Dancing with Miss Dacha (Reverse Collapse/Girls' Frontline)

[mrhax]

Reverse Collapse: "Dancing with Miss Dacha"


Lev woke up to the sound of rustling leaves and the distant cries of ravens.

Four days into the search for Subject Theta in deep forest, which 4 Recon affectionately called Miss Dacha - typical grunt humour, even when Theta had mutated to the point "she" is only humanoid by technicality - Lev still couldn't get comfortable with his new routine. By day, they slept in special tents meant to keep out Collapse radiation, always dank with recycled air and human stench. They moved by night - not because Miss Dacha couldn't see in low-vis, she was already effectively blind - but she too was a nocturnal creature, hiding away from prying eyes above in low-orbit unlike her compatriots.

Lev hated the forest. He was a city boy - born just south of St. Petersburg, in a silver of exurb untouched by the bombs and radiation. Forests always unnerved him growing up; even in the darkest alleys of a Yellow Zone city, there was a certain expectation it could reliably meet - shattered glass and mouldy concrete, the glint of a bloodied knife.

No such comforts in the deep woods. It is not night predators that Lev fears, exactly - the human animal has evolved to carry high-velocity armour-piercing carbines, eyes that see in the dark and a carapace of ceramic and metal - but a general sort of fear, the fear of ancient reptilian brain gazing into the dark unknown. His old sergeant gave him a tip when he first joined 4 Recon: "Watch the leaves. If it looks a different colour out-of-season, stay away. Acute Collapse radiation poisoning hurts a lot more than being gored by mutated wildlife." Ironically, the man died from stepping on a forgotten Antarctican landmine right after Lev passed by the exact same spot unharmed. He had liked his old sergeant.

4 Recon's mission was simple, in theory: find and keep pace with Subject Theta, make sure she doesn't wander any closer to their base. She was a clever old girl - satellites and helicopters could never find her on open ground, hence the necessity for grunts to hump irradiated land just so they could even begin to track her down. Lev would not have the honour of going solo - he accompanied 4 Recon's officer, a Lieutenant Jacques freshly transferred from Southern France, and Olya the combat medic, an old hand who knew the woods better than most in the base, just behind the dead sergeant. Along with the three soldiers were a full platoon of Tactical Dolls, eyeless faces that never sleep.

'Let's get going,' the lieutenant said brusquely as they finished breaking camp, the Dolls moving into formation from their daywatch. Jacques spoke little Russian, and the Rossartrist Union never insisted on one common language for the dozens of nations under its flag. "Dzhak", as Lev called him when it wasn't simply "Lieutenant", preferred to talk in staccatos, hand signals and the furrowing of the brow - a thoroughly old soul. He took after his father, Olya had told Lev.

Presently, 4 Recon had split into smaller fireteams, with most of the platoon moving ahead while the three human soldiers kept to the middle, ringing themselves with Dolls for protection. T-Dolls' sensors are much more sensitive than a pair of eyeballs, Lev learned, but Army infantry dolls still lacked the full-spectrum cognizance that converted civilian dolls have - like those of the Global Rescue Foundation. It takes a human officer, like Jacques, to interpret the platoon's audio-visual feed and give them commands - a doctrine for peer warfare, not the "dirty" way the Antarcticans preferred. But at least, the Antarcticans bleed - "Miss Dacha" does not.

'Hey, you reckon we'll find her before sunrise?' Olya whispered, letting the night wind carry her words away. 'I've a good feeling about tonight.'

'Beats me.' Lev answered. 'Not like we get to go home the moment we spot her.'

'Of course. I don't mind that really - being out here is a lot better than being stuck doing perimeter patrol and looking for ghosts.' Olya smiled through the haziness of true-colour nightvision.

'Really? Out here creeps me out-' Lev paused for a moment. '...I mean, the Antarcticans can strike us at any time. They can just teleport right behind you and rake your back.'

'Just campfire talk. They can't teleport themselves - but they can materialise sentry turrets behind your back. Big difference.'

'I dunno man - incoming is incoming, only thing that matters is if you can see 'em and shoot 'em, or you can't.'

'Well it does to me - wounds caused by turrets are usually fatal, wounds caused by the penguins are usually not.' Olya smacked her lips. 'Their machines aim for centre mass; their soldiers aim to maim and keep me too occupied to fight.'

