D.A.R.I.A Book One

by Martin E. Silenus

  “D, are you done getting the copter steam cleaned?” I ask.

  “Just finished Matt, I’m on my way back. I want to get a reading on any remaining Sarin gas levels within the camp prior to you going in.”

  D makes an extensive low level inspection of the camp and declares that the Sarin gas has dissipated.

  “Ok Matt, the levels are zero so it is safe for you to go in. But it is going to very ugly and revolting, I hope you are prepared.”

  “Not sure I am prepared either D, so I’ll just go get it done.”

  It is a scene out of a horror nightmare; the terrorists lay twisted in pools of their own vomit, defecation and urine. Of course the suit filters the air that I breathe and so it is impossible to smell the air of the camp, but even at that I imagine I can smell the death and noxious odors of the dead.

  “Got your video recorder on D?” I inquire grimly.

  “Yeah, I’m getting it all,”

  The remains of the terrorists did not get far from their first breath of the gas, two to three steps maybe. In the barracks they rolled out of bed and died tripping over their fellow terrorists. I move from building to building, inspecting, counting. At the end of the camp I check my count, something is wrong.

  “How many terrorist are we expecting here D, is it 280?”

  “Yup, that’s what the intel package said,” relies D. “Is your count off?”

  “Yeah, by 10 bodies, you don’t suppose we have a safe room shelter somewhere here for the instructors to hide in?”

  “I expect that is exactly what we have,”

  “Ok, I’ll go through the south end building again as there were fewer bodies in that building than most of the others.”

  “Be careful Matt, as the entrance to the safe room, if and when you find it will likely be booby trapped.”

  I search the building again, checking walls, back sides of closets, moving any mats on the floor looking for a trap door. Finally after my third try I find an access panel that leads down a short ladder to a tunnel. By lying on the floor I can see the steel door set into concrete for the safe room. I can also see the trip beams for the anti-personnel claymore mines.

  “Got it D, are you seeing this stuff?

  “Yes I am and do not go in there as you will be ripped to shreds!”

  “Ok, how are we gonna get these rats out?”

  “I’m directly over the back of the building and I see a vent coming out of the safe house in the trees.” says D. “Just stay where you are nice and quiet and I will be back in a minute, as I have an idea.”

  Ten minutes later D is back.

  “Come on around back Matt to where the vent stack in.” says D. “So here is my idea. We take a couple of gallons of gas and pour it down the vent stack and then toss in a couple of grenades. I would bet that we can turn all ten of those bastards to BBQ’d mush!”

  “Jesus D, where do you come up with these ideas?”

  “Saw in in a war movie, while you humans were sleeping.”

  I pour in the five gallons of gas, and as I am I can hear the hysterical jabbering coming from the safe room up the vent pipe.

  “Best be backing that copter up some D,” I say.

  “Roger that.”

  I pop the pins on two grenades and drop them into the vent and turn and run like hell. There is a thunderous WHUMP and the ground smacks my feet. I also hear the claymore’s detonating. Some son of a bitch is trying hard to get out. Rifle in hand and cloaking turned on I slip back inside the building. It is filled with smoke and nothing else. Looking down the ladder into the tunnel I see the remains of two or maybe three terrorists that forgot about the claymores when they made a run for it to escape the gas bomb. D was right they are completely shredded to fragments.

  “Need a lift soldier,” asks D as I come out of the building.

  “I sure do, smooth talker,” I reply clipping into the harness.

  Once back at the MEDC I sleep, or try to sleep, I’m exhausted, but the images of the last several hours are still too fresh to let me rest. So I thrash and doze and have nightmares. The wrong people are in my dreams, people from my past are dying of Sarin gas, and more disturbing still DARIA is lying amongst the terrorist bodies. I thrash and roll and mumble and fight at shadows, ghost memories, and then I am awake. We have missed something, something big; this camp has much more to tell us. We have to go back in and search more carefully. Ignore the dead, there is significant information still there that we have not collected.

