Purgatory, 15: Respite
23 Jan 2024Meowers
"Brief moments, days, even hours, that allow you to slow down and catch your breath amidst the chaos, are always welcome. They feel like they exist beyond the boundaries of time, like the world around you stops moving. A gift of fate, given especially to you, to keep you strong."
T +... Whatever. It's early morning... 75 hours and... 32 minutes. From the beginning of the operation. So that means we're opening our fourth standard day on this bloody forsaken jungle world. Yay. How festive. With some news, too, which I don't exactly like. Phah, as if there's anything to like in this mad mess.
So, there's a new incoming transmission on Whitley's magic comm box, dated two hours ago. Our dropship was spotted by an Azimuth patrol and attacked. Retreating, pilots sent a message, non-targeted, non-FTL, trying not to give us away, just aiming at the planet and we were lucky to happen to be on the side facing them at the moment. Yeah, about their retreat, therefore inability to pick us up, with a silver lining though: reinforcements are on the way. I guess our command had finally realised that something had gone terribly wrong, so two battalions of very angry and upset people, with rocket artillery, strike ships and armoured ground vehicles were dispatched to help us. They even have a shitload of defoliants and explosives, from cluster munitions and incendiaries to tactical hydrogen bombs. ETA six to seven hours.
Of course that's good. In a way. Although, I'm still quite convinced that a full-scale assault, or even a mere fact of a large force arriving because we've found them, would only end up with Azimuth evacuating their masterminds and all valuable, and incriminating, data, burning everything else to the ground in the process, along with the victims and their own low-tier workers, as they did it with the lab before. Only if the troops don't start dropping right on the main, central compound, and the landing pads, and nobody knows where they are, not yet. So all deaths would be in vain, they'd just hide for a few months and then restart their humble woodworking business elsewhere. Maybe even on another side of the planet, it's bloody impossible to find anything under these clouds and trees if you don't know where to search, and what for.
That means, yep... Our battered platoon has to press forth and locate that central facility. I might be terribly wrong, and, honestly, I'd like to be, though... You may guess. I don't want all this to be for nothing. So I have to send that group on a standby a couple systems away, leaving only a scout ship hiding on another orbit like our previous one did, listening and relaying messages. Also, I must tell my soldiers about that decision, right now. Because, you know, responsibility.
* * *
So it wasn't a big deal. Should I be surprised? Seemingly, the soldiers understand what hell of a position we're in, and they'd rather listen to me than to someone from a cosy ship on the orbit since my boots are equally deep in the same shit. We have many people wounded, we left a third of our platoon in the bags along our way, and even those who don't want to think of the strategy, would like to see more Azimuth suckers paying in blood. No need to dwell on it and waste breath, none of that sorry-excuse-me-could-you-please-mumbo-jumbo rubbish, a few hours of downtime are most welcome and then on we go.
They had something more curious to casually talk about. Namely the village and its inhabitants, so I was glad to put the serious face aside and join that little anthropology club of theirs.
Like, the theory of them being descendants of the original crew of the ship was the most popular, and honestly it might be the first thing to come to mind. Yet I don't think so, and some of the soldiers share the same opinion. Forgetting their own language and going primitive? Unlikely. A comparably much more advanced society of the mid-20th centuries, especially a crew of a large ship, maybe even purposefully designed to establish settlements in deeper space, would've probably maintained their knowledge and dignity through several generations, until discovered in future, if there was no possibility to contact someone right away. And space travelling itself was a far more complex process than it is nowadays, it wasn't simply someone's personal little adventure with friends, but a thoroughly planned, expensive operation, on a national or large corporation level. They must've had several protocols about what to do if lost in space and I doubt 'go degrade to primitive people' was one of them. There has to be more variables at play, something we don't know about yet.
Former lab subjects weren't a surprise, the most popular assumption was of them making a successful escape whilst being already immune to the indigenous grass infection, but then they didn't know where to go, so maybe the local scouts or hunters picked them up. Considering the atrocities we've seen, they could've lost an ability to speak even earlier, still retaining basic instincts, skills and cognitive functions, so they blend in the society perfectly. And we, unanimously, doubt that the lab subjects were the founders of the village: there aren't that many of them and they couldn't somehow spawn the primitive folks out of thin air around themselves in a few years or even less.
