The Traitor, Part 3

Atlantic Coast, Central America.
August 4th, 1765.
30 minutes after landfall.

Citra took a deep breath of the warm jungle air. "Mmmm. I love the smell of burning foliage and radioactive ash. I can almost feel my DNA unraveling." The mushroom clouds were only just starting to clear, the fallout raining back down to earth in big, dirty raindrops that streaked their scales.

Vaya shuffled her wings as her claws crunched through the glassy surface. "You have a CBRN suite, you big baby." Sprinters and SIBs were designed for the nastiest chemical and radiological warfare that the bioengineers could imagine. The rest of her forms weren't immune to everything like that, but they all had the radiation-hardening genes. If the field manual had been telling the truth, it would be basically impossible for them to get any sort of radiation injury unless they took a nap on top of an open reactor core.

"Yeah? If you're so confident, drink from the puddle." Citra nosed towards a sickly-looking puddle of ashy water.

"Sure." Vaya nosed down and took a cautious slurp from the puddle. It was a little bitter, but drinkable. "You know, this isn't too bad."

"...Seriously?"

"Yeah, try it. We can drink saltwater, this is fine by comparison."

Their sergeant, Astrid, turned around to see her squad drinking from a puddle of radioactive fallout like oversized scaly horses.

"Soldiers, what the actual fuck?"

Citra looked up. "Isotopes, they're what dragons crave."

"I turn my back for literally five seconds and you're drinking from the death puddle. You're gonna get fucking... I dunno, something."

"I don't think this can kill me in a way that matters," Vaya thrummed.

"Sure, but like, you wanna be carrying all those— aw, Hel." A pair of missiles shot up from the troopships offshore, punching upwards into the atmosphere. The radio sounded in their ears a second later, "Incoming. Incoming. Incoming." The thousand or so soldiers in the process of disembarking flickered like shimmering glass, armored scales replacing vulnerable flesh. There wasn't much cover to be had in the charred nuclear crater of the landing site.

"One hell of a welcome," Vaya remarked. There was a puff of smoke up above, the interception visible clearly through their slitted eyes. The radio sounded again, "All clear. All clear. All clear."

Astrid shifted back and shrugged. "Looked like an SRBM, just ringing the bell."

"You can tell?" Vaya's new vision was good, but it wasn't so good that she could make out a missile's exact size without any context.

"Two interceptors is an SRBM. Three's an IRBM or bigger. Four plus means aircraft a long ways out. TELs or lasers for anything close. TELs for bigger stuff, lasers for smaller stuff."

"Huh."

"You pick up on it. I was at Hawaii, saw enough shootdowns to last me a lifetime."

Citra did her best to raise a scaled brow, despite her face's lack of mobility. "You got off Hawaii?" The PDT had fought to the bitter end for the island chain, taking near-total casualties, and inflicting far, far more on the invaders in the process.

"Yeah, I switched sides at Hawaii. Don't ask me how many times I got shot, because I lost count after twelve."

Vaya would have whistled if she was physically capable of it like this. From everything she'd seen, Hawaii had been absolutely brutal. "Well, if it's any consolation, every Essie is probably fucking terrified of you now. Like, more than normal."

"Really?"

Kiran chimed in, "Yeah, they're scared as shit of any unit that extracted from the islands. They even told us about the 318th in training."

"Neat. That was my unit." Vaya blinked. If her instructors in basic were to be believed, the 318th Infantry Brigade had literally eaten an entire marine division on Oahu. That probably wasn't true. Probably.

"Wait, if you already had a unit, why come to the 499th?" Aisha asked.

She smirked, "Someone's gotta teach you kids how to be badasses like me."

Progress through the jungle had been quick, mostly because it wasn't so much jungle as much as it was ash and nuclear glass. They'd spent the last day leapfrogging with the trucks, flying forwards to secure the path, waiting while the heavies rolled up, then repeating. Vaya's kit was so covered in ash from laying in the craters that she felt like a radiological hazard. She almost certainly was, but it wasn't like anyone had a dosimeter. There wasn't any reason to bring them when radiation couldn't hurt you, after all.