Lieutenant Jacques suddenly raised his arm, signalling the column to halt. Officers are linked to their dolls - one of the vanguard doll teams must have spotted something.

'Body. 11 o'clock. Investigate.' Jacques wordlessly ordered with his free hand. That meant Lev and Olya.

Lev wasn't sure what to expect - some animal, one of theirs, or even an Antarctican grunt. Antarctican bodies, he heard somebody saying once, were never recovered: there were far too few of them, never enough time or manpower to retrieve the fallen. Some said the Antarcticans simply didn't care, that their technocrats stuffed so many genemods into the grunts that they weren't human anymore. He sometimes wondered if it was all bullshit they told each other, made themselves feel less bad about shooting a fellow man; but the thought made him less likely to pull the trigger, so he reminded himself it didn't mean nothin'.

When the two of them finally got close to the body, it turned out to be something else. It laid in the middle of a small clearing, unobscured by any bush, grotesquely mutilated. Lumps of blackened flesh, barely recognisable as limbs of something once human, were scattered around the clearing, with whatever organs used to be inside blended into the soil. Lev accidentally stepped on something as he moved closer for a better look: he felt it crack, like stepping on glass.

'Don't get any closer!' Olya hissed. 'Check your Geiger counter - you've got a small radiation spike right in front of you. It's an ELID - was.'

Lev realised then that whatever he stepped on must have been an atrophied bit of lung, or kidney maybe - silicified to the point it became rock.

'Oh fuck me-' He cried.

'Was a big one, too.' Olya continued. 'Takes a tremendous amount of firepower to do this much damage. Did one of our mech units pass through this area?'

'I don't think so…' He replied. 'Our mechs don't go this deep. Maybe the Antarcticans?'

'If it was them, they would have made so much noise Central would have heard it all the way from Moscow.' Olya shook her head. 'But I don't know if ELIDs do this to each other.'

The lieutenant spoke suddenly. 'It's an execution. Made an example to the rest.'

'With all due respect, Lieutenant, but what the hell was that supposed to mean?' Lev asked. But the lieutenant didn't answer, merely motioning them to continue on. The dolls whirred back into action, and 4 Recon was mobile again.

The words took on a life of their own in Lev's mind. He remembered the stories his aunt told him of the things that lurked in the shadows of dead cities and abandoned highways - impossibly old things borne out of humanity's hubris, in their vain attempt to control ancient technology they didn't understand. Even as a kid, Lev had already seen too much to believe in fairy tales, in great dragons and their hoards of gold - but these things, which Central gave the utterly benign and unassuming designation "Type D" - unlike the dragons of fantasy, didn't possess greed, hatred, or malice. They simply became the new natural order of things: as careless as the wind, indiscriminate as an earthquake, violent as a thunderstorm.

But nature does not "think", and Lev, slowly realising to his horror, that Miss Dacha does.

---

They had been humping the forest in utter darkness for hours, chasing one faint track after another. With every footstep, the trees morphed gradually - unseen at first, for each microsievert of Collapse radiation worked its way insidiously into every cell - then just as Lev's old sergeant had warned, the first sign was the leaves. Then the trunks and branches: strong and hardy oak trees of yesteryear wilted, died quietly where they stood. And from their husks began the blossoming of silicon crystals, ravenously cannibalising the corpses of their mothers until all that remained was jagged and alien.

Olya had been constantly cursing under her breath, her eyes trained on the Geiger counter readout linked to her helmet display. They were in deep - setting foot where neither men nor dolls were meant to be. Occasionally, the point dolls would run into some nocturnal predator - quickly dispatched in most cases, not so in some others - leading to several dolls completely written off from damage. They couldn't afford to carry the salvage - better to leave the wrecks where they lay, and move on. The night was fast ending, no time for slack.

Lev came across such a wreck after a short skirmish. The doll was mangled beyond recognition: some kind of wolfdog had had the initiative, and the doll only got one burst of fire off before the mutant's powerful claws slashed across the doll's torso, arms and rifle, cutting right past alloy like paper. Its singular eye was smashed as it was violently trampled, crushing its internals flat. Coolant pooled around its remains.

