A muffled beeping shepherds away a fuzzy dream. A soldier lies on the bottom bunk as he takes a moment to come to terms with consciousness. He is quite the average looking sort. A young man of pale skin, brown eyes, and brown hair to match, clothed in black shorts and a black tee. He slowly rolls off of the mattress with a yawn, bare feet meeting cement through the quiet barracks. He trudges past the various metal furnishings with a practiced ease that makes turning on any lights unnecessary. He leaves the dark bedroom, and down a tight industrial hallway as the beeping grows in clarity. A window on one wall lets in a bright white wash of the overcast sky, dust particles drifting out of the way as the soldier moves to an open door.
Past the doorway is a half-pill shaped observation deck, windows lining all along the top half of the room save for the doorway's wall. A skylight illuminating the center of the room. Monitors, terminals, and all manner of machinery take up the bottom half of the walls, much of the messy, wire-tangled arrangement breaching up to block the windows and crawl along the curve where wall becomes ceiling. The electronic equipment gently hums and chirps, complimenting an array of multicolored lights and glowing LCDs. One red dot blinks in time with the beeping over at a particular set of monitors.
Another yawn as the soldier drags over a rolling chair and taps away at an extended keyboard. He focuses on a monitor as a gray-scale map appears, and the beeping ceases. One cyan dot represents his position at the center of the map, and an orange triangle flashes in the northwest, on the outskirts of a long-deserted megalopolis. After a few more keystrokes, feed of a desolate landscape appears. Sweeping waves of smooth gray rock formations, like a stoic facsimile of a roaring ocean. The soldier stares at the image for a bit. Nothing. He switches the scene to another. The same flavor of landscape, but with minor differences. Some weathered faded-green metal skeletons of buildings, but no movement. Once more he switches, and finds the source of alarm. A very old and very worn framework of a radio station on the outskirts of the urban decay has collapsed. In other words: the most movement to happen for weeks.
The soldier stretches, not really having expected anything else, and stands. Awake now, his morning continues as many others. In the bathroom, he brushes his teeth and shaves. In a small, empty cafeteria, bathed in the alabaster daylight, he eats sat next to a large window, idly reading on a tablet. Once done, he stretches, exercises, and takes a shower. The soldier rushes no activity. Time, after all, is something he has in spades.
His days progress routinely, largely without interruption. He is stationed at an "overseer nest"; a guard post of sorts. Nestled in the sole geological passageway to a region where automatic interplanetary freight is sent and received from off-world. Equipped with various forms of long-range artillery, and connected to a wide-reaching surveillance network spanning the desolate two hundred kilometer area of the passageway, the soldier is tasked with neutralizing any unauthorized trespassers. Regulation of operating these overseer nests usually calls for multiple people working in shifts to constantly man the observation decks. The brass deemed such things superfluous in the case of this specific barren quadrant of the barren world it calls home. Not only was there no one here, but the rocky terrain and hollow skeletons of dead cities are so static that even false flags are a rarity. The base had previously been manned by a skeleton crew of two, though the second went stir crazy, and had to be recalled a month ago. Any replacement was clearly low priority. The soldier wasn't too bothered by that, but would be lying had he claimed to not be well anticipating his contract's end. Even the most withdrawn of introverts would find themselves wanting for some interaction after so long.
The soldier thinks on this as he takes time to neatly don a black dress uniform with white accents. He's fixing up his hair when a sound makes his reflection pause in the mirror. The beeping. Again. Perhaps another building or two followed suit with the first that awoke him. What a riveting shift. He calmly walks to the observation deck. His black dress shoes clack on the cold floor as he makes his way to the door, lazily kicking it open. He sits back down at that rolling chair, and checks the notification, silencing the beeping once more. The area in question is in the same spot as the last one, as expected. But then, the soldier is- for the first time in a while- given pause.
That old, dead husk of a city has lit up. A sea of rotted machinery and infrastructure twitching and sparking as they are urged back to work despite missing vital chunks of their compositions. The soldier begins hypnotically cycling through feeds of various cameras placed throughout the city. Seeing the megalopolis heaving wounded breaths and opening weak, faded eyes proves quite the sight. The soldier cannot even begin to guess as to what caused it. Orange triangles spatter the map as cameras and motion sensors pick up false flag after false flag. The soldier finds each to clear the alerts. Titanic industrial fans spinning, a massive glowing 3D mural flickering in and out of existence, a flood of water spraying from a burst pipe as wide as a highway. With each visage, his mind grasps for any explanation. The urban corpse couldn't have been revived by way of any random glitch, right? No, this is something else. Maybe someone somehow made their way into the city, and had quietly worked to turn it back on. But why? He flicks to one signalling camera in a tunnel under the ruins, and he sees a train jet by, blasting rubble out of the way.
With a curse, the soldier stumbles over to a wide metal filing cabinet. He searches old, worn documents and papers until he comes up with a map of the subway systems. Unfolding it returns an intricate network under the city, nigh insurmountable on foot, but if the old power grid is back on? Red markings tell that most routes have been caved in or otherwise made impassible. Yet, a spare few paths can still be taken south, past the coverage of the overseer nest, and to the off-world freight yard.
The soldier rushes to another terminal, this one in the center of the far wall looking directly out into the rocky, overcast landscape. He's typing rapidly, mechanical keys clicking in succession with intermittent glances at the map. As he enters commands, the diagnostic information flashes by hand-in-hand with the loud rumbling of cannons taking aim above. A shadow passes over the observation deck as a barrel briefly blocks out the colorless sky on it's journey to point northwest. He types a confirmation, and the moment he hits enter, the base shakes with a muffled BOOM that vibrates the soldier's bones. He looks up through a window to see only the aftermath, a hole punched through the fluffy clouds, only further clouds past it. Back at the cameras, he watches a mile of tunnel collapse, and then searches for the train.
