It was raining ash on their last day on Aschena.
Small, light, fluffy flakes that drifted down in an endless swirl. Grey skies above, grey horizons in the distance, and ash - ash everywhere.
“Something on fire, probably out to the west at the old radiation plants.” Burcoff chewed his cigar, adding his own trickle of smoke to the setting. His battered blue armour was already starting to take on a moldy coat of grey from the little time they had spent outside. “We should hurry up and get off this crunk-ball before the zekes arrive.”
Timmy had his hand out, palm up, and was watching the little flakes coming down on the outstretched gauntlet fingers. They seemed to swerve and dodge at the last moment before collision, swirling around the spread digits before continuing down to the concrete floor below. His suit was black, and branded with the Horus Eye sigil in several places. The verdigrised copper sigils pulsed with a heartbeat if you looked at them for too long.
“I can feel them. They’re still far out.” Timmy looked to the north, eyes defocusing for a moment, and Burcoff watched one of the flakes come to a gentle rest on Timmy’s outstretched hand. Another joined it, then a third.
Timmy’s eyes snapped back, and the ash on his palm whirled off, rejoining their falling brethren..
“There’s something else out there, though. I can feel a mind in the ruins. Not zeke. Something… something like us.”
“More scavs?” Burcoff chewed his cigar over to the opposite corner of his mouth, and glanced down at the rifle strapped to his chest. The oversized controls, meant for suited use, were grey and lumpy from the ashfall. “I’ll tell Charlie. Might be someone he knows.”
“No, not like that. Not scavs.” Timmy squinted off to the north, brow furrowed, and Burcoff realised - again - how young the kid was. Tank-bred, raised on sims, mind like a razor - but so damn young. “Human. Or something really close to it.”
Burcoff considered the sight in front of them. They were looking out over the remnants of an industrial park, with toppled towers and drooping pylons off to the east. To the west, nothing except the driving ash. Behind them, the cracked-open doors of the Vaulta bunker loomed over them, still partially shielded by the concrete walls that framed it. There was a hill behind that, and then mountains, and then under all of that - something valuable, which Charlie and the two scav teams were trying to dig out.
To the north was the grey horizon - and whatever Timmy had sensed.
“Want me to go check it out?”
Timmy’s brows furrowed even deeper at the question. Burcoff watched a thin trickle of red starting to inch its way out of the youth’s nose. Whatever he was focusing on was obviously taking a great deal more mental strain than he usually employed in these types of missions.
“Timmy?” Burcoff stepped closer and waved his hand in front of the youth’s face. “Sparky, what are you looking at, man?”
Timmy blinked, and the ash around them shivered. Burcoff felt his suit vibrate for an instant, and then the frisson was gone.
“Uh… yeah, would you? I’ll stay here and talk to you on comms.” Timmy blinked rapidly, looking around at the falling ash as if seeing it for the first time. “If you get close, I’ll walk you in.”
“The fuck is wrong with you, man?” Burcoff shook his head, unhooked his rifle and walked to the edge of the bunker’s loading platform. “You space out like that when Charlie shows up, he’ll strap your ass to the shuttle nose when we lift.”
Burcoff dropped off the platform and landed on the ground below in a puff of agitated dust. When he looked back, Timmy was wiping at his face and streaking lines of bloodied snot all over his chin.
“Timmy! Eyes front and wide, yeah? You’re in charge now.”
“Right, right.” Timmy gave a thumbs-up and flashed a red-toothed smile. “Channel seven, I’ll let you know when you are close.”
Burcoff sighed. He was on this job for the money only, and his retirement plan was waiting for him just over the horizon with a case of cold beers and enough stims to last him the rest of his life. Two more jobs like this, getting a cut from the weird stuff that Charlie dug up on the old Vaulta worlds, and he was out.
Out, gone, and no spark-heads like Timmy to baby-sit.
Burcoff adjusted the sensor pads on the suit to accommodate for the ash that was everywhere now, and started walking. There were old metal boxes around him, anchored to concrete pedestals in neat lines heading north, and he went down the line, heading north too. Timmy and the bunker entrance disappeared in the grey swirl behind him within minutes, and not even the thermal cameras on the back of the suit could spot him after that.
The industrial park must have been vast at some point. To Burcoff, in the falling ash, it felt like the inside of a grey box. The air was silent, noiseless, and cloying. He spat the stub of the cigar out after the umpteenth ash flake got into his nose, and dropped the helmet visor to seal himself in completely. Even canned air was better than breathing this crap.
Five minutes of walking, and he was at the end of the line of metal boxes. A burnt-out groundcar was wrapped around the last box in the line.
“Timmy, talk to me. Am I close?”
“Closer, yeah, much closer.” Timmy sounded excited over the channel. “Somewhere on your left now, and still ahead.”
“Give me a bearing, damnit. How many degrees off my main angle of advance?”
“Uhh…” The channel went quiet for a long moment. “About twenty off your zero. Maybe twenty-two.”
Burcoff shook his head, turned his helmet display to match the degrees offset to his left, and then walked off in the new direction. The line of metal boxes and the groundcar wreck was gone behind him after less than a score of paces.
There was a clucking noise outside, moving from left to right. His audio pickup caught it an instant before his motion sensors, and the helmet HUD painted an orange vector across his path. He had his rifle up and pointed at the end of the vector before his brain had even caught up to the fact that he had not seen anything himself.
“I have movement here.” Burcoff blink-clicked the suit sensors up a notch, and began to cycle half of the HUD through different view modes. Thermal showed nothing. Radiation view showed white static everywhere - the damn ash was radioactive, as expected. More views cycled past, showing little of value.
