Repple Depple

RAF Lakenhealth - AEGIS Joint Base

Suffolk, England

15 SEP 2028

0630 Hours

The morning came in the same uneventful way it had every time. Well, that was the hope at least. The alarm woke her from a fitful sleep and bid her to rise from her bunk. She slapped her device, silencing the noise in one swift motion. The darkness of the room was all that she could see until she pulled open the curtains. Dawn was creeping up on the base, lightening the clouds in the sky that hung over the British Isles on an almost perpetual occurrence. Members of the 48th Fighter Wing were already out on their morning runs along the base perimeter. She wasn’t part of the fighter wing though. She had been SIQ (Sick In Quarters) for the last thirty days. That meant that there was to be no extraneous activities for her. Treated with kid gloves, as they said.

Yesterday was the last day for SIQ. There wasn’t any time for a morning run, even though she had snuck off during the nights to get in some physical training against orders multiple times. Her SIQ chit wasn’t for any physical illness, but she still had to be treated like it due to the ramifications of the order. She also couldn’t be allowed out of her room except to get chow and to report to her doctor. She looked at her sparsely furnished room that had been put on loan for her stay at the base, but there was no time to admire it. She quickly stepped into the bathroom to get through her morning routine. Everything was concluded with a six minute shower in water that could be thought of as a stage below lukewarm. Her PT uniform was put into a hamper as she donned her working uniform.

She took a look in the mirror as she zipped up her coveralls. Her deep purple eyes weren’t as bright as they used to be. They had seen too much in too little time. There was a hardness in them, though. A fire that would be stoked in the days to come. The nametape above her right chest pocket read the only name given to her: ALLISON. On the same shoulder was an American flag. On her left shoulder was her unit patch. She stared at it, as if its mere existence was enough to put a trance on her. She tore her gaze away and put her hand on it to cover it. The patch symbolized her previous unit, the 28th ARES Assault Team “Copperheads” with a snake design matching that of the namesake. She clenched her teeth and took deep breaths. The fire in her eyes lit up briefly, but then dulled. Now was not the time for it, so she calmed herself down and let the feeling go for the time being. She grabbed a hair tie and twisted it around in her fingers, putting her jet black hair up in a ponytail. With herself more or less put together, she took one last look in the mirror. The small scars on her face from shrapnel around the corner of her mouth, across her forehead, and down her cheek were small enough to be missed initially. One could say that they were ugly, but that was their business. She knew it as such. It was what she was made for.

Allison huffed a sigh and stepped out of the bathroom. She grabbed a piece of paper denoting her orders that she had been given with the SIQ chit. She was to report to the base commander for further orders at the end of the allotted time. There was no use keeping him waiting. She stepped lively as she grabbed her cold weather jacket and patrol cap before heading out the door. The walk across the base was brisk, but she had somewhere to stop first before getting to the base commander’s office. By this time it was past seven in the morning, which meant the chow hall had just opened up. No sense facing the music on an empty stomach, and the officers usually slept later than enlisted anyway. She had time to kill and made the most of it by getting a good breakfast. Eggs, bacon, toast, milk, and an apple. It was enough to tide her over until lunch, wherever she was going next. She made sure to take her time and not rush, so as not to find herself with nothing else to do until she reported in.

By the time 0800 reached the base, Allison was already patiently standing outside the base commander’s office. The base itself was a NATO joint base between the Americans and the British, even if the Americans were the only ones present on the site. In the days since the Cold War went hot in 1991, it and its sister base, RAF Mildenhall, were put up to the new AEGIS initiative. A revolution in warfare had occurred when deep sea miners discovered deposits of a new mineral dubbed “Gutenium” that, when combined with other metals, to create a new alloy, allowed for an extremely lightweight yet extremely durable metal to be created. Soon the industrial sector was full of giant walking machines some twenty feet tall to be used for more dangerous engineering missions. But like with most inventions, it was soon turned into a war machine.

The arms race between the Soviets and NATO reached a new phase as huge deposits of this mineral were discovered all across Russia’s territory. Much in the same way that America had acquired the titanium to build the SR-71 Blackbird through shell companies, the same method worked for the most part with the Gutenium, but not for long. When the Soviets learned of what was really going on, they closed off all trade of the new mineral. That left America to start pushing NATO and SEATO allies to conduct deep geological surveys. As the race heated up, America made its first new machine for combat trials and dubbed them as the Armored Engagement Support unit, or ARES. In true Soviet fashion, the Red Army developed their own version and dubbed it the “Mnogofunktsional'naya Avangard Roboticheskaya Sistema” or Multifunctional Vanguard Robotic System. In Russian, this came out to the acronym MARS. As other island nations like Japan and Korea reported similar deposits found within their waters, alongside some off the coasts of the Americas, the Soviets soon realized that their monopoly on this new mineral was slipping out of their grasp. And with it, the chance at a true Soviet world. In early 1991, with the NATO coalition revelling in their fresh new victory in the Persian Gulf, the Soviets put the screws to them by invading Western Europe with their new MARS units supporting their Armored Brigade’s advance across Poland.