The volcano was where the jungle began again. The nuclear bombardment had stopped at the foot of the mountain, presumably to avoid breaking anything important on the other side where the ruins were. So now she was pulling guard, waiting for the engineering company to finish their earthworks.

"Guard duty isn't so bad like this, is it?" asked Kiran.

It certainly wasn't. The two of them were forward guard, hiding in their little segment of rainforest in their Loddies. The sleek wyverns had inky black feathers instead of scales, designed to absorb radar emissions and cloak them in infrared. On the ground and in the dark, they appeared as a pile of shadows, even to their own augmented senses. They weren't airborne, yet— the drone operators would manage that until they could get a better picture of enemy AD —but someone had to lurk out here in case Odie decided to wander over. The rest of the squad was a hundred meters back, a half-dozen RG-63s leveled at the jungle and ready to turn anything that moved the wrong way into a pincushion.

That is, if those ODI marines ever bothered to come here. By what Vaya had been hearing on the radio, they were trying to dig into the city ruins, and finding all sorts of violent surprises in the process. But better to be safe than sorry.

A twig broke. Rustling and bird calls were omnipresent; it had only taken hours for animal life to return after the mushroom clouds cleared. But she'd already figured out that the jungle life knew how to move quietly.

"Kiran, did you hear that?"

"Yeah. I don't see anything, though."

Vaya could see the faintest outline of something moving through the brush, but the vegetation was so thick that she could barely see more than a twenty meters.

"There's something out there."

"What, a tiger or something?"

"Can't tell. And I don't think they have tigers—" She caught a glimpse of it, a muscular big cat, spotted all over. "—okay, never mind. They do have tigers out here. Look at that thing, it's fucking huge." She'd seen tigers before at the zoo. This was not that. It was almost as large as she was, and she weighed nearly two thousand kilos like this.

"What the fuck does that thing even eat?"

Vaya's radio crackled in her ear, "What are you two talking about?" That was Astrid. Dragonspeech carried perfectly well through the vegetation, and had the advantage of being inaudible to anyone who couldn't shapeshift. They couldn't speak into their radios without a human face, but as long as they weren't too far away, dragonspeech would still work fine.

"There's a weird tiger out here," Kiran thrummed.

"A big one. Like, as big as me. Dragon me," Vaya added, "with spots instead of stripes."

Astrid replied over the radio, "That's a jaguar, same family as tigers. I don't think they're supposed to get that big, though. Maybe some magical gigantism?" The big cat suddenly perked up, looking in Vaya's direction.

"Oh shit, I think it heard the radio." The massive jaguar slowly padded closer, sniffing the air. "Come on big guy, just turn around, you're not my preferred prey."

She had hunted during training. Not all of them had; Sona and Lia were vegetarians, but everyone else had been set loose in the woods and told to reduce the local deer population. For her, it had been enjoyable to feel a deer go crunch when she landed on it during a dive, but it wasn't really the same as fighting a person. And the others had been right about the taste— dragon taste buds were lacking compared to human ones. She'd had a few bites before deciding to start a fire and cook some venison normally.

"I dunno, have you asked who it voted for? Maybe it's an Essie."

Vaya snorted and stood to her full height, making sure to make some noise as she did so. The jaguar looked at her, froze, and then bolted, sprinting back into the jungle.

"Apex predators still undefeated, I guess.

"Yeah. Bye, big fella."

Her radio crackled, "What, it's gone?"

"Vaya scared it off."

"Cool. Just found out we're being replaced by Charlie in about fifteen minutes, so there's a light at the end of the tunnel now. And some sleep."

The morning came and went without only a small amount of fanfare. The oversized jaguar they had seen had been prowling around camp until sunrise, Chef had been gushing about finding an unknown pepper plant, and some squad in Charlie had seen a bird with a positively enormous and neon-colored beak. That gave Vaya a tinge of sadness when she thought about it— they were in a place that had been uninhabited for almost a thousand years, and they were here to kill people instead of explore.

When it came Bravo Company's turn to leapfrog again, Vaya and Kiran were on point, as usual. Vaya prowled ahead in a hulking Shatterscale-H2, nearly three tons of tank-like muscle and bioceramics ready to absorb an ambush or trap. Kiran stuck to a Bladewyrm, and the rest of the squad followed behind them in a combination of Shiftscales and SIBs. Really, the bodies didn't matter too much; they could be anything they had in seconds, but they all had their preferences.

