An Unknown Enemy - Chapter 5: Hearts and Minds
Howl detached an incendiary grenade from her belt and carefully placed it beside a bomblet hidden within the grass behind an abandoned house. The bomblet was just a kilogram in weight and was probably released from a cluster bomb dropped to neutralize an ELID horde. Having failed to explode upon impact, it became unexploded ordinance—UXO—just waiting to be triggered by an unfortunate victim. How it ended up here was anybody's guess, but it had been waiting here unnoticed for who knows how long, the owner of the lawn having passed away earlier during the Sangvis uprising.
After placing a heavy blast-resistant dome over the explosive, Howl started the incendiary grenade's timed fuse and stepped back. Crouching from a safe distance, Howl listened as the thermite mixture within the grenade ignited, letting out a shrill hissing sound as it melted its way through the bomblet's metal casing, decomposing the explosive filling within it.
Howl looked at the chemical detector lying on the ground beside her; she was able to determine the composition of the explosive filling within the bomblet using the miniscule amount of chemical vapour that escaped its casing. Fortunately, the filling was made solely of TNT, a cheap chemical which was still effective enough against most ELIDs. More importantly, TNT tended to decompose in a non-explosive manner when heated, allowing for the use of heat as a demining method. Howl watched as smoke emerged from a gas vent in the blast dome. Although the combustion temperature of iron-based thermite was over 2000 degrees Celsius, the reinforced ceramic dome insulated the grass around it from the reaction within.
After the reaction died down, Howl walked over and lifted the dome, revealing a pool of molten metal beneath. The cooling slag glowed orange as it sat in a hole of its own making, any traces of the bomblet completely incinerated. Howl let out a smirk at another job well done; somebody would have to eventually clean up the mess, but that wasn't her problem.
"You done?" Magic asked Howl as she approached from behind her, lugging over an electrical generator used to recharge the drones.
"Yeah, UXO again," Howl reported, bending down to pick up her chemical detector. "What about on your end?"
"All UXO," Magic noted, "I don't think there's actually any landmines here."
"Hmph, why the hell are there so much UXO in this village?" Howl asked, "Usually you'd get one or two of 'em from freak occurrences, but this?"
"I dunno, man," Magic shrugged, "Something about this all feels off, but still, doesn't change what we gotta do. Come on, there's another one over here."
"At this rate, ya think we'll be done in, say, a week?" Howl asked.
"With just us two, that might be pushing it," Magic responded, "But I don't know if we'd be able to call over more Mace members, especially without arousing suspicion from you-know-who."
"Fuck Dreamer, man," Howl scowled, "She should just stay the hell out of our business."
"Hey!" a young girl called out from behind them, "You shouldn't say bad words!"
"What the f-" Howl muttered as she turned around, "Uh, I meant… Okay..."
"What are you two doing?" the girl asked, stepping closer. "Can I see?"
"We're demining, and no, of course you can't see!" Howl impatiently responded, making a shooing motion.
"Why not?" the girl asked, "I wanna see!"
"Do you want to explode?" Howl asked the girl.
"Ummm…" the girl paused.
"Of course you don't!" Howl rolled her eyes, "Get lost!"
"You're pretty good with children, aren't you?" Magic joked, watching the girl scamper back behind a wall, continuing to watch them from a safe distance.
"Kia said she would handle with the villagers," Howl nonchalantly replied, "Not my problem anymore."
"Hearts and minds," Magic teased, "Hearts and minds…"
"Yeah, yeah, I know," Howl sighed as she passed her chemical detector over a bomblet, "It does make shit a lot harder though."
"True," Magic agreed, "We can't exactly deploy a mine-clearing line charge here, can we?"
"Fuck, it'd be so much faster if we could," Howl laughed.
"But this isn't so bad now, is it?" Magic smiled, "Protecting the innocent, doing the righteous thing… Kinda makes you feel like a hero, no?"
"Don't start going all Aristotle on me," Howl said as she unlatched another incendiary grenade from her belt, "I just do the shit I'm trained to do; I don't give a damn about the other bullshit. I'll let Archangel and the eggheads deal with all the politics."
"Do you trust in Archangel?" Magic asked, a curious smile on her face. "With all the dove things she says and does, I mean."
Howl sighed and took a glance at Magic, "Am I really that much of an asshole to you?"
"Aw, come on, I'm serious!" Magic chuckled, "How do you know Archangel isn't leading us all into some sorta, like, disaster? Agent's gonna kill her for sure if she finds out about what we're doing!"
"Hopefully Agent won't kill me too then," Howl responded, "I'm just following orders."
"You know, Kia seems like she'd follow Archangel to the ends of the Earth." Magic noted, "What about you?"
Howl paused for a moment before responding, "Would you be surprised if I'd do the same?"
Kia sat and listened to the village chief talk about his village. It was a story that Kia was used to hearing by now: One where a small village—usually mostly farmers—gets caught up in the fight between Griffin and Sangvis Ferri and suffers as a result. Firefights between groups of dolls tear up the streets, killing some while rendering others homeless. Ringleaders pass through the villages, killing and torturing bystanders for collaborating with the enemy, to interrogate them, and sometimes seemingly for no reason at all. The villagers are scared, but they can't afford to escape, nor can they do anything about the fighting. Supplies run low as people are unable to reach the outside world, people get desperate, and well… Kia didn't want to think about the rest.
"Uhm…" Kia interrupted the village chief's story, trying to change the subject. "Since I'm here, maybe I could go and see if any of the villagers need my help?"
"I saw you help Petra's child when you first came," the chief noted, "Are you a doctor?"