  Frosty is in the data center, fussing and puttering with computer gear.

  “Jesus Frosty, don’t you ever sleep?” I ask.

  “Just an ongoing series of cat naps actually is how I operate best. How do you feel this this morning?” he replies.

  “Morning Matt,” says D. “You look like shit this morning, which is not much wonder considering your thrashing and abnormal brain activity while you attempted to sleep.”

  “Yo, D, jesus woman is there anything you don’t monitor?” I grump.

  “Very little human,” chuckles D.

  “We have to back to the camp; we are missing important information on how these terrorist camps operate.” I blurt out. “There should be a weapons cache, additional intel on training, computer hard drives, radio frequencies to lord knows where, and I suspect we have missed some small training teams that were out of the camp when we took it down last night. I think we are only half done here.”

  “Not too bad Matt, so that’s what you were doing when you were supposed to be sleeping,” says D. “As a matter of fact Frosty and I were discussing something along the same line. I suspect that this is not the only terrorist training camp that we are going to be approached to destroy. Seeing as we are not in hostile territory we can afford to take some time and learn as much as we can here about their methods of operations. Information that will without doubt come in very handy at other camps.”

  “We should run F.L.I.R scans up and down the valley looking for the teams that are out training. And ground penetrating radar would be very handy to detect weapons cache and likely drug caches in and around the camp.” I suggest.

  “Jesus Matt, we’re not gonna let you sleep if you keep coming up with all this extra work,” chuckles Frosty.

  “Yeah I know, but this is really bothering me, I’ve got all sorts of alarms going off in my head.” I mutter scratching my nose.

  “We can start the F.L.I.R scans as soon as I drop you off at the camp. Suit up and we’ll leave as soon as you are ready.” says D.

  I do not want to back into that camp of death. It bothers me how we gassed the terrorists en masse, it shouldn’t but it does. The place just creeps me out. Aside from 280 odd corpses rotting where they dropped, the place is so alien to me I might as well be on another planet. But I have to go through it all again carefully looking for the additional intel that I know must be there.

  D drops me at the North end of the camp, and goes off to start the F.L.I.R scans up and down the valley. This time I pay particular attention to the shape of the buildings from the outside to be sure the inside floorplan is matching. The barracks are just barracks there is nothing there but bodies. But the building that is beside the one that has the trap door has an extra wall across the back containing an office. Inside I find a laptop and a refrigerator containing drugs, syringes, and what not. Some very handy tools if you are in the business of altering people’s personalities and behaviors. I examine the drug labels, they don’t mean much to me, but I am capturing them on real time video and DARIA will know all about them. I remove the hard drive from the laptop and continue my hunt.

  Back in the building with the trap door I find another laptop in a desk drawer. Once again I remove the hard drive and collect a couple of memory sticks from the same drawer. Not wanting to but knowing I have to, I step down to the bottom of the short ladder in the low tunnel to the safe room. But there is nothing but body parts here and charred remains in the safe room. There are no further tunnels or roo
ms down here.

  Back outside I pause and just try to feel what I might have missed. All the bodies are grossing me out and buggering up my senses with emotions of extreme revulsion.

  “Matt, I have an idea where the arms cache could be.” says D. “At the North end of the camp on the small hill that I dropped you on last night it looks like there might be a cave entrance. I mark it on your visor map.”

  “Thanks D, I’m on my way to check it out.”

  Yeah, this makes perfect sense. The terrorists have not put much effort into their arms cache, just slightly renovated a natural small cave. The armaments are not that unusual either, AK 47’s, crates of ammo, and of course the ubiquitous RPG’s, and rocket launchers. What self-respecting terrorist team would not have either of these staple armaments? I pull a couple of thermite grenades off my belt and toss them in the arms cache as I scurry out the tunnel. A nice little 4,000 degree fire with associated ammo cook-off will render the armaments utterly useless.

