Chapter Text
The radio in Cirocco Wolfang's circuitry crackled to life, the sound coming in through an entirely separate channel than her hearing, which was occupied with the noise of her paws crunching in the snow. 'Smoke sighted. Northern tip of Lake Kronotskoye, looks like.'
She slowed to a quadrupedal jog, turning towards the lake with a swish of her tail. 'Just what we needed. What do you think? Illegal campers? Trash fire? Poachers? It had better not be poachers. I'll bite someone.'
'No biting. We've talked about this,' Trigger scolded, directly via encoded radio signal. In person, he wouldn't have seemed to be saying anything at all. 'Keep your nose to the ground on the way. I'm not sure what's going on yet, but I'll go check it out from the air.'
'You got it.' She put on a burst of speed, flashing through the snowy trees like a dark bolt of metal. Cirocco was a Wolfang model, built to navigate remote and rugged terrain with the capacity for both bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion. She almost hadn't existed. Just before her manufacture, a fairly prominent Wolfang had been implicated as a Maverick, and that had a nasty tendency of ending entire design lines by association. The demand for units that could patrol the kinds of areas that she could, however, was just too high, and the environmental work the Wolfang series had provided in the aftermath of the Eurasia Colony Incident helped to cushion the blow to the model's image in the public imagination.
Cirocco was sleek, sharp, more animal than human. Her senses of smell and hearing exceeded those of a natural wolf. She could reach a top speed of fifty miles per hour in almost any terrain, and she could sustain that speed without overheating for hours in cold enough conditions. Stationed where she was on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the conditions were sufficiently cold most of the year.
She burst from the trees and onto a perfectly white meadow, snow exploding into a cloud in her wake. Far above, she spotted the tiny dot that was her partner unit, Trigger Crowrang. Like her, Trigger had almost not been built due to associations with Mavericks, and like her, his specifications were ultimately too useful to discard. Where Cirocco was a ground specialist who could navigate any terrain, Trigger was an expert flier, with telescopic vision and highly efficient flight systems, hardened against icy weather. They had been commissioned and built as a pair about two years prior, and employed by the Russian government since.
Conservation efforts had suffered enough before the Eurasia Colony Incident. The largest piece of the colony had landed in China, on the border between the Shandong and Jiangsu provinces. The loss of life had been astronomical, even with China's advanced ground-to-air defenses chipping at it the entire way down. Further pieces impacted the Yellow Sea and Sea of Japan, causing massive tsunamis and sending saline clouds into the skies for days afterwards, as well as leaving craters on South Korea's northeast shore and at long last ending the Kuril Islands dispute by simply obliterating the contested islands entirely.
The second-largest piece of the Eurasia Colony had fallen on the largely unpopulated Kamchatka Peninsula, causing humanity to breathe a sigh of relief. However, there was no such thing as a truly uninhabited area when it came to flora and fauna, and the mere four years since the impact had been endless work to clean up the debris and try to restore some semblance of nature. It took constant monitoring and protection, regardless of the weather, and that was where reploids like Cirocco and Trigger came in. Working as a linked pair, they could easily monitor wildlife on the ground in conditions that a human could not have endured.
Cirocco lifted her nose to the well-below-freezing air and inhaled. Analysis yielded the faintest trace of hydrocarbons on top of wood smoke. She growled, and radioed Trigger. 'Whoever it is, they're using accelerants. Call it in?'
'Will do.' Trigger sent a brief message to their overseer, circling as he awaited a response. 'Orders are to investigate, but do not engage.'
Far below, Cirocco huffed. 'Fine, fine. No biting…today. Yet.' She allowed her speed to slow a little. Trigger would try to get visual first and let her know what to expect; that was how they had always worked. Once she had some idea what was happening, she'd move in and deal with the situation, with his backup as needed. 'Investigate but do not engage…what a bother,' she sent, in an under-her-breath tone. 'Someone's setting fires and we're just supposed to watch them.'
'Someone's setting fires and we're supposed to report back and await orders,' Trigger corrected. This was a conversation they had nearly every single time anything mildly interesting happened, and they both knew it.
'Orders. Whatever. You see anything yet?' Cirocco slowed a little further, though if she moved any more slowly she'd need to switch to bipedal mode and just wade her way through the snow.
'Nothing but smoke,' Trigger returned.
'De-ice your eyes,' Cirocco radioed back, snarkily.
'I'm going in a little closer. Hold your distance.'