After what felt like a few hours of walking, something dinged off of Vaya's flank. Before she could figure out what it was, a flurry of identical impacts struck her.

Sona reacted to it before she did. "Contact left!"

The squad reacted instantly, a hail of suppressive fire shredding the vegetation. It took Vaya another second to realize that she wasn't getting shot at. She'd been shot plenty of times with all sorts of weapons, but this wasn't even chipping her scales. It was like having pebbles thrown at her.

"Hold fire! No contact!" Her "voice" carried effortlessly through the gunfire, and she took a moment to try and figure out what was actually hitting her as the deluge of automatic fire tapered off. A stream of what looked like black glass was zipping back and forth through the brush, each fragment snapping against her armored scales before returning back into the jungle.

The rest of the squad stared at her. The stream of glass hadn't let up, but it was only going after her... to very little effect. A Shatterscale might not have been the peak of combat effectiveness these days, but she was effectively impossible to kill with anything short of anti-materiel weaponry, and even then she wouldn't go down easy. Even a Bladewyrm's fire had trouble hurting an H2 variant.

"Uh. Sergeant? What do we do?"

Astrid looked at her, as if to say, "How the fuck should I know," before her NCO instincts kicked in. "Does it hurt?"

"It's like throwing a rock at a tank."

"Okay, magic bullshit then. Go find out where it's coming from, I'll radio up. Aaliya, Citra, Lia, go with her, and put some armor on."

"Roger." Her squadmates twisted and flickered into Bladewyrms as Vaya pushed through the torn-up underbrush, quietly padding behind her. It was easy enough to follow the stream of shards, and after a hundred or so meters, they discovered the source.

In a small clearing was a squarish obsidian monolith, no taller than a person, decorated with pictographs carved into the surface. As she watched, fragments of it broke off and zipped towards her, then returned and slotted back into the stone like they had never left.

"Huh. I guess flinging obsidian knives at folks was a lot more dangerous back then."

Astrid's voice crackled over the radio, "What is it?"

"Some sort of Mayan thing. Thin obelisk, about two meters tall."

"Just break it, we've got a schedule to keep."

"Uh, roger. Give us a bit to figure out how." She glanced at her squadmates, "Any ideas?" The monolith was still flinging shards at her, a constant clinkclinkclink of glassy rock on carbide scale.

"You weigh like three tons. Just get a running start and smack it," Aaliya suggested.

Vaya shrugged, took a few steps back, and then lunged forwards at the obelisk, throwing her shoulder into it. Three tons of dragon won that fight, and the top half sheared off, toppling over into the leaves.

"That wasn't too—" There was a white flash and a thunderous crack as the thaumaturgy in the obelisk released. A sudden searing headache appeared in her brain at the same time that something picked Vaya up and threw her, tossing her into the woods like she was a toy instead of several thousand kilograms of dragon. She scrabbled to right herself after landing, sparing a glance to make sure the other three were in one piece.

While the other three were also slowly picking themselves up off the ground, the glance revealed a more pressing concern. An unholy writhing mass of warped faces and humanoid bodies was pouring out from the broken obelisk, quickly ballooning in size and shrieking horribly. Fortunately, they had a modicum of training for this sort of thing.

"Contact, salt!" The term "salt" had arisen from the academic jargon used to refer to a demon: non-autochthonous lifeform, shortened to NACL, and shortened again to "salt" for whenever magic made something wrong. Vaya didn't particularly care about the etymology, nor was she aware that the entity she was looking at wasn't technically non-autochthonous, but she did know what to do: She shifted, raising her rifle before her body had even formed, flicked off the safety, and held down the trigger.

The RG-63 was an interesting design for a rifle. In order to achieve the eye-watering muzzle velocities needed to have a chance at punching through exo-armor with tolerable recoil, the RG-63 was a combustion light gas rifle. The resulting contraption had a gas canister in the stock, a magazine by the grip, and a forward-recoiling action. It really shouldn't have worked as well as it did.

