Al's Rabbit Hole
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Old Glory Chapter 2
🕑 Added 2025-09-20 01:13:50 +0000 UTCThe Pandion set down at the last known location of Heimdall-9, a stretch of deserted swamplands that reeked of eggs and sour milk. In the cloudy, sunless evening the world lay under a pall of murky shadows, the cold humidity clinging to skin and armor alike. The air felt thick enough to drink, the smell of stagnant water and rot heavy with every breath. Towering trees rose like the skyscrapers of the Old World, their bark slick with moss, roots twisting into the muck that clutched at boots with every step. The soldiers of Valkyrie-5 sank knee-deep into the mire, each stride a fight against suction that tried to pull them under.
The water was a cloudy stew, the color of vomit and sewage, crawling with wriggling things and the snap of unseen predators below the surface. Flies swarmed in clouds, and slick-bodied insects climbed at their legs, biting through fabric where they could. Around them the swamp was a maze of half-submerged sandbars and winding paths, narrow ridges of mud that forced them to pick their way forward one careful step at a time. The trees pressed close overhead, branches knitted so tight they blotted what little light filtered through the clouds, and the ground stank of centuries of decay.
Signs of violence lingered in the gloom, sparse but undeniable. A tree ahead was splintered halfway through the trunk, the ragged wood blackened where an explosive had bitten deep. A scar gouged into the mud showed where shrapnel had sprayed, the fragments biting into roots and vines. A rust-colored splash stained one sandbar, long dried but still sharp against the pale muck. There was no hard proof yet of what they feared, but the trail already whispered that Heimdall-9 had not left here willingly.
Albrect took point, signaling the rest to fall in as their wrist comps pinged the last known position of Heimdall-9’s Doberman. Four miles east, deep in the swamps, right in the middle of a major radio deadzone. None of them were surprised. Until the Ark’s comm relays came online, this valley was a sink for signals, iron and nickel in the ridges cutting comms to ribbons. They would rely on the Pandion hovering at twenty-five hundred feet to relay what they could, but even then it was spotty.
Powell muttered, his voice tight. “Place like this, they were probably chewed up by the swamp before anything else even got to them. Eaten alive, dragged under, picked clean before anyone even knew they were gone.” His words came quicker as he spoke, winding himself tighter with every thought.
“Stow it, Powell,” Silph snapped, her tone sharp enough to cut. “You’re not helping anyone with that mouth. Button it down and keep your eyes open.”
Albrect cut in, his tone low but firm. “Enough. Form up. Doggit, status on the chain? I don’t want us blind out here.”
Doggit glanced at his wrist comp, tapping through the display. “Daisy chain’s still running. Us to the Doberman, Doberman up to the Pandion, Pandion back to the Ark. It’s working, but it’s rough. Half the packets keep dropping and the lag’s bad. We're getting a lot of chop.”
Albrect frowned, watching the trees sway. “So we’re talking half a net at best.”
“More like a quarter,” Doggit admitted. “They’ll know if we yell loud enough, but it'll be messy.”
Hotchkiss gave a dry chuckle, shaking his head. “Hell of a mess. Almost makes me miss the days of good-old satcom. Least you didn't get this shit when the system worked.”
“It is what it is,” Albrect replied. His voice was flat but steady. “Suck it up, Hotchkiss. We work with what we’ve got.” Albrect said with a note of finality in his tone. "Now fall in. There's a signal coming from grid seventeen, east-north-east."
The slog was brutal. Even with exo-assisted strength, the mud and twisted foliage made each step feel like hauling lead. The cold air pressed against them, sharp against the thickness of the humidity that clung inside their armor, making every breath feel heavy. They hacked paths with machetes, boots slurping in muck, shoulders scraping against wet vines and branches that seemed determined to snag and trip them. All around them the swampland writhed.
Mitch cursed as he yanked something black and slick from his thigh plating. It was a leech-like thing with a ring of needle teeth that had been trying to bore through the thick weave of his BDU, the thin fangs doing a decent job of digging in. “Son of a bitch! Even the bugs want a piece of me.” He squeezed it until it popped like a bloated pustule, before he tossed it away. “Damn things are everywhere.”
Marie grimaced. “What the hell, Mitch. That’s disgusting.”
Doggit gave a low chuckle. “You should have seen the jungles in India, back in the beforetimes. Leeches, mosquitoes, everything with teeth. Whole rivers of them some days, and the parasites! They got into everything.”
Mitch shook his head, muttering, “Glad I missed that vacation.”
