WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ The Little Prince in the Ossuary

Chapter 58

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Dozens of rows of spike strips, jagged latticed chains, had been laid out in front of the checkpoint. Normally deployed on roads to stop vehicles, here they served as a denial barrier against infected mutants.

The soldiers climbed out to help the sentries. Gyeoul joined them. The sentries looked embarrassed.

"Sorry about this. We should have cleared these ahead of time, but we only just got word--"

"Don't apologize. It's nobody's fault."

The clearing itself wasn't difficult. Each strip had a separate handle attached by cord; one good yank and it came loose well enough. The sheer number made it tedious.

When Gyeoul climbed back in, the sentries saluted.

"Safe travels, sir."

Jeffrey waved out the window. The convoy rolled out in unison. A voice crackled through the radio almost immediately.

「Platoon, maintain radio silence from this point until further orders.」

Given what they were hunting, that went without saying.

The Trickster's intermittent transmissions, always followed by a position change, told a clear story: it had learned human tactics. At minimum, it had figured out that blasting jamming signals nonstop was a good way to draw fire.

Could these things share knowledge with each other?

Even by Gyeoul's standards, this new variant carried dangerous potential in more ways than one. Communication was that kind of power.

The driver kept the speed down. Not because of the road. He'd switched the headlights off the moment they left camp, and navigating by monocular night-vision scope left little room for confidence. His upper body kept drifting forward.

In the distance, faint and irregular, the automated Noise Makers cycled through their intervals without prompting, keeping the camp safe.

Gyeoul checked the Tracker monitor, the tactical display showing current vehicle position, allied unit deployments, mission destination, and supporting details.

The last confirmed signal believed to be the Trickster had been captured in the hilly terrain southwest of San Miguel. Less than five kilometers away, as the crow flies.

The actual travel distance was longer, of course. Having nearly been caught off guard once before, Jeffrey was being deliberately cautious. He'd chosen to swing wide to the west and approach from the south. The lead vehicle's heading made that plain enough.

"What's that?"

Gyeoul pointed at something passing outside his window. A facility -- a row of massive satellite dishes lined up side by side. Not a light on anywhere. Abandoned.

"GPS-related installation, apparently. I just hope they don't order us to secure it anytime soon."

GPS required ground control stations for coordinate and altitude correction. This was one of them. The sheer number of antennas suggested it served other functions as well. There were radar domes too, several of them.

They drove past it and pressed on. Then the lead vehicle's gunner raised a fist. Stop.

On the Tracker, the destination was roughly 1.5 kilometers out.

The platoon searched a farm on the southwest side of the hills. Empty, thankfully, not a mutant in sight.

"Right. So. How do we play this?"

Jeffrey put it to the group. One finger raised.

"Two options. First: approach on foot, quietly. We could give that sly little Trickster quite a surprise. Downside is it takes time, and he might move on us while we're closing in. Hell, he might've already bolted by now."

He raised a second finger.

"Second: we hit him straight with the vehicles. High chance of being heard, but fast and hard. No matter how fast that thing runs, shaking us off won't be easy. So, which one?"

He made a show of asking everyone, but the question was aimed at Gyeoul alone. Jeffrey and the soldiers alike had their eyes on him.

Soldiers who actually fight don't dismiss instinct. The person they trusted most wasn't Jeffrey -- it was Gyeoul. For a platoon commander, that should have stung. Jeffrey's face gave nothing away. Lightness on the surface, something serious underneath.

"If both options carry uncertainty, I'd go with the safer one. Vehicles. But why not close in from the outside, tightening the ring as we approach?"

"That makes sense. We've got the mobility advantage either way."

True enough. Having lived through an actual pursuit, Gyeoul put the Trickster's speed at roughly a fast human, at best. Endurance was another matter entirely. In the natural world, humans were hardly among the swift. Jeffrey pressed a little further.

"Since we're taking vehicles anyway, should we split into two groups? Three works too."

Dividing forces was usually asking for trouble. But that depended on the situation.

They had eight Humvees. Most mounted heavy machine guns; a couple were fitted with missile launchers. For a single platoon, the firepower was extraordinary.

And the terrain was open. The hills rolled, but driving along ridgelines kept sight lines wide. Nothing like an urban environment packed with obstacles. With enough distance, a single Humvee could hold off an armed force of twenty or thirty.

Gyeoul agreed.

"Two groups. The numbers divide evenly too. One group communicates freely, the other keeps radio silence."

"And we vary the speeds. Beaters and hunters, split the roles."

At night, a moving vehicle's engine noise carried kilometers depending on how fast it was going. The distant Noise Makers weren't something to rely on entirely -- not against targets with sharper hearing than humans who could detect radio signals on top of it.

So the group communicating freely and moving fast would be the beaters. The group maintaining radio silence and moving slowly would be the hunters. Spiraling in from opposite sides, anything caught between them would have nowhere to run.

