In unison, SASS and RFB swung the body onto the cart with the others, nestling it between a gap. It belonged to Type 64, the black-haired doll's head lolling to the side as coolant started dribbling from a bullet wound, winding its way down across the other bodies to join the growing pool of purple-red fluid collecting at the bottom of the cart.
"That's the last one," RFB said to Grizzly as their team leader approached them. "Are we done here?"
Her voice was muffled behind the mask she wore. Every doll working cleanup down in Doll Services had to wear a full face mask and protective gear so the concrete dust didn't settle on their skin and corrode it. They could last longer in the stuff than humans, but the long-term consequences were apparently something Kerr and IOP didn't want to deal with.
Grizzly went to the cart's controls and pressed the "return" button, starting its automated journey back to the elevator, where the corpses would be brought up for disposal. "No, we've got another assignment," she replied as the cart trundled off. "That's the last of the dolls out here, but we're working our way back down to the lower levels and digging through the rubble to find any other corpses and help clear the Sangvis entry point so it can be sealed."
"Come on, it's been forever…"
"Lunch just ended," M590 said sternly. "Let's get a move on. HS2000 said that the rest was pretty unexplored, remember?"
They trudged down the hallway. They had spent the entire morning clearing bodies from the upper level and only just now finished the second, which was by far the worst. The initial Sangvis break-in as well as the retreat and pursuit of Sangvis had all passed through this area, which had been littered with both Griffin and Sangvis corpses. The least enjoyable part of it all was inspecting each corpse to find if Gestalt had been the one to destroy it. If so, the body would be marked for incineration and set aside for the followup team. Otherwise, it went on the cart and up to the IOP sector for disposal and recycling. SASS counted herself lucky that she had yet to find a doll she knew personally amongst the corpses, but there had still been an excess of grisly deaths for her to grimace at.
Ingram pulled at her protective gear, clearly disliking it. The mask and gloves were hard to deal with, SASS conceded, but she had gotten used to it, and the alternative was spending a long time in the repair bay. HS2000 had told them as such when she briefed them on the cleanup, saying that concrete dust corrosion could impede their effectiveness down the line – and with a battle on the horizon, no one wanted that.
Power had not yet been restored to the second floor, so Grizzly Team had to navigate the hallways by the light of the emergency lighting system, which washed everything crimson and made everything hard to focus on. They had all brought flashlights, but kept them off to preserve the battery and only used them when necessary. The red light shone through the pall of dust, combining to make it difficult to look any further than a few meters ahead.
"Hey, look at that!" RFB pointed ahead to a mound that materialized in front of them, looking uncannily like a fallen human.
Grizzly's eyebrows shot up behind her mask. "Wow, an Aegis. Haven't seen one of those since we were in Rocksert, right, Em-5?" Everyone came to a halt in front of the military android. It had fallen on its back, a large hole blasted in the front of it and shrapnel scattered about it.
"Didn't someone say that Calypso and Chrysanthemum had encountered one? This must be it," M590 replied. Grizzly walked closer and leant over the hole, inspecting the damage.
"This looks like K11's handiwork alright. I guess Sangvis wanted some heavy backup, huh?" The Aegis looked rather small sprawled on its back, but SASS knew that they were quite large standing up. Ingram knelt by its baton, inspecting the weapon.
"Hey, this is pretty neat. Big, though."
"Don't touch it," M590 said. "Parapluie and all."
Ingram stood and folded her arms across her chest petulantly. "You guys are way too paranoid about that. What's the harm in being curious?"
"Horror movie protagonists," RFB said.
"There's that one saying about the cat," SASS added.
"And the debacle with Parapluie and the AR team a while back," M590 finished.
"Well – I'm different," said Ingram, searching for an argument and finding none.
"Alright. When you're hunted by Griffin for being a traitor, try telling them that and see how well it works."
SASS toed a bit of scrap. "How did Sangvis even get an Aegis in here?"
