'Drive in.' M4 directed, the command line pushing SOP and STAR to their very limits. Single taps, each round precision placed, like each squeeze of the trigger released a little bit of that built up pressure that pressed in on their network. SOP was less affected by it, but the frenetic pace that the platinum blonde doll tore into the already scattered Sangvis formation ensured that their threat assessment and targeting programs remained overwhelmed.
M4 and STAR remained the base of fire, SOP the deadly dancer that ran rampant until all was still.
'Clear!' SOP pinged, adding a second tap to the processing unit of a downed Vespid. 'Can I have my grenade functionality back now?' She sent the permission request to M4 tagged with an image of the most pitifully adorable puppy that just tugged on M4's emotion module-
'And how many do you have remaining?' STAR pinged back, causing SOP to blink in confusion, patting her rig down.
Didn't she had an ammo count program?
'One… two… three… Three left, STAR!' SOP beamed into the network.
'We save grenades for enemies we can't kill with bullets or knives.' M4 reasserted her previous order, though this time without the pump of the command module behind it. SOP backed down immediately, but it still felt as if she were pouting in the corners of the network.
'But the little ones scatter all cool when you hit them with it. Like *Bwoosh!* *Bang!* It makes getting their parts easier too!' SOP sent her delight, a warm, uplifting sensation that made M4's frame feel all-that-much lighter. A buzz, an energy and desire to keep moving forward. She had to thank SOP's innocence sometimes. Levity, relief, humor… a counter-balance to the cold logic the rest of the team needed to operate by.
'Pressure is being relieved on the commander's front now. We can break contact and return to our prior mission.' STAR sent.
What was the human phrase…? "Speak of the devil and he shall appear?" M4 kept the instinctive frown from crumpling her expression or leaking into the network. STAR was simply doing what she was programmed to do, keep M4 on track and focused.
'Will call to confirm.' M4 shot back, muting the network before the excitement of SOP collided with the impatience of STAR. Some might have called her "decision" more hesitation, but M4 wanted to be certain that she was making the right call.
She didn't want more of the commander's dolls taking the hard reset back to base just because M4 was presumptuous.
The encrypted channel rang.
And rang.
And rang-
No G36 answering- she always answered by at least the first ring. That already was hint that something was wrong.
And rang...
Something was definitely wrong.
And rang-
The commander? Kalina? Anyone? No answer, and that send the paralytic shock of panic through M4's circuitry.
'Something is wrong at command.' M4 blurted into the network, unconsciously adding her nervous energy to the already tense mix. It was abrupt, disrupting whatever argument had been unfolding, and at once both sets of ocular sensors were unblinkingly set on her. She did her best not to shrink from them, to put on a strong face.
'Our direct line wasn't answered.'
'Interference?' STAR suggested. The first assumption, but it was wrong.
'The line rang though. No one picked up.'
'Maybe the commander was taking a bathroom break? Humans do that a lot.' SOP pinged in with a smile.
'G36 would have picked up.' STAR fired back near instantly, frowning both in-network and in realspace at SOP.
The whole time M4's processors ran overclocked. A thousand-thousand hypotheticals, whittling down the impossibilities from the probibles one at a time.
Not fast enough.
Not enough intel to cut variables out.
Can't plan effectively…
How-
The burden lifted like someone pulling the curtains open to the light of a sunny day. Without a word or command, SOP and STAR shared the calculation load. That was right… it wasn't all on M4's shoulders. They were a team, they were sisters… they could come up with something together. No obstacle was too difficult as long as they were together; that was why ANTI-RAIN were the elites, right? She could only hope that by the end of this operation, they'd have that final gap in their network filled.
Her digimind lit up with fresh ideas when the haze had lifted. If they couldn't get operational intelligence from command like they would normally, then why not simply contact those who were already in the AO and get their take?
[Closed Communication]
{G&K Encryption: RISK 5}
Accept?_
The request startled FAL at first, but it was a sudden and welcome relief. Command had found a way through for them, then?