An image flashed across his mind: he saw himself there with his carbine jutting out of the ground, a metallic plant watered with his blood. He left quickly.



It took them another two hours until 4 Recon chanced upon a scene most strange - a massive clearing, almost perfectly circular, roughly two hundred metres in diameter. Arrays of silicon spikes jutted out from contaminated soil in odd angles, stabbing the murky Carpathian sky, arranged with mad precision.

'Not another step,' Olya motioned the other two soldiers to stop. The vanguard dolls had stopped automatically in front of the clearing earlier, waiting for an override command. 'It's death in there. A mini Red Zone right under our noses.'

'By the Virgin Mother…' Lev unconsciously made the sign of the cross. 'How did we not see this from the sky?'

'Must be because it looks very similar to other pockets of dead trees around here at a glance.' Olya said. 'From orbit, that's more than enough, given radiation interference over this part of the sky.'

'You reckon Miss Dacha will be in there? I can't see a thing past these spikes.'

'Hell if I know. Lieutenant, your orders sir?'

Lev turned back to watch for Jacques's signal. The lieutenant's head was slightly bowed, his visor pulsing quietly. After a brief moment, he spoke.

'The beast knows we will come. It isn't here, but I will send one doll ahead.'

Unease welled up within Lev upon hearing "Dzhak"'s words. The beast knows.

'Lieutenant, if I may be allowed to ask you a question, sir?' He opened respectfully.

Jacques' head turned towards his direction. The command facemask completely obscured the lieutenant's eyes, though Lev remembered seeing them back at base - grey, dark with the heavy hand of melancholy.

'How do you know Miss Dacha- I mean, Subject Theta so well? It's not just guesswork, is it, sir?'

Jacques exhaled. Then he answered: 'C'est une question d'histoire personnelle.' The lieutenant then walked past the two of them and pulled out his binoculars. Some distance away, the heavy footsteps of a doll could be heard moving closer towards the centre of the clearing.

'Did you catch that?' Lev whispered to Olya.

'He said it's personal.'


The singular doll that the Lieutenant ordered to move has reached the perimeter of the clearing. It stopped, pausing on the edge, as if hesitant to be sent to death. Jacques remained silent: his eyes affixed upon the dead zone, steady breaths.

Then, one rubber pad after another, the doll crossed the threshold.

Lev imagined the invisible radiation like countless spears, stabbing the doll's hardened internals - if these simple combat dolls could feel, what would they feel? The needle-pain from the slow erosion of their circuit-flesh, the taste of iron where there is no mouth? Would it feel dread or indignation, or had it already resigned itself to fate?

Yet, like soldiers, the doll kept marching on. Lev watched the doll disappear into the spike field - everything afterwards all depended on the lieutenant. The man had secrets, of the kind that gets men killed: a sense of paranoia snuck up his battledress. His neurons flashed at the speed of light, making connections where there were none before - linking everything he knew and observed about "Dhzak", his always-brooding mood, his unusual quietness even for an officer. He finally realised that the lieutenant had been in mourning, rather than that typical haughtiness of officers from Western Europe with their ancient blood.

His thoughts were interrupted by a sharp crack - of something metal crushed quickly and utterly.

The lieutenant, in his customary manner, turned around and motioned for a retreat. The doll teams immediately assumed fighting formations before Olya had a chance to speak:

'Sir, what's happening?'

'Ambush.'

The lieutenant said calmly, without an ounce of fear or surprise. Lev felt the urge to bombard the lieutenant with so many questions, such as 'What the fuck did you just do!?' or 'What the hell do we do!?' and the instinctual response of his reptilian brain to start running, as far away from this madman as he could. But Lev was a soldier, a grunt, and the old sergeant had long expunged all notion of civilian-thinking from his brain; he stood his ground, trying his best to calm himself, and awaited his next order. Ironically, this madman was also his best shot of getting out of these accursed woods alive.

'Conduct fighting retreat, heading 290.' Jacques gave the order.

They would be heading in the opposite direction of their base, which was the entire point of the operation - to lead Miss Dacha away rather than luring her closer - and Lev understood this. Without the protection of a full quarantine wall, the base stood no chance. As it was, the casualties would be just limited to 4 Recon. As their luck would have it, the sector of woods they were in was a valley - they would eventually have to fight and climb. There was, at least, a slim chance of the three of them sneaking out of the danger zone at the end, whereas a larger unit wouldn't be able to.