"Probably the same way they did everything else, through the tunnels." Bending over the Aegis, M590 peered into its darkened eyes. "I'm surprised they bothered bringing one, but Sangvis never skimps when they don't have to."
Grizzly thumbed her radio. "HS2000? Yes, it's Grizzly. We found the Aegis that was reported. Yeah... yeah. Want us to wait? Sure."
"What's the deal?"
"PPSh-41 is coming down with the power loader. We'll help her if she needs it, then move on."
"How much do we have left to clear?" RFB asked.
"Maybe sixty one thousand square foot. Lotta rooms to check. Lotta corpses down here."
Grizzly didn't sound happy. No one is, SASS thought. Everyone in the base felt the effects of the raid, especially the cleanup teams. It didn't do well for the psyche (insofar as dolls' psyche went) to load bodies onto carts all day, but they did it quicker than humans, so Kerr had ordered it. Ingram seemed the least perturbed, but RFB was obviously depressed and unwilling, just like the dolls on the last shift – support squad Glazunov, G43 leading them as they passed by Grizzly Team in the opposite direction. SASS empathized with the look of dejection – no, depression – on their faces.
An echo came down the hallway toward the echelon, thumping footsteps of the power loader signifying the arrival of Papasha. She was by far the most skilled in its operation – a necessary trait, considering how often it was needed as of late. Several tons worth of debris had to be moved to allow the cleanup efforts to proceed, and Papasha had been working almost nonstop to assist clearing rubble and moving anything the individual doll teams couldn't.
Papasha stopped the power loader just short of Grizzly, leaning forward to get a look at the Aegis. "Oh wow… guess you're not as strong as you used to be, eh Grizzly?"
"Oh, shut it. Need any help with this?"
"No, I think I'll be fine taking it in segments. I'll radio if I need help."
"Gotcha. Let's go, guys." Grizzly started walking further down the hallway, SASS and the others following quickly.
"Hey, why are we even using radios? Zener would be so much faster," RFB observed.
"There's worries that Gestalt left some sort of Parapluie virus in the local cloud. We're under orders not to use Zener."
Everyone paused by the next group of corpses, taking in the view. It looked like the Sangvis and Griffin dolls had gotten in very close range of one another, and no one had gotten out alive. Sangvis dolls riddled with bullets collapsed against one wall while Griffin dolls had fallen against the other, some of them apparently having survived long enough to sit up and keep themselves alive. The rivulets of coolant collecting in pools between each doll made the outcome of their futile efforts clear enough, however.
SASS stopped and looked down at the doll at her feet. It was AK-47. In the emergency red lighting, her corpse was turned crimson to match the coolant, which had mixed with concrete dust to form a thick cement around her wound. Her rifle, twisted by a powerful grip, was flung against the far wall. SASS peered at AK-47's wound, saw how it looked like something had impaled her – something that went through to the other side.
"That's a Gestalt wound," Grizzly said after giving the stab a cursory glance. "Tag it and move on."
A few of the other dolls in the hallway – Galil, MP5, SIG-510 – had a similar wound. Every one of them was pushed off to the side and had a spot of spray paint put on their forehead by Grizzly. The rest were piled onto the new cart that had been sent to the hallway, which dutifully followed at a distance.
In silence, the cleaners continued down the hallway. Janitors, fixers, whatever term humans might use, SASS could only see herself as a cleaner. Cleaning up the pitiful remnants of the raid, cleaning up a mistake, cleaning up the dead, destroyed bodies of comrades and friends and fellow soldiers. She knew some of the dolls, knew quite a few, and a pang of resentment and depression pulled at her emotion module whenever she and RFB put one of them onto the cart.
There was HK45. She'd been SASS's guide around the base when she first arrived. Her hat had fallen on its side in a pool of coolant. M590 didn't need any help picking her up.
There was BM59, the first doll to make eye contact and smile at SASS. Her forehead had been broken in, and glistening parts of her popped out through the hole when Ingram and RFB dropped her on the cart.
