Day ??? of year 384 Post-Downfall
Sunstorm imminent
The Aftermath
[[Tarena Igna, Ezek Caendar, Edrik Marax, Uwe Straldast, Aidren Recker and Eris Geran(deceased) are Trenian officers.
Jerech Hayden Trent, Rayne Devien and Yan Terev are missing Trenian soldiers.
Eideren Naught is a nearby Trenian military base.
Angan Tirez is a Trenian civilian settlement, recently assaulted by Anderekian forces, an event that partiallly provoked the roll-in in the beginning.
Relevant outpost currently lacks a name.]]
60:00:00 LNT
With a jolt, Uwe's eyes snapped open, met by a metal ceiling. It took a couple of seconds for his mind to win over itself and finish what had been started by the "alarm" - a tactile notification, really, soundless and only triggered once with no need to switch it off. Waking upon an external stimulus tended to come with a sense of annoyance, yet he had
decided to drag himself up before his shift, and thus he did. He didn't like being bothered while he slept, but he
also didn't like dallying.
At 66, his shift begins, Igna's officially ends; at 99, Igna's shift begins, Caendar's ends; at 33, Caendar's shift begins, his ends. Two officers awake at any time, at least one of whom would have been on shift for a while. In an ideal case, it'd have been three
pairs of officers having overlapping shifts, but Geran was dead, Recker was more or less fully removed from the game, and Marax was just about out of it enough that he was variably able to keep an eye on things if he gritted his teeth and focused, but wasn't able to functionally
do much, so he wasn't formally assigned to anything. Yet, said Marax had managed to find his way over to the command center and station himself there regardless. Uwe wasn't sure whether it was dedication, stubbornness, or both, but either way, he was impressed. Positively or negatively, he didn't know, but impressed regardless.
Even Tarena had checked out after a hundred and twenty hours on her feet (shifts tended to become more flexible during actual combat and the immediate aftermath), yet this fellow had opted to keep going about as soon as he was conscious enough to do so. If it had been
anyone else, he'd have expected his singlemindedness to be the
result of being partially disrupted, but Marax had
always been like that. Bit aloof, perhaps, but notoriously duty-bound and seemingly unshakable. Some said even more so than
he was, though Uwe himself insisted that it was more a matter of him being part-reptile, in contrast to the beacon-of-light ideal Marax represented. Both of their business involved making sure people got done what needed to be done and, preferably, did not die. Just with a different disposition. Uwe's tended to be more disruptive.
He stretched - which was to say he first straightened himself with his arms by his side, then slid those up over his chest and folded his fingers above his head, elbows out. He was a tall man, even among his fellow soldiers, and a powerfully built one to boot. There was nary more than two centimeters between his shoulder and the ceiling when he was lying on his side, and maybe a hand's width of space left over his head with his toes touching the footboard. The space was wide, though; two of him would have just about fit side-by-side. Nevertheless, felt a bit too much like sleeping on a shelf. Probably sucked for anyone with as much as an inkling of claustrophobic tendencies. For him it was just mildly physically inconvenient.
In what was by now a practiced motion he pulled his elbows against his sides and his shoulders in and rolled to the side, legs thrown over the guard first, his torso sliding over after hands gripping the guard to slow his descent, ensuring a soft, soundless landing. It was useful to remember where you slept before you tried something like that; the landing would have been quite jolting from a middle or lower bunk. The same way, it was useful to remember which openings were just
barely tall enough for you to fit through during normal operation, since the same would probably not apply if you were wearing anything with thicker soles that day. Contrary to popular belief, most vertically-challenged passages were more hindrances than hazards to someone his height. It didn't take much brain-power to
not walk directly face-first into a wall.
Sent by the metallic thud and soft hiss of the APC's doors, Uwe sauntered over to one of the carriers. Fifteen tonnes of all-terrain truck, fully loaded with forty-five tonnes of mostly food, water, ammo and medical supplies. And that was just one of them, not counting anything crammed in the APCs or other more purpose-built vehicles. With the people left, the food they'd taken with them alone could last them the better part of a year. As long as they can go outside and the trucks stay intact, it would be a
long time before they'd have to pry the floor liners loose from the APCs and lick them clean of any miscellaneous crumbs.
The good rations would be gone long before that, but such was life; at least they had all the variety the category of "can last a decade and needs only boiling or no preparation" could offer. Seemed excessive. Either someone expected them to hold out longer than originally anticipated or they just sent what Angan Tirez no longer needed. On the flipside, showers would be dependent on rainwater or be restricted to wet towels for the foreseeable future. Last night had dumped enough water on them to last a week, but past that... If they didn't get mowed down sooner rather than later, there would probably be days where they could be quite grateful that all air they breathed was fully filtered as long as they stayed suited up.
