Operative : Iris Haber

Primary Equipment : 20kJ Mag-Rifle

Secondary Equipment : 1.1m Graphene Microblade

Iris had not been expecting a recreational farm. Thirty rows of ten cannabis plants, deep rooted to the earth and rigged with al manner of sensors, automatic watering, and storm protection. She’d never seen such a plant get more than waist high, but that had been an indoor plant. The field the scavengers had was free, checked only by the sun. The leaves were over Iris’ head, rustling with complex enough scents it caused an overflow error in her scent detectors. Apparently, they were as verdant as the trees.

The GPS thief sprinted straight through the block of plants, shouldering through between stalks and branches. He ducked hoses and slid beneath support frames, making an almost diagonal cut from one corner to the next, where Iris could see their cabin. It was a rough cut thing of green wood, probably made from processed deadfall in the jungle.

She didn’t bother trying to follow his route through the field, she just circled the long way round where tire tracks kept the ground rutted and muddy. Just as the thief popped out in front of the cabin, she cut him off, skidding to a stop. He was blasted tired, panting and sweating, completely human. She didn’t even have an elevated heart rate. “Hand it over,” she ordered.

The kid pursed his lips. He had the silicon device held like a sports ball in his hands. The way UAAF had designed it, it sort of looked like one too. It screamed high tech. He probably didn’t even know what it was. She had her mag-rifle in her grip, but not pointed at him. “Pay me.”

“What?”

“You military people have big budgets, don’t you? Pay me and I’ll give it to you.”

Iris couldn’t help but relax her posture as he stared back at her. She let her gun hang at her side. “You really think you’re in a position to negotiate right now? What would you even do with money? You’re in the middle of nowhere. Gunna go find a city to live in?”

“What the?” He jerked his head at the field. “You think we barter this? We deal in CubitCoin.”

Iris blinked and turned around to look at the cabin. It was a shoddy thing, half the planks warping from the changes in humidity and patched up with whatever the scavengers had on hand by the looks of it. However, there was a satellite antenna sticking up from the side. There was a real chance they had enough internet access to actually use a blockchain. She called it in. “Silvy, do we have a budget for bribing locals?”

“Come on, Iris. Can’t you just take it from him?” her Overwatch asked.

She glanced back at the kid. He had looked full grown, but only because of how many layers he had stuffed inside his coat. The kid was a skeleton barely into his twenties. “That’s not what you pay me for, and you know it.”

Silvy groaned. “You really going to make me fill out all this paperwork? This is a lot of work for me, you know that?”

Iris closed her eyes. “I’ll make it up to you next time we’re both on leave. Alright?”

“Deal.”

When Iris opened her eyes again, she started to ask the scavenger for his wallet address, but then she saw the rusted out pickup truck beside the two of them. More precisely, she saw the barrels sitting in the bed. They had red white and blue all over them. American chemical goods, a long way from home. She scanned over them with her eyes. Ammonium nitrate, calcium supplements, phosphorous, fungicide, everything a botanist could need.

“How did you get these?” They were all labeled BISON.

The thief wasn’t looking at her. He had heard the approaching buzz of one of the hummingbirds. He could see the chrome boy sighting in on him. Without a word to her, his guts gave out, and he bolted again, straight for the door to his house.

“Hey! Get back here!” She sprinted after him. He threw a door latch lock, but she didn’t even stop to try the handle. She put her shoulder into it and smashed through. Splinters flew everywhere, and the latch metal rattled against the broken frame. It might have stalled a human, but she was well beyond its design parameters.

That was the only shortcut she could take, after that she had to chase him in his own footsteps. Through a living room with more empty beer cans than bare floor space. Through a kitchen with more dirty dishes than clean. Down into a gloomy, cement basement. Her fear instincts started to kick in, to warn her that things were going wrong. The thief had to be going somewhere with a plan. If he was just trying to get away, the truck would have been a better option.

She sent out a call for backup, peeling a few of the combat drones off the crash site to help her.

