WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

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Chapter 146: Peep Show Grey (3)

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The sun was sinking beyond the fog. Gyeoul’s patrol took the outer route first. The view opened to the east. Beyond the heaving field of garbage, a wide marsh spread out. It had once been a nature preserve that was a salt field. A bleak spring wind blew over the swamp where sea met land. The wind carried a smell with it. Death was thick in the dense undergrowth.

Bzzzt... bzzzt... bzzzzzt....

It had been a while since he had heard that static. Gyeoul delayed their movement. His nerves prickled. The sensation was so faint he nearly missed it and walked right past. As the boy officer focused on it, Corporal Wolf told him there was no need to worry.

“Jamming from those Trickster bastards is common on the outskirts. Pay it no mind.”

Gyeoul shook his head. There had to be another reason 「Crisis Detection」 had activated.

“I have a bad feeling. Please deploy the troops. Set them up so they can form a field of fire in that direction.”

It was the commander’s decision. The corporal accepted it, though not gladly.

Time passed. Silence stretched. Shadows lengthened. His senses sharpened slowly. The threat he felt was small. But he could not ignore it. Infection was like fire. It might begin as a tiny spark, but once it started to spread, it became a disaster no one could control.

[Goodwill that is realistically impossible... is malice that kills everyone... this is America’s cry... slandering and attacking... Lieutenant Han Gyeoul... the many people who oppose him... you are America....]

The mutant hijacking the radio waves had mixed the president’s speech with a primary candidate’s speech.

“It may be a coincidence, but it is unpleasant.”

Corporal Wolf grumbled. A coincidence. In other words, Wolf did not think the Trickster understood language. The surrounding context was a complete mess too.

Gyeoul cautiously agreed. If a Trickster acquired language, that would mean the emergence of collective intelligence. The mutants’ strategy would improve dramatically. But no news had come in about a sudden change on the front. The 「Insight」 warning him of danger would have felt far stronger as well.

For example, there had been a previous apocalypse when the worst special mutant had appeared through a wildly improbable chain of events. Back then, his senses had started standing on edge from dozens of kilometers away, even though it had only been a single individual. Gyeoul thought a Trickster learning language would be a disaster surpassing even the worst special mutant.

‘Come to think of it, the interglacial period should be about over....’

He was not sure. But in this worldline, the lull in the apocalypse had been unusually short. It had been the same around Christmas. A little over a month had passed since the Humpback discovery. It would not be strange if the clock of destruction started moving again.

What would happen this time? The appearance of a new special mutant could change the situation dramatically. Among the monsters Gyeoul knew, several had yet to appear.

The progress of the apocalypse did not necessarily have to mean a new special mutant, either. A large-scale nuclear accident somewhere in the world. A series of massive tornadoes. War breaking out between nations. A terrifying number of insects covering the sky....

A monster would be better.

Gyeoul remembered the locusts. Their wings had been violet. They had also been horribly loud. The cause had been abandoned farmland in South America. The number of them coming up through Mexico had to be estimated by area. About ten trillion. Spread out, they covered more land than California. The government did not survive that year.

“Look over there. Range about forty. Left of the half-wrecked boat. One clump of garbage moving against the waves.”

Returning to the present, Gyeoul pointed in one direction. Corporal Wolf raised their rifle and examined the target through a 4x scope. At a glance, there was nothing unusual. But if one watched closely, it was moving very slowly while maintaining a steady direction. The water behind it rippled unnaturally.

The designated marksman sergeant who had moved with them from the start groaned.

“This is not the first bastard to swim while holding floating debris, but this one is pretty cunning.”

“I’ll shoot.”

Gyeoul nodded. The range was close, so aiming took only an instant. Tatatat! Since the light was fading, the muzzle flash flared bright. A precise three-round burst struck home.

Kyaaaak!

The garbage heap exploded. A bleeding Beta Ghoul burst out. Strength beyond human limits. The creature slammed down the floating debris it had been clutching and launched itself upward with the recoil. Then it stepped across other pieces of debris and bounded along. This was the second time Gyeoul had seen something run over water.

It won’t last long.

As Gyeoul guessed, the Ghoul soon fell. The frenzy that followed was the thrashing of a body dropped into water. Gunfire concentrated on it. The outside organization members fired like mad.

“Stop! Stop! Do not waste ammunition!”

