UPDATING MISSIONS FOR SPACE MARINES' SUPPORT ROBOTISED INFANTRY

CONDITIONS VALID FOR SCOUTING MISSION SF26L-K26LP37

SF26L-K26LP37

OBJECTIVES

- PROVIDE SUPPORT TO UNIT SF26L, REPORT TO THE SQUAD LEADER

MALFUNCTION - UNIT IDLE, NONRESPONSIVE TO OBJECTIVE

SELFDESTRUCTING THE MALFUNCTIONING UNIT IN 23:59:59

"Fuck me, selfdestruct countdowns again? I had enough of that .. " Krogar blinked at the text.

"Are you alright?" He heard a voice and understood that the shaking of his body had been Cirse trying to wake him up.

"I am damn not alright!" Krogar sat up, it had to be just a while since he had paased out. "I got infected by some kind of a fucking virus, it tells me I am a space marines's support robotised infantry or some shit! The fuckers gave me a mission and they threaten me to do it, otherwise . . bam." He gestured with his hand.

"Something mistook you for the kind of humanoid robots they use." Cirse stared at him, her eyes large as saucers.

"Just what the fuck Cirse? I mean, this city steals robots to join their army or what is this about?" Krogar was holding back his anger.

"It has to be some kind of an accident, there is not many advanced humanoid robots or androids outside of big corporations. You are certainly not a deliberate target."

"Is there a way to get it out?" He asked, but she just shrugged her shoulders.

"Great. So now I am a cannon fodder of cannon fodders, a bright future indeed."

He gulped, startled by a few appearing and disappearing maps, indicators, graphs and other features in front of his eyes. Looking deeper into what the virus was doing, it appeared its origin was some unknown system's component that currently thought the system was damaged and was "repairing", which consisted of installing tons of utility softwere that seemed to be the standart for space marines support robots, or shortly SMS.

"Fine, fine, give me all the bullshit, at least I will know where am I to go in order not to blow up!" Krogar growled grumpily.

A few small icons appeared in front of his vision, which he could expand to see the details regarding his health, objective, navigation, communication and so forth. He considered the possibilities vastly excessive, but was soon consumed by the section dealing with navigation that displayed the location of his objective.

* * * *

" . .Jejejeje jejeje jejeje je . .ho ho ho ho hoooooo!. . " At first, Cirse had been worried about Victoria's health, but that worry had mostly vanished only seconds ago. Only to reappear again when she stared at Victoria singing and moving back and forth like a crazy.

"Come on talk to me Victoria." She tried to get to her.

"Ho ho ho ho hooooo.. . ." She received a clear answer.

"Calm down and speak to me, what happened?" Cirse laid her hands on her shoulders, preventing her from dancing about the room.

"I have twenty three hours and fourty minutes to reach the objective." Victoria said looking at her like she was not actually present.

"Aaaand?" Cirse pressed on.

"The objective is not in our star system." Victoria began laughing.

Cirse just looked at Victoria in disbelief for a while, only to follow with a seemingly stupid question.

"Can't you just contact the dispatcher or something?" Cirse asked mechanically , her brows furrowed and Krogar expanded the icon titled "communication" without another word.

Only to witness one big nothing to happen, like nothing at all.

"What the hell? All the stuff looks so well, but actually . .nothing works?" Victoria frowned understanding less and less what was going on with her. At first, it looked real and professional, but a more indepth look revealed that all the icons, windows and graphs were actually an utter garbage with zero funcionality.

"What is it?" Cirse asked, hanging on Victoria's every word after witnessing the parade of expressions on her face.

"It is almost like, it is malfunctioning." Victoria kept frowning.

"There is a possibility it is just a trolling virus." Cirse said with straight face.

"What do you mean? Like someone is trolling me?!" Krogar felt the hair on his neck stand up, his anxiousness turning into anger.