There was one of Type 81's dummies that she kept in different wings of the base. This one was missing an arm, which Grizzly found stuck underneath a Ripper and threw on the cart next to the black-haired adjutant. Her usually serene face was frozen in an expression of fear and defiance that SASS found hard to tear her gaze away from.
Grizzly tapped SASS on the arm as they walked along, knocking the sniper out of her stupor. "Hey, SASS. You doing alright?"
"Yes." No. She was thinking of the training simulation with NTW mere weeks ago, when she had stabbed senpai. "Yeah, I'm fine."
"Look – if you don't want to go on, I can talk to HS-"
"I'm fine." SASS kept her eyes on the floor in front of her. She could deal with it. She wasn't naïve or innocent or inexperienced like she had been when she first came to S17. She had grown up.
Or so she told herself.
"Fine," said Grizzly, shrugging. She seemed relatively nonplussed by all the corpses they were handling, but that was to be expected from someone so experienced. The team leader jogged in front of the others and held up a hand as a signal to be seen through the dusty half-light. "Okay everyone, let's stop here. This is near where Sangvis busted into the base, so move slowly and keep an eye out for any weakened walls or ceilings – I don't want anyone trapped under rubble. Check thoroughly for corpses. We'll split up to make it go faster, so holler if you need help with anything."
"I'll take the storage rooms," RFB said. Grizzly nodded.
"Great. I'll head down the left hallway."
"I've got the center," Ingram called out.
M590 glanced at Grizzly. "I'll handle the storage rooms with RFB, there's more than a few of them."
Grizzly pointed to the left hallway. "Then you'll go down that way, SASS. Everyone can come back here once they're done, and if you're not back in half an hour then we come searching. Let's go."
It was quiet except for the sound of footsteps as SASS slowly padded down the hallway. There weren't any corpses here, though plasma burns had marred the wall in between chunks of concrete knocked loose by bullets. SASS reached for her flashlight – the emergency lights had gone out and it was becoming increasingly difficult to see.
In front of her was a pile of rubble blocking the hallway. It appeared that the ceiling had fallen in by some sort of shockwave, the rock ripping free and pulling down electrical cable and reinforced concrete with it. SASS shined the flashlight beam around, looking for a sign of anything small enough to move. There. SASS set the flashlight down and grabbed the chunk of rock, pulling hard on it until it suddenly broke free.
Then the rest of the pile fell in a cloud of dust, temporarily blinding SASS as she fell onto her back. When it cleared and she found her flashlight, a new hole had opened in the pile, big enough to squeeze through.
It was a tight fit, but SASS made it without any of her clothes or gear tearing. She fumbled for her flashlight – not a single light was on this side of the collapse – and swung the beam to the ground.
There were more than a few corpses.
The Sangvis stretched on. Their bodies littered the hallway to the farthest end of the flashlight beam, fallen over each other and leaking coolant, bullets through their heads and torsos and arms and legs, bullets in every Sangvis sprawled on the ground, all the way up to the rubble pile, where M1919A4 was laid out on a slab of rock, her clothes burnt, skin twisted and body cratered with plasma burns. Her namesake weapon had fallen at her feet, near which Spitfire's body lay face down on the concrete floor. Hundreds of shell casings covered the ground around them, shimmering in the light, surrounding Spitfire and M1919A4 like a heavenly aura.
Oh no.
This had been their last stand. SASS peered at the empty belts of ammunition, steadily becoming more and more sure that she knew what had occurred. Coolant coated one end of the machine gun and the butt of Spitfire's pistol – a few of the Sangvis had broken helmets and limbs – the burn on M1919A4's chest was so big that SASS knew it had to be point blank.
You got the action you wanted, she thought. It had been so long ago on that hilltop that M1919A4 pined for the sort of operations SASS got sent on. Just three weeks past she had watched her play the drums at the show. Oh, I'm so sorry.