"Then I'll be the beaters. Good luck out there, hunter."

Jeffrey clapped Gyeoul on the shoulder.

The whole discussion took just over three minutes. Everyone knew time was short.

The convoy split east and west. Four vehicles each, moving in their separate directions. Jeffrey snatched the radio and went.

「Jeffrey Bedell Brown's Christmas Eve Radio! The greatest star California's Seventh ever produced, the phenomenal Ensign Brown, is about to go absolutely wild!」

"......"

Gyeoul turned the volume down. The driver managed a pained smile. Jeffrey, undeterred, launched into a carol. Whether it counted as singing was debatable.

「FUCK! YOU! Merrily on hell! In hell! The guns are firing!」

The original was "Ding Dong Merrily on High." What came out bore no resemblance whatsoever. After a moment's consideration, Gyeoul turned the volume down a little more, just enough to still hear clearly. A sense sharpened by augmentation wouldn't miss even a faint anomaly.

Nothing came of it. The only things startled were deer, spooked by the dark shapes of the vehicles, scattering in every direction.

The search area had been small to begin with. Even at twenty kilometers an hour, ten minutes was enough to cross it. On flat ground there'd have been nothing to search at all.

Then the two groups met again.

"Hey. Long time no see."

Jeffrey offered a defeated little joke.

"This should be the spot."

The Tracker's margin of error ranged from 2.6 to 12.6 meters. If the Trickster had been here, there should have been traces. Jeffrey wandered the area aimlessly.

Gyeoul shook his head.

"Useless. The ground's frozen."

Even in California, December nights in the inland turned the earth solid. Rain that had fallen a few days earlier had left the soil waterlogged, which only made it worse.

He made a deliberate show of stomping down. Thud. That's what it takes to leave a footprint, the gesture said. And that was Gyeoul in solid combat boots. Forget expecting traces from the Trickster. Grumble, maybe, but not this one.

In a region normally this dry, even pressed grass left no mark. 「Tracking」 was useless here.

Jeffrey drooped.

"...What is this. This is pathetic. Are you telling me we just go back empty-handed?"

The words weren't out of his mouth before the radio operator in the vehicle started waving.

"Sir! Anomalous signal detected! Coordinates updating!"

"What? Where?"

Jeffrey bent half his body into the vehicle. Gyeoul checked the nearest Humvee's monitor. Coordinates triangulated from camp sensors and aerial drones were coming through.

Jeffrey let out a shout.

"Damn it! That's close! Mount up!"

No time for detailed orders. The last transmission had come from less than a kilometer away. And the signal was heading toward Camp Roberts.

Riding the sway of the vehicle over uneven ground, Gyeoul felt something was off.

Something that careful -- that calculating back in the hospital -- would just show itself out here in the open?

No time to think it through. The Humvee had already pushed to top speed and was bearing down on the new coordinates. The turret gunner called out.

"Target acquired! Ten o'clock! Distance, at least two hundred!"

An awkward angle from where Gyeoul sat. Jeffrey's voice crackled through the radio.

「Split! Vehicles five and up, take the western side road!」

The driver wrenched the wheel left. The right side of the vehicle nearly left the ground, the turn was that sharp. Jeffrey's group kept to the paved road; Gyeoul's peeled off onto unpaved.

The target shifted to Gyeoul's one o'clock. Through the windshield: abandoned farmland, rows of stakes driven in for the crops, and between them a pale shape moving. Too far to make out clearly.

Crack crack crack crack crack crack!

The heavy machine gun opened up like a waterfall.

"Damn it! Can't get a hit!"

The gunner had estimated 200 meters. Gyeoul's augmented eye put it closer to 300. A heavy machine gun with no proper sight picture wasn't going to score hits at that range.

The vehicle couldn't enter the farmland. The stakes were packed too tightly. Normally military vehicles could flatten that sort of thing, but this was bad enough to be a real problem.

Gyeoul tapped the gunner's leg.

"Switch with me!"

His shout was swallowed by the firing. He called out twice more before the gunner finally heard him and dropped into the back seat. Gyeoul climbed up and took the position.

「Firearms Mastery」 applied to heavy machine guns at thirty percent efficiency. He abandoned the machine gun. Standing upright in the mount, he raised his rifle.

Shooting from a violently shaking vehicle was agony. Even so, each time the wavering sights snapped into alignment for a split second, he squeezed the trigger at precisely that moment.

Hit.

The creature's gait twisted. Just slightly, its speed dropped.

Jeffrey's group was hurling grenades and rockets like they had a grudge to settle. It looked like venting Christmas frustration. Every round missed.

Closing distance sharpened the outline. The Trickster, no question. It was working the terrain to the fullest, weaving left and right through the raised center of the farmland to disperse fire from both sides.

