The Slog

Roman struggled to keep his footing in the ankle-deep slog of the muddy riverbank. The tainted water, mixed with rubble, dirt, and debris, had been accumulating broken bits of the ruined city for centuries. The resulting mixture was a slow-moving speckled brown mush that folded over itself repeatedly as it flowed down the steep slope.

He slipped on a metal plate embedded in the goo and fell onto his belly, sliding several meters and losing whatever small progress he had made climbing up the hill. He spat out a mouthful of the gunk and cursed as a mushy tide swelled, rolling over and caking him in its grime.

Black abyss, he was going to smell like shit until his next shower. Unfortunately, his next hygiene maintenance wasn't scheduled until the morning after tomorrow. That meant he was going to stink like a latrine until then. Probably meant he was going to have to rack outside of quarters tonight as well.

Someone above him laughed. "Chaki, you bunking with Roman, right? Have fun."

Chaki's face appeared at the top of the hill as Roman tried to reclaim his footing. "Damn clumsy fodder. Stop playing in the mud. The collie's here."

Roman looked at the green metal plate that precipitated his fall and scowled. There were some letters on it in an archaic form of solar English. He wiped the gunk off with his sleeve and read it slowly: New London.

"Are we on the right continent?" he asked in a loud voice. "I thought we're on one of the Americas."

"What kind of a stupid question is that?" Renee called down.

"I don't know," Roman said. "This is my first tour on this planet. I just thought London was a city in Europe. Or was that Africa?"

Overhead, a gray box-shaped ship struggled to fly around the many obstructions to their position. On top of the hill, fallen poles, loose wires, hanging vines, and building fragments jutting up and out were scattered all over the landscape, often making it difficult for the collies — flying boxes not known for their maneuverability — to reach their landing zones.

They were near a river mouth, and the soft ground had sunk so much that many of the buildings on both sides of the river leaned in over the water until they formed a triangular roof above it. Several of these buildings looked ready to collapse and probably wouldn't stand much longer.

"Why are our extraction points always on top of hills?" Roman grumbled. "Why can't it just come down to us for once?"

He renewed his efforts, using his hands to claw his way up. His arms sunk elbow-deep into the muck, getting even more grime onto his now completely filthy uniform. Not that it mattered anymore; he couldn't get any dirtier.

Roman and the other half-dozen jackasses with him were just finishing an eight-hour patrol of a region southwest of the city of Boston. Surveillance had picked up movement from what could possibly be the wastelander tribe they had been searching for the past six months, and of course, his was the unlucky squad sent here to investigate.

The Cooperative Forces, or Co-op, was created after the failed attack on Boston to retrieve the temporal anomaly to fulfill the agency's contractual obligation to the megacorporation. It was supposed to be a joint operation by Valta and ChronoCom. However, those Valta assholes — their leader, Securitate Kuo, specifically — did not seem to know what "joint" meant. Almost all the heavy lifting was carried out by ChronoCom monitors, while Valta's troopers just sat on their collective asses. Kuo had even had the audacity to tell the lead monitors to their faces that the Valta troopers were too valuable to waste. Black abyss, everyone in the agency hated that woman.

Ever since they had cleared out all of Boston and realized that the savages had fled, the patrols had had to expand their search perimeters to include the areas surrounding the city. Now, Co-op troops were forced to blindly chase the hundreds of random energy signatures that popped up, in the hopes that one of them was the tribe of savages they were after.

Roman finally reached the top of the hill and was helped to his feet by Renee and Pau. Chronman Mong sniffed him irritably as he continued to eye the collie making its way to their position. "Next time, be more careful, fool. If the collie pilot insists we clean his ship, you're the fodder doing it, you hear?"

"Easy for you," Roman muttered. "Not every asshole gets exos to fly around."

Roman wouldn't have dared to say that aloud. Mong was a Tier-5, fresh out of the Academy, and like most chronmen, thought he was a big deal. If Roman had to guess, the guy was probably nineteen years old. Definitely green and inexperienced, but already as arrogant as a Tier-3. Still, even the lowest chronman outranked the most experienced monitor.

The squad brushed themselves off and waited as the collie lowered itself to the ground. Fortunately, this patrol had been uneventful, though part of him wished the damn savages would just show up so they could end this hellish mission working under those corporate Valta assholes.

"I can't wait to get transferred off-planet," he ranted. "I didn't sign up to escape from the hellhole on Naiaid to end up in an even worse hell-hole on Earth."

A couple of the other monitors chuckled in agreement. Mong just sniffed and continued staring at the collie. No doubt the kid probably felt insulted having to patrol with a bunch of monitors instead of running time salvages, which was what chronmen were supposed to do. The collie landed with a splat in the mud, and the squad,...