For now, blood and burnt metal overbore all, mixed with the vague scent of damp foliage.
60:07:12 LNT. The seconds raced by, but even with a few packs of food gathered in his arm, there was still plenty of time before his shift proper. All the more convenient; even at times like this, Igna or Caendar would have less to say about things he did with his time off. If he won them back some of what had been lost, all the better.
The mood in the mobile command station was oddly stiff. People forcing themselves to be optimistic and distracted, but a sliver of anticipant fear remained. There were only so many times you could try and optimize the position of your drones and units, so many times you could organize supplies, so many things you could talk about before ultimately realizing that most people on location were just waiting for impending doom to materialize. So they tried to stay busy and not think about it.
As far as Uwe was concerned, busy just felt a lot less tedious.
"You're early," one of the commands remarked. She was a couple years younger than him, about Marax's age, with only a few battles behind her, with this one being the first that was on-site with a mobile station. She was fit, with a slightly rounded face and a tendency to smile when nervous. Chatty, but not intrusive enough to be annoying. Who wouldn't have liked someone like her, appearance-wise or otherwise?
"I brought food," he pointed out, dropping the rations on the table and taking seat. For the first time since some time last morning, he actually removed his helmet and gauntlets, running his hands over his face. There was a faint trace of a scar not quite fully faded on the left side of his jaw. You could try scratching your nose against the inside of your helmet. It always felt like there was, somehow, exactly
half a spot you missed. "I also assume not much news since I last dropped by?"
"Ezek dropped by and ordered some drones in position. Y'know just to cover our bases for as long as we still have some sight. Considered manned and wired recon for the same reasons, if we have any to spare. And we discussed some, eh, alternate strategies. Should about cover it."
"I see," Uwe tore one of the packs open, finding a wet towel to clean his hands and inspecting his options. For storage and compactness, most things were also very decidedly rectangular, be they fluids, sweet or savoury. Pretty much everything was very calorie-dense, for minimizing the effort you had to make to carry on for however long necessary. Lugging around forty kilos of equipment over terrain, and sometimes more, meant you spent energy like there was no tomorrow.
For many, there wasn't.
The labels (if you didn't read the small script) were delightfully descriptive. Meat #47. Taking a bite, it ended up like tasting like lightly salted jerky from some nondescript farm animal ... except, somehow, it had almost pate-like consistency. The former civvies had informed him that rations made no logical sense.
Dried was not supposed to be a taste. It was not actively unappealing, though, and that was that.
"I meant it, by the way. The food's for taking and you can't know when you don't have time to eat anymore."
"Ahh, thanks," the female command actually got up to gather a share, before quickly retreating to her chair, not unlike a child expecting to be scolded by her parent. "It's strange, you know. I know humans should eat. I know I
haven't eaten... But I don't feel the hunger. But I suppose I will ... try?"
"Adrenaline or whatever the hell it is, makes your body kind of forget to feel things for a while. Should be normal."
"I guess. It's not strictly a part of first aid, but I suppose someone might have mentioned things like that." She smiled sadly. "How do you lot get used to ... well, battles? It's not even my first time, but it still doesn't feel ... real. Like I'm back in training."
That, Uwe didn't know an answer to. "Some never really do. Others never really need to." He contemplated his share of rations for a bit. "I suppose I'm one of the latter."
The female command gave him an apprehensive look.
"Never looked at the personnel files for this mission?" Uwe's gaze was intense as he looked at her. It always was. "I never
was a civilian. Grew up on base. Studied in a military compound. Saw the men and women coming back. Eventually, went out myself." Well, that was one part of it, anyway.
"There are ... were, well, I suppose still are three hundred and sixty of them."
Uwe raised an index finger. "Only six officers."
"But ... I guess, never having had a ... regular life. I suppose I can't really relate to that. I suppose it is all you're used to." She tried nibbling on her food and obtained a thoughtful mien. "It does taste like cake. A cake someone has squeezed into about one tenth of its original size, but a cake regardless."
"The uncompacted one didn't fit in the package. Sorry 'bout that."
The woman snorted, mirthless.
The male command had kicked his entire chair loose and rolled over to take his pick.
Marax managed to look a bit forlorn. "Thank you for your offer, but I've been sentenced to hospital diet." IV bags, then.
"I suppose the same could be said for those guys?" Uwe asked. There were six additional people in the room with them. Soldiers, not regular command station inhabitants.
"I think so ... yes. They're here because the hospital ran out of space, kind of. And they're good enough to not need constant medical attention anymore, but not good enough to get back to work."