It's ahead. It passed the tunnel before his shot landed. With a hardened grimace, he runs back to the terminal and map. Adjusting his aim, he sees an intersection ahead where the route bisects. Anticipating that they will reach the intersection before he can destroy it, he opts to shatter both tunnel separately, further down, starting with the left. More frantic keystrokes and the thunderous shifting of the cannons, and another explosion. This time he looks outside as he hits enter, and he can see, for a brief moment, the golden flash of a truck-sized bullet snap out of the massive barrel and into the clouds. The soldier's already re-orienting a cannon to the second tunnel while the first one finishes cooling down. While it's turning, he runs to the cameras. They took the right tunnel, and have just passed the intersection when the feeds shake and go fuzzy for a moment as the left passageway collapses. The soldier hears the turning gun stop. Back to the terminal, he fires. Back to the cameras, he's just in time to watch the tunnels cave as the train passes through them.
The train tosses to and fro. Safety features engage, and the back two cars are automatically detached, abandoned to the falling rocks as the engine car continues on. The back two cars topple over and unto one another, and for just a moment, the soldier can see figures at the spot where the train shed the dead weight. Two people on the back of the engine car. One is reaching out and screaming at the cars behind them. Another in some sort of heavy cloak is grabbing the first and ushering them back into the car.
The soldier stares at the screen. He blinks a few times.
After a moment, he lets out a breath he wasn't even aware he was holding. He gets up from the chair. Over at the terminal, a new set of coordinates. He hesitates. The tunnel has only one real path forward. All other ways are impassible. He adjusts the aim of the cannons to the west. Far ahead of where they will be when the shot lands. With a single confirmation, the payload cracks through the atmosphere. Back to the cameras. The attack does indeed land well ahead of the train. He flicks through the feeds as he tracks it's progress.
In ten minutes, the train slows to a stop at the mountain of rubble, white light shining in from the hole to the surface. The train seems to switch gears, and slowly starts to accelerate backwards, before the shock-wave of another explosion echos behind, trapping them. At the overseer nest, the soldier rolls his chair back over to the monitor array, and stares with a vacant expression at the resting train car. Nothing. Nothing for a while. He can vaguely make out shifting shapes within the car. He ups the sensitivity of the motion sensors in that area, and returns to clearing all the alarms from the city, giving occasional glances back at the train car where the drifters still are. He can bombard and kill them all at any time. He probably should, right now.
But he doesn't.
...
After a little over half an hour, an orange triangle far out of the megalopolis and to his west warns of movement by the drifters. The soldier switches over to their camera to see three figures shuffling out of the train car carrying some large objects. It's too dark, and the figures too far away to tell exactly what they are. The soldier watches as the drifters lug the large objects up the massive pile of rubble and to the surface. Another camera up above reveals the objects to be motorbikes. Two get on one bike, and the drifter in the heavy cloak gets on the other. They all pause as they sit on their bikes, talking to each-other. The soldier nods to himself, and moves to another computer, a control stick hooked up to this one. The single square screen of this computer seems to show feeds of the cameras as the main computer does, but cropped to a one by one ratio, and with several targeting reticles set on them. The soldier hears the beeping of motion sensors, and flicks to one tracking the motorcycles now racing across the jagged landscape of smooth gray stone.
He watches the two motorcycles. Then, slowly switches to a camera watching a spot the motorcycles are headed to. He presses a button under his thumb on the control stick as he sees the two shapes approaching into view. The UI lights up with flashing indicators and a big 'READY TO FIRE'. His index finger hovers over the trigger.
The soldier takes a deep breath.
A burst of five bullets streak through the landscape towards the motorcycles, who try to veer out of the way. The solo rider dodges. The duo, not so much. Bullets pierce the passengers and their vehicle, sending all to the ground. Once the two figures roll to a stop, they're showered with another barrage of bullets to finish them off. The screen flickers to a new view, and the final drifter is in sight, speeding past, over, and under the landscape. Their cloak billows in the wind, along with long, flowing hair. They ride in a zig-zagging pattern, so leading where they're headed difficult. Not impossible, though. After five or ten minutes of rhythmic bursts of fire, one hail catches the back half of their bike, and their legs with it. Both are torn apart, the bike explodes, and the figure is flung to the ground.
The soldier does not finish them off immediately. He watches as they slowly prop themselves up by their hands, and look around. They get into a slumped sitting position, facing away from the turret. The soldier's gaze trails from the distant figure, to the even more distant exterior of... the overseer nest. His mouth parts in surprise, and a glance at the placement of the dot on the flickering map confirms that this final drifter went down within view of his base. Over the messy arrangement of computers, out the west side window, he sees a line of smoke rising into the sky.
Moments later, the soldier is standing outside the nest, facing westward. He slowly raises a long rifle, braced on the black metal railing. He looks through the scope and finally gets a close-up, clear view of one of these sudden trespassers. She's- the drifter seems vaguely feminine- sat slumped over in a growing pool of blue "blood". Her legs are mangled, showing wire and chords past torn paper white skin. She looks dead at him with glowing eyes through long straight black hair, and has seams going down from her eyes to her neck. An android of sorts. Apparently there are still some on this planet. Or, at least, there were. She doesn't do anything. Just watches him. Each breath by the soldier's weighs on his heart. He can see her shoulders rising and falling with breaths of her own. The breeze calms. Her head slowly lowers to the ground, along with her gaze, as as the soldier's finger curls to rest on the trigger.
He centers the rifle's aim just above her head, accounting for slight bullet drop, and shares one more deep breath under the billowing white clouds that race by.
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