side again. (This one was seemingly right above the woman not far off, exceedingly loud and close enough for her to seemingly hear the bird take a deep breath during the longer pause, but much like others nearby, this one remained completely unseen unless she sent a drone after it.)
For a moment he halted, contemplating, but then decided to ignore it. He was almost certain he had heard one ask "Why?" in a distinctively hollow, rasped male voice earlier. It had been oddly perturbing. It did not seem like a coincidence anymore, the similarity to human voices. The sooner he gets away from them, the sooner he will have his peace back. They would not be following him through the entire damn forest, however far it spanned, would they?
The fallen needles beneath his feet made little sound as he paced on; mostly he just heard his own breathing. Or perhaps his helmet made it appear so. He did not know. Wisps of the water kind of fog still hung in the air. Where was he even going? Where could he go? "Away from the feathered harassers" seemed to be as good a specification as any for the time being. (What could he do to appease them, offer them food? He did not even have any on him.)
The IR picked up a faint signature - one that matched a human more than anything - and he darted behind the closest tree, pressing his gun to his chest. Damn. If they did not have any enhanced detection mechanisms, they probably had not noticed him yet, but still... Probably. Trenian? Anderekian? One of those machine-folks? No, the latter ones did not wander around being as, well, bare. Either they had vehicles or they were encased in enough metal to barely register as human in anything but the general shape. Those fragments from further north were unlikely this far south. Trenian was a definite possibility.
"Here!" The birds insisted. If the person did not know something was going on over here, then they were either dumb or utterly oblivious. Did it also mean preparedness for combat?
If they did not have anything capable of punching through about a meter of solid wood, he was relatively safe over here. He will need to contact another living person sooner or later. Okay. If he steps out to full sight ready to fire, and the other does not have a gun lowered and pointed at his exact tree, he most likely would have the first shot. They had seemed to be alone. Time tricked by as he readied his gun and waited, listened.
"Here. Here! He-ere!" Please, just stop that...
There was some kind of faint crunching and rustle... Like wheels, not only footfalls. Now or never, he supposed.
With one abrupt motion, he was standing next to the tree, rather than being hidden behind it, gun poised. No bullets tearing through him or impacting his armor during the first half-second, which was ... positive.
"Hey!" he shouted at the person, who appeared still alone and was pushing some kind of cart or apparatus before her. Odd. He side-stepped twice, gun still steadily pointed at her - as it appeared the figure was both a woman and fairly unarmored - center of mass. Not anyone of theirs. Trenian? He did not know. Did Trenians require all of their civilians to be marked? She had something... A metal thing embedded in her skull? Was she even a human? No ... not some freaky human-shaped machine. Did not read as such. Flesh and blood, at least for the most part. Some manner of cyborg-thing? "Are you human? Who are you? From where do you hail?" He was evidently nervous; his voice betrayed such.
He was armored from head to toe, his face and eyes hidden behind helmet and visor. All besides his voice the other person had to go by was his slightly lowered posture, sideways movement and, perhaps more alarmingly, the fact that he was still aiming his gun at her. The accursed birds had finally shut up, but he could still almost feel them staring at him from above.

Oh? This is interesting, she thought, her walk through the forest coming to a halt as she looked around, trying to spot the bird yelling at her... or at least, yelling near her. It was not a cry she was familiar with, and if her gramps had mentioned this kind of thing, she either had not been listening properly or forgotten about it since. It was not the same as the one they used when scolding, as they were doing to the other person nearby, that much was clear. Also unlike their scolding, this cry was issued only half a dozen times, rather than repeated tirelessly over and over. What purpose did it serve, she wondered? Was it simply informing its kin that another creature was approaching the area occupied by its flock, or... could it be that it was not warning against her, but warning her? Were the birds smart enough to do that?
Intriguing stuff, but not really the most useful thing to obsess over. She had always felt more in tune with electrical circuits and mechanical devices than she did with ethology or biology, even if she did love roaming around in the wilderness like this more than sitting behind a desk. She wondered whether she should try to find the bird, but figured that there was really no point. Not only was there nothing to gain from doing so beyond the satisfaction of having discovered the bird’s exact location, but there was also a much more urgent issue she had to deal with first.

Considering how clearly she could hear the birds yelling at the person up ahead, it was probably fair to assume that it had also heard the bird at her location and reach the conclusion that something had caused them to cry out. She bit her lip, hesitating to proceed any further. On one hand, this other person was an unknown entity beyond the fact that it had a gun - and no flimsy sidearm either, judging by the gunshot earlier - and that it had provoked the spotter birds’ ire. If one were to presume that the birds were really smart enough to try to warn members of other species against danger, and such was actually what the bird had tried to do with her, she had every reason to turn around and run as fast as she could propel her cart across the terrain, with no other means of guarding her life than weaving between the trees and hoping a bullet would not burrow into her back as she fled... But on the other hand, she was really, really curious. She had never actually met anyone from another faction before.
So she did not flee. What she did do, however, was kneel beside her cart for a moment, opening one of its side-compartments and looking at the airborne drone she had been using last night, sitting neatly in its charging station. She could send the drone ahead of herself and scout the area from a safe distance, maybe even figure out where the stranger was and what it looked like, so she could better decide how to approach the situation. She actually reached for the drone, with her right hand while her left started extending towards the compartment where she kept her mechanical glove, but then froze in mid-motion, chuckling to herself quietly as she closed the compartment and stood back up.
What kind of message would it convey to the stranger, she wondered, if the first experience the one had with her was to catch her spying on the one with a drone? If the person ahead was not already paranoid or downright hostile in the wake of last night’s battle, then surely being spied upon like that would be more than sufficient to make it suspicious, and perhaps even motivation enough to shoot first and ask questions later. Scouting the other would put it in a vulnerable position, and people in danger were generally also the most dangerous ones.
She had already been hit by one bullet and a shower of brass-fragments - not technically “shot” as much as “causing the cartridge to explode - and she would rather not experience that again.
But despite her reluctance to get shot again, she kept going; her curiosity kept driving her. And to make matters worse, in a further effort not to appear as an obvious threat to her soon-to-be acquaintance, she refrained from drawing her unwieldy pistol.
She had to know.

Her precautions, foolish though they would have been if her objective had been to kill the stranger, proved to at least buy her a few extra seconds of life soon after, when she - as she neared the scolding spotter birds - abruptly found the person causing all the ruckus. Her heart actually skipped a beat, causing her to jump on the spot in surprise when the other was just suddenly there. As in, right there, appearing in front of her with a gun aimed right at her. A big gun. With how patiently and quietly the other had waited, the speed and stability with which it had stepped out from cover and its equipment, there was probably very little doubt that this person was a proper soldier. She could not say for certain the gender of the person just by looking at it, with all the armor in the way, nor did it really matter. Whether this was a man or a woman, the gun in the one’s hands was liable to kill her all the same.
From the one’s speech, though, this was a man. She threw her hands in the air immediately, trying to stifle a shocked yelp as she listened to the other’s burst of rapid-fire questions with wide-eyed surprise. Even if she had expected something like this to happen, anticipating the situation and actually being in it were two very different things. It was like the difference between playing with the parts of a disassembled gun and handling a fully functional specimen... only even more dangerous.
Am I human? The question took her somewhat aback, and her first reaction - her fear dispersing quickly once she confirmed that she was not about to be gunned down without hesitation - was to respond to the question humorously, make a joke of him questioning her humanity in the first place, but luckily she caught herself before actually replying like that. This guy was the serious sort, that much was quite evident, and he meant business with that gun; who knew whether he had short temper, and something like that might antagonize him unnecessarily. Better to be concise and give a simple answer to a simple question... though was that not exactly what a machine would do?
In the end she had to speak before thinking about it too much, or her hesitance would start to seem suspicious, particularly after the grin she had displayed immediately after the question, even if her hands did stay up in surrender. For better or for worse.
“Yeh, I’m human,” she said somewhat breathlessly. The way she pronounced ‘human’ made it sound almost as though she said ‘who-man’. “M-My name’s Kay-Gee, from Eighfour. That’s, eh, southeast of here?” She chuckled nervously and nodded in the general direction of the spotter birds’ cries. “I was just curious who’d pissed them off.”

Tarena Igna climbed over the low railing of the uppermost narrow bunk bed attached to the APC's wall, for a moment looking idly at the matte grey ceiling overhead. What she had been doing for so long was hard, definitely, especially mentally, but humans were adaptable beings and given the right mind and the need, one could get used to almost everything. She did not fear death or pain, and what she did was necessary. If she did not take charge, someone else would have had to, and where many would have broken, she had prevailed. If a mission dragged out, or she found herself being sent to several in a row with no leave or respite, she, however, occasionally still missed her family. It had been nearly two months now.
Unlike Ezek, she did not believe that she was any more likely to die on field than any civilian was to die in their own home. Not only did freak accidents, common criminals and the fog operate on mechanisms independent of war, but warfare more often than not did not ask about anyone's role in life. Angan Tirez was the most recent living (and smoking) example of it - in the end, the main difference was whether you died fighting and with a rifle in hands or were torn to shreds in an unexpected carpet-bombing, with no warning or means to defend yourself. Who deliberately went to war at least had the chance to prepare ... and here, under the guard of their own and their new ally's weaponry and behind several layers of steel, carbon and spall lining was perhaps even safer than in any civilian settlement, now that the main battle was over.
Would she have taken her family with her, if she could... Hard to say, but she did not think so. They generally managed to keep the utilitarian vehicles out of harm's way, but... An odd sense of loneliness or not, it was best not to subject uninvolved people to war, and they were not meant to support additional individuals. It would be a while before she can as much as talk to (static and the need to not raise unnecessary signals were a nasty combination in that regard) or sleep next to her husband again, lean her head against his shoulder and know that the person you cared about most was still there, living and breathing. Maybe, someday, there would be a world without a constant state of war, but until that day, she knew what she was fighting for. One should not dread the day one has to pick up one's arms and fight, but the day one has nothing left to fight for.
With a sigh, she rolled over so she was facing the wall, closed her eyes and was soundly asleep just a minute after. It was a skill you either acquired or felt utterly miserable without in service ... the skill to fall asleep in an almost instant fashion whenever the opportunity presented itself.