The heartbeat view was last, and showed something pumping a mile a minute a few metres ahead of him. Burcoff breathed out slowly, feeling his own heart slowing down fractionally, and began to step towards the flickering red-black dot on his HUD. The ash was coming down thicker now, and visibility was dropping by the minute.
“I have a heartbeat on scope. Moving in now.” Burcoff watched the ash around him shift, resolve into a wall - the corner of a building. Cracks permeated it in spiralling webs, and he recognized the trademark impacts of thorium rounds. Someone had shot the hell out of the place, at some point. “Timmy, talk to me. Is this the trace you felt?”
One foot in front of the other. Slow and steady. He was approaching the corner of the building, and the heartbeat was right on the other side.
“Timmy?”
Nothing on comms. Burcoff swore, then cut it off halfway. Damn kid was probably distracted by an ash flake again, or picking his nose.
Last check on his rifle, making sure the action was clear - and Burcoff stepped around the corner of the building in a smooth swing, rifle pointing dead at the sensor mark of the heartbeat.
There was nothing there.
Burcoff cast around, eyes locked to his sights as he swept the rifle from side to side, but there was nothing else. The wall here had more impact marks, and that was it.
A heartbeat, falling ash - and nothing.
“Timmy, what the fuck is going…” Burcoff watched the heartbeat trace on his HUD shoot vertically up the side of the building, his veteran instincts automatically tracking it with his rifle - and then the HUD blinked, and the heartbeat was gone.
“Goddamnit Timmy, what the hell is out here?” Burcoff’s roar reverberated inside his helmet, and he spun around to check the area behind him.
There was a shape there, something that had been standing behind him for who knows how long.
Burcoff blinked, and saw that it was Timmy. Black armoured suit with the sigils, unfocused eyes, even the blood down his chin.
Except it was not Timmy, because this Timmy had white marbles for eyes.
Not-Timmy opened its mouth, and the same clucking noise from before spilled out. On Burcoffs’ helmet HUD, the heartbeat view came back, overlaid itself on the shape in front of him - and found nothing. The reticle wandered over the shape, then bounced off into a wider search pattern again.
Burcoff pulled the trigger.
Not-Timmy bent sideways at the waist, weaving at impossible speeds and beyond anything that the suit was capable of, and dropped flat on its back. Burcoff, finger still on the trigger, brought the roaring rifle muzzle down - and Not-Tiny propped itself up on its hands and feet, still on its back, and scuttled sideways into the gloom. Dirt clods and clumps of ash flew as the rifle bullets chased it, and then it was gone.
Burcoff tore the magazine out of the rifle and pushed a new one into the receiver even as his mind reeled at what he had just seen. It took him about two seconds and eight heartbeats of his own to make up his mind.
Screw this. He was too old for whatever the hell this was supposed to be.
Burcoff set his helmet to scan through the targeting views again, and began to back-trace his steps to the bunker entrance. The suit’s inertial guidance painted a vector path on the ground, and he walked it in reverse, gun pointed back at wherever the Not-Timmy had disappeared to. He heard the clucking noise once more, after about a minute, but this time there was no motion trace, and the suit just logged it as directionless audio.
The minutes stretched backwards, ash falling away from him as he retreated, and when he found the line of steel boxes, he turned and ran. The vector path was a blue line underfoot, guiding him back home. His heart was hammering in his ears, and it was absolutely not from the exertion of running.
When he got back to the loading dock in front of the bunker, he could barely see the outlines of the bunker doors. Darkness was falling, and the ash was now an almost tangible sleeting from the sky. Timmy was nowhere to be seen, and Burcoff swore to himself as he hauled himself up the loading dock rungs and onto the platform itself. The bunker doors were still cracked open, just like before, but nothing moved.
“Timmy, if you were playing mind games with me, so help me…” Burcoff fumed over the channel, turning around to scan the corners of the platform, but there was nothing. No answers over comms, no movement, no shiver in the falling ash to betray the spark-head.
“Burcoff?” Charlie was standing between the bunker doors, holding his hand up to shield his face from the falling ash. The purple of his sleek infiltrator suit was a dark splotch against the darkness behind him. “What’s going on?”
“That goddamn spark-head’s messing with me again.” Burcoff did a last sweep of the platform, but Timmy was still gone. “Kid sent me off into the ash to chase a ghost.”
Charlie just nodded, nonplussed.
“Come, we found the good stuff inside.” He beckoned Burcoff over, before turning and stepping back into the bunker. His disembodied voice floated back. “You won’t believe the quality of the goods.”
Burcoff took a couple of deep breaths, waiting for his heart to calm down a bit, before heading into the bunker. There was little light inside, and the entryway tunnel was clogged with scattered crates and debris from their earlier breaching work. Charlie was standing with the rest of the team, deeper into the tunnel.
“What did you guys find?” Burcoff found himself thinking of his first case of retirement beers, and forced the image of those white marble eyes out of his mind through sheer effort of will. He had seen worse on campaign, after all. “Can we finally retire now?”
Someone flicked on a light, and Burcoff got his first proper look at the scav teams. Their helmets were off, on most of the men and women, and they were looking at him expectantly.
Everyone had white marble eyes, even Charlie.
Burcoff’s feet stopped even before his mind caught up with what he was seeing.
“Charlie?” Burcoff raised his rifle. None of the watching faces moved. “Charlie, what the hell is going on?”
He had a fraction of a second’s warning, a motion glimpsed in his suit camera, and when he turned, Not-Timmy was standing behind him, blocking the bunker doors. It smiled at him, red teeth over red chin, and slowly bent sideways at the waist until its head was touching the ground.
Behind Burcoff, Charlie clucked.
This is awesome - so unexpected, weird and creepy! I thought the Not-Timmy would have followed him back, but I didn't think he would have 'infected' or whatever he did to Charlie and the others - I loved this!