  “D, I found the weapons cache and have destroyed it. How are you doing with the F.L.I.R. scans?”

  “So far I have located two teams of four terrorists each that are moving back towards the camp. They are attempting to establish radio contact with the camp. So I expect that they are aware of trouble.”

  “How much time do we have until they get within a couple of miles?”

  “Estimate a couple of hours anyway, why?”

  “I noticed an old Cat bulldozer in the trees by the camp and I intend to start it up and bury these fucking disgusting corpses!”

  “My, my, aren’t we tidy.” taunts D.

  Surprisingly the Cat starts up with no difficulty and in no time I have an eight foot deep trench dug down the center of the camp. The dragging of the corpses and rolling them into the trench is just utterly revolting and takes longer the dozer work, but I get it done. Except for the pieces of the ones that were in the safe house, they can stay where they fell.

  A little more dozer work to bury them and pack down the dirt over mass grave and I am done. For some reason the mass burial has pacified my soul.

  “What’s the status on the terrorist teams D?”

  “They are just reaching the two to three mile distance from the camp.”

  “Can you drop me ahead of them on some high ground so I can snipe them?”

  “Yup, be there in a second.” says D.

  DARIA drops me on a rise about 500 yards ahead of the first group of four terrorists. I can see them clearly on my rifle scope as heat blooms as they make their way one by one through the bush. Settling in and controlling my breathing I start with the last terrorist in the line. “Cough” says the rifle, and the terrorist is flung into disarray. Then I sight the third terrorist in the line. “Cough” and the heat blob is blown up. Now the first two terrorist know the shit is in the fan and begin to scramble frantically. It is pointless as I can see them as clear as can be. “Cough, cough” and they are dispatched into splotches of cooling flesh.

  “Four down D, where are the other four?”

  “I will need to move you back to the ridge just north of the gun cache as they are coming toward the camp from that direction.”

  Once relocated and settled in I can see the terrorists approaching. Again I sight in on the last one in the line and smoke him first. But this time the other three scatter immediately. I lose one completely so he is likely behind a rock. The other two are partial images so they are huddled behind trees which are partially blocking my thermal imager.

  Terrorist number two is playing “whack a mole” with me, popping his head in and out of cover to attempt to locate my position. I watch and learn his rhythm and when he pops his head out SPLAT, rip his head right off. Terrorist three I am scanning for, and then I locate him. He has climbed a tree and is some thirty feet off the ground. I can see his heat signature on each side of the tree trunk. So I line up mid mass and touch off a shot, knowing the tree offers no protection at all for him as my shot will blow what’s left of him out of the tree and spread the remains over the ground. Damn that feels good, you can run but you cannot hide fucker!

  Terrorist number four is MIA.

  “D, I have terminated three but one has disappeared, I suspect he is behind a large rock or thick earth embankment. Can you swing around and check from behind him to see if you can see his position?”

  “I’ve completed another F.L.I.R. scan of the valley and am just coming back in towards the camp, let me change course and have a look see.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Ok, I have a partial image of him behind what looks to be an up rooted tree. He is huddled down in the dirt hole putting layers of mud on himself to kill his heat signature.”

  “Dandy, just keep an eye on him while I get down there.”

  I have cloaking on as I hump down the trail towards D and the cornered terrorist, slowing to a walk as I get real close to him, according to my visor data. Just as he come into view around the tree stump hole I step on a twig that snaps and the terrorist swings around and spray fires with his AK47 on full auto. He can’t see me and just fires a short auto burst at the sound. One of the rounds hits me in the stomach right below the chest. The suit stiffens and tightens at first contact but it’s like being kicked by a horse. I squeeze the trigger on my plasma rifle as I am blown over backwards and the terrorist just disintegrates with a wet splat in a cloud of blood and gore.

  “Matt, Matt, Matt, talk to me, are you alright, Matt, come on buddy,” cries D. “You’re ok Matt, there is no bleeding!”

