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17: Metagame
The Door Knockers and the Brainiacs got into a good working rhythm. They tag-teamed to secure positions on the ground and in the digital, constantly searching for the elusive Joker. He or she was way harder to pin down than they anticipated, but they had a trail and were making good progress. She and Darius were steady by now, their fling after the first drop turning into a budding relationship. During the day, Elena and her team kicked doors down, neutralized opposition, captured terminals. Darius with his Brainiacs infiltrated networks, fought off algorithms and enemy digital specialists, reached deep inside their logistics to cause chaos. They spent the nights together, sweaty, talking about what they’d do after the shitshow was over.
The progress did not come for free: they lost people to ambushes, traps, basilisks. But they were making progress. Everyone on the teams was optimistic. After the initial paralysis, the general feeling was the tide had turned. They had the initiative now, a modest upper hand, and they were pushing through. Sooner or later, the Joker was going to go down.
After several encounters, they got a better understanding of what they were up against. Titanforge and Abyssal were working with different paramilitary outfits. Titanforge employed some old war dogs. Seasoned, grizzled, and mean. They fittingly called themselves Inferno Troops. Elena was positive most of them used to be on their side not too long ago. They knew their tactics and were precise. They set up ambushes, made good use of terrain, and didn’t go down easily. At least some of them must’ve had Vanguard training. More troubling, they had a complete disregard for civilians, and in some cases, it looked like they tortured hostage Abyssal corporate citizens.
Abyssal Mining worked with Eclipse Corps. Eclipse Corps were not as elite, but what they were missing in training they made up for in numbers and tech. They were many, and the corporate-sponsored tacticals they used were top-notch. Abyssal could afford investing an order of magnitude more credits in their soldiers than the military. Their gear was way better than what the Door Knockers and Brainiacs used.
They had to learn and adapt. Know thy enemy. Win the metagame. They took down Inferno with superior tech. Go in carefully, with the latest tacticals and gadgets. Draw them out with drones. Use surgical strikes and minimize risk. Against Eclipse, they went head-on. Neutralized their drones and hit them hard, made them shit their pants. They generated panic and took advantage of the enemy’s lack of training.
It was a bloody game, but they were winning it on the ground.
At the same time, the overall situation was deteriorating. Fast. Civilian casualties were steadily mounting. The paramilitaries didn’t seem to have any qualms about hitting innocents, and word got out that Inferno Troops were committing atrocities. The two factions were both trying to cause enough uproar in the population to force a ceasefire and negotiations. The military sent by the AI Council, including Elena and her team, intervened to push them back, rescue hostages, secure key areas. It was an uphill battle. She couldn’t fathom the math behind the equations placing human life somewhere lower than corporate interests, nor the monsters who would execute such orders. And she was glad she couldn’t, it kept her pushing forward and gave her moral compass a magnetic north.
It started as a routine mission. They got intel on Inferno Troops holding a bunch of kidnapped Abyssal citizens hostage inside a hive unit. They were threatening to kill them slowly unless the right executives sat across the table to discuss a rehashing of the astrium deposits map.
She was actually glad to be boots on the ground on this one. Get those torturing fuckers and make them pay for their crimes. By now she was a veteran, dropped dozens of times. The Door Knockers saw shootouts, tangos down, teammates getting hit. Nothing you would ever get used to, but something you could learn to live with. Like knee pain.
They met in the briefing room, went over the intel together, then geared up and went down. A single vertibird, smaller team on this one. The intel was solid, and they had good tech. It was her and three other Door Knockers. Petty Officer Third Class Dan Graham (“Gram”), Ensign Alice Lozano, and trusty Chief Petty Officer Cooper, the Hammer. Party animal or not, Cooper was always on top of his shit during ops. They were also joined by Darius and another Brainiac, one of his whiz kids, to give them the digital advantage.
They got to the right level, deep underground, and started moving. Inferno took their time to destroy as many lamps as they could reach, so the walkways they were crossing were engulfed in darkness. But they’d done this many times by then, advancing was effortless. Their movements were precise, with two drones leading the way and night vision tactical overlays helping them see despite the lack of lighting. They were zeroing in on the unit, with Gram, who was point, behind the drones, and the Brainiacs covering their rear. The whole section was eerily quiet, even the constant background hum of the hive seeming to have dropped in volume. Their boots echoed loudly as they made their way to the target. The darkness and small space were meant to make them feel trapped, but they were packing a lot of heat and were ready to punch their way out of anything.
After a tense but uneventful trek, they made it. One more turn. The drones went around the corner first, relaying back images of yet another dark and empty walkway. Gram followed, confirming.
“Clear,” he called back.
“Moving,” said Elena, advancing to take position in front of him.
The unit was now in sight, covered by their weapons.
“Moving,” said Cooper, sprinting to take position on the right side of the door.
Once there, they switched to hand signaling. Positioned themselves on both sides of the door, point ready to breach, Brainiacs one step behind, ready to back them up.