In a place like this, if you were injured? If you couldn't save yourself, you wanted to be in something that could hightail out as soon as possible. The mobile station could pack up, the tents couldn't.
"Good thinking." Anything that might have been too sensitive for non-officers to overhear could be communicated through the screens, anyway. Even with the helmet off, a more careful observer might have noticed a thin, near-transparent layer over Uwe and the commands' eyes. It took more pressure to work with the control panel without the gloves off, but it recognized him either case.
Just a few missing pieces. "If I am not back by the formal start of my shift, then I'm trying to recover some of our missing soldiers. And run those cables. The worst thing we can be once the drones whiteout is completely blind." Shielded physical optics fared
somewhat better than any other medium available for them. "I've given seventeen points. Default to fallback."
Putting the helmet back took just a couple dozen seconds. "Until then, good luck."
"Hope we don't need it," remarked the male command.
61:38:00 Uwe was just about the only one currently on site who had brought a personal vehicle in the ordinary sense of the word. The drivers would probably object; they lived, and died with their vehicles. Feelings notwithstanding, they also had much less freedom to choose where to point them.
Uwe's vehicle was a modified dunerider. Camouflaged, vaguely wedge-shaped, about four and a half tonnes heavy, five meters long, but only one point two wide, and a single meter tall at a rest. It carried four autocannons and usually only the center-seated driver and computers. You could seat two more if they didn't mind being their backs against wheel wells and their legs stepped over any time the driver wanted to get in or out (at least there was enough leg room for anyone under three meters tall). Three, if the person in the middle didn't mind getting closely acquainted with the two other passengers. It sat low to the ground when stopped, wheels fully concealed under its armoured shell.
For uncharacteristically sentimental reasons, it had also been dubbed "Argent".
The Trenian officer made a short detour to grab a sizable medical kit from the transports, tossing it in the center back. Screens awoke even before he had finished strapping himself in. (It was remarkably easier to perform harsh maneuvers if you didn't have to hold onto your seat yourself.) The dunerider's targeting system drew an alien image of the surroundings. Whatever their helmets and armor had was ultimately still limited by size, power and weight, and couldn't be easily adjusted on the fly - a vehicle didn't have such restrictions.
Argent "stood", acquiring nearly half a meter of clearance, and headed for the lower plane, the ground, heather, needles and branches crushing under tyres the loudest sound it made.
It seemed quiet on the verge. Medium-sized erratic markers, probably wildlife. Too obvious to be humans in armour. Aberrations that could be attributed to plants (turns out that some plants ran hot; who'd have thought). Quite a lot of noise Argent's computers could no longer filter out, static from high-powered particles. A distant stronghold to the west. And an
incoming vehicle, a small, not a particularly concealed carrier.
Larecrom? So close to what it was guaranteed to know was an active site of conflict, on a path infringing on a neutral faction's outpost? Well, be he damned, but it made a part of his job so much easier... Bloody opportunistic scavengers. It was highly likely this carrier was piloted by a human... Commander-overseer Larecrom seemed to like being the only machine mind around, and its reach was not liable to hold this far for long in this weather.
The dunerider sped down the steep path, disappearing amid the tall tree trunks at its foot. There were only so many things Larecrom's minions could be looking for here, but Argent was faster.
The awareness of the lone figure was abrupt. Mere human senses could have missed him entirely, but the enhanced version from Uwe's armor made him conspicuous closing in and the dunerider's targeting systems lit him up like a beacon. Armor was for protecting you from detection as much as fire and projectile. Seven hundred and forty four meters slightly to the right. Fourteen kilometers down from the base. Good thing the wanderer had stayed away from the thicket; would have made it a pain to get through to him. And yes, it was indeed one of their missing soldiers.
There was a weird sway to the figure's gait, unchanging, slow, mechanical, even as the dunerider slalomed closer, slowed, and turned to intercept him. Looked like at the very least, Argent reached him before Larecrom's grabby pincers.
J.H. Trent only seemed to vaguely realize something once the dunerider's wheels deposited a generous helping of conifer needles on his boots and, perhaps more importantly, its metal frame physically blocked his way forward. There was no recognition, no understanding, only momentary confusion as he halted, bloodied, pale face lax and gaze losing focus again.
On the other side of the vehicle, Uwe swung himself out sideways, using the dunerider's frame as a swing-bar. That was more or less the only way someone his size could get in or out quickly, and it only worked if you were fit and mostly uninjured. The other was a slow, awkward clamber. Didn't bode well to trying to pack mostly unresponsive severely injured people in.
This one merely blinked as Uwe reached his side and drew the other door open. Unsteady, looking through the bulk of steel in front of him, breathing shallow, whistling, slurred, intermixed with soft clicking, like bubbles popping.
