SNAFU: Hunters Read online

  “Care to take a guess?” asked Charlie.

  “I’ve a good idea.”

  Sergeant Charlie and the rest of the pride crested the ridge right then. Foxy and Juliet passed Sierra and Tango their rucksacks. Vicky sat on a boulder and clasped a hand to her side where she’d taken a glancing blow from the MG. Tango inspected the damage, prodding the torn skin meant to cover the now visible ballistic weave. The move elicited a yelp from her patient. Vicky shoved her aside and slapped a length of duct tape on the wound.

  “We don’t have time for all that. I got this from Horus.”

  Charlie consulted with Sierra, sharing a video clip on her wrist-screen. Horus hovered dozens of meters over the ridge, showing a clear view of the ravine on the other side. The drone’s optics scanned the topography for several seconds before highlighting patterns the quadrotor’s programming deemed as aberrations. Horus zoomed in, magnifying the anomalies: bodies, five of them.

  “Let’s take a closer look,” Sierra said.

  “I should properly dress your leg first, Staff Sergeant.” Tango gestured to her wound, concern apparent in her eyes.

  Sierra grabbed the roll of adhesive from Vicky, ripped off a strip, and applied it to the lacerations on her calf. “After our little shootout these hills are going to be crawling with hostiles. We have zero time to waste. Juliet, you’re on point. Foxtrot, you bring up the rear. Everyone else, fall in.”

  Without further discussion the pride struck off, summiting the ridge then sliding down the scree on the other side. They traversed the ravine in a staggered column while Horus patrolled the sky and sought out potential threats. From the tail Corporal Foxtrot kept her eyes peeled to complement the drone’s electronic vigil. Sierra gave her a grateful nod and waved the rest of the pride on. The day Foxy relied wholly upon plastic and silicon was the day she dug her own grave and placed herself in it.

  Juliet located the first body, or at least fragments of it. The pride gathered around a human reduced to bloody ribbons. Shell casings punctuated the red ruin but Sierra could tell this wasn’t the work of a gun or even a knife. The destruction visited on the carcass bore animalistic qualities, gouges from tooth and claw.

  “Do you smell that?” Juliet asked.

  The kill was fresh and the cold had helped preserve the spoiling meat but the copper tang and voided bowels bouquet of death smothered the senses. Though somewhat masked by the heady perfume Sierra recognized the spoor of another predator. She assessed the scent, connecting it with the sample shared by Memphis during the mission briefing. The sample contained pheromones collected and catalogued so that mods could distinguish friendly mods from others on the battlefield.

  Tango beat her to the punch. “The rogue was here.”

  Sierra nodded.

  Charlie move alongside. “Staff Sergeant, Horus is tracking two scouting parties headed straight for us and they’ve got a drone of their own.”

  “Initiate Snipe Hunt Protocol,” Sierra answered.

  “Already on it.” Charlie tapped a series of commands on her wrist-screen, activating Horus’s electronic warfare package, designed to shut down enemy drones and jam their sensors.

  “Our quarry was careless enough to leave a trail for us to follow. Juliet, lead the way.”

  Again the pride set off, loping across and out of the narrow gorge. They passed more evidence of the rogue’s presence along the way – bodies like burst melons, ravaged and discarded. Accustomed as the pride was to death they still found the overkill distasteful. It bespoke a lack of restraint, reinforcing the necessity of terminating the obsolete mod responsible.

  Despite the irony of her position Sierra refused to feel shame for their role in hunting down and dispatching older mods. The unstable operators presented a liability to the Apex Program and, by extension, the security of the United States. She felt no kinship with the quarry, they were a breed and multiple generations removed. The rogue was obsolete, nothing more than a prototype. Sierra and her sisters were the future.

  ‘Patrol deflected. Proceed freely’, Horus transmitted after they’d traipsed along for a quarter of an hour.

  Sierra called the column to a halt. “Charlie, send Horus ahead to reconnoiter. I want to know what we’re walking into.”

  “Yes, Staff Sergeant.”

  “Foxtrot, Tango, you’re on overwatch. Stay frosty.”

  “Roger that, Staff Sergeant,” Foxy and Tango said in harmony, hustling off to take up elevated positions.