"All kinds of software travels the public network, most of the hackers begin with trolling software before they move on and start to mean business. Besides. . " Cirse touched her chin with her finger, like trying to look smart. " I can't remember anything named a space marines's support robotised infantry, if you exclude famous fantasy books."

She looked at Krogar with a pitying look and he looked at her with the kind of look telling her to shovel her smart chin-touching finger up her ass,

"Do you mean i have been infected with some software that will troll me twenty four seven now? You got to be kidding!"

* * * *

BABOOOOOM YOU HAVE EXPLODED!!

A funny voice exclaimed in Krogar's head making his fists clench. Shortly, his hand was grabbed by a considerably weaker one.

"Hey, I do not really like this idea much. We can still stay in the city, if we just lay. . "

"If we just lay low, which means to be forever in the stinking sewers, eating rats and frogs, because the surface is being watched? No thank you." Krogar snorted.

Staying in the sewers for some time, he realized the city was too dangerous for them with all its surveilance and he was too afraid to try and repeat his failure with connecting to another bigger computer network again.

"You have said there is this border town, a free town outside of Nas'Librion's influence." In response, Cirse just bobbed her head, while looking at a thick stream of sewer water.

"Yeah, but it is maybe too free for my taste."

"Don't worry, I may be out of my league fighting against bigshots, but we should be alright facing some local bumpkins." Victoria grinned at Cirse, trying to encourage her.

"By the way, is it really safe?" Victoria pointed at the thick stream of filth in front of them.

"It is, it leads out of the city. It is monitored, but it is known that no one gives shit about anything that is going out. They watch only stuff that is trying to get in against the stream."

"Hope so, I would love to die submerged in shits." Krogar said with irony and held his nose with both hands before jumping into the strem, the roaring torrent carrying him away. Most would be distressed by the situation, but he was after all someone with a vampire physiology, he was not pathetic enough to drawn in his form. Honestly, he wondered Cirse was calm, he would have never agreed to such way of leaving the city in her place.

Unconcerned with his breathing, he was carried by the stream of unimaginable filth until he saw the light at the end of the pipe and was excreted out of the pipe along with other lovely things and liquids the pipe pumped out of the city.

Actually there was not much light to speak of even though this was considered a day. The levels of light being as low as usual, allowing the growth of only the most resilient vegetation.

"Crap everywhere, never again." Krogar pulled himself up onto the nearby shore, getting rid of all the items of questionable origin that were stuck to him. "Disgusting."

Suddenly, he had an odd feeling of something missing.

"Right, where is she? Has she even emerged?" Krogar asked the question and looked at the surface of the liquid for a second.

"Shit." He jumped back into the muddy pool that was formed from all the filth. He would have never found her using his eyes, but he had quite a keen sense of locating creatures containing blood considering his body's nature.

He had submerged several times, but was unable to locate Cirse. The moment panic was about to take a hold of him, he saw a hand waving at him, before he would submerge yet another time.

"What a bitch, I am saving her life and she is safe and sound waving her flipper at me from the shore!" He cursed and wished he would have not as he took a bit of the ambrosia liquid into his mouth.

"Come on Victoria, don't laze around, we are still too close to the wall. Hurry up." Cirse welcomed him with a rebuke. Although he felt like submerging her forcefully into the stinking pool, he ended up just mumbling something under his breath, as he was walking further away from the detestable place.

Right before he managed to have his both feet on a solid groud, he felt someone else's fingers touching his calf and as his vampire instincs called, he began to pull out the object to find out if there was to be found some quality blood inside.

"Mmm, smells exceptionally good, strange."

There was a lot of vegetation, but trees were scarce here, which gave them only a limited cover, thus urging them to go faster.

"We should hurry, I am surprised we have not encountered any scavanging . . . . ." Cirse looked back nervously while quickening her pace and to her great surprise found out that just she herself was going somewhere while her companion was nibbling on some corse he had apparently dragged out of the whole city's piss.

"Yuck! Bad dog! Leave that alone!" She was repulsed by just looking at the scene and made a few steps backwards, not knowing what to say.