"Trent?" Uwe inquired, as he reached out a hand in an attempt to steady the apparent walking corpse.
Whether it was his name reaching some shred of consciousness still keeping his body upright and overwhelming it, or sheer coincidence, but it was as if a thread holding him upright snapped. All muscles lost tone at once, forcing Uwe to rather harshly grab the shoulder he had been reaching for and clasped his other arm around the other's ribs in an attempt to stop him from crumpling to the ground.
Well,
he certainly wasn't making his job any easier.
The body convulsed once, as if to protest the rough treatment, but fell limp again. Lucky that the Trenian officer's reactions were good enough to avoid the worst of the injury. If it weren't for the continued short whistly breaths, one could have assumed Uwe had been just about exactly too late. I truth, it remained unclear if the injured soldier was even any
less conscious than he had been a few minutes ago, trying to continue his trek to ... where exactly? How long would he have lasted like that? Minutes? Hours? A day? If he had not been stopped, would he have indeed continued until he was dead even before hitting the ground?
In the end, Uwe resorted to simply sitting down on the dunerider's doorjamb, and half dropping himself, half crawling backwards while dragging the other with him, propping his torso against the right wheel well, hanging the extra rifle to the back of the driver's seat... The snaps of small branches and fallen needles noted the arrival or Larecrom's carrier. It wasn't perfect, but they had this far defaulted to neutral standing, so Larecrom was not
likely to authorize an attack and voluntarily turn their undefined relations turn hostile. Better yet if the machine mind was out of reach entirely; its minions wouldn't risk instigating on their own.
Uwe guessed he should count it good enough that he could not only precede the machine mind's lackey, but even had an extra moment to try and get the injured soldier settled in. He climbed around and over the driver's seat, then reached out to lift Trent's legs in and close the door on that side. For a good few seconds, he contemplated just hightailing out of there. He wasn't
certain Trent would survive the trip back at potential chase speeds through a forest without being strapped in and some secondary aid. Unfortunately, he was borderline obligated to have a nice pleasant chat with Argent's and the small carrier's autocannons mutually pointing at one another.
He swung himself out and stood next to his dunerider, but didn't point his own rifle at the carrier. Looked plated enough to richochet the smaller bullets off, anyway, so it would have been nothing more than an impotent declaration of futile aggression. "Uwe Straldast, Trenian officer on duty. That is one of ours who appears to have gotten slightly lost. I'll be taking him to the field hospital now."
The silence dragged uncomfortably. Uwe was about to consider silence as the permission to proceed, but unfortunately, a soft hiss of seals releasting foretold a hatch sliding open and a metallic figure stepping out of the small carrier. Much like the blatant carrier,
that armor was anything but subtle.
"Is that so?" it said in a feminine voice. Didn't bother with even the base level of introductions.
"Yes. Do you mind if I proceed?" Best to keep it simple.
"And then what? You patch him up enough so that he can hold a gun again, and tell him to kindly die with you?"
"I don't intend to die."
"Most people don't. At least not until they are too desperate to see no other way out. Don't you think he might have wanted to leave, rather than die?" There was an unusual sharpness to the 'leave'.
"
Leaving is not forbidden for common-rank soldiers and civilians. It's coming back that
may not be allowed. Hand over your bigger guns and armor and go."
"So let him?"
"To do what? Be taken in by you?" What
was her aim? Kidnap their soldiers for research or experiments? Was she doing what Larecrom asked of her, or was she acting on her own? Did Larecrom even
permit its subordinates that much agency?
"For example. Our medicine is more developed than yours. No risk of sunder syndrome, no risk of remaining a vegetable for the rest of his existence. No risk of crippling PTSD. Or are you saying that your little outpost is in a such a bad way that you hope even one person who might be able to be propped up for a day with some tissue grid and a chemical coctail
could make a difference?"
"Unless he himself says otherwise, he is with us and as an officer it's my job to take care of him. I don't have a reason to suspect there's anything permanent enough to require your superior technology.
May I?" Larecrom's approach to the medical field was one of the reasons why people were often not permitted to return. You didn't really know who - or what - you were really getting back donning a mostly familiar shell. Uwe's reaction to the realities of it all was perhaps not quite as visceral as most others, but the very concept of being just replaced as soon a something went more permanent than a week ... well, if you thought of humans as anything other than wear components of a machine, it went against the whole concept of medicine. Larecrom
was a machine, so it wouldn't understand - but even it would point all of its not-so-insignificant firepower at anyone
else who wanted to pick at its internals.
"How convenient we can't just ask him, isn't it? He was headed our way, if I'm not mistaken."