But it worked regardless. Vaya kept the gun on target, releasing a flurry of steel needles and riddling the howling mass with holes. Aaliya and Citra recovered and followed suit, an additional pair of rifles joining the cacophony. The mass shuddered, twitched... and then started growing again, swelling up into the air like a hot-air balloon as the holes sealed themselves shut.

"Lia! Some help?!" Lia was notionally the squad's thaumaturge, but she'd only had the RIA training, not the PDT's infantry thaumaturge school.

Lia shifted back to her SIB, pulling a grenade off her rig while Vaya reloaded. "Brick out!"

The purple-striped cylinder sailed through the air and bounced off the entity, tumbling harmlessly to the ground. Then it exploded, a puff of iron nanoparticles clouding around the broken monolith. The tail end of the entity dissolved like melting cheese where the cloud touched it, and it shrieked even louder. Vaya's headache intensified, her counter-control tattoo burning against the side of her skull.

"Again! Cook it!"

Lia pulled another anti-magic grenade off her rig, pulling the pin and waiting for a second before the throw. This time, the grenade bounced off the entity and exploded almost instantaneously, the shrieking turning into gurgling as the iron dust broke the corrupted magic holding it together. Astrid and the rest of the squad barged through the vegetation just in time to see the last dredges of the gurgling mass melt into nothingness.

"Clear, I think," Vaya radioed, "Everyone okay?"

A trio of affirmatives answered her.

"What the fuck was that?" Aaliya asked.

Astrid shrugged, "Leftovers. And definitely not the only ones."

Progress through the jungle continued, with an increasing density of ancient defenses as they approached the ruins of what had once been a city. From the satellite imagery, it looked like they were going to reach the eastern side at the same time that the ODI units reached the western one.

The Mayans had left them plenty of surprises, but none that had been permanently lethal so far. Aisha had lost a body to a monolith emitting some sort of particle beam that set off a grenade on her kit, punching a hole through her hip and tearing off her right leg. Vaya had lost a body to a building-sized stepped pyramid that, as best anyone could tell, had been throwing pebbles at Mach 10. Both losses had been easily fixed, but tension was high. None of the constructs reacted to anything besides incoming artillery fire or live targets, and being the sacrificial lambs was wearing on all of them.

Vaya looked up from her ration pack as Astrid returned from some higher-up meeting. "So, what's the news?"

She puffed some smoke. "We're moving into the city as soon as the sun goes down. We have as much artillery support as we want for the first bit of the assault, but after that it's all CQC, because the brass doesn't want us blowing up the macguffin."

Vaya felt her tail flick with anticipation, which was strange because she didn't have one to flick like this. While she thought about that, Citra piped up from next to her, "Colonel Wright thinks they'll fight us over it instead of blowing up whatever it is and running?"

Astrid shifted, returning to her SIB. "Why wouldn't they? They've got us outnumbered two to one." She smirked. Unsaid was the reason why the Army had only sent a single brigade out here to fight two ODI ones: two-to-one was good odds for infantry.

"So where do we fit in all of this?" Vaya asked.

"We're on the southern flank. We're moving as soon as it gets dark, so rest up while you can."

The darkness of a moonless night was a lot more comfy now to Vaya than it had been in her past life. Not that she'd been blind in the dark back then either; her Exo-6 had IR and low-light optics, but the NODs were clunky and had a poor field of vision. Her new eyes had neither problem. Her slitted pupils were just barely avoiding the uncanny valley in human form... but she wouldn't be spending the night in human form.

It wasn't Vaya's first time in combat, or anyone's first time in combat. She knew what to expect. The support companies had already been playing out their game of drones and jamming, trying to establish electronic superiority. The pair of marine regiments they were up against had the numbers, but the snakes— the PDT, she was a snake now —would make up for it with better jamming.

A half-dozen quadcopters wove through the treetops overhead as her radio crackled, "Alright ladies, that's our cue. Lia?"

"Right, casting." Lia dripped some blood from her IV tap into the ritual circle she'd already burnt into the ground, and murmured a few words under her breath. The circle glowed dimly with power for a brief second, then flashed like a camera bulb.

