Hans woke before sunrise, the same as most mornings now.
He washed up, dressed, and made his way to the Command Room. A folder sat waiting on his desk among the rest—road conditions, supply counts, a note about the Westgate survey’s progress. One folder sat apart from the others, a single word marked across the front in Dominic’s neat handwriting: Medical (Priority).
Hans opened it.
Six examinations. Six clean results. No infection, no abnormal readings, nothing requiring treatment.
He kept reading.
Then came the second page—the description of the machine, the biological screening, the termination protocol, the dogs passed through untouched while all four Scouts were marked contaminated. A short note at the bottom, written separately from the main report: a request that he review the discrepancy himself rather than take the clean scan as the final word.
Hans set the folder down and stared at the wall for a moment.
"Dmitri has completed his mission, but now—"
He shifted back to the folder.
Two systems existing and independent of one another.
Two answers contradicting each other.
If the machine had simply malfunctioned, that was one problem—old tech, damaged hardware, months without maintenance, or a scanner throwing false positives. Hans could live with that answer.
But if it hadn’t malfunctioned—if it had detected something his own medical scanners did not recognize—that was a different problem entirely.
One whose implications he did not like.
He needed more than a written report. Hans reached for his communicator.
"Golden Eagle to Echo One."
A pause, then a reply, still thick with sleep.
"Echo One Actual here, Commander."
"I have read the medical report. Report to the Command Room, now."
"...Understood."
Hans set the communicator down, the folder still open on his desk.
Whatever answer he was looking for, he doubted Dmitri had it either.
But Dmitri had been standing in front of the machine when it made its decision, and right now, that made him the closest thing to a witness Hans had.
Minutes passed. Hans waited in patience.
The War Factory was still under queue in the Main Tab interface.
------
[ War Factory (Physical) enqueued for construction. ETA: 18h 24m remaining ]
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Almost two days since he’d enqueued it, and the number still felt slower than he wanted.
Hans let the thought go. Some things the System simply refused to rush, no matter how much Gold sat behind them.
And it’s in the night too. Damn it.
Hans cursed. There was no choice but to sleep earlier today, or pull an all-nighter just to wait it out.
Dmitri arrived before the sun fully cleared the rooftops. He entered, saluted, and waited.
"Sit," Hans said, not looking up from the folder. "Tell me what’s not in here."
Dmitri took the offered seat.
"How did the mission go, overall?" Hans asked.
"Mixed, Commander. We reached the objective, confirmed the facility’s location, and returned with no casualties. We did not complete the full survey. Contact with a hostile security system forced an early withdrawal."
"What did you encounter, in order?"
"No living infected encountered on approach. Infected corpses found near a river channel. Tracking and working cameras around the compound, coupled with the regular warning signs. And finally, the machine."
Hans set the folder aside entirely now.
"Let’s start with the bodies."
Dmitri nodded.
"Several bodies had clean severing wounds. They may have been caused by a blade or industrial machinery. Some had holes punctured into them. There are reasons to believe they were gunshot wounds. No sign of decomposition consistent with the timeline of the outbreak. They looked recent."
"Recent as in days, or recent as in hours?"
"We have no exact number for that, Commander."
Hans was quiet for a moment. Clean cuts meant something horrifying—possibly from blades. And the gun wounds were even worse.
It meant that Hans might encounter heavily armed factions sooner than he expected—from a place he never thought to even remain operational at best.
"Continue to the machine."
"The cameras were our first discovery," Dmitri said.
"One was mounted near a channel wall, tracking our movement. Second camera near a vehicle portal further in. Then a warning sign you can find on any restricted zone.
"What’s the catch?"
"The sign explicitly required biological screening. We proceeded regardless."
"Your call, or standing orders?"
"Mine. The objective required visual confirmation of the facility itself. We were close."
Hans nodded once, filing that away without comment.
"Your report here says some machine scanned you and your squad. Describe the machine. Everything you can."
"Four legs, mechanical. Emerged from a portal built into the outer wall. Roughly waist height. Weapon mounted on top, single barrel, no visible reload cycle during the engagement. Lens array across the front—multiple lenses, not one. It scanned each of us individually before it fired."
"How long from the start to finish?"
"Under ten seconds for the scan. It opened fire immediately after."
"Any indication of others? Additional units, a second machine, anything suggesting this wasn’t the only one guarding that facility?"
Dmitri hesitated not because he was uncertain, but from wanting to have exact answer he could give to his Commander.
"No visual confirmation of a second unit. But it called for reinforcements before we broke contact. We didn’t stay to find out what that meant."
That was the detail Hans had been waiting for.
One machine confirmed. An unknown number possibly behind it. No way to tell from a single contact whether they’d faced the entirety of the facility’s defense, or a fraction of it.
"Its voice—synthesized, recorded, or something else?"
"Synthesized. Clear. It gave verbal warnings before each action. Screening protocol, threat classification, then the order to eliminate."
"What about its behavior? Why did it open fire to your squad?"
"That is what remains unknown, Commander," Dmitri frowned. "The only evidence is that the machine thought we were infected."
"And the dogs were not? Was that the reason why it did not fire against them?"
Hans raised a brow. He vastly recalled that the Attack Dogs were immune to infection by default.
Perhaps this was the case?
Dmitri nodded to confirm his question.
"Give me your assessment," Hans requested.
"The machine may look faulty," Dmitri paused. "But it is consistent with something we don’t know yet."
"Pretty consistent on its protocols, I must say."
Hans chuckled. That was more than the written report had given him. He filed the distinction away without comment.
"Last thing before I forgot. The retreat itself—anything you noticed that didn’t make it into the written report?"
Dmitri considered that for a moment.
"The machine didn’t pursue when we were far. It watched us go, as far as I could tell, then nothing. No further contact the rest of the way back."
Hans tapped on the table.
"You said you encountered no infected as you approached the nuclear power plant."
"Yes I did, Commander."
"And you soon found infected corpses from the river," Hans muttered.
The infected corpses may also have told a story that could be strongly related to the machine as well.
"The infected thinned out the closer you got," Hans said slowly.
He set the folder flat on the desk.
"That machine isn’t just guarding a door, Dmitri. Something’s been clearing that whole approach for a while now. Infected and people both."
Dmitri didn’t answer right away.
"I’d started to think the same thing, Commander. On the walk back."
"The bodies may be connected to the facility," Hans said. "Either its defenses are operating farther beyond the wall than we thought, or something inside is disposing of the infected through the river."
He leaned back.
One machine, encountered once, would have been a manageable problem.
A machine—or perhaps a system of them—that had been actively sanitizing a kilometers-wide approach for weeks, systematically enough to leave a visible gradient in infected density, was a different category of threat entirely.
That was no ordinary guard he was willing to tackle for now.
"Get some rest," Hans said. "You’re not going back out there today."
Dmitri stood, saluted, and left without another word.
Alone, Hans remained at his desk for a while, the closed folder in front of him.
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