"Or just
away from the battle, and the rest is sheer coincidence. He disappeared midway through; there is no reason to suspect he knows there's not a merry band of Ardeks just waiting to score another straggler."
The metallic figure audibly scoffed.
"And I
could try asking him if you would kindly stop holding me up for half an hour." Pause. "Well?"
"Very well. Do whatever you think you need to." For some reason, the figure seemed to take it as the permission to walk closer, stopping just a couple meters from the dunerider and positioning herself so that she had a clear of the dunerider's interior. "I'll be waiting." She didn't appear to carry any weaponry, but with the vehicles doing the stalemating, it was not needed. If anything, she was no longer standing directly in front of Argent's guns, but
was right behind Uwe's back once he entered the dunerider.
"Just stay clear of the dunerider," Uwe notified the woman as he dropped in.
Not much had changed with Trent's condition; the main issue was a fairly straight-forward large-caliber gunshot wound, from mid-back to almost next to the neck (had he been leaning forward?), taking out parts of a lung, bones, muscle and blood vessels on the way, luckily (if such a term could be applied) seeming to have torn most of it out rather than leaving a mess. Internal bleeding, trapped air and shards couldn't be passively managed; blood loss
mostly could. Supplemental oxygen might be a good idea, but at least he seemed to manage to breathe with what he had left.
No mistake, the same injury without being suited up would have caused a person to completely bleed out in less than two minutes, now ... well, that was probably still less than eighty percent of the blood you definitely needed to stay alive, and maybe half of what there optimally should have been. The other half was mostly kept in by a thin layer of glue. If there was burst damage or internal tears, they were wont to be quite minor. At least blood was easy enough to replace.
Midway through being inspected, Trent's eyes widened a notch, and he definitely looked at the officer, rather than somewhere through and past him. His lips and tongue moved, but no discernible vocalizations escaped. The brief recuperation period had probably enabled him to to regain enough awareness to remember something, but the broken body already brought long past its natural limits refused to cooperate. "Wait a moment," Uwe told him. The injured man slumped, coughing softly.
Having gone over what he could see and copied over the backup personal tracking information, Uwe opened the medical kit. He wouldn't be doing much with the injury - that one seemed stable enough - nor touching the armor. Restoring people was the medical staff's job, and he was liable to do small mistakes that caused the dedicated professionals no small amount of additional headache. Removing pieces of the armor was strongly advised against for the exact same reason; even lying mostly down, removing pressure at the wrong time could evidently drop blood pressure just enough to be the final straw. (The entire first aid training carried the same tone; to anything too much, too little, or in the wrong order, and you'd just be killing the person yourself.)
The metallic figure did her best to look at what Uwe was doing without stepping closer, even as he was merely placing a hard patch over the damaged armor on the injury site and attaching a port to his neck. Finally there was some use of him having lost the helmet in advance. Anything necessary could just be injected through the neck and Uwe
didn't need to worry about accidental internal spinal severing by losing the neck brace. He had lasted this far without one.
Shifting through the kit, he picked out four remarkably large syringes of slightly dark bluish, translucent fluid (four should be enough, he had been told to leave a reserve for the drip). Uwe hit the back of one against his knee with an audible snap. The flid turned milky, light blue with the container warming up.
"What is that?"
Uwe halted. "Blood substitute, more or less." Hardly anything she needed to know. Still, it wasn't going any harm to answer, and the question was more likely from the human than Larecrom. He resumed, repeatedly lengthwise turning the container over before de-capping it, attaching it to the port, and pulling the plunger back by just a notch. No bubbles. A small tendril of blood floated up through the now-opague fluid, glancing against the clear side of the container.
'Inject it slowly at an uniform pace.' Well, he tried. This far, he hadn't found out what kind of adverse effect or type of sudden death failing to do so would have. One down, three more to go.
"What would happen if you replaced a person's entire blood with it?"
"I am not a doctor, biologist, or bioengineer," Uwe pointed out, activating the second container. "Live, I figure. Look slightly more greenish or blueish than usual."
"And why not?"
"What?"
"Be a doctor, biologist, or engineer."
"Too impatient."
"I feel you."
"This is not a typical job for you," Uwe stated, matter-of-factly, briefly focusing as he checked the connection of the second container.
It shouldn't have been possible for a full set of armor - possibly with reproduced, and therefore easily modified voice - to be visibly taken aback, but the woman clad in metallic gray (if it was a woman) seemed to be. "No. I mean, yes. Why?"