Cirocco picked up speed, but veered north, maintaining a radius around their target. Despite her complaints, she followed orders quite well. She just saw no need to do so quietly. The same independence that made her able to thrive in the wilderness for weeks at a time with only Trigger and the wolves of the Kronotsky Biosphere Zapovednik for company made her chafe when directly commanded, but she tolerated it aside from her tendency to verbally spar with whoever gave them to her.
'That's strange…'
'What's strange?'
It took Trigger a few moments to respond. 'No people at all. Just a brush fire. Wait…no, I see something, heading your direction. Flying, but it's moving pretty quickly and it's low to the ground. Prepare to intercept.'
'Finally,' Cirocco chuffed, putting on another burst of speed and turning towards Trigger's position. Whatever it was, she spotted it, and while it was too small to make out, it wasn't fast enough to get away from her. With a lunge and a snarl, she leapt a fair fifteen feet into the air, catching the intruder in her mouth and slowing to a gentle lope in the lee of a stand of trees, where the snow wasn't quite so chest high.
'Pfeh, it smells and tastes like gasoline. I think it leaked all over my mouth.' She reconfigured her posture, shifting to a bipedal stance, and pulled the offending thing out of her jaws. It was a quadcopter mechaniloid, with a flamethrower nozzle mounted onto it. Of all the things, Cirocco thought. 'You would not believe what I just plucked from the sky.' A gout of flame shot from the nozzle, and she jumped in surprise, glad that she had incidentally been holding it with the nozzle pointed away from her. 'Ooh, we got a live one.' She gave the nozzle a sharp twist, snapping it and its ignition coil off neatly and rendering it harmless.
Trigger circled lower, braking with several powerful flaps of his wings and a blast of his propulsion systems and coming to a stop beside Cirocco. He was the lightest of the Crowrang models yet, built for power conservation in extended flight. Like Cirocco, he was a newer, sleeker design; unlike her, he was slender, sporting the most basic of armor and very few frills, where she was heavier and more powerful. Like their organic counterparts, they made an effective pair, covering each other's weaknesses with their respective strengths. 'What is it?' he asked, still via radio in case anybody was around to hear them.
Cirocco held the drone out. 'Someone's playing stupid games. Why would you build this just to send it into the middle of nowhere and start fires in the middle of the snow?'
Trigger communicated briefly with their supervisor. Cirocco could have done it, but the two of them knew she would likely pick an argument, and over the years they'd concluded that letting Trigger handle anything that involved speaking to authority was the much simpler course of action. 'We extinguish the fires, and then we bring the mechaniloid back for analysis and disposal.'
'Easy.' She reached with two fingers into the drone's miniature helicopter blades and began snapping them off, to ensure that it wouldn't get away again, then handed it off to Trigger for safekeeping.
She threw herself to the ground, reconfiguring her joints on the way. By the time she hit the snow, she was quadrupedal again and off at a run towards the smoke trickling through the trees. Along the way, Cirocco began emitting a hum as she primed an internal compressor, snow melting on her chassis from the heat.
The wolf reploid found the source of the smoke. It wasn't much of a fire, if she had to be honest, even with the gasoline. The deep snow and sparsity of larger trees kept it largely contained without her intervention. Still, Cirocco did not abide trouble on her land. She opened her mouth and fired a freezing burst of chemical foam across the smoldering flames. It expanded instantly into almost nothing upon contact with the air, then crystallized on contact with the surfaces of the brush, until the fire was completely smothered under a blanket of ghostly transparent shards of ice that sublimated away in the sunlight as Cirocco watched. Frost rimed her plating, now, as the intense cold of the depressurization reached her surface.
'Dealt with,' she reported to Trigger. 'No footprints or anything I could see to follow, either. Who the hell uses a drone to start a fire in a random place at a distance?'
Trigger's reply came after a few moments. He was probably thinking. He did that too much, in Cirocco's opinion. 'I couldn't begin to guess.'
He has probably begun to make some guesses, Cirocco thought, but she would sooner pry his bolts out of him than his thoughts, if he weren't inclined to share yet, so she let it slide and ran back to him. "I radioed. They want to see it in Petropavlovsk," Trigger said aloud.
"Petropavlovsk," Cirocco repeated, incredulous. Her tail swished in the snow. "On this short of notice? They can't just take it at Dolinovka?"
"It's only two hundred kilometers as the Crowrang flies," Trigger said. "It's nothing. I'll be back by morning at the latest."
