by Michael Todd
“I call it ‘specialist mode,” he said to Kennedy after he’d tried it a couple of times. “So when I actually do it, I’ll ‘engage specialist mode.’ And when I pull the arm back on, it’s ‘gunner mode.’”
“You’ll have to promise me that you won’t shout that nonsense when we’re actually in the field,” Kennedy growled.
“I second that motion,” Young said with a grin.
“Thirded,” Monroe said with a shrug. “Sorry, Jacobs.”
“Whatever,” he responded cheerfully and shook his head. “You’re all simply jealous of how cool my new hybrid armor is.”
“That or wonder why you focus on how cool it is instead of doing your job as a specialist and collecting data,” Madigan retorted. “We’re in the Zoo for a reason, you know, and it’s not to come third in a cool contest.”
“Hey, I…wouldn’t come in third,” Sal said. “Besides, that’s why we brought Monroe with us, right? To be the specialist so I could be a gunner?”
“No, we brought Monroe along so you could have help with the specialist-ing while you were being a gunner,” Kennedy said with a chuckle. “Besides, there’s two of you, which means double the people to make money for us on this trip. So get cracking and make me some money. I’m not here for the pleasant and aesthetic views, you know.”
“Are they always like this?” Monroe asked Young as they dropped back in the squad. The vehicles were well out of sight now, and the familiar sights and sounds of the jungle surrounded them and cut them off from anything but the Zoo itself.
“I’ve only been out here with them once,” Young said. “But that one time was enough to tell me that…well, yes, they are always like this. They keep the banter up almost non-stop. It’s actually good for morale and keeps people distracted from all the different kinds of death that we might find out here. Although I did promise death by beating to those who don’t pull their weight in this run so...”
“Right.” Monroe saw where he was going with that. “I’ll get to…specialist-ing, I guess?”
“Don’t…don’t do that,” Young muttered. “Don’t encourage him. It makes all this worse.” He turned to face where Kennedy and Sal still walked. “Hey, Jacobs, get to work. Make us some bounties. None of us are out here for free.”
“You’re jealous!” Sal called and shook his head. “Fine, I’ll go into…specialist mode!”
“Just fucking don’t,” Kennedy warned.
“Too late, already love it,” he said and switched his facemask’s HUD to the specialist software. It removed the targeting reticle that followed the assault rifle in his arm and allowed him to look around as he made adjustments to the different programs to figure out which he’d need at which time.
“You have the Pita tracker working on your phone now, right?” Sal asked in a private comms channel and glanced at Kennedy.
“Roger that,” she responded and kept her voice low even though her suit blocked anyone whom she didn’t want to listen in.
“Good. Keep our heading toward the nearest cluster large enough to warrant a visit,” he said. “Since we took a different direction from the rest of the squads, we should be able to keep clear of the money that they make while we make some of our own.”
Kennedy nodded and they clicked out before anyone noticed the communication. People tended to be suspicious of private channels, so Sal had learned to keep their conversations brief when it came to their own trademark method of tracking the money-making plants and their flowers. It was best to keep some things exclusive to Heavy Metal, right?
Sal peered into the heavy growth and made sure his motion detector was on. As they got deeper into the jungle, the lack of direct sunlight should have meant that smaller plants wouldn’t grow as much, which in turn would make it much easier to navigate the area.
He really needed to lose the natural assumption that the Zoo would behave like a regular jungle. The underbrush was as thick deeper in as it had been outside. And since it was much darker there, navigation was more difficult.
But then again, not as difficult as it could have been.
It took almost complete darkness to see the phenomenon with the naked eye. He’d noticed it on their last run while they set up camp. It had been later than anticipated, which meant that they had started off in the dead of night and so he’d seen it. Tiny blue lights glimmered like pinpricks in the trees and glowed through cracks in the bark. These were the minute indicators of the presence of the goop inside the plants.
Except that they were more noticeable now and easier to see. It was as if the bigger the jungle became, the more goop the plants had in them, which in turn made the forest grow faster…a perfect, balanced circle. Sal supposed that it went on ad infinitum too. The goop had created a jungle that was meant to grow, and that was exactly what it did despite all the efforts of the men and women at the Staging Area. He wasn’t even sure that the wall could stop it.
That was both terrifying and awesome at the same time, he thought with a chuckle.
Either way, he could tune the night vision in his HUD to detect the very particular kind of light that the goop in the trees emanated, which made navigation so much easier.
He’d given Kennedy the specs to put into her suit, as well as Courtney, with a stern warning to restrict it to Heavy Metal personnel only. He needed as much as he could to sell back to these people once he had finished there.
The altered night vision gave him an almost daytime view of the area, and when he engaged the motion detectors, there wasn’t much in range that he couldn’t see.
Satisfied that everything now worked optimally, he glanced around, and his eyes were immediately drawn to movement on the trees. He’d already noted the presence of advanced, tree-dwelling simians, but as he stepped closer, he noticed that something much smaller moved over the surface of the massive trunks.
“What is it?” Kennedy asked.
“Insects,” Sal said, almost amazed. “Well, make that arachnids, since they have eight legs but they act like insects.”