She put aside a chunk of processing power, readying for fresh calculations that would get them all out of this mess.
"FAL reporting." She sent as soon as the channel opened. A few bolts of plasma streaked by before she ducked into cover once again- her reactions were delay now that she was on a call? She'd have to get that checked-
'Miss FAL?'
A questioning ping. M4's voice-
'Miss M4? Were you sent to find us? Communication with command has dropped out.'
'For you too?' M4 had fired back as instant as an electric pulse, like she had been expecting that answer. That wasn't really what FAL wanted to hear.
"Reloading!" FN2000 shouted when FAL didn't immediately respond to the fire-team protocol. FAL's dummies stood and began their concert of gunfire, but without the mainframe guiding them, they were little more than distractions.
There were more pressing concerns right now.
'We have standing orders to drive for grid A2. The commander's last intel was that there was significant SF presence there.' FAL passed her mission to M4, the elite accepting them immediately.
'We and the other echelons are not advancing fast enough to strike where these reinforcements keep coming from. Without the commander's eyes we cannot maneuver effectively.'
'Got it. We're on it, just hold tight as best you can and minimize casualties.' M4 sent back. FAL puzzled the response at first, at least until a Jaeger's bolt tore through another one of her dummies.
She didn't have to think of the "why's" and "how's"... but something stung in her emotion module. Ah yes… pride, she had talked to the commander about this feeling before. Her pride was wounded.
'You don't have to risk your mission for-' FAL had begun her answer in the microsecond it took create the impulse, only to be cut off mid-though by M4.
'Mission accepted. Standby.'
The line went dead.
At first FAL felt insulted- an uncontrolled microsecond impulse fired off from that stung her pride- but the relief she felt on hearing M4's words… it washed all of that all away.
Miss M4… if anyone could help it was Miss M4 and her team.
Just that little ray of hope could keep the other echelons fighting until their very last bullet. FAL captured that feeling, looped the recording of Miss M4, and scattered it into the local fireteam networks.
They could do this.
'We infiltrate to grid A2, with keypads 2 and 5 being the most suspect of where the enemy command and control center is.' M4 coldly relayed the map of the AO. The terseness in her message, the calm authority in her digimind kept STAR's criticism silent for the time being.
'We bypass any contacts. Temporary ROE is fire only if or when we are detected. Clear?'
'Affirmative.'
'Yep yep!'
'This is what we were built for.' M4 pinged, sending all of her assuredness through the network. Every milliamp of confidence she had.
Leaving only that anxious discomfort in her own emotion module.
The thousands permutations of how this could go wrong, the thousands upon thousands of consequences to her decision. The curse of such a powerful predictive program was knowing every possible failure and being unable to plan for them all, and the curse of command was having to know you were sending people you cared for into all of those potential failures.
Was… was this what the commander felt every deployment? How could a human's psyche handle that? Even if his soldiers were dolls, he invested so much into them that even if he were the most heartless and cold of human beings, there would be some apprehension.
At least… the commander wasn't burdened by every little variable, every logically conceivable failure.
M4 hated it.
"Do your best. You are built for this." The commander's words slipped into her thoughts, played straight out of her memory bank. She could even feel the warm hand on her shoulder, that reaffirming squeeze and the nod of his head as he spoke, "Lead with a calm head. There is plenty of time to panic and ruminate after the mission is complete. Sometimes… that's the worst part."
A deep breath- less to oxygenate and calm the nerves like a human, more to cool the processors. Even a cutting-edge doll like her could fall back on such basic mechanisms…
Just like now, they could trust in their basics.
'STAR take point on infiltration while I run possible plans. Once we're in the AO, we go completely signal less. Set Primary Objective as: Infiltrate to target grid and locate enemy command and control facility. Set Secondary Objective as: Terminate/disable enemy command and control network.'
Which meant find the Ringleader, kill the Ringleader.
Settings locked in and her body on auto-pilot behind STAR, M4 turned inward, dragging her consciousness through the net like she were trawling for fish. Anything for operational intelligence; area maps, township records, architectural blueprints, zoning lines… thankfully she only had an three-hundred square meter chunk that she needed to find and then comb through.