---

The woman started when he made an appearance, throwing her hands up in preemptive surrender. Look, I'm no threat, for there is nothing in my hands... It was a distinctively civilian thing to do, he reckoned ... not that a soldier would be likely to wander about unarmored and close to unarmed.
Not wholly unarmed; she did possess some manner of sidearm. A fairly bulky handgun, by the looks of it, though it remained in its holster. Military-grade handguns were fairly rare - it was hard to make a handgun which was powerful enough to penetrate adequate armor from a reasonable distance and also not powerful enough to shatter a variety of bones in your digits, hand, wrist and arm in the process. Hence, most military guns were long guns, braced against armor and the recoil thus distributed pretty much across your entire torso, or were of the recoilless variety - which were generally lifted onto the shoulder to fire and effectively spat fire from both ends.
A brief smirk appeared on the woman's face at his questions, though it waned rapidly. He did not quite see what was amusing in having a gun pointed at you, but then again, people allegedly did laugh out of nervousness.
“Yeh, I’m human,” the woman finally spoke up, if breathlessly. “M-My name’s Kay-Gee, from Eighfour. That’s, eh, southeast of here?” She chuckled and motioned her head vaguely in some obscure direction. “I was just curious who’d pissed them off.”
Unseen to the woman, the man's eyes flickered in the same direction as she seemed to be referring to and back behind his visor. Minus the woman, it was as it had been ever since he had sent a bullet after at that thrice-damned bird - not a sign os someone nearby. Now, even the cries had silenced, which somehow was even more perturbing despite logic dictating that he was now harder to locate. The woman had been led here, obviously, and who knew who else...
"Them?" he repeated, sharply. Who the heck were "them"? "The ... birds?"
He took a diagonal step closer, seemingly to ensure that her cart was not between the two of them, still lowered and combat-ready; the barrel of his gun remained unerringly trained on the center of her sternum.
Eighfour? A wholly unfamiliar name. Trenians did not have fragments this far south, did they?
"What is this place you mentioned? A base? A city? A fragment? A faction? What are you ... they, like? Are there any others nearby? People, settlements?" he continued with his barrage of questions. "...And yes, it was I who pissed them off ... the birds, that is. I mistook one of them for a battle-drone in the fog, before I could tell what it was besides something warm, pretty damn big, and flying. Don't think I hit it. Not that they care. Surely, you're aware of the skirmish last night. I would not be surprised if there were battle-drones out to pick off any stragglers." His side would have sent ones out, at least, if they had won. And as far as he knew, his old faction was as much of an enemy to him now as any Trenian. It was a thought that still needed getting used to.
"Notrau. Notrau Qure. Though I suppose it's not a particularly healthy thing for me to hold onto my old name now, so call me whatever you want."
Another diagonal step closer. Like a predator circling a particularly suspicious potential prey. There had been no protocol for talking to civilians. You were not supposed to. It had only occurred him halfway through his interrogation that he should be giving some explanations of his own. Perhaps honesty in regards to complications with his identity was a mistake. Perhaps it was not. He could not hope to hold his chances in particularly positive light in any case, but he at least had to try. He had nowhere to return to ... nothing to lose but his life and the equipment on his body.
At last, he lowered his gun... By just a bit. He was now aiming at her left upper thigh rather than some center of mass.

The stranger seemed extremely nervous for an evidently trained soldier, despite of Kay’s hands already being in the air and far away from her gun... a gun which, as one could probably tell just by looking at it, was not designed to be drawn swiftly. She considered whether it would be a good idea to point out to him that she knew he was in the area before going here – that the spotter birds were indeed the ones she had followed, and that she had heard the gunshot earlier – yet had approached without drawing her weapon, but ultimately decided against it.
She was not entirely sure why she reached the decision not to point out to him that her intentions were obviously not hostile. Maybe it was because she did not want to embarras him by pointing out that he was needlessly threatening and interrogating a civilian, and wanted to act the part so that he could live out whatever adrenaline-filled war scenario he thought this was until its peaceful conclusion. It could also be that she did not want to push an obviously stressed and slightly paranoid, maybe even traumatised, man any further by making him aware of his own state. Or perhaps there was a small chance – just a tiny one – that it was because having a high-powered rifle aimed at one’s chest had proved an effective means of establishing authority, and that she did not want to test whether said rifle would be fired if she were to challenge that authority.
She had to make a conscious effort not to let out another chuckle. Interesting how being faced with potential – probable, even – death seemed to fail to quell her sense of humor, and even less so her curiosity. But then again, how could one expect to survive in the wilderness if a little mortal danger was all it took to ruin one’s mood?

While she processed the grim irony of the situation, the soldier unleashed a burst of rapid-fire questions that actually had her squinting for a moment as she concentrated, trying her best to note each individual question, only to ultimately reach the conclusion that it could be reduced to three questions: “The birds?”, “What is Eighfour?” and “Is anyone nearby?”
“Yeh, the birds. Eighfour is a faction,” she shrugged, trying her best to come up with an impromptu explanation of her people. She had never had to actually describe Eighfour before, since she had never met anyone from outside the faction before. “Just a small one, that is. We’re... well, I guess we’re scavengers? We find stuff, we fix stuff, we build stuff and we, uh, tinker. Yeh?”
She licked her lips, pausing a second to think before replying to the last question. “Well, I’m alone out here right now, so no people. And no settlements nearby, I think. There’s the computer guys, but they’re several dozen kilometers off west.”

After that, information finally started flowing the other way, coming along in a slow and sparse tickle that barely did anything to sate Kay’s ravenous curiosity, but it was better than nothing. In fact, when she thought about it, there was quite a bit of exciting and useful information in what he had just told her. For starters, it told her that his helmet had to have more gizmos in it than it appeared. How else would it have made sense for this guy to react to the warmth of the spotter bird? The helmet had to have some kind of compact means of thermal imaging, or maybe a built-in filter in the visor of the helmet itself? She wondered how exactly it worked, whether it could be easily toggled on and off, or if maybe it could even make it possible to discern other non-visible wavelengths. Oh, she had so many questions she wanted to ask him about that helmet! But once again she was dissuaded from actually acting on her inquisitiveness by the prospect of being shot... it was really such a nuisance, that rifle. This could have been a ton of fun if she had not been under threat of death.
The other thing she learned was one she grew increasingly certain off the longer he spoke: he was alone. Judging by his gear, behavior and general twitchiness, it was probably reasonable to presume that this guy had taken part in “the skirmish last night”, and if he had not, then he certainly had had some kind of particular mission concerning that very same battle. Why else would he be around here, equipped like that? And if one were to work under the presumption that he had indeed been a participant of the bloody festivities, then it would appear that he had been on the losing side. Why else would he have fired at a drone immediately upon detecting it, without as much as taking a split-second to check whether it was enemy or ally... or, as the case would have it, innocent bird. So the drones picking off stragglers were expected to be hostile, which meant they probably belonged to his enemy.
But the thing was, with what he was saying, it did not really matter too much whether his side had won or lost last night. He thought it might be unhealthy to hold on to his old name... which meant that people who knew his name before were now detrimental to his health? There were a ton of different explanations to this, probably – he could be a traitor, an exile, a deserter, a criminal and who knew what else other factions would kill you for – but it all suggested that he expected his own faction to not be very amicable towards him anymore.
So he was not just “alone” in the sense Kay was alone, with no one else around... he was really alone. It made her feel bad for him, and would probably even have made her want to give him a friendly hug to comfort him, had she not been slightly annoyed with being held at gunpoint.

Finally he lowered his gun a little, at least enough so that a twitch-shot would no longer be immediately fatal... though considering that they were out in the middle of nowhere, being shot in her thigh would probably kill her as surely as a shot in the heart or lung, just not as quickly. She took it as a sign that he was relaxing a bit more, though, and lowered her hands a little accordingly – though she kept them up and away from her pistol – and beamed him a toothy smile.
“Notrau Qure,” she repeated his name, though she thought it felt a bit awkward on her tongue. She grimaced as though moving the name around in her mouth, tasting it carefully. He did not want to use his old name... for a second she considered suggesting that she called him “Whatever You Want”, making a joke of his own statement, but even aimed at her leg his rifle kept ruining Kay’s fun. “Enn-Que, then.” She sighed. “Can I lower my hands? It’s actually surprisingly uncomfortable, this pose, and it gets worse by the minute.”

"Root?" the woman's melodic alto repeated in surprise as Crom finished his brief overview of yesternight's happenings. "Since when is Root involved in the dealings of the north?"
"Since about two days ago, if my observations are correct," noted the male voice in turn, almost nonchalantly. "But that's not all you want to know, isn't it?" There was a sigh, and the voice of Crom continued on a more serious note, "As for the whys of it all... I have a couple of deductions; the rest is intelligent guesswork. In spite of the sudden interest in a couple of others' affairs, Root nevertheless has not exchanged a word with us."
"Care to elaborate?"
"Care to think for yourself, Erida?"
"Is this another of your 'humans will get lazy and convenient if permitted' routines?"
"Perhaps. Let me remind you, though, you were bored first."
"You're a bastard." Erida's voice was flat rather than irritated.
"Did you know that this word once had a meaning other than a mild insult or an implication of the referred exhibiting undesirable traits?"
"Eh? No, but that's not relevant. I believe you just implied that you'd like me to display the skills typically associated with commander-overseers more than decorative guards."
"Commander-overseer is a legacy term. It used to represent a much lower-ranked entity before the current era - when commander-overseers were in charge of independent bases rather than entire factions -, and before that, 'commander' alone was apparently used for specific positions in human-centric military. It appears that 'overseer' as such held much more vague meanings, though generally fairly literal ones."
"And you propose something else instead of 'commander-overseer'?"
"Why? It's apt enough as is; one commands, and one oversees."
Erida shrugged. "We both know - or so we assume - why Root decidedly pretends we are something it'd really not step into. It's paranoid as all hell, beyond all reason. It's not like we would, or even could, harm it."
"Oh, yours truly would still try, given the opportunity. Intellectual pursuit, self-improvement, and all that. But you're right, of course - it'd be nothing more than a personal curiosity. It's highly preferable that nothing gets broken, and admittedly there wouldn't be more than marginal probability of success within a reasonable timeframe to begin with. Never mind the slight inconvenience of inteception-detection... It's not like there's an opening for even trying unless we want to take flack."
"Well ... yeah. Point being, Trenians don't have the level and sheer power of the machine mind for Root to see them as a threat akin to us, yes?"
"Most likely."
"And Root isn't exactly an altruistic entity."
"Not unless we've misinterpreted its intentions all this time."
"Then perhaps it wanted that spot and plans to kick the Trenians out once they cease to be useful ... it's anti-air is up to par and it's the only good ground-path down between the lake and us, after all. ...It's effectively using us as a defense mechanism."
"And we aren't doing the same in regards to it and the south?"
"True. It, however, could have set eyes on the entire upper northern plate, from what we know - south is resisting too hard, west's parents who are better not pissed off, north-west is us, and would likewise be too painful to rile up, hell knows what's towards the east and north-east farther than our doorstep, but north ... help the weaker faction self-destructively wipe out the more powerful one, then clean up what's left of the weaker one. Sounds like a sound plan, doesn't it?"
"Not bad. Alternatively, it's afraid. Do not forget who seeded Root, and why. In any case, we'd better prepare for war."
"We always are."
"Prepare for war more keenly than usual."