But Lev wasn't really thinking. They were on the run - he had no time to weigh his consideration between a "heroic" sacrifice or gamble his chances on the base having enough tanks and artillery to chase Miss Dacha away. The lieutenant's order was all that his mind had to run on, while gunfire from the rearguard dolls intensified, firing upon their unseen pursuers.

Then more gunfire erupted in front of them, then it was all around them, a disorienting cacophony of fires and growls and screams. Jacques signalled to halt - they were surrounded completely, there wasn't any direction they could run to.

Suddenly, everything went deafeningly quiet. All of Lev's senses were on full alert: but there was nothing he could see beyond the dead trees, and he kept waiting anxiously for the sound of a broken branch, or the deep thud of heavy footsteps. Nothing.

'All pursuing ELIDs destroyed. We have six tactical dolls left.' The lieutenant remarked, only pausing to breathe.

Those last six dolls were their close escort - everything else was gone in that short retreat. But Lev was hardly relieved: he felt like they had been stripped naked and defenceless, while that damnable beast toyed with them from the dark far beyond the range of their nightvision.

Damnable beast. He was beginning to think like Dzhak. There were no signs that Theta was onto them, but he just knew.

His sixth sense compelled him to look behind, and in a fraction of a second he glimpsed a massive shadow mid-leap. By pure instinct, he jumped on the ground away from where the shadow would land - not long after his body hit the ground did the shadow followed, landing with a thunderous bang, sweeping everyone else off their feet. Despite having maintained their spacing, Olya had the worst luck - she flew into a nearby tree, hitting her back dead on its trunk like a broken toy thrown by a petulant child.

Their escort dolls got up immediately and opened fire upon the shadow - at knife range they couldn't miss even on full auto - but a full volley of armour piercing bullets didn't seem to bother the shadow at all, as it leisurely tore apart the dolls one by one - a few with its claws, others with its hard tongue at the speed of a tank cannon.

All Lev could do is to watch the carnage unfold, as both audience and hostage. His legs were frozen; his mind scrambled between running away or try to at least take Olya with him, though at the force she impacted that tree she might have had her spine severed and she was dead, or maybe he ought to calm down and just try to crawl away but he can't just leave everyone behind. Dzhak was still alive, he shakily stood up and regained his footing but there was no fear in him, none at all, and he faced the beast head on with nothing but his handgun and a grenade in the other hand and silently watched as the beast finish mauling the rest of the dolls. Then they stared down each other for a moment that seemed to last an eternity, before the beast's tongue punched the right arm, the arm with the gun, away from Dzhak, sending a stream of blood flying in the half-light. But Dzhak was already on top of the beast, and with his good arm he stuffed the grenade down the beast's throat, and screamed with his final breath, the only emotion Lev had ever seen from him:

'C'est pour Papa, bâtard!!'

The grenade exploded in a shower of blood and silicified flesh.

When Lev opened his eyes and wiped the viscera off his goggles, Dzhak's torso was gone, what's left of him sliding down the beast's horrendously muscled body. As for the beast, half of its head was a writhing mass of quivering, bleeding flesh - or one of its heads. The tongue was shattered. Something told Lev that it was still alive, but he would rather not try to confirm it.

He slowly got up and limped over to where Olya had been, and to his relief, she was still breathing.

'Why are you... still here, you dumb oaf…' She struggled to speak, her voice hoarse with pain.

'Come on, you remember the oath we all swore - leave no one behind..' His own voice sounded strange, like someone else was speaking in his place.

'The lieutenant…'

'Dzhak's gone.' He hefted Olya on his good shoulder, and she groaned as he put her in position. 'Took the beast with him… I hope. I don't want to be here when it gets back up.'

'Heh… I was right on the money, wasn't I? We found her before sunrise…' Olya whispered.

'Funny you said that, because the sun is coming up… hey, stay awake, I still need you to point the way.'

'Yes, yes… I outrank you, you know…'

The sky was getting bright enough that he could finally turn off his nightvision.

 

[NHO]

You write good, emotional things. Need more comments.