M4 came back to meat-space crouched low in the shadow of an alley. Landmarks- theatre, tall chapel-steeple sticking out past that, two-lane through-way… she ran it through everything she had downloaded, pulling up the necessary maps.
"Signal interference is strong here." STAR whispered at a barely detectable level, pointing to the theatre building across the street.
In her digimind, M4 had assembled the assault plan, loading direct order command strings that she would need like bullets into a magazine. At the same time, she had drawn up a operational sand table in the dirt, the target building as best as they knew it.
They ran the plan only once, their frameworks were mostly the same to the point where they could all extrapolate each other's thoughts and plans even when not connected.
First phase was scouting. SOP spearheaded, and despite her over exuberant nature, she was easily the quickest and quietest of the team. On M4's signal, her sister slipped away, the last thing that M4 could see was her illuminating grin vanishing into the dark of the theater's foyer.
Even with auditory sensors heightened, M4 could barely register SOP's movements- at least not until the platinum blonde doll had slinked her way back to the team.
'Upper- clear. Ringleader, center.' SOP hand-signed, painting the picture without words. Center… center stage, their target was on the theatre's stage. M4 nodded, the plan coming together like anticipated.
'STAR, upper balcony, base of fire. SOP, side flank, hard punch.' She signed back.
The team nodded. Standard ammunition swapped out for their high-velocities, SOP given the coded, nonverbal signal to access her grenade permissions again.
Three against a Ringleader?
Well, if it was any other dolls, it would be a quick trip back to base in a new frame. But they weren't any other dolls… and they wouldn't get that quick trip back, either.
That thought made M4 hesitate, her hand freezing before she could give the signal to begin. Once they were engaged… there was no room for this hesitation.
Should… should she wait for reinforcements? Had SOP been spotted? Was this a trap? Was there a better plan of engagement?
SOP smiled, placing her hand out in the center of their little huddle. STAR as well, placing hers atop SOP's. Both of her sisters looked at her.
And M4 had to let the anxiety go, placing hers atop the stack. They were only missing one… but they would have it soon enough after they finished this little detour. There would even be a fun little war story to tell M16 as well.
SOP slipped away first. She'd go around the flank, get as close as she can while M4 and STAR set bases of fire at the ground-level door and balcony deck respectively. When M4 connected the network again, it'd all kick off.
M4 practically tip-toed her way to the theatre's door, the thing thrown wide and welcoming, which was never a good sign, but she confirmed what SOP had scouted. A woman clad in shiny black leather; skin tight, revealing, gaudy.
But there was still a respectable beauty to the frame, a sort of… elegance to the Ringleader as she held a ballet pose so perfectly still. M4 hated her empathetic systems sometimes.
The tactical module though, that highlighted everything else. Eyes closed, a motionless statue, the Ringleader was frozen so she must still be commanding her exterior forces or otherwise deep in a network dive.
The time to strike, shock of surprise and speed, violence of action.
The Zenner connection snapped out, SOP and STAR lighting up in her digimind immediately.
The forty-millimeter grenade went out immediately from somewhere in the stands, shattering the stage and sending a blast of obscuring dust and debris into the air. Bullets tore into it, each member of the AR Team seemingly trying to sweep the cloud away with gunfire. SOP's optimism was wordless as she moved to close in, but movement up on the stage countered her. A single shot of high enough velocity that it pulled the dust with it like a comet's trail, straight at SOP.
Before M4 could even shift to see if her sister was fine, a fresh torrent of bullets tore apart the doorway. She threw herself to the ground, diving towards the concealment of the seating rows.
"My audience has arrived early!" The Ringleader shouted out as the dust settled, glee the most prominent emotion ringing out. "Unfortunately there is no pre-show, so I supposed I must get on with it then!"
The Ringleader danced to the side, ducking away as another grenade detonated behind her. A pirouette, a sweep of suppressive fire from that gatling-cannon of hers, wildly shredding its way through the absent audience.