The first MARS units met the NATO defensive line like the tanks of the British Army at Flers–Courcelette in mid-September of 1916. Prolonged engagements were fought as NATO commanders tried to adapt to the presence of a new machine on the battlefield. After months of fighting, the Americans created Operation Open Invite and used NATO armored battalions to bait Soviet MARS units into a trap. The result was the destruction of a full platoon and the capture of several units for reverse-engineering purposes. As the war waged on, American researchers came to the conclusion that the Soviet MARS units were clunky, cumbersome, and crude. It was more of a tank on legs than anything else. This led to the further refinement of the ARES units and a drastic shift in design philosophy. Rather than seeing them as an attempt to replace the tank, the new ARES designs were made to support tanks as part of a larger offensive.

The new units were refined into what would end up becoming not a walking tank but instead an extension of a soldier. In the early 2000’s, the war had gone cold and then hot again in flashpoint engagements for several decades. Diplomats worked tirelessly to stamp out the flames of destruction between the two world powers while scientists outside of the Iron Curtain were making breakthroughs. Though wholly against it at first, the scientific community soon saw it as the only solution to their problems. Early ARES units were suffering the same fate as the MARS units. It took two people just to pilot one, while MARS units usually had crews of three. Efforts were made to keep the ARES design slim and sleek, but it couldn’t be done without sacrificing crew protection. Until, with the risk of being thrown out of the scientific community hanging over her head, one Dr. Morgan Sutton of Great Britain, pioneered the creation of a system that could grow a human embryo from a fertilized egg and allow for special genetic augmentations to be made during its life cycle.

A new generation of operators were being grown in vats and created for one singular purpose: to interface with the ARES units in a neural uplink without being susceptible to brain overload. The resulting operators were dubbed “demi-machina” by the project lead and were a huge success. The neural uplinks allowed for the operators to be able to control their ARES unit completely as if it were their own body. This also allowed for the machines to be slimmed down since they no longer required a cockpit with controls and resembled human soldiers much better, which further distinguished them from their primitive counterparts in the Red Army. With the very first human born for this new initiative being adopted by Dr. Sutton, NATO came together to form the AEGIS task force. AEGIS, Allied Expeditionary Group - Interdiction Strikeforce, became the cornerstone of NATO’s new defense against the Soviet MARS platoons. Donors from across the Free World were brought to supply the program for their new generations of demi-machina.

That was how Allison had been made. She was brought up in an American lab as part of the AEGIS training program. As the Soviets grew desperate to bring Europe and its resources under the yoke of their oppression, AEGIS deployed to meet them head-on alongside NATO armies. Bases were converted for use alongside the Air Force and Army branches to facilitate movement of the ARES units quickly and efficiently. Somewhere along the line, in the fog of war, Soviet recklessness overrode reason. They started to develop a new bio-weapon that they planned to release in France and Germany to destroy NATO opposition. Before it could be fully weaponized with a failsafe vaccine, NATO foreign intelligence agencies caught wind. The President of the United States authorized a long-range strike from a stealth bomber on the lab once its location was discovered. The end result was something no one could’ve predicted. The bio-weapon, a new airborne virus, was contracted by the surrounding fauna and soon spread itself across the animal kingdom. It wasn’t long before people were set upon by infected animals, allowing the virus to mutate and affect humans. The result of the infection caused those afflicted to revert back to a predatory and animal-like behavior pattern while also making them cannibalistic.

It was a waking nightmare as the infected numbers were doubling overnight. While the animals seemed to die off after prolonged symptoms, the infected humans did not. All down the lines, Soviet and NATO forces were being ravaged by their enemies as well as their former comrades. Cases began popping up across the Caucasus, the Balkans, even as far as the Middle East. Within a few short months, despite the Soviets and NATO agreeing to suspend hostilities and focus on the new menace, more than 50% of the world had been affected by the bio-weapon. AEGIS soon found itself repurposed to work with other NATO brigades to enforce quarantine zones, but much of Europe had already been lost. Lines were drawn and walls were built. Island nations were insulated in both the Atlantic and the Pacific to protect their own. That all happened less than two years ago in Allison’s life. She was 22 years old. She had been in AEGIS long enough to have seen combat against the Soviet proxies, and now against infected threats.

Allison took a deep breath as her mind wandered to those days. The things she had seen; the things she had done. The world had been torn apart. The declared No Man’s Land zones were not only harboring infected, but also wannabe warlords who had salvaged much of what was left on the frontlines to protect themselves as well as to enforce their own version of law and order within those zones. Counter Insurgency was swiftly becoming the new NATO standard, even as the Russian Bear still loomed on the horizon, licking its wounds. She had fought against the Reds and now the infected, but new enemies were popping every day. It was an absolute mess.

Speaking of messes - the sound of boots hitting the tile floor sounded from the hallway. Allison instinctively moved to the position of attention and stiffened up. She watched from her peripheral vision as the base commander walked up to his door. He unlocked it, stepped in, and closed it behind him. It was a test she would have to pass. She gave it a few more minutes, listening to the subtle movements inside the office, before she rapped her knuckles on the door frame. “Enter!” signified her permission to walk into the office. She felt the weight of everything hit her in the psyche as she thought about what this meeting could result in, but her body reacted as it had been drilled. She grabbed the door knob and turned it.