Doggit laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. "Chipper up, Jayne. At least it thinks you're as delicious as you seem to think you are."
"I guess something had to, eventually." Muttered Corporal Silph from the side, pulling a strangled groan from the twin and a laugh from the rest.
The forest was almost worse than the water. Tangled roots and coiled vines blocked every step, the undergrowth closing like a cage. The water around them shifted from shallow bog to sudden drops, hidden pools where pale things slithered just beneath the surface. The squad picked their way along ridges and sandbars, each step a gamble against being dragged knee-deep into sucking mud. Motion tracking was useless. Giant snakes slithered in the distance, spiders the size of helmets crawled overhead, and reptilian shapes lurked at the edge of sight. Once they passed a crocodile that must have stretched fifty feet, its bullfrog tongue lashing out to drag some horned goat-thing into its mouth, only for a flower of barbed tentacles to coil from the swamp and drag it under with a wet snap. None of them wanted to know what waited beneath the water. And that, as terrifying as it was, counted as the least of the dangers they had seen.
Halfway through the march they stumbled on something even stranger; a skull, massive and weathered, jutting from the muck like a pale hill. It was the size of a main battle tank, with teeth four feet long and thicker than a man’s torso. The squad froze, staring at it.
“Jesus,” Mitch breathed. “That thing could swallow a Pandion whole.”
Doggit crouched low, scanning the surface. “Teeth like these weren’t made for grazing. Whatever this was, it was a predator.”
Albrect’s voice came steady over the comms. “Doggit, pictures. Queue them to the Ark.”
Doggit nodded, raising his wrist comp. “On it. They’ll want every angle.”
Marie’s voice slipped through, quiet and uneasy. “I don’t even want to know what could have killed something like that.”
The words hung heavy over the unit. Powell muttered, "Jesus, what could kill something like that!?”
“Enough,” Silph barked, sharp and commanding. “Speculation gets you dead. Eyes front, weapons ready. Stay in the here and now.” The words were just that, though, as the squad eyed the massive skull, each imagining something worse than the last, something with gripping claws and snagging teeth the size of a battleship, trundling around, maybe hunting, maybe for them.
The deeper they pressed, the worse it grew. Chittering things scuttled across trunks and branches, covered in claws and far too many legs. Powell nearly lost his mind when something the length of his arm dropped onto his helmet and began trying to bore through. He thrashed until Hotchkiss calmly cut it in half with a swipe of his machete, the corpse tumbling into the swamp. The Doberman added to the tension, freezing without warning, autocannon swiveling toward unseen threats in the dark. Each time the squad stopped cold, weapons raised, waiting for an attack that never came. Then the drone would move again, silent but watchful.
By the fourth mile, it was Powell who broke the silence. His voice cracked over the comms in a half-whisper. “What if Heimdall-9 got dragged off by one of those giant crocs? Or sunk into the muck, pulled down by those flesh-eating plants?”
Maria’s voice came cool and sharp. “Don’t start.”
Mitch snorted. “Christ, Bert, shut up. You’ll have us all jumping at shadows.”
“All of you cut it,” Silph growled, and the group fell into silence once more.
Albrect said nothing. He stared at his wrist comp, then back into the shadows, the memory of another swamp creeping in. Panama. Ropey vines dragging men screaming into the dark. Mutants, Plaguetouched, tearing through lines at night, eating anything they could catch. Men. Animals. Sometimes even each other. The forest pressed in tighter, and he kept his jaw locked, pace steady. He finally broke the silence with a low order. “Keep moving. Stay tight. We’re not getting lost out here.”
Three hours passed before they reached it. The Doberman lay in ruin, a shattered husk that should have been impossible to break. It had been built to withstand railgun strikes and keep fighting even with half its chassis destroyed, but whatever had come through had reduced it to a mangled corpse of steel and composite. Limbs had been ripped free at the joints, its weapons torn away, its armor plates peeled back like tin and its hardened carapace smashed until wiring and circuitry spilled into the muck. Cables dangled like torn sinew, optics crushed flat, the machine’s once-proud frame desecrated with clinical brutality.
Albrect crouched low, eyes narrowing as he jacked its intact drive into their own unit. The Doberman waited nearby, posture rigid, sensors humming with a faint edge that almost felt like unease. Even a machine knew when something had gone wrong. The squad shifted the ruined chassis to get better access to it's ports, and that was when the true horror revealed itself. Wedged beneath the destroyed drone lay the severed arm of a man, torn away at the elbow, the hand still clutched a pistol in a death grip, streaked with dried blood.