They shuffled along in a line in much the same way that ants did. He turned the viewer in his HUD up to give him a better view of them. They didn’t seem to notice that he approached.
“That’s weird,” Monroe said as she joined him. “I don’t think I’ve seen insects around here at all. Except the…you know, giant ones. Never anything scaled down to proper insect size.”
“Arachnids,” Sal corrected and spoke softly as he usually did when he focused. He didn’t want to interrupt the line, so he had to follow one of the tiny creatures climbing up the tree to get some decent, up-close shots. He made sure that they were all in the real lighting so that the perception wasn’t altered by his night-vision addition.
“What?”
“Eight legs, that makes them arachnids,” he said impatiently as he snapped as many shots as he could, both of the individual arachnid and all of them working together.
“They have a thorax as well,” Monroe pointed out. “That makes them insects.”
Sal shook his head. They could quibble over the exact species of the little bugs that they looked at later. For now, he was curious as to why they all carried small globules of bright blue matter in their jaws. Obviously, they carried the goop around. Had they taken it out of the tree? Or had they brought it to the tree? Both were valid options. Various species of insect had nests and hives in trees, but he’d never seen any of the animals actually interact with the goop in an outward fashion like this before.
He chuckled. They acted like insects, despite their eight legs. He didn’t know of any arachnids that worked in a hive-mind like this.
The two specialists took more pictures and added them all to the databases in their suits before they moved on.
“These are probably the first insect-arachnids we’ve seen out here,” Sal said with a nod. “Add that to the bounty. Do you think we’re not carrying our own weight now, Sergeant Young?”
“Shut up and get back to work,”
Young responded. Ito made the sound of a whip.
Sal looked up suddenly, and his eyes flickered to their left. He could see Kennedy glance around too. He nudged a button with his chin, minimized all the specialist software, and reactivated the gunner capability of his suit. It was a nifty and well-designed piece of technology, he admitted as he focused and gripped his gun tighter when he raised it cautiously.
His improved view revealed a full pack of the hyena creatures, at least twenty of them. They chipped and yelped to catch the attention of the rest of the pack as they circled and moved closer to the squad.
“Heads up,” Sal said. The suit chambered a round in his rifle as he raised it level with the approaching pack.
“Make a circle, back to back. We have hostiles on our six too,” Young growled, his own weapon hot and ready. The squad complied and surrounded the more vulnerable member of their group. Sal was used to it being him, and he remembered how annoyed he had been by the concept. He could only imagine that Monroe felt the same right now.
Tough. If she wanted to live, she had to let her gunners protect her.
Sal opened fire. He remembered what these weapons felt like to shoot without the aid of power armor. They kicked hard and kicked high, which made it difficult to aim at anything when he wrestled with his own weapon to keep it down and relatively stable. He suddenly realized that his approach was all wrong. These assault rifles were designed to shoot like this. He allowed himself to work with the weapon and in a few minutes, didn’t even feel it kick as the shots were quickly filtered out by the suit to protect his hearing.
The effects were dramatically visible, Sal realized as the hyenas yelped and tried to evade the bullets. It was hard to feel sympathy for them, though. Memories of how they had tried to clamp down on his skull on his first trip were hard to forget. These attacked, but he’d noticed that they weren’t the bravest or most persistent of creatures. As soon as the fusillade began, they backed away quickly. He stopped firing when they turned tail and disappeared into the jungle. He didn’t like them, but there was no reason to kill if they didn’t attack.
He turned to see what the rest of the squad had to deal with. Five of the massive, venom-fanged panthers lay on the ground around the squad and a couple more now retreated. Sal narrowed his eyes. Unlike the hyenas, the panthers weren’t the type to run as soon as potential prey showed aggression.
Still, five out of seven made a heavy loss for the pack. He made a note of the change in their usual behavior.
“There’s nothing new here for us to pick up, right?” Young said as soon as they were clear of any animal attacks.
“I don’t think so.” Sal glanced at Monroe, both for her opinion and to make sure she was all right. She nodded in the affirmative, and he took it on both counts.
“We should still collect some samples, though. Just in case,” she said.
“Agreed,” Young said. “We’ll stick around for five, and then we move out.”
Chapter Eighteen
They didn’t need five minutes to collect samples. The most time-consuming project was when Sal collected venom from the panther’s fangs, and that was only because he needed to disengage from his power arm to do it. They set off again in no time.
His mood dropped slightly. He’d killed these animals before, and it had never been a problem. For some reason, and only for a short while, he had forgotten that killing was something that he actually had to do. That was why his spirits had been higher at the beginning than they were now once reality set in.
It wasn’t like his mood influenced the group or anything. He was sure that they would be perfectly happy if he became a bit quieter.
“Hey,” Kennedy said. She stepped beside him and nudged his unarmored shoulder. “Is everything okay? You’re quiet now, and I don’t think the jungle can take that.”
Sal smirked and shook his head. “Yeah, I’m fine. I remembered how much fun there is to be had here in the Zoo.”