  “Juliet, tend to Vicky’s wound.”

  “That’s not necessary. I’m fine,” the solider answered.

  “Stow it, Specialist, that’s an order. Might as well let Juliet kiss your boo-boos while we get our bearings and have a few minutes. I’ve got my own to deal with.”

  Sierra sat and took a slug of water from her canteen. She removed the medical kit from her ruck before taking another swig of water. Rehydrated, she peeled back the adhesive stuck to her leg, revealing the gouges in her bloody pant leg and the subsequent lacerations in her calf. She pulled off a glove and began extracting the slivers of rock embedded in the skin with her retractable claws. Once finished she sprayed anti-bacterial over the cuts, covered it in gauze, and fastened it all together with a fresh strip of duct tape.

  “Check your screens. You’re gonna wanna see this,” Charlie called out.

  Sierra tugged her glove back on and viewed the live feed streaming on her forearm display while Horus recorded, the quadrotor suspended above a city in tumult. An inferno raged, engulfing the stacks of shipping containers that had been converted into residences. Figures in riot gear bearing the Eight Immortals Group device battled in the streets against men in drab jumpsuits and hard hats trading fire with automatic weapons.

  Sierra watched a rebel wind-up to toss a Molotov cocktail only for it to explode in his hands, intercepted by a lucky bullet. The improvised incendiary consumed the man and those standing nearby. A mass of jumpsuits overwhelmed a detail of riot troopers on the main thoroughfare as the chaos expanded. Those few with guns used them as clubs but the majority, armed with little more than rocks, took turns pummeling the EIG contractors. Sierra snarled at being forced to watch the combat from a distance though she knew she didn’t want to be involved. Her priorities lay elsewhere.

  On the screen a bulky armored personnel carrier turned the corner farther up the avenue. Several rebels retreated down back alleys or hid in domiciles but most persisted to assail their victims, oblivious to the approaching threat. The remote weapon system mounted atop the APC rotated to greet the crowd. Fifty-caliber tracer rounds lanced through soft targets, causing the mob to crumble under the pitiless barrage. The weapon system ceased firing a few moments later, the field transformed into an abattoir.

  “Recall Horus,” Sierra told Charlie. “I’ve seen enough.”

  If the rogue’s trail didn’t take any drastic deviations it would lead the pride right into the rapidly deteriorating situation at Ming Resources’ No. 4 Extraction Site. Memphis explained during the meeting how the escalating tension between the state-sponsored company and its workers in the territory had boiled over. The Eight Immortals Group had already stamped out insurrection at another mining location in the province but the violence was spreading. Trusted informants belonging to Memphis listed No. 4 as the next most likely to revolt, and they’d been right. And as of four hours ago it was the last known location of the rogue mod they’d been sent to eliminate. The two circumstances were not a coincidence.

  “Orders, Staff Sergeant?” Charlie asked.

  “Regroup, we’re moving on.”

  “We’re going to just walk right into a war zone?” Juliet raised an eyebrow, barely visible through the eye slot of her balaclava.

  “Nothing can be allowed to impede the mission. If anything the fighting will serve to conceal our presence. We can use the noise to our advantage.”

  “And if the rebels attack us again?”

  “React with extreme prejudice. Miners, EIG
, PLA. Kill ‘em all and let She Who Mauls sort ‘em out.”

  The pride continued on without another word being spoken. Tracking their quarry into an active warzone was far from ideal but there was no alternative. The good news was that the rogue’s trail was unmistakable. Now that the pride had a fix on him it would be nigh impossible for him to shake them. Mental state deteriorating, the mod hadn’t given any consideration to masking his path but that was generally how things went with these types of missions. The difficulty wasn’t in finding the rogues but putting them down.

  The commandos made good time, reaching the outskirts of the extraction site before nightfall. They paused at the edge of the city to develop a feel for the situation before circling around the conflict in pursuit of their quarry. Rebel miners fought on in the waning light, ill-coordinated yet invigorated at having shed the blood of their oppressors. Outnumbered, the EIG contractors responded with superior firepower and training. Armored Personnel Carriers delivered shock troops to the areas of heaviest resistance and the battle spilled through the city without regard.