"Hmph," Cirocco huffed. As independent as she was, having Trigger outside of radio range made her fur itch with anxiety. They were each other's firewalls, from almost the moment they were activated. They may have argued and occasionally tussled, yes, but they had sworn to defend each other at all times and from all dangers, and that was difficult to do with one of them over the horizon. A human might have called them blood brothers, though reploids chose less biological phrases in general. "You had better be."
Trigger opened his wings and poised for takeoff, the disabled mechaniloid tucked under his arm. "Go play with your pack. I'll be back before you know it."
"Right, right." Cirocco bumped her snout against Trigger's beak, not too roughly, but not entirely gently either. She only showed affection to packmates, which Trigger was one, even if he had the unfortunate disability of being entirely bipedal. "Hurry home."
"I always do." With a downbeat and a rush of heat from his propulsion systems, Trigger took off. Cirocco watched him go until he was out of sight in the gray sky, then shook the snow off her shoulders and trotted northwest, towards the ridges at the foot of Kizimen Volcano. Her sharp nose was good for more than simply detecting gasoline fires. She could smell her way home to her pack blindfolded, if she needed to.
As she approached, she paused, and howled, then waited, ears erect. Soon enough, she heard several replying howls in the distance. Cirocco picked her pace up, impatiently bursting through the snow. Independent though she was, she did not like being entirely alone. Trigger had not been wrong when he told her to go to her pack.
She followed her nose, and arrived at a clearing against an outcropping of stone. Beneath it, the breeding pair had dug out their den, and several curious cubs peeped out of the shallow pit at the sound of Cirocco's arrival. The others hopped to their feet and pranced out to meet her, tails wagging, and within moments six other wolves were whining happily and competing to see if they could fit her snout into theirs and vice-versa. They were not great fans of the lingering scent of gasoline on her tongue, and some concerned noises ensued, but she was fine and reassured them as much insofar as was possible without verbal communication.
To humans and reploids alike, climbing on each other and comparing mouth flavors was an odd way to say hello, but Cirocco was not just any reploid. She had been pre-loaded with as much knowledge of wolf socialization as humanity had amassed, and much of the time she felt more related to canines than humans. Even in her defragmenting dreams, she was a wolf, and not a wolf of titanium alloy and silicon. Trigger had his own database of corvid knowledge, and she shared enough of it to generally understand his body language, and vice versa; after all, their representative species interacted extensively and cooperatively in the wild as well.
Cirocco tucked her tail and greeted the pack's breeding pair next, bumping muzzles with each of them, then the pups, who she rambunctiously but gently bowled over with her nose and sniffed thoroughly. Everyone smelled healthy and well fed, which eased her mind. She flopped to her side in the den, allowing her systems to run just a little bit warmer for the pups' benefit as the sun descended behind the mountains.
Wolves did not, of course, have names. Accordingly, Cirocco did not really call her packmates anything in her head. They had titles, of a sort, though even these were more impressions of their appearance, voice, personality, and most importantly their scent. She had not tried to translate them to Russian or indeed any language, and if she had to refer to them in speaking with anybody else, they had assigned numbers which she used. Cirocco did not have a name to the wolves, either, but she certainly had her own pitch at which she howled, and her place in the pecking order. They had found her odd at the start, to be sure, but she turned out to be impervious to teeth, she did not behave threateningly even after having been chewed on, she could run warm at will, and she proved quite willing to chase bears off with no regard for her own safety if they got too close to the den. After that, they'd decided she might as well be a packmate.
Cirocco did sometimes compose a report or three about her pack as part of her employment. She was on friendly enough terms with a few other packs in the area, as well, and she kept biologists updated about them too, but those were not her pack. She had known these particular wolves since she had been activated and stationed, and outside of Trigger, they were the closest thing she had to family. She couldn't spend as much time with them as she liked, since she did have duties, but she returned most nights.
They howled amicably together in a chorus into the late evening. Cirocco didn't join in hunting, since that felt unsporting to the prey to her and would have gone against her orders besides, but her wolves were competent enough without her. It wasn't as if she was trying to claim any part of their kills for herself, so it wasn't like she was freeloading. Once the nighttime chill truly set in, the pack curled up in a pile, Cirocco towards the outside as the cold didn't bother her and she made a good windblock, and they all slept. She stayed half-alert, defragmenting with one eye open until the dead of night, when her systems finally settled enough to switch to a lower power mode.