She smiled and nudged him again, gentler this time. “Yeah, I get that. Keep your chin up, though. You don’t want the rest of our team to come and have this same conversation with you.”
“Well, maybe I like the attention,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s you,” she muttered and rolled her eyes. “Attention whore. Drama queen. Egomaniac.”
“I get the point.” Sal nudged her in the shoulder this time. “Stop…describing me.”
“Hey, do you pick that up?” Young called from the back.
“Pick what up?” Monroe asked and looked around a little fearfully.
“I have interference on my comm chat,” Young said and tapped at the console on his hip. “I can hear something, but I’m not sure what it is.”
Sal checked his comms locator. It was a useful device that let him know if there was comms chatter near him without the necessity to actually listen in. Something definitely pinged the signal above zero, but there wasn’t much signal.
“The Zoo causes all kinds of interference,” he said and linked the comms to the speakers in his helmet. He listened intently for a few seconds and could hear something other than the regular interference static, but he couldn’t make it out. “Kennedy, do you think you can clean this signal up a bit?”
“Sure, let me break out my quantum generator to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow,” she rumbled and waved a dismissive hand. “How the hell am I supposed to clean the signal up a bit?”
“I installed trademark equipment on the suit when I used it,” Sal explained quietly.
“You what now?” Young asked.
“Nothing,” he said and turned to Madigan. “Remember, I showed it to you—”
“Oh…right.” She shook her head and loaded the software. Sal claimed credit, but it was actually something that Boulos had helped him work on. The man was an engineering genius, and with a little scientific help from Sal’s end, they were able to develop software that could clean up the communications while inside the Zoo by counteracting the very unique radio signals that the goop gave off.
It was a rather obvious solution, but sometimes, you needed geniuses to see what stared you in the face.
The signal cleared slowly, and a voice stuttered through. The man spoke in a raspy, pained voice in a foreign language.
“He’s speaking Russian,” Ito interjected quickly. “I didn’t know we had any Russian operatives in the area.”
“We don’t,” Young said. “They set up another base to the north and have run missions like ours from there. We haven’t run into them yet because…well, the Zoo is huge and growing.”
“He doesn’t sound like he’s doing too well,” Sal said and hastily inserted himself into the transmission. “We read you on this end. Please respond, over.”
“I can speak Russian,” Ito said, almost offended.
“Well, would you really want to translate everything this guy says?” Kennedy asked.
Ito nodded. “Good point.”
“Hello?” the man said in a heavy accent. “This is Lieutenant Gregor Popov, Fifth Battalion. Do you read me?”
“We read you loud and clear,” Sal said. “Well, loud, anyway. Are you in need of assistance?”
“Suit is damaged. Can’t move from here. Rest of squad was attacked.” The signal grew clearer the more Sal and Boulos’ program worked on it. “In desperate need of help.”
“Roger that, Lieutenant.” Young cut in. “This is Sergeant Lionel Young from the UN Staging Area. Can you send us your coordinates?”
“Roger…roger that,” Gregor said, and after a moment of muffled static on the mic, a series of numbers and letters appeared in Sal’s HUD. He assumed that it had done the same thing with everyone else’s.
“That’s only five klicks from here,” Young said.
“Are we really going to rescue a Russian?” Sousa asked. “Aren’t they the bad guys?”
“I’m…still here,” Gregor said.
Sal killed the comm connection for the moment. “In this parti
cular situation, I think the fact that he’s a human makes him…well, maybe not one of the good guys, but definitely not one of the bad guys,” he said. “Maybe something along the lines of a lawful neutral?”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Sal shook his head. “I say we go in after him.”
“We need to keep working,” Young growled. “Since there are seven of us, we can split up. A team can help the Russian while the rest maintain the heading.”
He nodded. “Sounds like a plan. Kennedy and I can help the man while you guys follow this heading.”
Monroe made a face, and Sal talked quickly when he saw that. “The idea is that if we’re to split up, we should have at least one specialist per crew. That way, we cover more ground over less time. And since I can work as a gunner and a specialist, it makes sense for me to be on the team with fewer people. That’s my logic anyway. But I’ll shut up now, okay.”
Young nodded. “That actually makes sense. Jacobs and Kennedy, head off to help our Russian friend. The rest of us—”
“Maintain a northwest trajectory,” Kennedy interjected. “Keep walking for ten klicks or so and you’ll find a big collection of Pita flowers. We’ll circle around and meet you there.”
“That’s a plan,” Young responded. “Good luck, you two.” They’d been over this on their last mission with Young. He knew that they had a way to track the plants without having to wander all over the place, and he was perfectly content to leave it in their hands as long as Sal and Kennedy divided up the bounty.
“Stay safe,” Monroe said with a small smile and punched Sal in the arm. Hard.
“Owww…will do,” he transitioned smoothly but rubbed where she’d struck him. “And you too. Keep your eyes open.”
She smiled and moved forward to follow the other squad members.
Sal connected to the comm channel that Gregor was still on. “Hold on there, Lieutenant. We’re on our way to your location.”
“Much appreciated,” he replied, the relief very evident in his voice even through the tenuous connection.