"Small talk. People sometimes do it amid shootouts and standoffs. Takes the edge off if there has been a lull for too long. I don't ordinarily expect the
perpetrator to be the one trying to initiate it, though. Not that I'd have much of a sample group." If the others were not sure what they were doing, assume control. "You also didn't introduce yourself. I know the carrier is one of commander-overseer Larecrom's."
"Erida Madrek. Guard. Eastern Gate."
"Sounds decidedly uneventful. It's no man's land, isn't it?"
There was a longer pause. Perhaps she was thinking. Or hesitating. Or communicating with someone still on the carrier, even though Uwe didn't outright pick out a short-range transmission of any sort without looking up from what he was doing or consulting Argent. It was only two dozen meters, after all - it'll be many hours until the flare tied to the impeding sunstorm reaches whiteout levels for such a short distance. "By which you mean?"
Perhaps they were still trying to conduct an interrogation of sorts, and the less meaningful chatter was just a distraction. Third one. It was not probable he could have somehow messed out the counts, having set the correct amount aside at first, but enough time and you automatically counted - and recounted - everything. Bullets. Magazines. Enemies. All the same.
"No man's land. And no machine's, for the matter. A stretch between factions most units don't tread and defenses aren't built since setting up camp where one can shoot another
could be seen as needlessly provocative." But every now and then, you found the occasional scourer, drone, carrier or observation unit testing the waters. See if someone had accidentally left anything behind. Or anyone.
"I figure it could be called that. I don't see much action; wasn't even on-shift for the fireworks last night."
It had probably been a good long while since anyone had taken a shot at
any of Larecrom's people, not just her.
"If you want to give the closest Anderekian outpost your greetings, be my guest."
"We are not
seeking a war."
"Neither are we. I am reasonably certain the Ardeks already decided you're at
at least one, anyway, should you want action. It would be quite unfair if watching was all that was left for you."
Trent attempted to lift his head.
"Hold still. I'm not done yet."
The injured man dropped that particular effort, but lifted his left arm enough to slide it over his chest and weakly rake the fingers of his glove over the patch now covering the right upper quadrant of his torso.
"That's something I'm leaving for the med techs. It is not a concern right now."
Trent's hand had moved further up, trying to feel the side of his neck and the site of the port, so Uwe unceremoniously picked it up and dropped it back at the man's side.
"Ah, and in case you haven't quite realized - we have a visitor," Uwe pointed a thumb over his shoulder. 'Visitor' felt like a more neutral term than 'company'. Strange, that. "That's Madrek, one of Larecrom's. I don't suppose you've talked with a outsider before."
Trent tilted his head enough to see the figure looming a short distance from Argent, brow furrowing slightly. He swallowed, but rather than try to speak, simply halfway lifted the hand and lower arm Uwe had just dropped for a few dozen seconds, fingers spread.
Uwe activated the fourth container, pointing the thumb of his free hand at the downed man in turn. "Trent, soldier. And now you have actually met. Hope it's mutually pleasant."
As his hand moved closer to his chest, visible only to Trent, Uwe's fingers briefly formed a brief succession of signs, which to the wholly uninitiated might have appeared as a brief attempt to prime stiff joints, but if Trent was sufficiently alert to comprehend words, should have been enough to explain the situation.
Caution. Scavenger. Comms insecure. "Good to see you're back among the living so quickly," Erida offered.
"Not trying to burn reserves at half capacity does that," Uwe shrugged, briefly focusing on attaching the container.
"He is right there, you know."
"I know.
That part you actually get used to quite quickly, the med techs chatting about random things while working on you. Sometimes about you, too. I imagine they're a lot less reserved, should you be fully out of it."
Trent's
right hand moved. Acknowledged, request for extraction, medical aid needed? There was no need to tell him to get out of here as soon as possible, so... He had not been alone? All the more reason to wrap things up.
Uwe nodded, as if confirming to himself that he was done, turning to try and find an isotonic drip, oxygen canister and lined (that part was easy enough), and pick out what else he suspected he needed, from replacement painkillers to anti-emetic to ... at this point, he wasn't even sure he didn't count as a medic, anyway, with the absurd amount of things you had to take account of. (Good. Now do it
without reference, using just your memory and the script on the equipment itself.)
"You've been awake through it all?"
"I have. They have blockers for that, it's not like you feel much. It is entirely possible to sleep through it if you aren't a particularly light sleeper - and most soldiers have had a lot of practice being
selectively heavy sleepers. War medics don't always have the time and resources to do it otherwise, but otherwise you could simply request to be rendered comatose, if you wanted."
Uwe had picked out no less than eight ampules and seemed to be contemplating over them before injecting different measures from seven of them into the drip, hanging it to the driver's seat and setting up the lines to both it and the supplemental oxygen. The eight ampule, they said, had to be used between two and four hours after everything else ... so that one had to wait. He pocketed it and a syringe for easier finding once it was needed.