But farmland had to end somewhere. The creature burst onto a clear road with nothing to hide behind and came face to face with Vehicle One. Gyeoul grabbed the radio.

"Jeffrey! Veer off!"

The creature's torso flared red and it fired a straight beam of heat. Jeffrey's Humvee took the microwave burst head-on and lost control for an instant. The vehicles behind it did the same, a light chain of collisions. Curses crackling through the radio -- nobody seemed badly hurt.

On Gyeoul's side, a new problem. A pack of regular mutants. Too focused on the Trickster; he'd been slow to notice. He raked the machine gun across them, but a few slipped through and hurled themselves onto the road.

The driver screamed.

"Road kill, you bastards!"

He trusted the Humvee's hull and plowed straight through. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. The mutants bounced away like toys. Through the night-vision scope it was a wild sight -- hot liquid glowing amber, speckling the hood and fading to purple.

Then a mutant, broken in every place it could be broken, spun through the air and passed just over Gyeoul's head. Spraying blood, eyes fixed on him, hands clawing. Fingertips grazed him and fell away into nothing.

The vehicle behind caught it instead. Coming up close, it got blindsided. A mutant landed on their hood and panicked the driver into swerving wildly. The thing was ruptured through its organs but still somehow alive, plastered to the window and refusing to come off. Gyeoul twisted around and opened fire. Twenty rounds, base of the spine to the back of the skull.

「Sir! What if you hit us?!」

Frantic over the radio. The top rider in the trailing vehicle.

Ballistic glass. And he hadn't missed anyway.

Gyeoul turned forward again. The target had put distance between them while he was dealing with that. The destination looked like an abandoned ranch, building silhouettes clustered beyond a broad stretch of open pasture.

Ping. The machine gun ran dry mid-burst. Too slow to reload. Gyeoul switched back to his rifle and kept firing. Standing on a moving vehicle, shooting at a running target, and still the thing's back kept taking hits.

Crack!

The Humvee smashed through the ranch fence. The impact jarred Gyeoul's footing and he pitched forward, catching the edge of the gun shield with his forehead.

Of course. He touched the wound. Not deep, but blood ran into his eye and blurred half his vision. He wiped it roughly clear; his targeting efficiency dropped a notch.

The Trickster finally took shelter inside one of the buildings. A dead end. The Humvees, bristling with fury, circled and closed around it.

「From this point on, we are demolition workers! Give it everything you've got!」

Jeffrey, eager to level the building with the creature inside it. Gyeoul cut in immediately.

"Wait! They said capture if possible?! This is a perfect chance!"

「I don't care! That thing stole my Christmas Eve! In the name of Jesus Christ, it dies!」

Then a long pause, a single sigh, and Jeffrey issued the order to hold. Gyeoul dropped off the turret.

"I'll go in!"

"Hey, at least take some cover! You're going to get yourself killed!"

Regular mutants were crawling out of the other ranch buildings. The remaining soldiers moved to handle them; Gyeoul broke for the building where the Trickster had gone. Rifle slung over his back, bayonet in one hand, pistol in the other, he stepped through what was left of the door.

A dark corridor. He followed the footprints visible through the night-vision scope.

Wind splitting, sidelong.

A muscle-whip swung past just above Gyeoul's ducked head. The wall took the blow instead, a deep furrow gouged clean through the wood. Deep. Like a frog that had lost control of its own tongue, the Trickster couldn't pull its arm back -- the limb was caught, pinned by sharp wooden splinters. Gyeoul drove the bayonet in. Then again. Then again, until the muscle couldn't function.

The creature threw its whole body at him instead. Whatever it had left, it was using all of it, torso beginning to heat up. Warmup time: one to two seconds.

He unloaded into the screaming face and rolled between its legs. Spun into a firing stance immediately and put bullets into the backs of the creature's knees. The heat wave blasted into the wall. The whip-arm had gone that way too. Burning meat filled the corridor.

The creature let out a broken shriek.

On its knees, it turned to look at him. Gyeoul headbutted it with his ballistic helmet. Then shot through its ankle ligaments.

He swapped weapons, kicked it in the back, poured a burst into what remained of one shoulder. Stepped back, changed magazines. Put some distance between them for safety. There might be a final spasm.

Quiet.

Was that a complete incapacitation?

A few steps away, catching his breath, Gyeoul felt something strange.

The creature, face-down, was looking at him. Not thrashing. Looking at him directly, pulling the corners of its mouth upward. Unmistakably a smile. Then it began making a sound -- a wet hitching noise, closer to laughter than crying. The radio static spiked to an extreme.

The soldiers who'd followed him in were shouting over each other. Gyeoul stood still and thought.

It was strange from the start. Why? Too easy. Like it came here to die.

But he had no answer. He waited. No new threat appeared.

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