Corporal Wolf shouted. The Ghoul, shredded to rags, sank while facing the sky. Its pale face slipped beneath the surface. Glug, glug. Bubbles rose. It was the last breath leaking from its punctured rib cage.

The sergeant lowered their aim and said, “Lieutenant, you have quite the instincts.”

That much was enough for a soldier to accept it.

The patrol resumed.

It was his first time taking this route, but Gyeoul did not lose his way. It was thanks to several days of sentry duty. The scenery of the maritime city he had looked down on from high places had become a translucent map through the linkage of 「Map Navigation」 and 「Memorization」. In the areas his eyes had reached, there was no danger of getting lost. Aside from blind spots.

From the city growing farther away, gunfire sounded now and then. Was it the desperate struggle of isolated citizens? Gyeoul thought there would be more to it. For instance, the citizens might not be fighting mutants. According to the materials he had studied, inside the bay, American citizens were traded as precious goods.

‘Insurance.’

The belief that the United States would not abandon its citizens.

Most armed groups inside the bay claimed humanitarian protection as their justification. They said they were caring for several people, listing their ages, genders, origins, names, and so on in detail.

In the same context, the Black Guerrilla’s public executions were also a more violent form of negotiation.

As they walked, a rusted cargo ship drew near. From the outside, there was nothing special about it. But Gyeoul knew this was the farm. He thought he could smell wet soil on the wind.

Since it was an important place, many troops were stationed there. One of them shouted.

“Open up! It’s the big brothers from the Black Orca Gang and the White Skull Corps!”

Black Orca meant black killer whale, while White Skull was White Skull. But translated into Chinese, White Skull Corps? Gyeoul found it an odd coincidence. It happened to share a name with infamous political thugs.

A gangway lowered from the side of the hull. The people on guard saluted stiffly.

They entered the farm. In place of fields were the containers loaded on the deck. Soil had been spread across the floor, with LEDs attached to the ceiling. Heating and power were handled by solar panels. Plastic sheeting had been wrapped around the walls to improve insulation. Aside from the soil, the rest of the materials must have been easy to find. This ship itself was a cargo ship to begin with. All kinds of cargo that had once been headed around the world were now abandoned with no one left to receive them.

Indoor cultivation was not new, but this was his first time seeing it set up on such a large scale aboard a ship.

Gyeoul was honestly impressed.

“Building this can’t have been easy.... Where did you get this much soil?”

Corporal Wolf shrugged.

“You know the boats that go out to open sea for fishing? We slipped a barge in among them and sent it out. No matter how many half-dead things are around, somewhere along that long coastline is bound to be empty. At most, there were a few scouts. We sniped them from offshore and landed. Ah, and we got the excavator from a landfill nearby.”

More than relief supplies, what kept the maritime refugees fed was the fishing work done by fishing boats. It was possible thanks to the U.S. Navy, which maintained a minimum level of order along the eastern Pacific coast.

But that was easy to say. The reality must not have been comfortable. Gyeoul asked again.

“Even if you found a quiet coast, actually landing would be a separate problem, wouldn’t it?”

In other words, how had they gotten ashore without a pier? Landing people alone was simple, but if heavy equipment like an excavator was involved, it was much harder. They could not just shove it into the water at random, either.

“Simple. Barges are flat-bottomed boats. We used the tide.”

“Ah.”

That meant they brought the boat in when the water was high, then waited for the water to drain. Once the boat settled onto the ground, they could open the ramp door and bring the equipment ashore. Then they worked until the next high tide. Depending on which point between high tide and low tide they chose, they could adjust their work time as well.

But this had a problem too. Once they landed, they could not withdraw until the right time came. In the worst case, they would have to abandon the boat and jump into the water.

The designated marksman sergeant snorted.

“If it got urgent, we could always take rubber boats. We were ready to run at any time. Well, even so, it got close several times. You can’t farm with beach sand, so we had to go a little farther inland from the shore. The highlight was when hundreds of them came rushing in while ten of us held the line. That was completely insane.”

“That’s why it was work fit for Marines.”

Marine spirit was not sane. That was what the corporal meant.

As Christensen had said after the earlier patrol, the farm was in the middle of harvest. Each container had holes cut through the walls to make paths. Different people worked in each section. It seemed they had been handed out by family unit. Aside from a few sections of cannabis, the rest of the crops were all potatoes.

‘The most efficient famine-relief crop. High calories per area, and a short cultivation time.’

