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.
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.