  “Arrgghh, fuck, can’t breathe,”

  “You just got your breath knocked out, you will be fine, just stay still and try to breathe.”

  After what seems an eternity of gasping and threatening to puke I can begin to breathe and get up to one knee. But my stomach is killing me.

  DARIA answers my thought, “You are gonna have a very handsome bruise on your abs from the AK47 round at such close range. It hit you with just under 1000lbs of force.”

  “No shit D, jesus I’m dying, can we just get out of here?”

  “You bet buddy, just clip in and we are gone.”

  Back at the semi Frosty helps me up the steps into the data center and sits me on an examination table.

  “Let me help you out of the gear Matt, so we can have a look see as to how you faired.” says Frosty. “Looks like that combat suit saved your ass a second time.”

  The hologram of D appears as I struggle out of the suit and Frosty helps me to lie back on the table. She is looking concerned and sucks her breath in quickly and puts a hand to her mouth when she sees the ugly red welt on my upper stomach.

  “Hold still while I get this injection into you,” says Frosty. “It will help with the pain and our diagnosis, but will make you sleepy.”

  I mutter something unintelligible as I start to slide away. Frosty throws an odd looking soft cover over me and I swear I could feel it tightening and adjusting to my body, then darkness.

  Chapter 25: Dreamland

  I am drifting within my memories, D is with me, I can feel her touch and her soft re-assuring voice in my head. There is no sense of time, no sense of pain, hunger, just the softness and blurred edges and contentment of dreamland with D. We are discussing the moral issue of gassing some 300 people without warning. Why does this bother me when I am fine to shoot them one on one? Why do the actions of extermination revile man so much? D is talking quietly in my head and offering points of view and referencing psychological studies on these phenomena. How does she know this stuff? How does she know how to comfort for this type of thing? How can she be talking to me? Does burying the terrorists make you feel better Matt? Yes it does. Why is that? They were humans and I feel a moral obligation to a fellow human. You didn’t bury the terrorists you shot. No I didn’t. Why is that? I don’t know, it is complicated and I’m not sure I understand myself, for the camp terrorists that we gassed burying them brings me a sense of closure. Perhaps it is a moral upbringing thing
, I don’t know. It’s all right Matt, relax, no stress, you are fine my love, just rest and float with me. It was good to drift, and float, and feel D’s tender touch.

  On day three after the shooting I regain consciousness. Frosty and D are there watching me and asking how I feel. I immediately flex my ab muscles to check my stomach damage and am amazed that they feel fine. I probe with my fingers and cannot find soreness of physical damage. I sit up confused, how can this be? I should be so damned sore that I cannot sit up without help. D is watching me with a soft smile on her beautiful face. Frosty is scurrying around clucking.

  “How are you feeling Matt?” asks D with a big smile.

  “Ridiculously good, considering the initial damage, how long was I out of it?” I ask.

  “We kept you unconscious and healing for three days, there was no great rush and we felt you could use the additional rest and healing time,” replies D.

  “That size and depth of a bruise would not disappear like this in three days, three weeks maybe, but not three days. How did you manage this?” I puzzle.

  “We do some work in the area of medical nanotechnology, healing at the cellular level, that combined with DARIA monitoring every aspect of your mental and physical state allows for extremely rapid healing.” offers Frosty. “Sure beats the hell out of aching and being on pills and painkillers for a couple of weeks doesn’t it?”

  “This is frickin amazing; I can’t even tell I was shot!” I mutter incredulously.

  “You are very welcome, nice to have you back, and nursing you was not an inconvenience to me, as a matter of fact I rather liked it, brought out my maternal instinct,” chuckles D.

  “Guffaw, D you are more human than human,” laughs Frosty.

  “Working on it, but you humans are ridiculously complex on the emotional, spiritual, chemical, and hormonal side,” says D.

  “I feel a headache developing with this line of talk,” I say softly with a smile. “But thanks to both of you for your efforts and results, I so appreciate this, it’s amazing, I feel great!”