Vaya looked herself over. She, along with the rest of the squad, had faded into a blurry blob, even in infrared. It wouldn't hold up to any real counterspell, but it would give them a few seconds of relative immunity when they were first noticed.

"Alright. Let's go." Vaya flickered and twisted, the camouflaged carbide scales of her Bladewyrm replacing body armor. Kiran followed her lead.

They crept forwards, slowly pushing through the underbrush. The visibility sucked, even with her new eyes. Infrared and lowlight vision made the night as bright as day, but she still couldn't see through leaves.

After what felt like ten minutes of crawling advances, Kiran spoke. "Hold. Contact front," they thrummed, "they don't see us yet."

"Where?"

"About a hundred meters dead ahead. They're set up in a little overhang—"

"I see them." There was a machinegun nest set up in a half-ruined building, a few fuzzy shadows, barely noticeable even to her senses. "Not sure how many. Probably a squad or so."

"Roger," Astrid replied. "Lia, prep a de-fuzz. Everyone else, standard battle drill, wait until they open up. Vaya and gang, flank left. And radio silence until they start shooting." Radio silence was just as crucial as the fuzzer spell. ODI's ELINT capabilities might not have been quite as good as the PDT's, but the difference didn't matter that much if they were going to flatten the whole grid square with artillery anyway.

"On the way." Vaya pushed through the brush, hoping the movement wouldn't alert any of the waiting soldiers. Kiran followed her, along with Citra and Aaliya. The standard battle drill was simple, and they'd practiced it what felt like a thousand times: one fireteam pins the enemy down, the other flanks them. And with sightlines as interrupted as they were, flanking was a walk in the park.

At least, it was a walk in the park until she nosed around a corner to find the blur of an ODI marine laying behind some rubble with his rifle at the ready, twenty meters away.

The blur moved, and Vaya moved.

The problem with ODI exoskeletons, one which Vaya personally knew far too well, was that they were clunky. The strength was incredible, as was the armor, but getting from up from a prone position took nearly twice as long as it did without the suit. Even just swinging around the weapon would take a second or two.

Vaya's claws dug into the ground as she rocketed forwards, nineteen hundred kilos of blurry death in a race with the end of a gun barrel. She won it, just as Kiran thundered "CONTACT!" Melee combat with a human-ish blur was difficult, but she'd been human for long enough to be able to make a decent guess. A swipe with her front claw missed, only gouging out chunks of stone, but told her where his body actually was. Her follow-up tail strike hit, punching through the underside of his unprotected jaw and into the brain. Even in death, the marine stayed blurred, the magic persisting regardless.

There was a shout and then a crunch from a dozen meters to her left as Kiran killed a marine she hadn't seen. "Another down."

"Down!" Aaliya shouted, "get do—!" She didn't manage to follow her own advice, her call interrupted by the wet thud of a high-caliber bullet punching through her chest plate. The rest of them flattened themselves to the ground, just barely evading the stream of bright-red tracers as it scythed across the squad. The shots themselves rang out a second later, the bullets arriving a faster than the gunfire itself.

Aaliya shifted to a spare and managed to get out a weak "Hit, two left."

"Smokes?"

"One sec," Citra said, "I'll call it. Cover me." She fiddled with her headset, an IR ranging laser flickering out over the jungle for a fraction of a second. Aaliya worked on emptying her magazine towards the direction the tracers had come from. After a few seconds, Citra slapped Vaya's flank. "On the way. Let's go."

"Moving." They would deal with whoever was over here later, with guns or blades or artillery. ODI troops wouldn't willingly move through smoke when Bladewyrms could be lurking inside of it, and they all knew it from experience.

A sound-but-not-quite-sound like a ringing bell pushed its way through the air as the fireteam darted towards the machinegun nest exchanging fire with the rest of the squad, Lia's de-fuzz blasting away the magic blurring their shapes... and also, hopefully, that of the enemy.

"Astrid! How many in there?!" Vaya thrummed as loudly as she could.

"At least four!" Astrid's voice was accompanied by a searing bolt of purple-blue dragonfire, her Shiftscale's oxyacetylene bolt hitting a branch and destablizing some fifty meters away from the ruins.