Potatoes could be harvested a hundred days after planting.

Gyeoul also had farming experience. Because he had planted terminator crops, the next year’s yield had been catastrophically low. In the midst of that, what he had still managed to harvest had been potatoes.

In any case, based on that experience, he mentally calculated the yield. By eye, each container section’s shorter side seemed to be 2 meters and 30 to 40 centimeters. The longer side was 5 meters and 90 centimeters. If so, the maximum production would be about 13 kilograms in potatoes. But the environment was poor. The tubers the farmers dug up were lacking in both number and size. He expected about half the maximum. They would have to harvest three sections to fill one box.

There were about three hundred modified containers.

“The output won’t be that high.”

The story would change if all five thousand or so containers loaded on the ship were modified. They would create a large farm of 7 hectares, 20,000 pyeong, stretching more than 70 kilometers across its length and width. But that was an impossible assumption. Procuring the soil would be difficult, and even if they got the soil, power and water supply would be problems.

At Gyeoul’s evaluation, the corporal asked, “Harvest aside, doesn’t it at least look good?”

Wolf meant the people working. Faces enjoying the joy of harvest, smiling faintly with sweat-soaked hope. Then the corporal lowered their voice.

“I was worried about the day we would leave. Whether we could really go with clear consciences while leaving these people behind....”

Orca Black was the most reasonable group inside Golden Gate. As proof, the faces they had met while patrolling were not soaked in despair. Relatively speaking, at least.

But this could not last forever. The operation would end once the whale hunt was complete. One CIA team, and elite fighters pulled from several units of equal or greater caliber, led by Force Recon. There was no reason to delay the withdrawal of such high-grade personnel. Even counting only salary, they cost around 100,000 dollars per person per year. The Republican Party primary candidate’s speech echoed even here.

Once the fictional mercenaries disappeared, what would happen to the people who relied on them?

Maybe the corporal felt uneasy about saying something soft as a Marine, because the next words grew rough.

“We are devil sons of bitches. But sons of bitches have their own rules too. Shitting somewhere and running off is what the mutts at the mouth of Harlem do. A battlefield needs conviction and honor. The worst battlefield of my life was Iraq, and it will stay that way.”

Meaning Wolf would not let anything become a new worst.

It looked like an extremely proper attitude, but any soldier with their head on straight had to be like this. They had no choice. Gyeoul read the foundation beneath it through experience.

People who killed people needed justification just as strong. Certainty that they were doing the right thing. Faith that they were fighting on the side of justice. A conviction that they were protecting good people and fighting evil. Without these things, the mind collapsed. Because the shock of throwing oneself onto the line of death while killing strangers was that enormous.

More than half the veterans of the Vietnam War suffered severe combat fatigue.

For soldiers, pride was not optional.

Allocating operational capacity to unnecessary work like building a farm must have come from the same place.

“I hope these people can live properly even after we disappear. If we work the outside bastards hard and make men out of them, well, they should be able to live while protecting what needs protecting. But this era really is a dead end, all right. Making a Marine say things like this.”

Wolf sighed and shook their head.

============================ Author’s Note ============================

#Q&A

Q. PersonTree-nim: @What do you do when you write about a field you know nothing about?

A. There is nothing to do but gather materials and study. Still, these days, it is nice that if you put in enough time, you can verify details to the level you need.

For example, in the Trap arc, where Atascadero State Hospital was the setting... since internal information about that facility is not disclosed for security reasons, I got clues from job listing sites. Reviews and evaluations from people who worked there remain. Then I looked up those people’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

I write novels with the thought that one line comes from ten pages of verification. Of course, it cannot be perfect, and if you really know the topic, it is probably full of holes. Haha.

Q. LongLiveTheMoonlightSculptor-nim: @Would a PMC like that, though not actually one, emphasize comradeship like that?

A. Of course not. They are using it because the situation calls for it.

Q. PAM-nim: @Hahahahahaha. Author-nim taking 45 hours to write one chapter. Quite a bit of time has passed too, so I feel like it is about time second-generation zombies started popping out... Hmm.

A. Rather than second-generation, it is about time for a new species to appear.

Q. BlitZkrieG-nim: @Author-nim, if it takes you two days to fill your childlike innocence and you start on the 24th, the 26th will come quickly, right?!

A. There is also the method of sleeping soundly from the 24th until the end of the year.

Footnotes:

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