Maybe it's another experiment we don't have any idea about, making people primitive somehow and building a village for them, or at least clearing the place in order for them to make one for themselves. One way or another, the settlement has some connection to the rest of the Azimuth facilities, it's clearly indicated by the familiar muddy road going further into the jungle from the second entry gate on the far side of the fence, an element we didn't notice at night. Ship parts and that ancient suit... They might have been here for those centuries. They might have been given to the villagers by Azimuth. This whole thing might have been either an installation made by Azimuth purposefully from scratch, or they just had discovered the ship here and put it to use, moving the primitive folks to this place for some reason.
That line eventually led me to Steven, the survivor of the predator attack, and his words about 'enjoying the pain' and other gobshite Azimuth was about to pump into his head. Thing is, he told it to me only, in private, on my recorder, and that little detail didn't seem so important back then. Retelling his words to the soldiers, I generalised it to 'usual Azimuth brainwashing bullshit'. So now I've set that part on playback for everyone to listen. The villagers flog themselves, inflicting pain. And enjoying it, obviously. It seems to be an important ritual for them. An Azimuth experiment, no doubt now. Fuck them, sometimes I can't believe how mad they are.
Also, another question we don't have an answer to. Nobody saw any children or pregnant women. But quite a lot of corpses. In a place that doesn't look like it's going to turn extinct soon, the approximate number of huts and treehouses is more or less adequate for that population. So... How do they reproduce? And so fast, to keep up with the amount of deaths? Uh. No idea. We thought about cloning, but then they don't look all the same, they have a diversity of their own, slightly different skin tones, different facial features, hair, eyes, all that. A large DNA database, owned by Azimuth? Maybe. Or maybe they have even more of these folks somewhere, breeding them and distributing to villages like this one. Or they are, actually, captives, undergone some kind of primitivisation experiment, sterilised, given a vaccine, and sent to live here as a backup pool of test subjects. Theories, theories...
* * *
So... 77 hours 40 minutes. Collectively decided to stay in the village for another day and night. Yeah, it's friggin rotten and smelly and bizarre, but hey, go try find something less heinous on this entire planet. The locals are a brainless bunch, yet they seem to like us, they don't look aggressive and certainly they don't look plotting. I've 'asked' for a few wooden planks to create some kind of a temporary place to put our backpacks and weapons onto, at least as I could, with gestures and sounds resembling their 'language'. They gave me a couple of those laying around, and a little later, in minutes, they appeared next to our camp carrying dozens of planks and small logs, so that we could've made even a few benches, of sorts. Maybe they had to disassemble a hut or two to collect such a pile.
Their food is yuck but at least it's meat, not the MRE stuff, and, with that 'reputation' of ours it seems like they give us the most fresh food they have. One platoon won't put a strain on the reserves of a village of that size. We could use our helmets to collect rainwater. We could finally get the manual chargers from the engineering toolsets and do cranking and turning in shifts to put some juice into the depleted batteries. Ah, I was right when I said to keep them, though it was more for stealthiness. And... we really need some rest. Three days of this hell have exhausted us, on the run, with night battles, constant casualties, atrocities around, lost in the endless jungle and soaked in our own sweat and sometimes blood.
And I should wait for the reinforcements anyway. To send them on a standby, using quite a primitive communication technology in order not to reveal our position. We've had enough of those dickheads trying to kill us even without shouting 'we are here'.
* * *
T + 79h 35min. Official Operation Shadowhand log, ground forces commander Ina Muir, AXDF. Engaged in a battle of playing chess. With pebbles and cartridges of different calibres being our pieces. Mine are, of course, the queens. And the board is made by drawing it on the ground with a stick. Me: 5, Platoon: 2, Stalemates: 1. Mhehehe, me smart.
* * *
Next part: #16: Inferno
Next part: #16: Inferno