Cirocco's nose twitched. Olfactory sensors sent a report to her central processing. Central processing examined it, ranked it, and discarded it as highly likely to be a result of defragmentation processes. Undeterred, her olfactory sensors continued to report, though it wasn't until her auditory sensors joined in reporting abnormal input that central processing finally agreed and began to terminate defragmentation processes in favor of resuming consciousness processes.
The wolf reploid cracked one eye open, sleepy but suspicious. It was pre-dawn, still dark, though her packmates were beginning to stir. Ears pricked up as they noticed something off as well, and one of the non-breeding males, born from a few litters past, got to his feet warily, stalking out to sniff the air.
Cirocco dislodged a sleeping pup and stood, giving herself a thorough shake outside of the den. She raised her nose to the breeze, but it must have shifted since she'd detected…whatever it was she'd detected. Her systems had been frustratingly inspecific in her sleep and evidently discarded the information upon waking. Useless, she huffed internally.
'You back yet?' she radioed, hopefully, but Trigger did not respond. Her range was good, but not that good. Height might help her, if he was just on the horizon, so she climbed the rock over the den and tried again. 'Hey. Trigger. You within range?'
She still didn't receive a signal, so she sat on her haunches and waited, nose still to the air and ears pricked. Finally, the wind shifted again, slightly, and Cirocco smelled it: gasoline, again. But they'd incapacitated that mechaniloid…unless, of course, there were more, she realized. Without Trigger's vantage point in the sky, they would be a lot harder for her to find alone. The two of them worked as a pair to triangulate disturbances, and while Trigger could perform well enough solo, Cirocco had the disadvantage in this case.
Cirocco closed her eyes and raised the sensitivity of her auditory sensors to maximum. The faintest choppy hum met her ears, though it was steadily increasing in volume. She growled, quietly. Another one of those things. Well, she could deal with them herself, she knew. After a few moments more to make certain of the direction and to account for the wind, she leapt down from the little overhang, dashing through the sparkling blanket of newly-fallen snow over the high meadow.
Even in the dark, Cirocco could see clearly, and if she'd had any doubts they would have evaporated in the flash of the puff of flame she spotted. 'Idiot thing,' she growled under her breath, trying once more to radio Trigger just in case and receiving nothing back. She increased speed a bit, startling a hare out of her way as she exploded through the frozen white.
The mechaniloid never knew what hit it. Cirocco collided with it so forcefully that several arms of its frame snapped off, and she grabbed and shook it, fangs tearing through its outer skin and crushing components. She threw it aside, and realized that she still heard quadcopter wings, from multiple directions.
'Trigger,' she radioed. 'I don't know what's happening. I don't know what to do. Where are you?'
Cirocco picked a direction and ran, eyes scanning for more of the things. They weren't hard to find. They seemed to be wandering around and starting fires aimlessly. 'Cirocco to Kizimen Geological Station. There's more of those mechaniloids from before, and they're burning everything. I just downed one and I hear at least three more, I think, but Trigger isn't back from Petropavlovsk yet.'
The drones were all heading away from each other, and Cirocco knew it, but she was only one lone reploid and could only do so much. She accelerated again and intercepted a second, though not before it had started a long line of fires.
'Kizimen Station. Trigger is en route. He should be back in about thirty minutes. We're calling for support from Dolinovka, but it's going to take some time to get them together.'
'What do I do until then?' Cirocco asked, trying to spit the taste of gasoline out of her mouth.
'Take down the drones if you can. Put out fires. If you can find where they're coming from, let us know, but controlling the damage is your priority. If you encounter any people, don't engage. Let the team handle them.'
Cirocco must have been scared, she realized, because she didn't see a reason to argue. 'Got it,' she assented, priming her chemical foam compressor again. She ran down the line, extinguishing the sparse trees. At least the fires here couldn't spread at this time of year, but letting the trees burn wasn't acceptable even so.
By the time she had finished, Cirocco could hear and smell several more of the drones, their flamethrowers lighting up the snow in flickering bursts. Why was this happening? Who in the world was doing it? She pursued the nearest one, and it evaded several lunges from her before she succeeded in snatching it out of the air. One powerful bite crunched it into uselessness, and yet, another had already taken its place.
'Kizimen, this is Cirocco. There's too many of them and they're all over. I can't keep up,' she radioed, then to Trigger, 'Trigger. Please. Help me.' He still wasn't in range to respond. She whined as another flew right past her, flamethrower blazing, while she was putting out the flames another had started. She hit it with a burst of foam that clogged its blades and dropped it from the air, but she didn't have an unlimited supply of it; she would eventually run out, and then what?