  Any drones launched by the EIG were promptly struck from the air by miners compensating for poor accuracy with sheer volume of fire, the darkening sky streaked with tracers. Charlie set Horus to patrol above the reach of small arms fire to keep him from being spotted but the downside was that he could only provide limited support in the impending hunt. It was an inconvenience, if only a minor one. Even were they to be stripped of all weapons and gear Sierra knew her pride could overcome any foe they came across.

  From the smoky shroud of gunpowder to the metallic tang of spilt blood, a multitude of odors vied for dominance. Sierra inhaled, spending several moments isolating the rogue’s spoor amid the muddle of battle and fixating on it.

  “We hunt,” she said once she had locked on.

  The pride dispersed into formation, the move as familiar to the commandos as breathing. Sierra locked onto their prey’s trail and followed it directly into the extraction site. Charlie and Juliet prowled at the Staff Sergeant’s left wing while Victor and Tango took her right. The four of them spread out placing several city blocks between them and the Staff Sergeant, casting as wide a net as possible with which to encircle the rogue and prevent him from slipping away. The sound of gunfire rattled around them as they advanced. Foxtrot trailed behind the squad, climbing from one elevated position to another as the pride pierced deeper into the haphazard stacks of shipping container and prefabricated buildings that made up the ragtag city.

  The women crept through narrow alleys and broad avenues, dodging squads of Eight Immortals Group contractors and mobs of miners alike, both bent on racking up a body count. The battle diminished as daylight leeched away but pockets of intense fighting remained, scattered throughout the city. Black market night vision and low-light mods had allowed the miners to meet the EIG on a more level playing field but they were still losing. The pride came across mounds of their bodies scattered at nearly every turn.

  The latest corpses they encountered, however, hadn’t been laid low by EIG rounds. These had the mod’s distinctive mark all over them. The slaughter matched that of the bodies they had found earlier. Four miners, weathering the riot in the presumed safety of a freight box, had been caught unaware by the rampaging mod and rendered down to scraps. Sierra drew in a deep whiff of the dead miners and seized upon the scent of the rogue’s winding trail intermingled with the carnage. It confirmed they were closing in on him. Sierra knelt and dipped her fingers into the rent flesh of a headless torso to see how long it’d been since the rogue had passed that way. The pitiful remains were rapidly cooling but still retained some warmth. In the frigid mountain air that meant only one thing. The rogue was nearby.

  “Contact, engaging Immortals!” Juliet barked over the comms.

  Sierra snapped her wrist-screen to eye level and got a bearing on Juliet’s location, Horus dipping lower to provide better detail. The specialist was less than a hundred meters away but separated by a row of stacked containers, pinned between two converging fire teams of EIG. Charlie, nearer to Juliet, had immediately turned to render aid and Sierra watched the pair work to extricate themselves. Two Apex Program mods against eight Immortals was a fair fight by anyone’s standards but the pride never fought fair if they could help it.

  “Converge on Juliet,” the Staff Sergeant ordered, bounding across to the tower of corrugated steel and scaling it with leonine finesse.

  From her new vantage point Sierra observed three contractors closing in on Juliet’s makeshift shelter while a fourth hemorrhaged blood into the compacted dirt. From the meager protection of a flame-gutted bulldozer Juliet traded rounds with the Immortals, slowing their approach. The fire team farther down the lane, which had been maneuvering to catch her in a vice, had run afoul of Charlie’s arcing blade. She slashed through their ranks with surgical precision, severing vital arteries and sending Immortals shrieking to their deaths.

  Sierra joined her fire with Juliet’s, designating a target and placing a tight grouping of rounds center mass. The EIG contractor’s forward momentum faltered; he stumbled to one knee but did not drop. Sierra howled at his defiance. The Immortals were clearly heavily armored but it was possible they’d been modified with subdermal ballistic weaves of their own. She took note and adjusted her aim, delivering a series of shots to the man’s face.