Dimly, SASS knew that it wasn't her place or her job to apologize. It was hard to look away from M1919A4's dim eyes, to think about anything else then her brief memories of when the doll had been talking and smiling and joking with M2 and walking and wishing she was doing something else – SASS took a breath.
M1919A4 stayed perfectly still.
This is a tomb.
Trembling, SASS knelt down by the doll. Her right hand was tightened into a fist, looking for all the world like she had been bringing it over her hand to swing a punch when she was knocked back onto the concrete. The brown sidecap was singed and torn where it sat limply next to its owner's head, its tattered look reflected in the rest of M1919A4's uniform. Her box of ammunition was empty, jammed into a gap in the rubble and with a belt leading from it to the gun.
Moving to Spitfire, SASS hesitated just a second before carefully pushing the handgun doll over onto her back, removing her hat and –
…
When she worked up the courage to look again, she couldn't do anything else but stare at Spitfire's horrifically disfigured face. Half of it had been burnt by plasma, ripping away at the synthetic skin and bone, boiling the artificial fluids and blackening everything. The side of her head was a mess of melted plastic and metal, and when she got close the putrid odor nearly made SASS choke and drop her. Nothing was left but a disfigured visage not even reminiscent of a human.
She gingerly set the doll back down and placed the black hat over her face.
For a little while, SASS stood between the two dolls, listening to her breaths and running her thumb back and forth around the flashlight button. She couldn't quite process it all. Do they still have backups? She would have to check the list. Another task to handle after this cleanup. Another thing to remember. Another doll that might be dead.
SASS walked to the end of the hallway and found a hole blasted into the wall. Slowly, she reached for her radio as she stared into the tunnel, only hearing her own intermittent breaths.
"...Grizzly. It's SASS."
"Go ahead."
Grizzly's voice was unworried and busy, exactly the opposite of how SASS felt. It helped bring her back to reality a little, if only temporarily.
"I found the Sangvis point of entry. There's a bunch of bodies here, a couple Griffin dolls got trapped in with a load of Vespids. I can't move them out through the rubble."
"Alright, leave them alone for now. We'll come back later with Papasha. Head into the tunnel and check for anything else, but don't take too long. Radio if you need anything. Grizzly out."
The radio clicked, and SASS was once again left in silence. The doll turned around and took one final look at the entombed dolls behind her before ducking through the hole and into the tunnel.
SASS reached up and pulled her mask off. There wasn't much corrosive dust in the tunnel, so she figured it'd be fine to go without the obstructive apparatus for at least a little. She could hear something over her own breathing now, the echoing shuff shuff of her footsteps as she plodded down the tunnel, the rustle of her clothes, the shifting of the rifle slung over her shoulder. At least there aren't any corpses.
It wasn't fair, SASS believed. Didn't Sangvis care about dolls? Not in a material sense, but emotionally – Ringleaders had emotions, she knew. They were all needless cruel, from what SASS had heard, and she supposed that that was why Sangvis so brutally slaughtered Griffin. Gestalt seemed to take it a step further, not even bothering to speak or pretend at humanity unless it had to. That was the real advantage Sangvis had, their unemotional nature. There was no worry about their morale, because there was none to begin with.
Without completely realizing it, SASS grew convinced of what she had to do. She had known it for a long, long time already, from Kerr's orders, from the directive Griffin implanted, from NTW-20's mentoring, from Grizzly's guidance, from what SASS had already been doing for nearly a year now. Kill Sangvis. Oh, she had known it, but now SASS became cognizant of something else about it. Being ordered to do it was one thing. Seeing the burnt corpses in the hallway invoked another. Something resolved itself in SASS's digimind, a resolution quite unlike a programmed directive or order she was forced to obey. No, she wanted to destroy the Sangvis dolls very much, chief of them Gestalt, who had gotten the others killed in the first place. Killed Ingram, back in the hangar. Killed so many other dolls that were spray painted and set aside for incineration.