Elena lifted her right hand up, counted down on her fingers. Three. Two. One.
Lozano kicked the door in. Cooper quickly followed with a flashbang. Then Gram stepped through, followed by Elena and two drones. She went in, shotgun ready, clearing the left side of the room. Nothing there.
“Clear,” she said.
“Clear,” echoed Gram.
The rest of the team streamed in. Nobody else in the room. No hostages, no Inferno Troops.
“Fucking intel guys.”
They turned on flashlights, looked around for clues. No signs of struggle. No signs of anything, except a terminal on the wall opposite the door. No need for muscle after all.
“Brainiacs,” she called, pointing to the terminal.
Darius stepped in front of the group, walked up to the terminal, and embedded. As soon as he did, the damn thing exploded.
Elena was thrown face first against the wall. She felt her nose crack, forehead smack against hard nanocrete, and intense pain in her back. The impact made her dizzy. She half turned, half stumbled to see the room filling up with smoke. Cupping her nose with her hands, she tried to assess the situation. To see if Darius was OK. Darius was not OK. What was left of Darius was a pair of booted feet, the rest of him splattered across the unit.
Her stomach dropped. Training took over. On autopilot, she called what she was supposed to call.
“Check in. Now!”
She heard a couple of “up” calls from Lozano and Gram, her Door Knockers, struggling to get up from corners of the room. Nothing from Cooper though. The other Brainiac didn’t respond either.
“Hammer, check in!”
Silence.
You couldn’t really train for this. She stepped towards what used to be Darius and looked around the room using her flashlight. The room resembled a slaughterhouse. They’d rigged the terminal, made it blow up as Darius was trying to connect. Small radius, targeted, high-powered. She was lucky, got knocked against the wall, like her two other teammates who were not in front of the device. Darius got blown to bits. Some of his insides got stuck to the ceiling, blood dripping down. With her flashlight, she followed a streak of blood and organs through the door to find the other Brainiac. He was thrown back out on the walkway, broke his neck against the door across. She could see him slumped down, head at an impossible angle, eyes blank. She went to Cooper, on the right side of the room, trying not to step in what remained of Darius. Darius! Oh no! Cooper was gone. A long shard of metal, propelled by the blast, went through his armor plate, ribs, heart. He was still bleeding, but Elena confirmed there was no pulse. The two drones were next to him, offline. The blast must’ve knocked them against the wall too, with enough force to damage their circuitry.
Everyone accounted for, she turned to look at the pair of boots that used to be her lover. She felt her eyes tearing up at the impossibility of it. Nothing left of him! But she had no time to grieve, people still depended on her.
“Move out,” she called.
She walked out of the room backwards, taking a final look at the smear of blood and guts on the floor and ceiling.
They had to navigate back to the vertibird. This would’ve been the perfect time for an ambush, to finish what the booby trap didn’t. They were down to three, with no drones. Elena’s ears were ringing. Lozano was limping, wincing at every step while insisting she was fine. They were in bad shape. No backup either, they dropped with a small team, and it would take time for reinforcements to reach them. She put out a call anyway.
{We have three down, booby trap. Moving towards the bird for evac. Any chance of backup?}
No reply. Either comms were jammed or they were too deep inside the hive. They were shut out of the corporate network and couldn’t rely on the local infrastructure.
“Looks like it’s just us,” she told the other two.
“Fuck it,” replied Gram, “let’s do this.”
No time for subtleties, they mounted the flashlights to their rifles and Gram’s shotgun and retreated as fast as they could without having to leave limping Lozano behind. The silence would’ve felt even more foreboding, but Elena’s tinnitus gave her other reasons to worry. She suspected she had a concussion. And so, they traversed the dark walkways, all the way back to the central shaft. Miraculously, nothing happened to them. The vertibird was there, waiting. They got on and pulled out. They checked Lozano’s leg, which appeared to be fractured. Gram managed to get away with nothing more than a bruise. Elena started feeling pain only once they were way up above Forge. It turned out she got a big chunk of metal lodged in her back.
Back on the Ironclad, the medic told her she was lucky—half an inch higher or half an inch lower, it would’ve gone through her rib cage, between the bones. Half an inch to the left, and it would’ve hit a vertebra, likely leaving her paralyzed. As it was, it was just going to leave an ugly scar. The medic confirmed she had a concussion too. She was on the bench for a while.
She had to prep a full report describing the situation in every gory detail, and she was fuzzy while doing it. She called “clear.” But it was clear, how could she have known there was a booby trap? Why did they go down with such a small team? Would it have been better to have more boots on the ground? Or would that have just led to more victims when the explosive would’ve inevitably gone off? Her head hurt, and blaming herself was of no use. Still, she couldn’t help it.
She spent that night alone, like she hadn’t done in a long time. She cried herself to sleep. She wished she were half an inch taller or half an inch shorter. She wished she were the one to interface with the terminal. She saw lonely nights stretching ahead of her and was eager to get the medic’s all clear, go back to knocking down more doors.
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