Year : 2202

Location : Siberia Sector 07

“Dropping in three, prepare for fall.”

“Why do I have to prepare for the fall? It’s the landing that–” Retaining clamps popped free on pneumatics. The pod shifted down and caught the wind. Despite the altitude, the delivery jet had enough speed that a sliver of scoop was enough. Beyond gravity, the drop pod was sucked free of the belly of the jet. Metal scraped, railings sparked. It boomed, slamming the passenger against her restraints. Her head whipped forward, catching the crash cage with her temple. The metal popped, bending backwards and cracking the display screen.

“I said prepare–”

“I know what you said!” Iris snapped back at her Overwatch.

The pod equalized with the air, careening to a relative halt and relinquishing itself to gravity. For a moment, there was listless silence. Iris sighed. Then the atmosphere began to thicken. The speakers chirped about pollution levels and radiation detectors and storm currents and a dozen other things she didn’t care about. A moment later, wind drag began to howl. Friction stripped the frost from the pod, cooking it clean with her inside. The panels and struts groaned and creaked under the twin forces of thermal expansion and aerial compression.

Overall, the fall wasn’t bad. She rated it a seven out of ten.

Then the landing boosters ignited and all the candles went off. Felt like the seat wanted to ram her own spine out through her mouth. The pod roared, rumbling around her as the engines cut through the pestilent clouds. Iris didn’t have to do much to sink into the acceleration gel and close her eyes.

When she landed, she didn’t stop. The whole pod lurched. One engine exploded, grenading off on one side as the pod careened. It flipped end over end and then she really landed. The front of the pod hit solid and Iris flew out of her seat to the very limits of her restraints. Her head missed the crash cage only barely.

Iris coughed, her sense of balance reeling. Eventually, she realized the front of the pod was face down and she wasn’t going anywhere fast. “Silvy, what the hell was that?”

“A tree,” her Overwatch responded.

“A tree? You’re telling me I hit a tree in Siberia?”

“Sector 07 is a warm zone. It will be settled for farming later this year, once service roads are finished. The wildlife has been quite abundant the last few years.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Iris grumbled. She popped one belt after the next, sagging lower and lower through the drop pod interior until she finally landed on the door. The display screen had been smashed to bits, unusable, so she crawled over it and got her boots beneath her. The door was supposed to pop off with concussive blasts. She tried using them, but the explosions did nothing but crack the seal and spill some dirt. She didn’t know why she had gotten her hopes up.

“I got a question for you. And I know I ask this question every time, and get the same answer, but Silvy, you gotta tell me. Why did I get an equipment sized drop pod instead of a human sized one? When–” She jammed her shoulders up into the seat above her and shoved. Her boots cracked through the door, crumpling it beneath her as the heft of the drop pod heaved up. She roared, tossing it off of her and into the dirt. “I’m not a piece of equipment!”

“But you are as durable as one,” Silvy answered through the radio.

Iris snarled and straightened up. She was in the middle of a forest. An oversized forest at that. Looked like the Amazon had come to vacation in the north. The trees had roots the size of cars, rolling tendrils of wood that churned the loam. Trunks like skyscrapers swayed around her, all except the one she had crashed through. That one had snapped in half.

All around her, she could hear more burns, more impacts. Other pieces of equipment were landing across the region. ‘Such a waste of drop pods,’ she thought, but she knew the answer to that as well. She sighed and took a whiff of the jungle. It smelled like… Unidentified Chemicals 1 through 4270. Chemical detectors really weren't anything like a nose, no matter how they packaged the things behind her faceplate. When the computers started making identifications, naming off urea, ammonia, and other rot, she was glad she didn’t have to smell the feces in the area.

“Join the chome boys, Iris,” Silvy said, and a waypoint appeared within Iris’ vision. A distance too, a kilometer and a half. “Crash site is just ahead. Bag the good bits. Pickup is already on its way.”

“Your accuracy is getting higher. I might actually be able to get there in a few minutes.”

“All depends on the weather, sweetie.”

Iris sighed and got to walking. Beneath the verdant canopy, she hopped up on the roots and used them like roads. She tied her hair up in a ponytail. Silvy would have thrown a fit, calling it strawhead, a waste of beauty, like she had a broom stuck off the back of her head, but it kept it out of her face at least.

One of the chrome boys trotted up beside her. Wolf variant, an RW-33 taller at the shoulder than she was and charged with enough electricity to make itself a tesla coil, if the onboard AI felt like it. The robot scouted her out, did some digital handshakes with Iris’ systems, and trotted on ahead.

Silvy cleared her throat. Entirely unnecessary; Iris could see when the girl on Overwatch unmuted herself. “You should probably be running. We’ve confirmed the presence of some people in the area, and that’s your job.”

“Scavengers?”

“Farmers, we think. Survivalist types. We’re getting visual feeds now, they look pretty rough.”

Iris huffed and took off at a sprint. If the drop pods had peppered the forest like shotgun spread, something else had hit it first, like a knife slash. The waypoint took her right to the edge of the carnage, and then she just had to follow the scar through the smoke and mist to get to the grand prize.