"Regained your ability to speak yet?" He asked.
Trent swallowed, closing his eyes to focus. "I 'hink so." Weak, hoarse, unprojected, but understandable enough.
Uwe turned his head to look at Madrek. "You had something to ask?"
"Where were you intending to go?" Erida inquired.
Trent furrowed his brow again, as if something was bothering him, but seemed to be in no hurry to reply.
Please don't say anything stupid. "Well?" the woman hurried him on.
"Let him gather himself," Uwe said. "In his condition? Talking is still
effort."
"Ge' help," Trent said. "Fo' us."
"For the Trenians?" Erida specified. Convenient that she most likely hadn't had much experience interrogating, either. She was feeding answers.
"Yes." Trent's reply was prompt. Take the gifts you are given... It did confirm beyond doubt they were hurting, but Larecrom had been watching, anyway, so it was probably as harmless line of questioning as it got.
Probably. It had to have known something else was going on, or it wouldn't be lurking about as brazenly. It had to have known that they already had
some help. Good thing? Bad thing?
"So! Do you have any, or are we dismissed?"
"I am not authorized to make any decisions, but I will discuss it with commander-overseer," Erida said. "In an awful lot of hurry, are we?"
"Naturally," Uwe said. "Trent needs some reassembly, and I am on shift and have work to be done. Let other people rest for a change. I believe I don't need to share our coordinates with commander-overseer Larecrom if you had something further to discuss."
There was a pause.
"Farewell then," Uwe concluded before the woman found something else to say, saluted, and drew the left side door shut.
"I will consolidate your path with the rest of the data," said Uwe as he reached over to strap Trent in. "I reckon it overlaps with the target of our rescue mission?"
Trent nodded.
"Alright." He shifted over to the driver's seat, finally able to stretch his back ever since climbing in. Good thing he was still young. A dozen seconds passed. "Same place you set up camp?" Uwe turned his head enough to be able to glance behind his back.
Trent nodded again.
Argent didn't lurch forward. Argent simply obtained momentum, circling around before disappearing into the woods. Uwe drove more calmly than he would have if he were alone; the pneumatic suspension was built for maybe three, four times the speed over a much rougher terrain. Larecrom's small carrier didn't follow. Besides a few megaraptors and one signature that might have been a direstalker, there wasn't any sign of a being too big to fit a palm.
As he neared the location Trent had indicated, Argent's targeting systems pointed out a gun, but didn't mark it as a threat. It was one of their own. As he neared the weapon, climbing onto what felt like a fresh landslide exposing more of the towering cliff of the plateau, it became evident it was
just a gun, stacked up upside down between some rocks on the sheared-open entrance of what felt like an old compound of some description.
A decoy? The place had probably been buried for centuries, and already there were plants trying to bury it again, half a meter long tendrils fighting for their right to life on the freshly exposed soil. Plants were no less brutal than animals or machines. They were just slower. Sleep in the wrong place for too long, and some of them would probably try to strangle you and keep you for fertilizer. Fair enough. Humans ate
them, too, and used them in refining.
Old ruins weren't safe. If the obvious threat of aged structures weakening and yielding wasn't enough, plenty of them still had remnants of defense systems, waiting to serve masters long dead. Argent didn't seem to be picking up anything else, so if their camouflage wasn't supreme and they weren't just faulty enough to fail to detect Trent but still detect him, it was probably safe
enough.
In any case, it was worth recording and syncing the place. Whether it was just barren abandoned concrete, slag to melt or a great discovery of untold riches remained to be seen. If it went deep enough to be non-bustable, they might yet be coming back here even before any resource-recovering operations...
Argent had stopped left side facing the decoy, yet nothing detectable past increasing quantities of electromagnetic noise continued to happen. The dunerider's left door swung open. There was thunder in the distance. The air was uncomfortably still, and even through the suit, felt charged.
"That the place?"
"Yes."
"You were lucky it doesn't seem to be live."
There was something eerily reminiscent of direstalkers approaching fresh battlefields in the manner Uwe moved forward after exiting the dunerider. Slow, meticulous, helmet turning as if it would help with listening, but producing no sound himself. It looked like a concrete entrance hall, a waiting room before a security gauntlet. There did appear to be a door on the far end, a sturdy stainless metal hatch that was probably dozens of centimeters thick. He wasn't going to investigate further at this time, just pick up the motionless figure laying on the ground not far from the entrance and go.
Kneeling down next to Trent's helpful message, there didn't seem to be any visible damage to the armor - on the side he could see, anyway -, nor was there any record of a breach that was not one particularly potent shockwave. Disrupted, then.