"Pretty much, yeah," Kia affirmed, "I'm technically not licensed by the UMC, but I heard you don't have a doctor here, so it'd be better than nothing."
"Very well," the chief agreed, placing a hand on the tabletop to help him stand up.
"Oh, right…" Kia said they began walking towards the door to the chapel, "You never told me your name."
"I didn't think you cared," the chief shrugged.
"I do," Kia responded.
"My name is Kirov," the man simply stated, "Thank you for asking."
Kia looked into the driver seat of the truck she arrived in as Kirov and her walked by it; she was surprised to see it empty.
"Veritas?" Kia called out, walking over to the back of the truck. Chalice 2-Alpha—nicknamed "Veritas"—was slumped over on the rear bench, having dozed off after finishing unloading all of the Mace girls' supplies.
"Whuh- huh?" Veritas mumbled as she stirred awake, "Ah, Kia… I- uh, did I fall asleep?"
"Yeah, sorry to wake you up. Just checking on your whereabouts," Kia smiled, "How long has it been since you last slept?"
"Ugh, maybe 8 days?" Veritas muttered.
"Yikes, has Gager been slave-driving you again?" Kia joked, "Alright, sorry to interrupt your nap then, you can go back to sleep now."
"Uh huh," Veritas tiredly answered, brushing her wavy dark-green hair away from her face as she let out a long yawn.
"Is the sun not too bright for you?" Kirov asked, walking up to the back of the truck, "Why don't you go sleep in the chapel?"
"Huh?" Veritas groggily responded, staring at the unfamiliar man. "Oh, okay. Uh… thanks, sir…"
Kia and Kirov continued their way down the street as Veritas made her way to the chapel, walking past the four Guard units standing as still as pillars in the afternoon sun. Not far off in the sky, Kia could see one of the demining drones hovering in the sky; Kia wondered how much progress Magic and Howl were making.
"That green-haired girl hasn't slept for 8 days?" Kirov asked after a while.
"Yeah, she was probably busy doing supply runs for one of our… well, you know," Kia replied, handwaving the last part, not wanting to bring the war back up.
"Is it not dangerous to drive while sleep deprived?" Kirov asked, seemingly slightly amused.
"Well, sleep and fatigue work a bit differently for us dolls, compared to humans," Kia explained, "We can go pretty long without sleeping, but we still have to 'sleep' every once in a while to streamline our neural clouds. But we don't usually go that long without sleep; the Chalice gi- uh, the logistics team is just perpetually overworked. Poor girls."
"An army runs on its stomach," Kirov quoted.
"Indeed it does," Kia agreed.
Under village chief Kirov's supervision, Kia walked through the village streets, asking the people she met if they needed any help. At first, the villagers treated Kia with suspicion; Kia was still a part of Sangvis Ferri, after all. However, with the support of Kirov, many of the villagers eventually decided to trust Kia and grasp this bizarre yet valuable opportunity for medical attention. Eventually, word got around, and people began voluntarily going outside to seek Kia out, who found herself essentially running a mobile clinic in the village's main intersection.
Kia medical bag contained a variety of generic drugs, which she liberally distributed to those who needed it. Since the Mobile Task Force had access to multiple small universal chemical synthesizers, Kia and the rest of the medics were able to requisition some of them to create a few batches of drugs "just in case," though they didn't have many opportunities to actually use them. In addition to medicine, Kia also provided counselling services, having quite an affinity for psychology. Many of the Mobile Task Force dolls routinely came to Kia for advice or to vent their emotions during rough times, and now Kia was providing the same service for the human villagers.
Thankfully, most of the patients Kia examined only presented with common small issues such as mild infections, malnutrition, and stress-related illnesses. Although Kia didn't encounter anything really serious, she could sense a general level of malady afflicting each and every one of the villagers, as if a sickly miasma permeated the entire village. It was something Kia had noticed when she first arrived, but now after having done detailed examinations on many of the villagers, Kia began to suspect that something bad was happening behind the scenes.
"Kirov, sir," Kia asked the man in a pause between patients, "Can I ask you a question?"
"Go ahead," the man said.
"It's… um…" Kia began, trying to word the question in a non-alarming manner. "It could be nothing, but I get an impression that all of the villagers here are all afflicted by some illness, though I can't pinpoint the cause…"
"Hmph," Kirov responded, rubbing his chin. "We are all slowly dying here, Kia, day by day. We aren't eating properly, people are fearful, what did you expect to happen?"
"I… I see…" Kia muttered, looking back at some of the passerby. Although Kia had seen similar scenarios in other villages she visited in the past, this village's case seemed to be a degree more serious than the others.
Suddenly, Kia's contemplation was interrupted by the sound of multiple gunshots nearby. As villagers in the streets cried out in panic and fled the source of the sound, Kia instinctively grabbed her M16A4 rifle from her shoulder and loaded a magazine, shifting into a combat stance. Quickly slinging her medical bag over her shoulder, Kia ran towards the scene of the incident. Rounding a corner in the street, Kia locked eyes with a group of unfamiliar T-dolls standing about 20 metres away beside the truck Kia arrived in. Noticing Kia's presence, they instantly raised their weapons at her, causing Kia to reflexively take a step back.
"Whuh-" Kia stammered, her eyes widening as she stared down the barrels of the unknown dolls' guns. She looked to the ground beside the truck, the four Guard units that accompanied the SFMTF team were lying dead on the ground. Kia stared at a doll in the front, her dark blonde hair rolled over her dark grey dress and fur-lined jacket. Behind the doll's RFB assault rifle, Kia noticed a telltale emblem on the doll's dress; it was the emblem of Griffin and Kryuger PMC.
Oh no, Kia thought, You have got to be kidding me.