Two coughs from the above-deck answered the wild spray, and the Ringleader flinched, staggered forward slightly as STAR's rounds slammed into the back of her cranial-case, but left no scratch. The dancer up on stage didn't spin again, didn't drag that wild-gunfire through the crowd; instead, she melodically laughed, her finger pulling a separate trigger.
That shock of panic from STAR as a super-heated slug nearly took her head off.
'Two guns in one? That's not fair!'
'SOP yours is technically two guns in one.'
'Change angles, make sure she can never line up two of us at once.' M4 commanded, spiking their circuits with a impulse as she relayed the positional data. The plan could be adjusted- something something about surviving contact with the enemy.
The Ringleader seemed fine with shrugging off STAR and M4's gunfire however, more concerned with keeping SOP pinned in place as her fire swathed around, searching the blonde doll out.
Damn it, they were just picking at her, trying to find a weakness to the frame, but they would need to maneuver to win this one. M4 shifted, readying to run for the next row over-
And the seats in front of her exploded in a shower of sparks and cushion bits, the storm of steel tracking towards her. Half-a-second to react as she threw herself to the floor once more, rolling until she fell into the back of the next row down as the bullets cut their way over her.
STAR slammed two rounds into the Ringleader's chest, one right atop the other, pinging that she was set and ready to really open up-
The deluge of steel tracked up, directly towards STAR's position the very instant that she had pinged. The Ringleader knew what they were doing the moment they did it. She was in their network, somehow.
'Offline!' M4 pinged, sending the command lines for independent action. They wouldn't be as coordinated, wouldn't be able to support one another as instantly, but M4 needed to have faith that SOP and STAR would still operate in their bounds. She managed to crawl beneath the row, standing into a firing position. Her overclock programs were ready, she just needed the right opening, the few seconds of uninterrupted fire.
Fire shifted, the hose of bullets shredding its way down from STAR to M4 now.
Why?
Why did it seem like this Ringleader was operating like one of them?
The dancer pirouetted again the moment M4 broke to dive, the barrels of her weapon batting aside a diving SOP, throwing the T-doll back into the stands. A delighted cackle, a smile of pure joy as those barrels opened up on the upper deck once again.
They were being outperformed, out played because it was just three. M4 felt the snap, the do-or-die impulse of her programming- that moment where self-preservation went out the window.
She leapt to her feet, her overclock pumping fresh processing to her targeting systems. Focus sharpened, recoil perfectly controlled, pin-point accuracy despite every impulse of her weapon sending its barrel off target by millimeters.
Those barrels turned towards her once more, and she was not ready to move- she still had bullets in the mag, could still push out that little bit more-
"Banger!"
Hard-coded phrase, trained into her digimind by experience rather than programing. Despite staring down those spinning cylinders of death, M4's ocular sensors went dark. A punctuating bang, the heat of slugs ripping by her by a hair's breadth, the scream of anger and annoyance from on stage.
And the fresh flood of confidence when her sensors came back to see a Ringleader staggering up on stage. So this once fancied herself a dancer? Then M4 would take away her ability to dance. Her rounds slammed the thigh -no that was not working- into the knee now…
And M4's chorus was answered by the drumbeat of STAR's rifle picking up her targeting. No matter how armored something was, you throw enough force into the same exact point at a combined fifteen-hundred rounds a minute, something was bound to give out.
Intruder buckled, falling to one knee as the other shattered- the only problem was that M4's overclock was winding down- they'd have to finish this the hard way now.
"Enough of this ungrateful audience!" Intruder howled, and despite hobbled, hefted her weapon forward, those death-spitting barrels spinning-
At least until SOP slammed full-force into her. A primal scream, one that sends a shiver through M4 as she watched SOP savage the Ringleader's arm joint with her bayonet before rolling away and slinking back into the darkness. It was like Intruder had forgotten that M4 and STAR even existed a moment, screaming her fury at being assaulted so barbarically with the drone of gunfire.