Fuck.There was no telling whether this man was alive in any other sense than having a heartbeat, and even that was bound to only last as long as the active state of his armor lasted.
Not much he could do besides making sure his body didn't drown itself before that point and leave the rest to the already overworked med techs. Given that Devien obviously did not walk here, Trent must have dragged or carried him the entire way. Must have taken the last of him, and even recovering a small part of it, he still hadn't given up. Must have taken no small amount of dedication when he could have just written his friend off as a lost cause - which he, rationally speaking, probably was - and just try to save himself. Though, who knew. People were weird. Sometimes, they were fully accepting that they were done for, but give them a task to aim for, and they took themselves far past what you thought possible. Didn't even have to be a
logical task.
PLEASE HOLD ON.
WILL BRING HELP.
J. H. T.
Time to get out of here. Regrettably, Devien hadn't had the decency to walk right up to the dunerider, so Uwe had to pick him up and carry him to Argent himself. Trent observed him setting the other man down in the opposite side of the dunerider, face seemingly impassionate. Certainly more aware than before.
"No' good ... is it?" he asked as Uwe briefly turned his back and tore the third gun out of its makeshift nest to hang it in the vehicle.
More aware as not always a good thing. Some people just didn't do well with reality finally hitting them. Game over, time to resign.
"Probably not. Time will tell." Uwe didn't see a point in lying. Trent was going to have to come to terms with it, anyway, and the only logical takeway from postponing cluing him in would have been the realization that Uwe couldn't be trusted if the situation wasn't convenient for him. "I am genuinely impressed you managed to drag him all the way down here."
Trent sighed, looking up the the ceiling. "Had to ... try." There was a loud bang, similar to small caliber gunfire, and he flinched.
"I apologize," Uwe muttered. No helmet. Loud sounds
would hurt. Needed to crack the suit for a drain; now to tie him in place and that was that.
The second leg of the journey back took place in similar silence as the first, the dunerider only slowing down once it had to navigate between people and vehicles back at their current outpost. No sign of Terev the rest of the way, either. The vehicle came to a halt in front of one of the medical tents. One of the nearby people - one of the drivers - scurried off.
Uwe wasn't in immediate hurry to get out, simply looking behind him and watching his slightly more lively passenger. Trent had lifted his left hand and was watching it with a vaguely concerned expression on his clammy face, clenching and unclencing his fingers. Even despite the glove, it was clearly evident it was trembling, its voluntary movements jerky, almost spastic. Well, it had been more than two hours now.
"If there is something more you'd like to say or ask, do it now. The next chance will probably be more than thirty hours away."
"Wha' now? Wha' will happen to me?"
"Overload of sorts. Still not medical personnel."
Trent closed his eyes for a dozen seconds and jerked his head, as if trying to deter a fly. "Not that." He attempted to gesture with his left hand. "In... After. In general."
"Some reassembly. Then... Recker seems to be pretty much out of commission and Geran's dead, so it's pretty much just me, Igna and Caendar now. Ah, and Marax seems to have assigned himself to be permanently in the command station, not that he could leave under his own power at this time. Given the circumstances, you might as well be stuck with me for the time being. Any objections?"
Trent contemplated for a moment. "No."
"Good, so that's decided. I will give you an overview of the situation once you're back."
"Can ... they do tha-
that? Fix ... him?"
"Who, what?"
Ah, he somehow remembered that part. "Larecrom? Can it fix total disruption? The same way replacing a vehicle's computer fixes it. Since it hasn't had a long time sitting around watching him, it has no chance of even pretending it's something else."
Trent dropped his hand and sighed, visibly deflating. "Do you have ... anything ... drink?"
"I am afraid the med techs might literally whack me with the nearest item if I give you any."
Trent closed his eyes. "Pity." Pause. "Tha's all."
Argent's both doors slung open simultaneously. Uwe stepped over Trent's legs and, once outside, knelt next to him to detach the drip and inject the contents of the last ampule he had earlier pocketed. No reason to not finish that part; who knows, otherwise they might even try to interrogate the poor sod. He set a hand on Trent's left shoulder, even as a set of footsteps approached and stopped behind him.
"Explain." Caendar was not in an overly good mood. Not with his arm and no one running the camp in his stead.
"More visitors," Uwe informed Trent, patting his shoulder before raising to face the other officer on duty. For the height difference, he was actually looking slightly down at the other. "Found two of our missing men." Not even a full moment had passed since the formal beginning of his shift. Didn't seem like a bad result.
66:07:15 LNT
Noctis
Izurich
sandstorm
Alfhedil
Tuujaimaa