A shot down stealth bomber from the United Asiatic Armed Forces.

Who had shot the thing down? No one had told Iris yet, but one of a dozen PMCs in the area could have been responsible. All that mattered was that she recovered the guts, and the warhead, for the American military.

Iris whistled when she saw the plane. It was a morphic type, and from the way crash landing had ripped it apart, she could see all the joints and plating, the pistons and actuators that would make the wing profile shift and ripple. The damn thing could mimic the radar signature of anything from a high-flying eagle, to a passenger jet, or a jet fighter if it felt like it. Before a missile clipped the engine and detonated the fuel at least.

Then she saw the brown figures of people scrambling over the piles of broken tree bits, clutching things to their chests. The chrome boys had spotted them, and they the machines. “Excuse me!” Iris called, springing from one bit to the next, bounding over the charred carnage as Hummingbirds cut off their escape. They weren’t really hummingbirds, or even remotely similar to them, but they could hover on the spot and fly backwards, so the name had stuck. Stuck like the gun barrel noses of the robots, right into the vision of the locals.

At first, she thought they were old. The closer she got to them however, the more she realized they were just dirty with grease and smoke, and had long ago lost the baby fat from their cheeks. Hunger, stress, and fear had sapped the youth from their features. It made Iris scratch at the silicon facsimile she had for a face. She didn’t even have real muscles to smile with, not that survivalists would be able to tell the difference.

What mattered was the stolen bits they had hidden clumsily in their coats. “My name is Iris, I work for the Americans,” she said.

They spoke back to her, some guttural degradation of Russian. It took a moment for her processor to identify the dialect and auto-translate it, so the first few sentences came as subtitles before his words flipped to English for her. “This isn’t American territory. You have no right to be here. You have no right to this plane. You’re on our land, you bitch. Call off your robots, or are you just going to rob us of this too?”

Even with the cybernetic interface between her brain and her face, Iris found it hard to keep her expression pleasant. “Okay, so first off–” she pulled out her Geiger counter from her pouch and turned it on. The thing crackled and beeped ominously, though it was only at about double standard. “This plane was armed with a nuke, so this definitely is our jurisdiction. And second–”

The local spat on the ground, landing the glob of phlegm across the toe of her boot. “Everything here is radioactive. You can’t fool us, bitch. You people are the ones who dropped the bombs everywhere. Besides, warhead casing is too thick to leak radiation. You think I’m stupid?”

Iris closed her eyes for a moment and composed herself. The mission was just to pick up the junked plane. There was no combat expected. The combat was supposed to be entirely with the air force, badgering UAAF for space. She was in her nice, approachable civilian clothes that the government didn’t reimburse for, and he had just spat on them. She was the friendly face of the operation though, and she was good at her job. “I think you’re currently surrounded by over a dozen military grade combat drones more than capable of killing you and the only thing between you and a shallow grave is my good will. The fact that you’re being confrontational with me implies that, yes, you are stupid. What did you even take? The nuke weighs like a hundred kilos, so you obviously don’t have that on you.”

The man scowled and pulled the thing out from his shabby coat. It was nothing but a chunk of radar absorbing material. It was good stuff, if he needed to do something like hide a direct line radio transmitter from general detection, or just really wanted a high powered microwave. Completely worthless to Iris too.

She sighed. “Okay can you three just stay here?” she asked, glancing at the two younger ones behind the speaker. “We’re taking the actual good stuff. If what you want is the plating, it’s all yours.”

The local shuffled closer, closed ranks, huddled. A natural reaction with a dozen guns pointed at them. Iris put them out of mind for the moment and went down to the crashed plane. The wolf type was digging into the missile bay and dragging the warhead free. The more delicate work was being performed by a remote operated monkey. She had never gotten a proper answer whether it was human piloted or AI driven, but it crawled through the cockpit, not that a pilot could have flown the thing, with a laser cutter and went looking for any memory bank that hadn’t been melted by the crash.

“We have a problem,” Silvy said. “The GPS receiver is missing.”

“Since when does UAAF use GPS?” Earth’s orbit was more polluted than the lithium mines. A non-stop shooting gallery.

“We don’t know since when, that’s the problem. Iris, you need to find that thing, now. Mission critical. If we can recover that, we might be able to target some of their active satellites hiding up there.”

“Silvy, come on. It got hit by a missile, crashed, and that’s something that would definitely be purposefully destroyed when the plane realized it was trashed. What makes you–”

Silvy sent a video feed from the monkey direct to Iris’ vision. The spot where the GPS receiver should been was empty, with angle grinder cut marks still cooling off. “That lying punk.”

She spun and turned on the scavengers. One of them bolted. He could have been shot dead on the spot, but that might have broken the receiver, so every single combat drone locked up with indecision. He had to be grabbed. That meant it was Iris’ job.

She dominated in speed, but the local knew the way. For every sprint and leap she took, she had to double back and redirect just to catch up with the jungle tunnels. Before she could catch him, he made it back to his farm. The sight of it stopped Iris cold. She blinked.

The scavengers had a field of marijuana plants hidden between the trees.