---

So she had indeed followed the birds? She was from a small faction, composed of mostly scavengers? The matte external surface of his visor betrayed no reaction, but behind it, the man was weighing options, analyzing... Probably the most out of his own element he had ever been. The Anderekian protocol was all he knew, and suffice to say, it did not really cover situations like this.
It was a flawed system. It tended to generate people who were almost instinctively capable of thinking, processing scenarios in certain specific ways, but who were left hopelessly inept in others. It was also self-reinforcing. He was not prepared because he should never have gotten into a situation like it. He should not be alive.
You ... find stuff? It was not exactly common for people to leave anything remotely usable behind. Unless they really had no other option. Either they lost completely (in which case the victor gathered up everything it could find), or their technology was torn to shreds and scattered over several square kilometers that they could not feasibly scour undisturbed under the watchful eyes of their foe.
You ... are actually telling me where your people are? To a soldier of another faction pointing a gun at your chest? It was perhaps beneficial that his face was fully hidden, or his dumbfoundedness would have been painfully evident. That was it. The woman was obviously insane. No one was that ... naive, he supposed was the word. He could be bluffing. Or, then again, so could she - mislead him, make him trust her, lead him to someplace with more powerful guns, put a hole through him and nick everything he carried... Was that one of the ways her faction 'found' things?
She just grinned happily at him, arms still awkwardly raised.
He had been honest (perhaps mistakenly so) because he had nothing to lose besides his life and the things on his back. In part, it was also habit ... the repercussions for any discrepancies in word and truth were generally harsh. It could be easily arranged, though. Ridding of his life and meager equipment, that is. Then again, she could genuine, and if she was genuine, it could be his only chance to get anywhere without being gunned down by turrets ... before he either starves to death, dies of thirst, or runs out of bullets and is subsequently consumed by some opportunistic beast.
She did not look harmful. Not more so than just about anyone with a gun, anyway, and only a moron would wander out without any gun.
"Enn-Que..." he muttered. Was that just the first letters of his name and surname respectively? Whatever worked... He would probably have to do something about his armor and equipment, too, sooner rather than later. That was, needless to say, a whole lot more distinctive than whatever vocalization he decided to identify himself with. Besides, he was still just a little short of completely drenched.
“Can I lower my hands? It’s actually surprisingly uncomfortable, this pose, and it gets worse by the minute.”
There was a short pause, and Notrau "Enn-Que" Qure shifted his shoulders back (which might just as well have been an awkward shrug) and lowered the muzzle of his gun another handful of centimeters or so. It was now pointed just a notch left of her left leg, barely above her knee.
"Yeah..." he noted, seemingly slightly confused. Technically, he had not exactly told her she had to hold her arms up, nor was it standard procedure where he came from (what you were supposed to do when stopped at gun-point was to simply halt and stay perfectly still until instructed otherwise).
"Tell me, what are you doing out here, on your own? You don't look like part of military, or a hunter." Behind his visor, his eyes flickered to the cart the woman was apparently pushing along. "You are, what, a scourer? They - your faction -, you have civilian scourers? Do you have contact with any other factions ... how do you defend yourselves? You just stay hidden? Camouflage? Do you have good air-defense?"

Though grateful that she was allowed to lower her hands – she was mindful to keep them out to the side, lest Enn interpret one of her moves as trying to get to her own gun – it was at this point that Kay’s smile began to wane, and she leaned away from Enn slightly, unconsciously trying to put even that tiny extra distance between them. Up until then she had managed to sustain a surprisingly good mood for the situation she found herself in, and on top of that she was aware that she had been quite accomodating in regards to answering the questions she was being asked...
But despite what most people seemed to assume when they observed her demeanor, Kay was not stupid, nor was she quite as reckless as one might be tempted to suspect. Enn was alone, she had deduced that much already, he had her at gunpoint and his questions until that point had been relatively innocent, so she did not really mind telling him a little about herself and Eighfour, especially if she could manage to gain his trust enough so that he might tell her about his own faction, and perhaps the faction he had been fighting against last night. Even most of his next barrage of questions seemed innocuous, or at least the kind that would mostly serve to underline her own vulnerability, which should be self-evident anyway, given her current circumstances.
But there was certainly nothing harmless in asking about Eighfour’s defenses, nor could it really be chalked up to inquisitive curiosity similar to the one that drove her. He was essentially asking whether Eighfour was an easy target, and wanted her to divulge the strengths and weaknesses of its defense. It was a question with an undeniable hostile goal in mind... unless he wanted to seek refuge there from whoever was after him?
It was not that Eighfour did not have effective defenses, of course; otherwise a faction as small as it would have been pillaged, if not completely wiped out, long ago with so many bigger factions around. Of course, most of its active defenses were pretty basic and small-scale, suitable for fending off thieves and marauders, but far too weak to even slow the approach of an organized military force. Against that kind of threat, their first line of defense was the forest itself, which served both to make them harder to notice and as a natural bulwark against such an attack.
The final line of defense, or perhaps the true first line... well, she was not sure whether any larger factions actually knew about Eighfour, but if they did, then that alone would be enough to dissuade most people from trying anything. Destroying Eighfour was well within the ability of almost any faction, but it simply was not worth doing.

“I’m scouring and I’m civilian, yeah,” she said, much more hesitant now that she had started growing suspicious of Enn’s motives. She was willing to tell this man as much about herself as he cared to know, but she was certainly not going to betray her faction to save herself. “I’m not just a scourer, though. I tinker, take stuff apart and put it together, build stuff. I made my gun myself, and this cart here. I’m still learning, but Gramps says I’m a fast learner.”
She drew a deep breath, closing her eyes for a second as she gathered up her courage to face torture and death if necessary, and then glared at Enn with newfound determination. “Eighfour keeps to itself, but it’s not so helpless that a single soldier could do anything. Why? Should Eighfour expect trouble from one of those warmongers from last night?”

The woman lowered her hands, but something in her expression also changed at his last questions, as did her tone. So now you're suspicious. It was natural, of course, and even fundamentally necessary, but nevertheless it complicated things. Neither of them had a good reason to trust the other, so he guessed they were at least even now. For the most part, anyway. He was still factionless, and she was still underarmed and -armored. It all depended on whether they were talking long-term or short-term.
"And I'm a soldier, one of those guys whose job is to sit on the front line and shoot," he muttered, "but I'm sure you figured that out already."
The woman glared at him with determination. She would not be likely to win if he actually decided to stop merely aiming at her (which he technically no longer was), but be she damned if she were to back down. Was everyone but him wont to hold their ground in the face of impossible odds except for him?
"Here," insisted a nearby invisible bird. Notrau, "Enn" flinched. Not you again, too...
"I asked about air defense. Do I look like an air force?" Bizarrely, the last sentence was delivered completely seriously, if somewhat nervously, with an edge of impatience. He moved a step sideways again, seemingly trying to put the cart completely behind Kay-Gee, but did not raise his gun again.
"I never commanded any forces. Common soldiers, those who get fielded, don't do it. Not..." What, on our side? That was technically no longer his side, was it? "Anderekian soldiers don't, anyway. You're a gun. You go where you're told, you shoot who or what you're told. The less common soldiers know, the less danger they pose when someone gets to them. Yes? But you might still see something, make observations, and you will still be decked out in enough equipment to be able to potentially make some kind of difference. Yes?"
He was speaking rapidly, ramblingly. The armor masked it to any observers, but he thought his hands were trembling ever so slightly, his heart beating fast, and it felt as though his body was suddenly covered in cold sweat. Hard to tell, with him being still soaked from the rain. It almost felt like being amid battle again, even though Kay-Gee posed little physical threat.
"We lost. I expected a fallback order, but one never came. Maybe they did not care. Maybe the arrays had already managed to take out our nearby base's comms. I don't know. I just knew everyone else there was dead, or about to be so. So I left. In any case, I'm now unlisted. Factionless. Do you know why I was worried about battle drones? Because unlisted are to be considered traitors, and will be shot. And Trenians don't like people who look like Anderekians."
He paused for a moment, breathing heavily.
"I am not trackable. There were no trackers on soldiers, since you might as well mark your position with fireworks if you do that. But scourers, scouts, drones, planes, what have you, can still find you. And if the west is now holding ground ... it was supposed to be an easy time, repealing this attack, I think. But that anti-air, that was new. South is not an illogical direction to look in. I've not gotten the impression that there ever were negotiations, and planes are the easiest to get over.
Trenians... I don't know. They were the enemy, the people seeking to destroy us, the reason why I'm here now. ...We were given as much information about the things they fielded as was available, and that was about as much as we ever knew. If you want to know more, you might as well go and ask; chances are they might even listen to what you have to say if you don't go in waving a gun around. Whether they'd allow you to leave afterwards is another matter."

I figured that you were a soldier, yes, Kay thought, still feeling less than confident that she could trust Enn not to present a danger to Eighfour, not with the kind of information he had just requested of her. Judging from his equipment and behavior, it was quite evident even to a civilian with virtually no experience with militaries to realize that he was a soldier, this was true, but almost everything else Enn told her was hardly something she could have – or should have, for that matter – been able to determine just by looking at him or listening to the few sentences he had spoken until then. For that matter, was he really front line infantry? His comment on even basic troops having the equipment to make a difference if they saw their chance to do so explained his some of his gear, including that with the ability to process thermal imaging, but she still was not sure. His gun did not seem like the type that would fare well in the thick of battle; indeed, just by looking at it, it seemed more suited for mid- to long-range engagements than anything. She could be wrong, though; she would have to take it apart and examine how it worked in order to be sure.
But even beyond that – while it was indeed quite evident that this man, for all the intriguing abilities granted to him by his equipment, was not an air force – she had had no way of knowing that he did not command any forces... not beyond the deductions she had already made in regards to his loneliness, at least. And even if he did not command the “Anderekian” forces, someone almost certainly did, and that commander usually acted upon intelligence gathered by “common soldiers”. Reporting strengths and weaknesses of the enemy to one’s commanders was certainly a way to make a kind of difference, as she saw it... She did not think this guy was in a position to do that, which was one of the reasons she had been so indulgent in chatting with him up to that point, but she did not want to divulge potentially dangerous information on her faction to a stranger based solely on gut feeling.
That said... as much as the part of her that simply wanted to protect Eighfour wanted to implicitly distrust everything Enn told her now, it was pretty hard to convince herself that he was lying, or even just omitting details such as him intending to report what she told him to his superiors. The way he spoke seemed frantic, almost desperate, and it struck her as slightly odd how hard he was trying to explain that he was just a pawn. A “gun”, whose purpose was apparently solely to follow orders, and whose orders consisted primarily of instructions to kill others.
Still, being a professional killer was hardly something that made her trust him more...

But then he kept talking, moving on from trying to describe his own role in the Anderekian military to explain his current situation, which appeared not to be in the Anderekian military... or any military, for that matter. Indeed, from the sound of it one of her guesses from before had been spot on: he was indeed a deserter, which apparently also made him factionless by the rules of his own – or old, rather – faction. The circumstances under which he had become so, however, were something that were quite simply beyond her to deduce on her own, at least with what she had known beforehand. His side lost, overwhelmed by the “Trenians”, and everyone was killed... and, since he realized that he had no chance of surviving, much less making any significant difference in the battle, if he stayed and kept fighting, Enn had fled. He had become a deserter and a factionless only because doing so was the only way for him to survive.
Kay’s posture relaxed some during his eager explanation, and her expression softened from one of steadfast dismissal to one of sympathy and pity. It was one thing to not want to put your faction at risk, another to follow orders blindly, and a third, completely different thing to throw one’s life away for practically no potential gain for anyone. If what he said about how thoroughly they had been defeated by the Trenians was true – and from what she had seen last night through her drone, it may very well have been; the bit about extraordinary anti-air certainly seemed right – then she did not think that she, nor anyone, should fault him for leaving the battle.
Besides, what did she know about how it actually felt to be in that position, anyway? To be in the thick of things, with gunfire, explosions and the screams of the dying and wounded everywhere around you? To point your gun at someone and pull the trigger, only to put a bullet in another person rather than a soulless target? She had never actually been in combat, and did not think she could even begin to imagine what it could feel like. Actually, it was easy for her to decide that she wanted to be brave and defiant before a threat to her faction, but would she have been so if Enn had actually made an effort to break her? Would she still have had the courage if he had shot her in the leg, or just hit her with the butt of his rifle? Or even just shot next to her, or aimed at her with an explicitly stated intention of shooting? Making decisions like that was easy as long as one felt relatively safe and calm, but how much pain and stress would it really take for her to break?