Vaya tilted her head at Kiran, "I'll get it. You and Aaliya sweep for others."

Kiran nodded. Four was doable as a duo, especially already-distracted targets. The angle was as good as she could ask for, really– they were coming at a ruined structure embedded in a hillside from the side, out of view of any openings, but it meant the only way she'd be getting in was from the side where everyone was shooting.

Citra slotted a 40mm flash grenade into her underbarrel launcher. "Vaya, you ready?"

Another drill they had practiced a hundred times. Vaya nodded. "Let's do it."

Citra keyed up her radio, "Hold fire, hold fire, CQC, CQC!"

Private Karnik breathed a sigh of relief when the gunfire let up. He didn't have any illusions about hitting anything, they'd barely been able to see each other through all the vegetation, but he was still alive. And he wasn't currently being shot at, which was a plus. He took the opportunity to rest his gun on the ground and reload the belt.

Private First Class Devan was somewhat less reserved. "That's right, run away, you soulless freaks!" He held down the trigger, the heavy autocannon sounding out a thud-thud-thud as it sprayed rounds downrange.

"Shut the fuck up, Private! Get y—!" The corporal's yelling was interrupted by the pure-white light of a flash grenade landing outside his firing position. Karnik's optics blanked, the sensitive electronics briefly overloaded by the light.

His digital ear protection didn't let through the bang from the grenade, but it did let through the sound of something large moving very quickly.

Vaya leapt through whatever passed for the doorway and found herself face-to-face with six RI Marines in full kit, almost recovered from Citra's flash grenade. She didn't have time to bare her fangs, but she felt the flash of satisfaction from the looks of fear on their faces.

CQC had a simple order of precedence. People pointing a gun at you died first, and whoever was convenient died second. Vaya opened her jaws and loosed an explosively-propelled copper slug at the marine on the other side of the room who had been smart enough to raise his gun. She was moving again before he even realized there was a hole through his chest, her heavy tail-blade thunking through the thin neck guard of the man closest to her and severing his spinal column. She killed her third victim with teeth, knocking him off his feet with an explosive lunge and ripping out his throat with her fangs before he even hit the ground.

There was a gunshot— not the thud of an autocannon, but the crack of a PDT rifle. Vaya glanced backwards just in time to watch Citra put a second and third round into the head of another marine.

They hadn't even managed to start aiming their guns yet.

Private Karnik's optics came back online in less than two seconds, treating him to the sight of four dead squadmates, a PDT soldier pointing a gun at him, and a Bladewyrm, sickle-like fangs dripping with blood. Devan raised his gun without hesitation as soon as his NODs recovered, and a split second later his face vanished with a wet sound as the dragon's bladed tail punched through it. Karnik decided that, as his gun was currently unloaded, the best course of action was to remain very, very still.

"Hands," the soldier said, motioning with her— her? gun. She spoke Hindi without an accent. Karnik slowly raised his hands.

She nodded towards the dragon. "Vaya, hit his emergency release." There was a pause, and the corner of her mouth tilted up in a smirk. "No."

The Bladewyrm stepped behind him. He had a realization: there were still six grenades hanging off his chest plate.

"Okay, you're going to drop your kit, put your hands on your head, and—" Citra noticed him glancing at the grenades on his kit.

"Don't do—"

Vaya pulled the release lever with her teeth. As the suit unfolded, the marine dove forwards towards Citra, pulling a grenade off his rig and yanking the pin.

"GRENADE!" Citra leapt backwards, shifting midair to her Bladewyrm and sprinting out of the ruined structure. Vaya simply put on her Shatterscale and took a step backwards, angling her head away from the grenade.

Nothing happened.

"Citra, are you sure about that grenade?"

"I watched him pull the pin!"

Vaya peered at the marine. "Oh. Hold on a second." The grenade was sitting on the ground, pin missing... but the spoon was still attached. He'd gripped it so hard that the thin metal hinge had bent, holding it in place.

Vaya shifted to a SIB and picked up the grenade. "These things are pieces of shit, you gotta be gentle with em." She wrenched off the spoon and hurled it outside, where it exploded harmlessly a few seconds later.

"Now, I believe you were trying to surrender?"