The basement was the least basement like basement she had ever seen. Rather than matching the cabin’s footprint, with concrete walls and joists overhead, she had to chase him through a tunnel, switching back and forth down intermittent steps. She passed through rusted out gates and past boarded up doors. She heard the scavenger stop running, the pounding of his feet halting just ahead. That gave her enough of a heads up.

The room was lit by ancient incandescents. Oversized bulbs with near-indestructible filaments that sucked down power and spewed out more heat than light. It turned the room sepia like an old western film. There was a rusted door opposite her, but the scavenger had gone for the desk. A gunshot blasted off.

Iris’ reflexes cranked up to their maximum. Her head jerked to the side, the first bullet ripping a hole through her hair. Her hand darted for her sidearm, her micro-blade sword. The second bullet went wide as she ducked and drew. The third clipped her shoulder, blasting through her jacket and cutting the synthetic skin from her protective plating. The fourth was cut in half out of the air. The rest of the scavenger’s magazine emptied out at her, accomplishing nothing more than dirtying her clothes.

“You fucking synthetic monster!”

Her hand trembled. She watched him clumsily rip the empty magazine out from his rifle. Her reflexes didn’t want to settle down, didn’t want to approximate human. Every movement from the guy sent a twitch through Iris’ body, even when he fumbled the fresh mag and sent it clattering across the floor between them.

“I’m not a monster. Put the gun down and give me the GPS receiver.”

The man laughed. It was a frantic, panicked laugh like gallows humor. “Oh yeah? You don’t even bleed when you get shot. Can’t believe you americans put a human face on a machine.”

She flinched back. She put a hand to her shoulder and gripped it, feeling the tear, the flap of silicon dangling from her deltoid plate. There was no heartbeat in it, no warmth. Not so far from the case her heart floated in. She pointed the tip of her sword at him. “This is my face, whether you believe me or not. Now look, hand it over before I break you. I was going to pay you for it, just like you asked. But not anymore. Drop the gun and put your hands up.”

The defiance grew cold in his expression. His lips pressed to a line as he tossed the empty gun down on the desk. It hit something that clicked. Iris could have heard it even without enhancement. “What was that?” she asked.

“I put the gun down. See? My hands are up.”

“What did you press?”

“Didn’t press nothing.”

“Yes you– Argh, Silvy, did some kind of radio transmission just leave this place? Did he just call in backup?” The switch to her own radio frequency was seamless on her end, but left the scavenger squinting at her.

“Iri– ere a– ou? –re signal–”

Iris swore. Silvy’s voice was more static than not. She tried to signal the hummingbird outside. The system told her there was too much packet loss to take control of the machine directly. It did take a command to form a relay chain with the other drones though. “What the hell is this place? No farm would have an insulated bunker underneath it.”

The scavenger grinned. “And yet, that’s what it is.”

“Who built this place?”

“Dunno. Kept the trees from growing here though, didn’t it?”

Whatever the place was, it had nothing to do with her mission. “Just give me the GPS receiver and let me leave. I’m running out of patience.”

“This thing?” he asked, picking the device up once more.”

“Yes,” she hissed back at him.

Something trembled through the concrete beneath her feet. Something big, heavy, and lumbering. There was a step-step to the rhythm to the vibration like some subterranean heartbeat. Her first instinct was to get a scan of the area, but if radio was blocked, scanning would be useless.

“Here,” the scavenger said, and tossed the GPS receiver to her. It arced through the air in a lazy lob. If it hit the ground, it would shatter. All of her attention snapped onto it as she threw out a hand to snatch it. Just as her hand touched it, grabbed hold of the rough cut edges, the door beyond flew open. The steel slammed open, crashing against the wall as masses of flesh shot out. They looked like roots, tendrils, fingers. The thing split in two, opening up to either side as it pushed off the wall and threw itself at her.

“What the–”

She couldn’t even tell what it was, much less what to do about it. Even her combat assistance programs came up at a loss until teeth the size of her hands opened up in a dripping maw lunging towards her. The thing hit her like a truck. It chomped down, digging rough fangs into her body and tearing her from her feet.

Then she was blind, inside the thing’s mouth.