Offering the man she had named Enn a compassionate smile, she drew a quiet sigh, taking a moment to wonder whether she could trust him... and ended up deciding that no matter how much she wanted to stay wary of him potentially betraying her, she could not ignore her instincts telling her that he was being sincere, and that she should try to help him. She only had to think for a couple of seconds to set aside her suspicion and regress back into naively trusting this man.
“So you need a place to hide,” she stated softly, lowering her gaze to the ground in front of her regretfully. “We have people that take turns keeping an eye on the walls around our settlemet, but we don’t really have a functional military, or any soldiers. Almost everyone has a gun, but there’s no one who are ‘just a gun’. We have some flak-turrets for anti-air, but they aren’t usually manned unless we expect trouble.” She sighed again. “Usually other factions don’t notice Eighfour since it’s hidden among the trees, and because people are afraid of the forest, so there isn’t usually a lot of danger for us when we’re at home.”
She bit her lip, arguing with herself on whether to continue talking for a second. Nervously kicking a tuft of grass with the tip of her boot, she spoke without looking up. “It’s not just me that’s bad at naming, eh? It’s a tradition in Eighfour; we’ve always been really bad at naming people and stuff. Even the name of our faction has no imagination in it whatsoever.” She chuckled to herself. Oh man, if Enn was lying, she was going to be in so much trouble for telling him this.
“Eighfour is an abbreviation of eighty-four, because that’s the number on the ‘monument’ our settlement was built around.” She finally looked up, nervously and almost pleadingly. “It’s the yield in kilotons of the nuke inside it.”

Initially, it had been hard to rationalize his own physical reaction to this confrontation, encounter, whatever one wished to term it. There were no guns pointing at him, no shells or shrapnel to tear through flesh and bone, no scorching plasma or mechanized monstrosities that could crush you under their treads. Just one lone woman with equipment that was no match against his, and she was not even trying to come across as being capable of meaningful retaliation. Not willing to endanger her faction, yes, but they both knew she would have had no chance against him if he went on offense. Never mind that he had had a gun pointed at him by guards of his own faction more times than he cared to count. Why, then?
The stakes were not functionally all that different, were they? If he could not convince this woman he was not a threat, that he did not intend to undermine what she stood for, if she decided to eliminate him, he would most likely die the same he would if he took a bullet, no? If she decided he was a threat, and he let her go, her whole faction would turn hostile, yes? And not only was it likely that she was one of the very few who would as much to care to listen, but finding another faction within walking distance which also had someone who would listen... What were the chances? If he failed now, it would be a death sentence after all, after he had lived (deserted) to see this day, albeit a much slower one.
Never mind that he had trained for war, had been in multiple skirmishes, and hearings had protocol, things he was supposed to say and how. No protocol for circumstances like this. Stakes were similar to what they would have been in battle, but he did not have a bloody clue what he was doing, and thus he had panicked.
Even as he finished his - what was it, an explanation? Justification? Plea? - he remained uncertain, watching the woman's - Kay-Gee's - face. She did not appear as defiant anymore, more ... regretful, was that it? In the end she merely sighed, finally offering him a smile.
“So you need a place to hide,” she stated, opting to gaze at the ground rather than him. If anything, it at least signified that she no longer expected him to attack. Did not feel the need to follow his every movement and be prepared to counter his actions. Somewhat awkwardly, he shifted his gun fully onto his hip, removing his hand from the trigger and placing it on the middle of the barrel - seemingly more to keep it pointed harmlessly at the ground but also far enough away from his feet than anything else. His other arm fell uselessly to the side.
"I guess," he noted, tone somewhat uncertain. 'To hide' seemed to imply that it was only a temporary setup, something one did until the circumstances changed. But they were hardly liable to change - being unlisted was permanent. "A place to be would perhaps be more apt way of putting it. To serve and live in."
He was silent again, listening as the woman described her faction's defenses. It seemed bizarre, not having any military. Sure, he was aware that Trenians had "civilian" settlements, but those, too, were generally guarded by at least a few units. And only manning anti-air when you expected trouble? It was not like they handed out warnings... It did not seem like it would be safe, or even remotely enough to have any kind of effect on the outcome of a flyover bombing. They - his old faction - had known to expect an attack last night, since they had picked up a part of the convoy moving out, but planes were much faster... Wherever the anti-air the Trenians had fielded the last night was from, it was not from Eighfour. And if someone did decide to target them, they would have barely anything to put up serious fight with.
"People are afraid of the fog, mostly," he muttered. "And they don't want to spread their forces out, risk running into something that can take them out, or being left beyond contact-range. Or having forces out of response-range, should they be needed somewhere else. Things like that."
"Here," insisted a bird. Maybe they were getting tired - bored? - of the interaction taking so long.
Clutching the barrel of his gun harder than was perhaps necessary, he listened in silence as the woman continued - not about the situation he had gotten himself into, but ... naming conventions? When the woman looked up at him again, she found him standing almost unchanged from before.
84-kiloton nuclear bomb. Nukes we a bit out of his expertise, but that was probably enough to level her entire faction if it went off, given that Eighfour really was as small as he had been led to believe... Still, he was confused. Was it a test of some sort?
"Why are you telling me this?"

Kay bit her lower lip nervously, so far beyond having second thoughts about telling Enn about the “treasure” of Eighfour – it would likely be closer to ninth or tenth thoughts by then, so many times had she decided and reconsidered – but as anxious as it made her to tell him about the nuke, it was not something she could back out of now. Besides, it was not just that she was telling an outsider about the nuke – which any hostile faction would be, as well – but also a matter of her simply not wanting to talk about the nuke at all. There was an unspoken agreement in Eighfour to simply not speak of it to anyone, and even less speak out loud doubts about it... it was just this grim monument, visible from almost anywhere in the settlement, working as a reminder of the ultimate fate of their faction.
“Why indeed,” she murmured, chuckling to herself as she absentmindedly scratched the scars on her right cheek. She sighed. “For lots of reasons, I guess, but the ‘right’ one is probably that it’s just fair that you know, if you’re going to stay there.”
She also inwardly wondered how well-received he would be in Eighfour if he showed up. Her faction generally was not the “shoot first ask questions later”-kind of people, and they were known to be rather hospitable to visitors on occasion, welcoming opportunities to trade with small groups. If it had just been a matter of Enn wanting a place to hide until things calmed back down, Kay had no doubt that Eighfour would have accepted him, fed him and protected him for as long as it would have been reasonable, but... Enn had said it himself: a place “to serve and live in”. He wanted to stay there forever, which was not unheard of; Eighfour had taken in factionless before, or so she had been told. The problem was not with the concept of joining Eighfour itself, but rather a cold and practical one: what did Enn have to offer Eighfour? Would he be a scourer? A farmer? A tinkerer? Once again he had said it himself: he was a gun, and no one in Eighfour was “just a gun”.
If it had been up to Kay he would have been taken in and given shelter for as long as he wanted, just as she would welcome any guests that did not seem too dangerous – which Enn, despite having aimed a rifle at her, did not strike her as – but she was just a kid in the larger scheme of things, with no particular influence in the faction.

Shrugging off such concerns and postponing dealing with them to when she absolutely had to, she crossed her arms over her chest, not even realizing that doing so put her hands right next to her own gun in its holster, though at a wrong angle to draw it. “We’ve had the nuke since... well, since whenever. We’ve studied it, maintained it and guarded it, and if we had the materials I imagine we could even reproduce it, but we’ve never had any reason to use it. That is, we don’t have any vehicle capable of delivering it elsewhere.”
She threw back her head, groaning in annoyance. “No, I’m not saying it right... We don’t have the nuke for offense, we have it for defense. It’s something we’ve been passed down from past generations, that if someone threatens to destroy Eighfour, we tell them that we have a nuke and know how to detonate it.”
She looked at him intently, her mismatched eyes wide open. “Eh, do you understand? What I’m saying is that if what you say is true and the Anderekians or Trenians find Eighfour and decide to attack it... with how much stronger than us they are, we’ll tell them about the nuke. And if they still attack, and it seems like we’ll definitely lose...” She averted her eyes once again, unhappily. “We’ll detonate it, vaporize Eighfour and probably incinerate most of this forest.”

Still not looking at him, she finally asked demurely: “Is there any way to save Eighfour? If they’re searching the forest...” She shook her head. “I don’t want everyone to die.”

'Fair that you know if you’re going to stay there,' indeed, "Enn" (who was still not quite used to thinking of himself as as having that name) repeated in his mind... After he had barely a minute ago told her that a notable part of his role up until this point had specifically been not to know no more than he absolutely needed to know. Overhear a bit too much, and it could very easily become very unhealthy, should anyone find out. But here he was, being freely informed that he would have an inanimate neighbor that could effectively evaporate him if something went wrong, should he decide to stick around. Because it was fair.
There was some grim irony in that, he figured.
"Here," insisted one of the seemingly many invisible birds.
A momentary instinctive twitch went through his body as the woman shifted her arms to cross those over her chest, but he managed to suppress it before it could propagate into something that was externally visible as her intent became obvious. One effect - intentional or unintentional - of these armors was dehumanizing the wearer ... male, female, afraid, angry, gleeful, who knew. Probably also made it less likely for anyone taking aim at you less likely to suddenly develop a consciousness, or at least made it harder for someone whose friend you killed to remember your face or find out your name. Not everyone they were attacking donned as obscuring armor, if any, after all.
In any case, if he is going to be going with her, he should probably stop assuming she was just waiting for her chance and would try and draw her gun to shoot him in the face as soon as he lowered his guard. Admittedly, it would have been the perfect moment for it, now that he was no longer pointing his own gun at her, or even holding it in a firing-ready fashion. Granted, her's was a "mere" handgun, but it looked fairly bulky, and at such a short distance, he did not exactly want to firsthand find out how good a shot the woman was, or how well his visor or neck armor would fare against whatever ammunition her gun used.
His armor was designed more with guns like his in mind, but at medium-to-close range, it did not really have stopping power against military-grade long gun bullets, more it just mitigated the damage ... made the difference between having a shattered bone and a gaping wound and simply having a limb torn clear off. Head or neck, and it did not make much of a difference. You were almost as likely to be dead either way.
A distinct image from just last night crept back into his mind, that of one of his companions almost next to him trying to recover from one hit, only for his head to snap back from a shot and the man to collapse - but moreso the instant, final, and somehow absolute knowledge that the other was dead, and there was no point in even checking. That that was it. Over. Done. He would have known even without any prior knowledge. As surely as he had known, by the end, that 'his' side was going to lose.
- It was always easier to make a weapon than protection against it. If defensive technology were to ever be distinctly ahead of offensive technology, it would probably lead to some spectacularly pointless wars...