'Hang in there,' the station operator told her. 'Just do what you can.' Cirocco followed another drone further afield, ambushing it from the frozen bushes, when a new sound reached her ears: high overhead, a helicopter zoomed past.
'Is Dolinovka already mobilized? They can't be here yet,' Cirocco asked the station.
'No, they're ETA forty minutes at least,' the operator replied.
'Then who was that just now? A helicopter came through.'
'I don't know. There shouldn't be anybody in the airspace yet.'
'I'm going to check it out.' Without waiting for approval or denial, Cirocco turned tail and ran towards the receding sound of the helicopter's rotor.
'Stay put and deal with the drones,' the station told her, but she wasn't listening. 'Cirocco. Where are you going? That's an order.'
She slowed, but decided she could do both at once if she was clever, leaping high into the air and snatching another drone. 'There, I took another one down, are you happy?' she radioed back.
'Whoever is in that helicopter, you are not to engage them,' the voice in her head insisted, though she had tuned him out again, pausing for a moment and raising to a bipedal stature for a better vantage. The helicopter had stopped moving, from the sound of it. It was landing near the ridge, unless her ears were entirely deceiving her, and they weren't, she knew.
Then, after a moment, she heard a sound that stopped her antifreeze in her tubing.
Rifle shots.
Without thinking, she hit the ground at full speed, tearing through the snow back to her den. This had been a diversion. Whoever these poachers were, they'd sent Trigger off and lured her into leaving her pack unprotected, and she'd fallen for it.
The reek of blood and fear and musk and gunfire met her nose long before she arrived, and by the time Cirocco burst into the clearing, she had forgotten everything: the operator in her ear, her orders, the mechaniloids, Trigger finally hailing her, all of it gone in a burning haze of rage and grief and vengeance. The poachers scarcely even had time to react before they were in her teeth, ripping a path from one to the next until the den ran red and muddy.
"Cirocco," came a voice, and she whirled to face it on all fours, growling and bristling, jaws dripping with blood, eyes wild. "It's me, Cirocco. It's Trigger." He stood, cautiously, wings half-extended as if he might flee, one dark hand hesitantly extended. "Come on. You know me. Calm down. Listen to me. I heard everything. You were screaming into the radio, but it's alright. I'm not going to hurt you."
She did not know him in that moment. Cirocco did not even know herself. She backed away, snarling, until her hind legs bumped into the tidy stack of wolf corpses that had been her pack. She stopped, planted her paws as if she could protect them in death, and held her ground, still growling.
Trigger nervously lowered himself to one knee, which was awkward with his birdlike legs, but he managed. "Hey. Come on. It's just me, your firewall. I'm back. I'm here to help. Talk to me, Cirocco."
Cirocco's growling tapered off, and slowly her tail tucked. Her ears and hackles lowered. She whined, crawling forward only to crash on her side at Trigger's feet with a pitiable sound. There were no words she knew for what she wanted to say, but she did not need them. He leaned in and crossed his beak with her snout, and she licked him weakly, tongue slick with blood.
"All dead," she finally said, still in a half-whining sob as if she'd forgotten how to even speak. "My pack is dead, the poachers are dead, and when the team from Dolinovka gets here, I'm dead too. What have I done? What am I supposed to do?"
"No," Trigger said, gently but firmly. "You are not dead yet, and I won't let you die. Not while I live."
"But your job," she said, rolling onto her feet. "Your orders. What about them?"
"They can go to hell," Trigger answered. "We swore we'd protect each other long before we had any orders. I'm not leaving you to the disposal crew, and you wouldn't leave me, either."
"I wouldn't," Cirocco agreed. "I wouldn't." She turned, staring at the bodies of her pack. Her only family, aside from Trigger. A howl of mourning rose inside of her suddenly, and she wailed into the night sky until Trigger put a hand on her shoulder.
"I just heard from them. The team is almost here. We have to go," he said.
"And then what?" Cirocco asked, finally quieting. She could still smell the fires the drones had set. There were so many. It had been a losing battle from the start, and if she had realized it sooner…
"And then we keep going. They'll be too busy with the drones to worry about us for a long while, and by then, we'll be far from here."
Cirocco nodded, mutely. "Just show me which way to go."
"Northwest. We'll go over the mountains and try to lose them." Trigger took to the air, and with a final glance over her shoulder, Cirocco followed him on all fours like an earthbound shadow.