SASS swallowed and blinked. She could hear voices up ahead, see beams of light swinging about, and she stopped walking to listen to the echoes.
"...I'm just saying…"
"I know you're 'just saying', so just shut up."
"Play nice, please."
"Hey, is that a Griffin doll up ahead? You there!"
SASS waved a hand. "I'm Griffin!"
"Good, didn't want to have to shoot you," one of the dolls said as they drew closer, shining her flashlight in SASS's face.
"Hey, watch where you're shining that." Another reached out and pushed the light down. Once the glare was out of her face, SASS could see that it was ARX-160, who smiled at the rifle doll before staring down PPK. "Guess there's someone else in the tunnel, eh?"
"I came from Doll Services. We found the entry point back there," SASS explained.
"Finally. Well, I guess that's our work cut out for us. Were there any side hallways back there?"
"I wasn't really paying attention."
"Can't be that much left in this branch," GSh-18 said, putting her hands on her hips. SASS glanced at the fourth group member, DP-27, then back to ARX-160.
"Sure," said the assault rifle. "PPK, how long until our shift's over? I don't want to spend any more time back here than we have to…"
"Long enough," the doll sang back. ARX-160 sighed audibly. "Well, we'll walk that way with you, just to be sure. You are heading back, right?"
"I was searching for any corpses," SASS replied.
"There aren't any, the place is clean."
"Then yes, I'm returning."
"Great!"
Thankfully, the other dolls were quiet as they walked back down the tunnel. ARX-160 and PPK exchanged the occasional word while DP-27 continued shining her flashlight around in the search for irregularities.
"Hey, SuperSASS," GSh-17 asked, matching pace with the rifle doll.
"Yes?"
"Have you found any dolls still alive?"
SASS was glad she was behind the flashlights, because she couldn't hide the look of pain on her face. Spitfire… "No, they've all been… destroyed."
"That's no good," GSh-17 said, and then she was quiet.
For a while they walked in silence, at a much slower pace thanks to the group. SASS realized that she had walked quite a distance, and hoped that Grizzly hadn't panicked yet.
The tunnel felt different when she was with other dolls. SASS felt more uncomfortable and on edge as she looked at the dark corners and rusted equipment, despite the others around her. Or perhaps it was because of them: because of the way ARX-160 kept one hand around the grip of her gun, how GSh-17 patted her holster from time to time, how DP-27's flickering eyes belied the casual swagger she adopted, how PPK's laugh was so strained. They were all on edge, waiting for a battle – even though the tunnel was dead silent but for their footsteps and muttering. SASS heard the group slowly fall silent, and then there was nothing.
Soon, ARX-160 called a halt, and SASS decided to pause instead of continuing on. The doll was shining her flashlight on an unmarked door, around which the others gathered. ARX-160 stood still for a moment before turning to PPK and remarking, "This isn't on the schematics."
"Well, we ought to explore it."
ARX-160 heaved another sigh and looked over her shoulder to DP-27. "Hey, do you have any idea what this is?"
"Don't ask me," the blonde replied. "It's old Soviet stuff, they didn't write down half the stuff they did normally, nevermind secret tunnels… wait. I'm Russian, so I'm supposed to know something about it?"
"Well, that is why we brought you," PPK said.
"No, it isn't," ARX-160 said through clenched teeth. "Let's just get it over with, then. SASS, are you coming?"
"No, I should get back to my team."
"Very well. Good luck, then."
"Sure."
GSh-17 turned to SASS again. "If you need any immediate repair work, you can call on the open frequency and I'll come!"
I doubt that we'll find any dolls still alive. "Thank you, both."
SASS waved and then turned to continue on. She was glad to have not spent much time with those dolls – Grizzly and the rest of that echelon were plenty already. If anything, she needed some time to herself. M1919A4 and Spitfire still weighed heavy on her mind, and SASS told herself again that she would need to check if they were on the list of lost backups.
Just for closure.
As she walked, she cried.