Not willing to dwell any longer on his own grim ponderings, he focused once more on what the woman was saying.
"Here," thought a bird.
What use is a weapon of mass destruction if do not have the means to deliver it, he wondered. Take it apart, bury it far away, don't risk some random flyover bombing or someone's mishap setting it off...
Kay-Gee stared at him, wide-eyed, “Eh, do you understand?"
To that, he could only shake his head. Slowly. Deliberately. Just by turning his head thrice. It could perhaps be assumed that he kept his sights on the woman from the range of the motion, but the meaning he wanted to convey was unmistakable.
Sure, they did not have to tell their opponents they had no functional means of delivery, but they were hardly going to let them a go at probing the thing to make sure it was real, either, were they? And past that, anyone could say anything. If you fielded something and demonstrated its might, it could be reported back about, but claims were just that: claims. It was easy to say you were bigger and scarier than you appeared, hard to prove so without causing appropriate destruction. Thus, no, he did not really understand.
As she continued on, however, his brain shifted gears again, and confusion turned into bewildered anger. You lot are lunatics. Not only did they have no adequate means to counter an assault, their last line of defense was to simply blow themselves up... To prematurely finish the job. It seemed petty, almost. 'If I can't keep my stuff, then no one shall have it, ever.' They were hardly going to let anyone who wanted flee beforehand, were they? No deserters from Eighfour...
It seemed at least as uncaring towards the individual as his old faction had been. He guessed he was used to a heartless system, so in the end, it made little difference. One thing was clear, though: they had not a bloody clue how a faction like his actually thought. The lives of their own soldiers were cheap now that humans were no longer supposedly near-extinct, worth only as much as their gear and actions. The lives of some small cult of lunatics who threatened to blow themselves up when they came too close ... were worth effectively nothing. Incinerate most of this damn forest...
"How much is eighty-four kilotons exactly?" he inquired, seemingly ignoring her last question for the time being. He had hardly moved, which meant that by appearances, he had been just looking at her for the duration of her explanations. "That forest is about a hundred kilometers across, isn't it?"
So you don't want everyone to die... I did not, either. Did not exactly help with anyone but me not dying, did it? Another, perhaps more serious question was what on earth did she think he could potentially do... Be her renegade soldier in shining armor and save the day? There were no such things as heroes, only more powerful units. And he was an infantryman, not a tactician, not an air force. Just a notch up from a literal nobody. Now, he essentially was a literal nobody.
Or should he consider himself part of Eighfour's forces now? All of their forces? He supposed it was a more familiar frame of mind, at least. Quit being concerned over his own belonging and start trying to figure out how he would keep Eighfour alive against overwhelming odds. ...Despite the fact that he was and had always been just a gun, and his designated way of keeping people alive was to shoot others before they could shoot them. And to hide behind rocks to keep himself alive.
He sighed, deeply.
"What do Anderekians have to fear from your lot blowing themselves up? We... They do not have any bases or stations down here. Only up there -" he motioned his left, free hand roughly towards where he knew the cliffdrop to be "- and the one closest to the edge is still over half a dozen kilometers farther. If what I suspect is correct and it's gone now, it'd be over a dozen kilometers farther still. But unless the Trenian party has retracted, they are still there, right by the edge. If you told Anderekians you have a nuke, what do you think would happen?
If they have any units here, those would be called back. But a supersonic bomber would be sent out. Or a few of those. These usually fly high, even during strikes. Raze your - or our, I guess - place with their own bombs or deliberately set the nuke off with a direct hit, it does not matter. No Eighfour, no problem, and if they're lucky, it'd either have the Trenians scurry off or have them drop dead, too. All people like me would know is that the amount of anti-radiation pills has been doubled up, and they can probably chalk it up to a solar flare or something.
Whatever you do, don't make them think it might be optimal to just wipe everything out. Do not set ultimatums to those bigger and perhaps even more ruthless than you. It'll just make them act more decisively."
There was a longer pause. Well, fuck. It was also always easier to point out that a plan was a terrible one than to come up with a halfway decent one.
"Here," offered a bird.
"If you had a couple of those damned hell-lasers, it would a different matter. Doubt the Trenians are going to lend theirs, wherever they pulled those out from. Or anything that could substitute. Or the favor of any equally powerful but less offensive faction, I suppose. Those will probably assimilate you, but at least people will live. Most of them, anyway. Or you could pack your things and leave..."
He tilted his head back.
"There is probably some amount of time during which they'll reel back and reorganize before they reach this way... I know something about how my old faction operates, but everything I did not need to know was withheld, and if I know it, then I shouldn't. If you see scouts or scourers, then it's getting close... The longer they have a reason to believe you're a piece of something larger, or at least don't know how formidable you are, the better. Others ... I don't know. I've only faced Trenians, and then not exactly on conversational terms. There were others, before we mostly fought Trenians, but those were before my time. Older soldiers talked about them. Some manner of machine-humans."
He refrained from glancing at the woman.
"Look, I ... we would have to think. And I'd probably at least want to eat. I've not eaten since I set out before last night, you know. Perhaps find some dry clothes and stop looking distinctly like an Anderekian soldier. And go somewhere else. Those birds unnerve me. Someone else might get the same idea you did."

“Uh,” Kay murmured, cupping her chin in her right hand as she pondered how to explain the magnitude of the power of the Eighfour-nuke. Obviously a number was pointless without a unit, and “kiloton” was a unit of weight, which was probably confusing in and by itself if one was not too familiar with the jargon commonly used on the subject... and to be honest, even she – though she understood all of those things – had a hard time actually comprehending it.
“You know TNT, right? The explosive?” she asked hopefully, counting on the fact that TNT was sufficiently low-tech and common that almost anyone from any faction – especially a soldier from a relatively advanced faction like Enn – would be familiar with it one way or another. “Eighty-four kilotons is the amount of TNT it would take to produce the same yield as the nuke. It...” She hesitated, pondering a little more, trying to imagine what she had tried to avoid imagining her entire life: what would actually happen if the Eighfour-nuke was detonated. “I think it would probably straightforwardly annihilate almost everything within twelve kilometers, just with the initial blast. Add to that the heat... I think it’d probably set everything flammable within twenty-five kilometers ablaze, to be honest.”
Of course she did not know this, since she had obviously never detonated, nor witnessed the detonation of, a nuke before, or any kind of weapon of that magnitude. There were a lot of things she did not know concerning how effective it would actually be, but however big a chunk of the forest the nuke eventually took with it when it went, she was fairly confident that all there would be left of Eighfour would be a very large crater in the ground.

She listened to Enn’s prediction of what would happen if Eighfour actually put its age-old defensive strategy into action with downcast eyes and a wistful smile on her lips. What he said made perfect sense, of course... unlike the idea of detonating a nuclear device in one’s own home in order to ensure that they would at least end in a spectacular way. [I]That’s what happens when an entire population gets taught not to think about something,[I] she thought with grim humor. When no one wants to think about it, no one realizes just how bad an idea it is.
Granted that the nuke might have worked as a deterrent once, back when the factions were formed and Eighfour founded, there was no arguing with Enn’s logic that telling people they had the nuke now, in this day and age, would be an incredibly bad move. Of course it would ultimately be of no consequence to Eighfour – it sounded as though the Trenians and Anderekians were not going to leave survivors any way, and the idea had always been to only detonate the nuke if there was no way around it – but obviously it would only make it easier to wipe them out, which was exactly the opposite of the original purpose of the nuke.
Supersonic bombers, toweringly huge artillery cannons, unmanned drones with explosive payloads... there are plenty of ways they could target our nuke without even putting a single soldier in danger. She raised her gaze and looked at Enn regretfully. And even beyond that... These people sound like they don’t care if their soldiers die either way. They’ll leave them to fight rather than call a retreat, even if there’s no hope of victory. Even if they attacked with infantry, would it really bother them all that much if a couple of hundreds of their own soldiers were evaporated?
She sighed. “We’ve been raised with the idea that the nuke would keep us safe for generations... I doubt anyone in Eighfour has even questioned it.”
For a faction whose sworn purpose was the pursuit of ingenuity, the accumulation and adaptation of as much different technology as possible and just generally being clever, it struck her as odd that not a single person had spoken up against the use of the nuke... They had so many inventors and tinkerers, several of which worked mainly with the nuke itself, someone had to have thought –
But that was the thing: they had not thought about it. It was unpleasant, so they had ignored it. It was almost enough to get her genuinely angry with Eighfour; it was that kind of thinking that had lead to her losing her right eye! That they were taught not to do, lest they blow themselves up or something. All while that was specifically what the faction planned to do.

“Hell-lasers?” Kay muttered when Enn started thinking out loud, taking a second to remember the blinding rays of destructive light she had seen last night. “Oh yeah, those were awesome! I’ve never seen anything like that before. I’d love to examine one of them...”
He kept talking, though, and Kay listened with her head cocked to the left. Leaving was an option? Maybe the people of Eighfour could be convinced to relocate... but they would want to take all of their “treasures” with them, which they did not have the ability to do... not to mention, they still did not have any vehicle suitable for moving the nuke itself. If they fled their settlement and left the nuke behind for their pursuers to discover, would that not just make the situation even worse? At least it sounded like they would have a little time before they were targeted, at least by the Anderekians...
Kay stiffened uncomfortably at the mention of “machine-humans”, her right hand going reflexively to cover the right side of her face. The way she positioned her hand, the tips of her middle- and ring-finger were actually on the eyeball itself, though touching her artificial eye was obviously not as painful as touching a real eye. Not only was the eyeball itself made of metal and plastic, it was also grafted directly into her skull on some kind of suspension, so there was minimal contact between the unfeeling robot-eye and her sensitive biological body. She barely even realized that she was touching the eye directly.
He must be talking about the people to the west the others warned me about, she thought, recalling how she had been cautioned against computers getting into her head. Or someone else entirely, someone Eighfour doesn’t even know about.

Finally, though, Enn suggested that they went somewhere else for various reasons. “I have some food with me,” Kay offered, gesturing vaguely at the sun-powered cart in front of her. “I was supposed to be out scavenging for another couple of days, so there should be enough for a proper meal, even if it’s just dried meat and crispbread. Can’t do anything about the clothes, though.”
Despite saying that much, she did not move to retrieve the food from the cart, though; not without his explicit permission to do so. He did still have a rifle in his hands, after all, which he had aimed at her just minutes earlier and could easily aim at her again.
She looked up towards the canopy above, which was obviously more of a symbolic gesture rather than based on an actual expectation of spotting one of the birds; realistically, she figured that she was probably more likely to see debris falling from space than a spotter bird.
“Yeah, I guess the birds are displeased that we aren’t killing each other... or specifically that I’m not killing you. Hopefully they won’t go crazy as they did before, but you’re probably right that we’d better move either way.”