M4 spotted a discrepancy immediately, an object wedged into one of the gaps in the handle of the cannon that hadn't been there before. Closer scan- SOP's last forty-millimeter, the explosive casing torn open like an aluminum soda can. At once her digimind blared a warning:
[CAUTION: Compromised munition! DO NOT HANDLE! Contact EOD!]
No hesitation as she took aim. Pick it out amongst the chaos, of the flashing strobe of cannon fire, of the sudden jerky shifting, of the erratic unpredictability…
The resulting detonation tore what was left of Intruder's mangled arm clean off, cracking the Ringleader's weapon near in half. A stunned silence, a momentary relief as Intruder lay sprawled out on the stage.
At least until SOP dove on her again, bayonet held high before coming down on the back of the neck. Just like with humans, severing the main circuitry there lead to paralysis, and SOP was anything but surgeon-precise with each stab of the bayonet.
"Your eyes are pretty!" The platinum blonde cackled, yanking Intruder's head up by the hair when the frame ceased struggling.
"Sop, STOP!" M4 verbally commanded. Despite how lost SOP was to her programming, the bayonet tip froze right at the lens, that ice-blue ocular sensor pulling it into focus as the rest of the team closed in.
"Interrogate first, then torture." STAR called out as she dropped herself from the balcony. M4 had to agree, though… she didn't exactly want to use the word "torture."
"Fiiiine~" SOP groaned, rolling her eyes as she spun her bayonet between overly-dexterous fingers. The very next second, she slammed Intruder's cranial case into the floorboards, cracking the old wood.
"Who do you work for!?" She cackled with glee, yanking Intruder's face back up to hers.
"Sop, seriously?"
The platinum blonde stuck her tongue out at STAR to blow a raspberry before staring the Ringleader eye-to-eye.
"Tell me what you know!" She screamed, giving Intruder a violent shake by her faux-hair.
"You think that I will just tell you?" Intruder scoffed, "You may destroy this frame, but I will continue. My mission was a success, my computing framework will be saved to see that I am not wasted."
SOP was practically buzzing with an unnerving energy, M4 could see it shuddering its way through the limp Sangvis doll. She averted her eyes before giving her sister the nod that she was waiting for.
The sounds of a blade through synthetic flesh, of metal scraping against metal, of the popping of something from a socket and the snapping of wires.
"Ooo, pretty~" SOP cooed, holding aloft her new toy, "Full spectrum visual range too! Pretty neato stuff you got!"
Her gushing over the tech was punctuated by another brutal slam and the cracking of more floorboards. STAR had averted her gaze too as SOP continued her… salvaging operation, turning to M4 for the update.
"We can't risk diving her, she was in our network somehow." M4 whispered, trying to hide under the decibel threshold of SOP's delighted cackling.
"P-P-Perhaps you should. Call. Y-Your p-precious pet hu-hu-man-" Intruder called out, that smug grin wide on her face before SOP slams her down one last time, finally working her bayonet through the ocular socket and straight into Intruder's processors.
The the snowy haze that had enveloped them the moment they had stepped into the theatre was gone in an instant.
'M4 to command! M4 to command- tag urgent!'
No response still.
The jamming was gone, so why!? No response, not even an emergency ping back from G36 or delayed message from the commander or Kalina.
Something was wrong.
The panic set in at once, every circuit in her processors spinning wildly out of control at the near-infinite probabilities, almost all little variations of the same failings, of the same consequences.
M16's signal was fake.
They were baited out.
Intruder was just a distraction.
A trap.
In a single millisecond, M4 had experienced pure dread. It was… familiar, she had experienced it before, but that didn't mean that she was ready for it, or that she even knew how to contain it. The one person that could help her parse it… was…
"Oh uh… yo, hey guys."
That voice… that voice.
It made M4 want to break down and cry, it made her shake with such inexplicable anger, it made her remember the feeling of gentle-yet-firm hands stroking her hair, of a million failures and a million successes…
And relief. So much relief.