  The Immortal dropped without a sound but the Staff Sergeant was already transitioning to the next target, no time to appreciate her handiwork. Juliet stole the next kill from her and together they wore down the final fire team members with a barrage of deadly hail. As soon as the last Immortal in her sights fell Sierra turned her attention to Charlie and watched as Tango and Victor joined the melee against the other troops, hacking the last of the EIG soldiers apart from behind.

  “Hurt?” Sierra asked, returning her focus to Juliet, noticing the woman’s labored movements when her sister stood. Sierra dropped down off the corrugated steel to the hardpack below and approached her subordinate.

  “Cracked a couple of ribs it feels like. Nothing major,” Juliet replied with a wince.

  Sierra nodded, offering up a sympathetic smile for the specialist’s grit, her fingers unconsciously surveying the damage to Juliet’s side. She hopped on the comms. “Foxtrot, has our little skirmish drawn any scrutiny?” She stopped her examination of Juliet’s armor when no reply came from the pride’s marksman.

  “Corporal?” she queried, an icy pall washing over her.

  Sierra’s wrist-screen placed Foxy’s icon 350 meters south of their current orientation. That was well beyond the regulated spacing she was expected to maintain. Sierra glared at her screen again, almost demanding it show something different. The locator remained steady, and Sierra felt bile rise in the back of her throat as Charlie, Tango, and Victor wandered over from claiming trophies and set up a perimeter.

  “Sergeant, bring Horus down to Foxy’s location. I want eyes on her now!”

  Charlie didn’t argue, but Sierra knew the risks of having the quadrotor descend for an active sensor sweep and tapped a set of commands into her wrist-screen as Charlie did. Still, Charlie commanded it to do just that despite the frustration she must have felt. A sea of worry churned in Sierra’s stomach as Horus reported to its new stationing and Foxtrot failed to materialize on the wrist-screen. The quadrotor scanned a jumble of shipping crates turned mass graveyard for victims of a clash from earlier that day but no patterns emerged that might tell Sierra where the soldier had gone.

  “Switch to thermal,” Sierra ordered, the words rumbling out.

  Horus did as commanded and two human-shaped heat signatures bloomed on the display: one sprawled out across the ground and another, much larger than the first, fled the scene.

  “Horus, tail the moving signature.” Sierra knew right then what had happened. Her heart pounding against her ribs she sprinted off in the direction of the stationary thermal sign. “Do not lose it whatever you do, you hear me?”


  Horus complied, abandoning its circuit and boosting away to keep pace. The pride followed in the Staff Sergeant’s wake, abandoning caution in a reckless dash to the location of Foxy’s icon. A figure chanced crossing the route ahead, only for Sierra to light it up without pause. It proved to be an innocent bystander, an unarmed miner seeking shelter from the battle, but Sierra felt no compassion for the man, her attention fully focused on finding her sister. The memory of the incident was gone from Sierra’s mind before they’d even passed his crumpled form four strides later.

  The rogue’s scent reemerged from the char and stink of the city, filling Sierra’s nostrils as they neared Foxy’s marker. That does not bode well, Sierra thought, grumbling at her own negativity. She needed Foxy to be alive but deep inside she knew otherwise, and it made her sick. The area was littered with the wreckage of bodies. They were primarily rebels but the clash hadn’t been entirely one-sided as evidenced by the twisted metal carcass of an Eight Immortals Group APC.

  “Charlie, Juliet, break off and find Foxy. Tango, Vicky, you’re with me.”

  Juliet and Charlie obeyed without question, angling off to find their missing sister. Sierra, Tango, and Vicky maintained a fix on the rogue, whose movements suggested severe mental degradation. He changed direction seemingly at random, weaving in and out of buildings and makeshift residences without any obvious tactical purpose. Horus drifted along in the target’s wake, reestablishing line-of-sight whenever the rogue broke from concealment until the three commandos were able to corner him in a two story pre-fab.

  Sierra surveyed the building from her vantage point across the way. The cheaply built structure had weathered the rioting unscathed, much to her surprise, but it explained why the rogue mod had chosen it to settle in. Thermal scans peered through the roof, showing the pre-fab to be devoid of all life save a single pacing blur of warmth: their target. Sierra let out a slow, quiet snarl beneath her breath at seeing the mod’s signature light up. They had him at last.