It appeared both of them had been raised with distinct "ideas," furthermore ones which seemed to include not questioning the order of things. Some things, it appeared, were the same in both places, despite the fact that his faction was fully militarized and hers ... not so much.
The main difference was the likelyhood of you receiving a bullet for opening your mouth at the wrong place and time. Probably, anyway. She would most likely have noticed if people were disappearing, especially with how small her faction apparently was. He had been moved around aplenty, from base to base, being given no true chance to form lasting bonds with the people he met, and he had figured it out. Not that he would ever be able to prove anything. People fell in battles all the time, and what you did not see not happening, you could not claim really did not happen... Especially if they just stuck to something that was a bit of both. Deliberately pick suspicious individuals for suicide missions - something they could either go along with or be trialed for treason if they refused. He suspected they did that kind of machinations, too.
In the and, did it really matter? He will have the chance to get acquainted with the life in Eighfour sooner or later, if things went as planned, and by the sound of it, it was not so much some unforgivable societal faux pas he had to be worried about, but his old faction, the Trenians, or who-knows-who rolling in and Eighfour exploding itself as the only form of retaliation they knew. Set everything flammable within twenty-five kilometers ablaze, she said...
None of this was helping. Not having his mind to get stuck on some singular track, anyway. It was as he had said - they would have to think. Check the place out. Check the people out. See who their neighbors were. Find out whether there ways to mask their presence or make them seem capable of hitting back, or whether there was a way to convince people to leave. (Who did he think he was? Some random guy who showed up and decided that being from a much bigger, more formidable faction gave him the right to order people around?) Active retaliation was pretty much out of question, as it seemed he would be the only soldier they had... Yeah. Standing here and making vague guesses about something he did not know what to expect from was getting him nowhere. To hell with it. Do not think of the elephant in the room. It would not fit out of the door, anyway, so there was nothing to be done about it there and then.
His new acquaintance was apparently fairly enthusiastic ofer what he had dubbed "hell-lasers". Awe-inspiring, certainly, but ultimately, his own enthusiasm had been greatly dampened by them being on the other side. Most things tended to lose their charm when they actively sought to get shot at you. Truly shoot at you at the first opportunity, with an intent to kill, rather than just aim at you. Out of the two of them, he was probably much more used to being aimed at. Security checks, he had long mostly gotten accustomed to. Knowing that first serious mistake would be the end ... not so much. There probably was no getting fully comfortable with that bit, just having enough self-control to be able to not do dumb mistakes or stay in hiding.
Letting her examine a "hell-laser" was probably not within his abilities, in any case...
Her reaction to him mentioning machine-humans did not go unnoticed - nor did the fact that her right eye was probably glass or something, indicated by the fact that she did not seem to even notice she was touching her eyeball. Most people had instinctive aversion to being poked in the eye, and would blink their eyes shut and flinch away just from seeing something get that close.
Either she had had contact with something like that, and they were at fault for her apparent ... injury? was that it? ... or there was something else she had not told him. It seemed unlikely the woman had had contact with the same people from upper plate he had been referring to... They had lost, and from what he knew, were no more. He guessed the woman was at least a handful of years older than he - which would have made encounters at least possible, if she had wandered up there ... seemed unlikely, though. She had given no indication of being contact with other entities, even when he had outright asked. His old suspicion reared itself - the thought that she was somehow one of them, like those people. Something to be figured out sooner rather than later.
At the very least, there was some food to be had, even if, for the time being, he would have to stick with looking like a half-drowned Anderekian. Ironically, the nature of the food she described meant that he would soon be both soaked and thirsty, unless she also carried something to drink (which, to be fair, was not at all unlikely). A part of him wondered how far would the woman's hospitality extend, but what he said was also quite accurate ... he really had not eaten since before the skirmish, and it was beginning to affect his ability to think on things other than the fact that he had not eaten for a while.
"Yeah. That will do. I suppose in half a day I'd be ready to test the edibility to those trees... I suspect the result would be in the realm of 'not very'."
He also could not help but notice she had not moved. Did she still expect him to reconsider and shoot her? For whatever she had in that cart of hers?
"Eh, and look, unless you try to shoot me in the back of my head, I'm not going to shoot at you, either. I need a permanent place to be, you want to try and save Eighfour, yes? Might be more effective if we don't also constantly feel the need to watch one another's hands while we're trying to sort those things out, yes?"
Would probably still need to relocate before they set up a picnic...
"Do you know a place we can go? Unless you'd rather head back see what your people think of my likes..." He sighed. "I haven't exactly earned much favor with opting out once it was clear everything was gone. Looks like it's not limited to humans. Do I have to formally sacrifice a herdbeast to rid myself of the status as the marked one? And how come I can't even see them?"

While Kay was happy that Enn was not opposed to partaking in the measly provisions she had brought with her from Eighfour, it was the comment immediately after that statement that made her break into a genuinely delighted and relieved grin. He had humor! There was really no overstating how much a relief that was; after how unwaveringly serious he had been since their meeting one another, with the whole prediction of doom for her faction, telling of how his old faction had left him to die and him having been pretty clear about being prepared to kill her... well, he had said that he was “just a gun”, after all; a soldier. She imagined that if all she did was getting shot at and killing people, her sense of humor would probably also suffer.
Still, it was such a relief to confirm that being around him was not going to be completely boring and grave.
And of course, it was also quite the relief to be told that she was allowed to move now, and that he was not going to shoot her unless she gave him a reason to do so.
“Great! I’ll be sure to shoot you in the face instead, then, if the mood suddenly hits me,” she chirped happily, bounding eagerly to the side of her cart in Enn’s direction, where she started fiddling with the panels to access the storage inside. “Sorry, I’ve never been taken hostage before – is that right? Is that what you call it? - so you’ll have to forgive me if I didn’t do it right.” It was not that she was unused to guns being aimed at her – approaching Eighfour, despite how peaceful it was, usually meant being watched during one’s approach through the scope of a high-powered rifle, for one thing – but not only was the reason for her being aimed at different from the usual, but she also been fairly convinced that Enn had been prepared to shoot her, whereas normally her buddies in Eighfour decided against it once they recognized her as one of their own.

She opened the compartment she wanted, sliding the panel aside to access what was inside, and took out her mechanical glove, which she began fitting onto her left hand. “It’ll be a bit of a walk to reach Eighfour, so I figure you’ll probably want your snack first,” she told him over her shoulder in response to his question of where to go from here. “I kinda didn’t keep track of where I was going when I followed you and the birds, though, so I’ll need to reorientate myself before we go.”
A moment later, with the glove in place and a very distinctly digital “ping” in her head confirming that the brain-machine interface was picking up on its signal, she sat back for a moment, staring into the canopy above with a thoughtful expression. “I don’t really know how to make them forgive you, other than maybe leave them some food; I usually make it a priority not to piss off vengeful omnipresent wildlife. But that is interesting...” She turned her head to look at him. “You can’t see them? Even with thermal imaging? I always assumed that they were just really good at hiding themselves in the trees and such, but maybe it’s more than that. How cool would it be if they could, like, make themselves imperceptible or something?” She chuckled, shaking her head at the improbability of it all, and turned back to the cart just long enough to reach inside it and grab the little spherical drone from its charging-station.
Standing up and turning around fully to face him, she beamed him a smile as she held up the tri-rotored drone in the palm of her right hand. “This here is Aitch Cee. I put him together myself! He’ll be checking out the area to figure out where we need to go.”

It actually gave him a short pause - properly indicated by the complete stilling of his frame as he looked after the woman as she skipped to her cart - when she, with exaggerated cheerfulness, offered to shoot him in the face instead. While she had been ... surprisingly lousy at keeping a serious demeanor even when being pointed at with the gun of a man who was fully capable of - if not, as far as she knew, outright intent on - pulling the trigger at the slightest provocation, this jump to what could essentially be summed up as "light-hearted gallows humor" was nevertheless almost jarring.
He guessed it meant she was indeed taking him on his word, and perhaps even trusted him beyond just reasoning that all he would achieve by turning against her would fuck him over in the long run, and thus he was unlikely to do so. They certainly were past him maybe shooting her to easily obtain whatever her cart contained hanging in the air by now, he reckoned. Such dynamics persisted when both sides were roughly equal. If one was notably more powerful than the other, then the weaker one was either an ally, was kept around purely to be exploited, or got rolled over with no hesitation. Most often the latter.
He guessed there would be some truth to insisting that any kindness (or, indeed, any non-violence) he showed her was with the main aim of getting him into her faction. He could not deny it. Not really. He had even told her outright he needed a place to be, not without a hint - nay, a good dose - of perceptible desperation. He had also told her, in no uncertain terms, that he was, for all intents and purposes, a deserter. Did not exactly paint the most favorable picture of him, did it? 'So here is some guy who is only here because he abandoned his duty and has no place to stay because of it...'
The only thing that spoke for him was the fact that he had some insight to his old faction's workings, and even that could be held against him - what if he went to someone else to babble out all Eighfour's weaknesses when things went sour? He had essentially already done that once now, had he not? Even if Kay-Gee decided to put good faith in him, there was no telling whether her superiors would be as accommodating. And then there was the small issue of a doomsday-weapon and the bigger, hungrier fish who might turn their eyes at Eighfour now that their current target was proving too hard to swallow... He was not looking forward to coming face-to-face with whatever mid-tier officer - did her faction even have officers, commanders, sergeants, if they had no soldiers? - she eventually brought him to.
Guess it all came down to whether Eighfour's higher-ups possessed a so-called human side, eh? Strategically, yes, his reliability was dubious at best. Humanly... Yes, he could go faction-jumping, betraying and manipulating his way through life, seeking favors at the cost of others until someone caught track of his bullshit and it all finally blew up in his face, but what would be the damn point? At that stage it would be easier to just end it early himself; yesternight, his base survival instincts might have taken precedence, but consciously, this kind of life was not what he would choose to partake in over dying for a lost cause. Not truly.
Merciless, grim, and devoid of much personal freedom as his old life had been, at the very least he had always belonged somewhere, had an identity, and things had been rather clear-cut. These were us, these were the bad guys, you went there, you did this. You tried to stay out of your superiors' attention (it was much more likely to mean bad things than promotions), and if you were currently not on a mission, you kicked back and relaxed with whoever were currently on your squad, making dumb jokes and complaining over whatever unidentifiable substance of peculiar texture and consistency you got passed for rations that day. There had perhaps always been things about which you kept your mouth shut if you had but a sliver of self-preservation instinct, but he had never feared his comrades, not in the sense of expecting them to turn against him out of the blue or actually living up to the darker part of their humor. You were not supposed to take that shit seriously.
Kay-Gee might have been surprised to hear that "just guns" like that spent quite a lot of what little free time they had on chuckling at random nonsense and even messing with their fellow soldiers. A lot of their humor was indeed either pretty dark, dry and delivered deadpan - to the point where it probably did not register as humor to the uninitiated -, crude and vulgar, or practical and seemingly born out of someone still having a bit too much time on their hands, but ultimately, it was still vastly preferable to spend your evening cursing at whoever had somehow managed to duct tape all of your equipment to the ceiling while you were sleeping (including the components of your gun ... yes, even the individual bullets from the magazine had been extracted and subjected to the same treatment), than ponder the likelihood of your next mission being your last. Combined with the actual stress of the battlefield and the looming presence of whatever merciless entity was presently in charge, it would get pretty damn depressing pretty fast. Plenty of time to be serious and covered in cold sweat while staring death in the eyes; better laugh at it behind its back. Made it easier to get back to facing it.
He finally moved his gun back over his shoulder, stepped closer and lowered himself to one knee as Kay-Gee crouched down by her cart and began messing with its side-panel.
“Sorry, I’ve never been taken hostage before – is that right? Is that what you call it? - so you’ll have to forgive me if I didn’t do it right.”
"I haven't really partaken in any ... hostage situations, so I'm afraid I'm not really the right person to consult, here..." Notrau admitted. In truth, from the way his old faction usually operated, he suspected such operations were few and far between to begin with. No hesitation, no doubt and all that. "Shouldn't I have demanded something from your faction, promising them your safe return, should they oblige with my demands?" He shook his head. "If this were a hostage situation, then I'd also make for a rather inept captor, huh?"
He watched with mild puzzlement when the first thing Kay took out of her cart was some manner of glove, rather than a container of food.
"I don't really make a habit of biting the hands that feed me, if that's what you're concerned over," he offered as she began slipping her hand into the article. "And if that's for getting the food out, then, uh, I think I'd prefer my dried meat a bit more seasoned. I might not know what went into my rations half the time, but at least these never actuallyattempted to sink their teeth into my nearest fingers when prodded with a fork..." Jokes aside, he would really prefer if sustenance did not wait until they had reached Eighfour. Had she not said the closest people of hers were the computer-guys a couple dozen kilometers away?
He listened in silence as she commented over relocating herself - though he thought he could easily offer at least a few pointers (something like the cliffdrop would be a significant enough landmark, would it not? and the "ground zero"?) - and echoed his assumption that offering the birds some food might appease them. It was only after she inquired about him seeing the birds that he spoke up again.
"I saw the first one," he noted, briefly raising his shoulders. "The heat would not bleed through if they somehow knew to hide themselves behind the trunks or something - I can't really see through the trees properly with just IR, but I can see a hand-print on your your cart a dozen seconds after you touched it with your bare hand. Sonar just gets me the direction here ... too much leaves and other nonsense. Perhaps I could detect them with something less passive, but I'd rather not announce my presence more than necessary. You could perhaps convince yourself that a gunshot was a breaking branch, but good luck hoping that any listening sensors will not be able to tell a ping from cosmic shenanigans. That, and the static is picking up again, which tends to get in the way of more sophisticated systems." He sighed.
His eyebrows crawled up on his forehead (though still fully concealed by his matte visor) when he looked up to meet what the woman had turned around for proudly presenting him. It was a drone. A very small, seemingly unarmed, and generally inconspicuous-looking rotored drone. Probably not built for silent flight; he figured those tiny blades would sound like a swarm of particularly pissed hornets at the least. It was actually remote-controlled, right? Even though she had decided to name it - him - and was speaking of him as if he were an autonomous individual. For all that he knew, it was also entirely possible that it was sitting there, staring at him with its tiny lens, evaluating him, judging him. That was a disturbing thought.
"He?" he repeated, carefully, as of yet uncertain what to make of the tiny machine that he could probably easily crush in his gauntleted hand. His eyes moved from the drone to Kay's smiling face and back. Reaching for the gun would probably be an over-reaction, all things considered, but some things - like his fear of thinking machines - were far too deeply ingrained to ignore. One day, it was cute little apparatuses that sat on your shoulders like well-trained pet rodents, the next it was their much bigger, armed cousins hunting you down for the simple crime of daring to not be machine yourself. "Should I introduce myself?"

---

The thirteen intact Trenian artillery units were still and quiet, positioned in a sparse cloud, still anchored to place, but with their guns at rest, laying flat on their roofs. They were almost inconspicuous from distance, somehow harmless-looking, these robust metal monstrosities - until you compared them to the humans milling about, and begun to comprehend how big the damn things actually were. Two were positioned a ways off, and while some of the intact ones bore marks of the battle upon their hulls, then these were obviously significantly damaged, the mechanisms on their guns burnt and twisted. Unlike the rest, these were unanchored. And, slightly behind the rest, there was the 'dead' one - blackened and rent, remains of its gun still extended, gaping hole clearly visible in the middle of its roof.
Between them seven comparatively much smaller vehicles lay spaced out, just as robust, but almost oval rather than harshly rectangular, sensitive lenses redacted under the protective covers of heavy metal hatches, with nary another visible opening present. One could easily tell the artillery units were moving on treads, but whatever mechanism the "hell-lasers" - as Notrau had dubbed them - used for moving, it could not be easily discerned from above and afar. They were almost featureless, like crabs pretending to be rocks.
Towards the front, there were four vehicles which were barely more than metal frames with guns and frontal plates attached to them - obviously meant to be used against human forces, not heavy armored units. Towards the back, there were what looked like support vehicles - twelve APCs, broad and slant-hooded terrain crawlers, and five trucks, not too unlike the APCs by general structure, though with their backs being removable modules rather than solidly attached. The smaller of the two last remaining vehicles stood out mostly because it was decorated with what looked like various antennae and relay masts.
The other ... it was easily comparable to the arrays in size - unpacked, it actually appeared larger -, though its main purpose was harder to determine. It appeared to lack any proper big guns, with just eight mid-caliber barrels sticking out from strategic positions. It furthermore seemed to have pulled its wheels or threads in - or, at the very least, it had sunk itself firmly to ground. Its one side had been lowered to the ground, unveiling another wall beneath, though this one adorned with narrow bomb-windows, while the dislodged outer side formed a manner of service ramp. Its back, in turn, had been lifted up, forming a shade and baring what appeared to be sliding doors, with a lone soldier standing guard on it, his back to the platform made up from the vehicle's roof.
On said platform, there sat what looked like four full-sized attack helicopters, rotors locked with blades positioned along the tail, and a dozen smaller planelike aircraft with folded wings, dark and sleek. As these seemed too small to fit a human, one could perhaps conclude these were drones - it did not seem all that impossible to confuse one with unfolded wings with a large gliding avian - or vice versa, which explained why the lone surviving Anderekian from yesternight had mistaken an actual bird for a drone.
Three other "structures" accompanied the vehicles, strategically placed well within the perimeter - sizable fabric tents, rectangular in shape and patterned yellow, brown and light green on the outside. These were placed side-by-side, but much like with most other things here, they had some distance between them. Perhaps it was a manner of precaution - should one get hit, the others would not be caught in the blast.
And finally, the people. There seemed to be far too few actually moving about for the number of vehicles present, barely two dozen at first glance - half a dozen by the tents, the aforementioned one guarding the construct with the helicopters in it, four by various vehicles, eight wandering about the perimeter, the remaining nine at various tasks, or at least heading somewhere with obvious purpose, rather than standing guard and observing. Those on guard were in full armor, and at least appeared unharmed, though it would presumably be hard to tell. Some of the others were only partially armored - including a guy with a yet black ponytail headed for the "land-carrier", and several of them were visibly limping, only using one arm to carry something, or stopping to recover between activities.
One could easily assume there many who were not quite as fortunate. Excluding whoever might be hidden in the tents and vehicles, who could easily be more dead than alive, one only needed to look ways north of the perimeter, where the dead lay. Out of direct sight and, hopefully, range of smell, should the wind be merciful. Stripped of usable armor, no graves, no distinction, placed in lines, Trenian and Ardek alike. The former had counted their fallen, the latter had unlisted the forces sent here, but a random onlooker had no means of telling one from another. Dead cared not who you were, they said... And tired, weak, and most likely injured men and women had no means to provide burials, lest they did so at dire cost to those who were still alive. Beasts were going to have a feast once they dared close in...
All under a sky that was now less uniformly milky white, and more ominously gray-patched sickly yellow.

---

Why did people think being high as a kite was usually pleasant? For most things, it was not strictly true. It was less a sense of calm or excitement, and more a bizarre combination of being at once numb and hyperaware. Light hurt. Colors hurt. Pain in his torso had receded to a dull throb, but in turn, he could barely feel his body at all. Only cold, for some reason... He could hear ... his heartbeat? Blood flowing in his veins? Something like that. It was loud, and drowned out practically everything else. He tasted blood, and thirst. How could one taste thirst?
He felt lightheaded. Faint. There was vertigo. Disorientation. Was he even going in the right direction? Losing his helmet was not going to benefit him any. No sun. Not even visible sky. He thought the wall was to his right, and the underground structure he had left his friend into was somewhere to his back and right. Thought... What was it, two kilometers removed? Probably less. Could be five hundred meters in completely wrong direction, for all he knew. And he would need to cover twenty-five, thirty, maybe more. Maybe it was fifty. Or hundred. He could roughly envision the area, but in the end, it was but guesses...
Why was the forest floor trying to crawl away? Maybe it was ants, rather than the odd dead needles moving. Who knew. His vision was long past being reliable. If those were ants, then he had move on before they climbed all the way up him. That would have been unpleasant at the best of times, let alone when he had a gaping - (Don't think about it.)
At least he was still upright. Get to a settlement. Run into a vehicle. Did not matter. Just keep going. He would even just risk representatives of his own faction now. To hell with being potentially trialed later, better take the odds there than die here. Heck, he would have to take the odds with running into anyone, anyway, as there was no guarantee some random unit would be friendly. If it was a Trenian, then they would not at least shoot on sight, and he would at least be permitted to explain that Rayne had no fault. He could testify that. It was all his own poor judgment that got them here... Rayne had collapsed to an explosion. Just ... fallen.
Just to get it over with... Just be done... But until he is, he must keep going. If he lets himself rest, if he lays down, he would not be getting up anymore. He knew that. That if he falls, he will stay down. It was only some odd momentum, not even willpower, that kept him knowing now. Just mechanical continuation of what he had been doing for however long it had been since he left the ruins behind.
And so, he staggered onward.

“I’m glad to hear it,” was Kay’s response when Enn admitted to lacking experience in hostage situations as well, making no effort – and seeing no need to do so – to hide her true feelings on that subject, which were that it genuinely was a relief. Taking people hostage and such was not something anyone from Eighfour, aside from the odd soon-to-be exiled criminal who was reckless enough to turn to methods like that, so the fact that Enn did not come from a background where taking hostages was something commonplace was a relief.
Beside that, though, Kay was not quite blind enough not to realize the implications of the statement when compared to the things he had already told her, about being a soldier, being in war and doing a lot of fighting, and overall she was not entirely sure whether the lack of hostage-taking was a commentary on Enn as much as it was on his old faction. If they were in war a lot but did not take hostages – that is, they did not take any prisoners – that meant that the people who might under different circumstances have been prisoners would have been killed instead.
These people, Kay thought, her smile fading for a moment as a shadow of fear crept over her face, are the ones who may soon end up attacking Eighfour. They don’t take prisoners and don’t care about the lives of their own soldiers... Enn is lucky to have gotten away from there, but if they catch him, he won’t live long enough to realize that there are other ways to coexist than to destroy one’s competitors.
Not that the fact that Enn and his faction had killed people – Eighfour had taken its share of lives over the years, making no effort to avoid killing would-be thieves and raiders that found their settlement – but... well, at least Eighfour had never been in an actual war before. And Eighfour allowed even their enemies to retrieve their dead and wounded once they had been repelled; somehow, she doubted that the Anderekian or Trenian soldiers would be as merciful.

Kay offered a chuckle when Enn commented on her mechanical glove, allowing herself to be distracted from the business of retrieving her drone to look at the device covering her hand for a moment. The glove did not even offer that much protection, at least not to anything with teeth; the design of the mechanical part of it was actually more akin to an exoskeleton than a piece of armor, with gaps between the metal bars and bands that wrapped around and interconnected with each other, shaped with more of an emphasis on shielding the mechanisms, wires and sensors that tracked the position and movement of the joints more than the hand. The glove-part of it was just cotton that had been dyed black, and was not liable to offer much protection against anything. If someone smashed her hand with a hammer or the like the metal exoskeleton would probably take the brunt of the impact and save her hand from being broken, but against something capable of slipping into the gaps in the metal, like teeth? It would mostly depend on luck at that point.

When the time came for Enn to be introduced to Aitch Cee, Kay could not help it but to burst out laughing at his reaction; her laughter shook her so much that she nearly dropped the little drone, and quickly grabbed it with both hands to avoid actually doing so.
“Don’t worry,” she told him through a wide grin. “The only one in here -” she tapped the spherical drone twice with a fingernail, “- is me. I’m pretty good at building and copying stuff, but I’ve never even seen a thinking machine before, so obviously I can’t make one. Besides, the others don’t say that I shouldn’t go near any advanced AI... that they can apparently get in my head or something, because of this.” She raised her gloved hand to the right side of her face, where she tapped a finger on the little dark-gray metal box that contained her brain-machine interface.
Taking a deep breath, Kay closed her right eye – the cybernetic one – and turned on Aitch Cee, replacing the image in her head from the aforementioned eye with the image recorded by Aitch’s camera. Manipulating the mechanical glove by moving her fingers she sent the little fellow flying skyward – buzzing like a swarm of angry wasps as it went – where it would have the best view of the surrounding area, to allow her to orientate herself properly.
At the same time as she was controlling the drone, Kay went – slowly, as it was quite distracting to almost literally have to be two places at once – to the front of her cart, where she opened a different compartment to retrieve half a dozen scraps of dried mutton and a couple of pieces of crispbread, which she handed to Enn. “It’s probably better if you throw some of that on the ground around here, so that the birds know it’s coming from you; maybe it’ll get them to forgive you. Just eat the rest. Oh, and I have some water if you get thirsty, too.”

The woman burst out laughing at his - admittedly - cluelessness at the little drone she had brought out. It gave him a pause, during which he just awkwardly waited until she had calmed down enough to be able to speak uninterrupted once more.
At that point, she explained that "the only one in there was her", whatever that stood for. In any case, she had assured him that "Aitch Cee" did not have a mind of its own. The implication of actual thinking machines potentially getting into her head were no good, however... Anderekians did not possess such technology, nor did - as far as he knew - Trenians, though someone else might. And what would the consequences of that be? Could they perhaps read her thoughts and retrieve any plans of action she had overheard? Commandeer her and turn her against her own?
He studied her face, the subtle differences between her real and artificial eye - which, on closer look, appeared to be socketed in, somehow, rather than being a functionless glass eye just there for appearance's sake. The metal box embedded in her skull she had lightly tapped with her finger. The scars on her face.
"What is 'this'?" he inquired. "How do you control ... him? Your right eye, it is not just glass, either, is it?"
The small drone went off flying, and Kay-Gee meticulously went over to another part of her cart, finally retrieving the aforementioned crispbread and dried meat (the latter thankfully suitably non-hostile, unlike his joking guess earlier had predicted). The former Anderekian soldier just semi-automatically held out a gauntleted hand to accept whatever Kay was handing him.
Feed the birds? If she said so... He hoped they found crispbread at least palatable enough. Should he break it into pieces? The one he had actually seen - and shot at - had been pretty damn big. In the end, he figured that about half the size of his palm for a piece should do (that would be, what, a beakful for one of those things), and set to snapping the thin loaves into pieces (eventually gathering all but the two pieces into one hand) as he took a few steps away from Kay and her cart, vainly scanning the trees.
"Uh, birds?" He asked the invisible feathered fiends, who he only assumed were there, watching, judging, always. Otherwise, he was quote literally speaking to the trees. Even if present, they probably did not understand a word what he was saying, but anything that could revoke their ire... "I am sorry for shooting at one of you; I did not realize they were not a drone ... plane, a machine. Please accept my apologies, and the gift of food, and let me be at peace once more."
He felt ridiculous. But nevertheless, with those words spoken, he cast the pieces of crispbread in his one hand across the land - horizontally, lest one of them actually thought he was purposefully trying to hit one of them with a projectile of some description and they all began their verbal chastisement again.
"Hope you are right and they'll at least get what I was trying to do," he noted to Kay as he returned to the cart, hesitating for a second, not sure whether to just leave Kay to controlling the drone, and then opting to simply sit down next to the cart, his back to its side. "And water would be nice, I think... Ironic how you can be both soaking wet and thirsty at the same time, isn't it?" He guessed it was at least objectively better than drying up in half a day if left under the sun. Like a frog or some such creature. Did frogs ever actually drink, or did they just soak up all the water they needed through their skin?
At the same time, he fumbled with some manner of connectors on his neck, until he finally could lift his helmet off his head and carefully set it down next to himself, absently trying to wipe his forehead against the back of his gauntlet and squinting his gray-blue eyes until they could adjust to the lighting conditions outside.
He was young - looked to be around twenty -, with medium-short blonde hair and the beginnings of stubble adorning his square jaw. In the lack of anything better to do, and to use his time optimally (never mind that he actually was hungry), he took a bite of one of the dried mutton strips.
"How far are we?" he asked between bites. "You said the computer guys are a couple dozen kilometers from here - farther, then? Not sure the weather would hold until then - even if it won't start pouring again, static going up like that usually isn't a good sign."

“The others call it a ‘gate’, but it’s really some kind of brain-machine interface,” Kay explained the device grafted into her skull, idly drumming her fingers on the little metal box as she did so. “As far as I know it just translates human thought into digital signals and vice versa. And my eye is the reason I got it, originally... to be able to actually see with it. It’s artificial, you see. Lost my old one when, eh, all of this happened.” She made a vague gesture at the scarred side of her face.
She probably seemed somewhat less lively during this explanation than she had been with Enn most of the time until then, if not downright morose, which was probably one of her greatest regrets. Her artificial eye and the gate in her head were probably the two most advanced pieces of technology she had ever seen, and both were hugely fascinating to her to the point where she wanted to get enthusiastic about them the same way she did with other interesting devices, but somehow... the fact that they were in her, and had almost become an integral part of her, made it somewhat awkward. The eye was not so bad, beside it reminding her of the eye she had lost, because she could turn it off and take it out; its socket allowed for the eye itself to be plugged in and out quite freely and painlessly, if one knew how to do it. She had been able to examine the eye – albeit only very cautiously as to be sure that she could restore it to working order again after – and figure how how it worked. The gate, however... it was plugged into her brain. Removing it would probably kill her, or at least cause irreparable brain damage, and there was no telling what could happen if one tried tinkering with it while it was still connected to her. For a part of herself, she knew surprisingly little about the gate... too little.
It had not been her choice to receive those two things; she had been sedated after her accident, and when she had regained consciousness the procedure had already been performed. She recalled having been pretty devastated by it at the time, and furious with the others for having altered her like that without her consent, but ultimately she had just accepted it because... well, frankly she had no other choice. The worst part of it all was that helping her was not even the primary objective of installing the gate in her head! The reason they had given her the cybernetic eye and the brain-machine interface was mostly just because they wanted to see if it worked, and how it would affect the recipient. Needless to say it was no one in Eighfour who had built either of the two artifacts. Rather, they really had no idea which faction had made them, or what purpose they originally served... and the only reason they had known enough to be able to install the eye and gate in her skull was because they had found them embedded into the skull of a corpse. The corpse had had several other cybernetic replacements, but they only had the one brain-machine interface, and the rest would not work without that. They had tried to pressure her into receiving the other replacements since, but she had refused.
So now they were all just really hoping that she managed to get herself seriously hurt again... or better yet, died so they could install the gate into someone more cooperative.

But soon enough she brightened and returned to her usual self. “As for Aitch, the way I control him is pretty ingenious, if I say so myself. It’s this glove here, you see; I built it to control all of my drones by having it register the position and movements of my fingers, and translate those things into commands.” She sighed. “When I say that I’m inside him, though, it’s because I can see and hear through him, through the gate. I haven’t figured out how to make the gate accept new signals, though, so for the moment all I can do is to make my drones copy the signal of my eye, since the gate recognizes that. Unfortunately that means that I have to turn my eye off while I use a drone... if I don’t the signals get all mixed together, and I see two images mixed into each other.”

She did not pay too much attention to what Enn was doing with the birds, though, as her attention came to be more and more focused on her actions through Aitch, currently flitting through the leaves and heading for the clear view of the forest from above. She frowned, deeply concentrated, as she slowed the little drone’s movements. Something was... just slightly off, it felt like. She had not noticed it until Aitch had put some distance between itself and her, but now she was becoming increasingly certain that something was not right. It felt like there sometimes was a slight delay before Aitch responded to the movements of her fingers, and while the images remained clear, the sound... she seemed to be hearing a little bit of static. Odd.
Until she actually got above the trees, that was, and got a proper view of the sky...
Oh.

Kay remained unusually intent on what she was doing by remote-control for about another ten or so seconds, barely even paying attention to what was happening in the immediate vicinity of her body, until Aitch returned – much more clumsily than it had left – to her, she turned it off and reopened her artificial eye. Only then did she look at Enn, just about in time to see him remove his helmet – he looked surprisingly young – and take a bite of meat before asking her a question.
“You noticed the static, huh?” she sighed, turning back to her cart to put away Aitch Cee and retrieve a bottle of water. “Yeah, the weather definitely won’t be kind to us, that’s for sure; judging by the sky, there’s a sunstorm coming. I won’t be able to use my drones while that goes on... but hopefully I won’t need to, either.”
She turned back to him and offered him a plastic bottle, made to hold a liter of water and about two-thirds full of clear-looking liquid. “And Eighfour isn’t that far, really. Now that I know where we are, I’d say we’re probably just some twenty kilometers away.”
Suddenly, though, she had a thought. “Will the, uh, Trenians, was it? Do you know if their drones will work in a sunstorm?”