The Ledger of the Dead
The supply depot was a scar on the frozen plain, a long concrete bunker half-swallowed by drifted snow and the skeletal remains of a fuel depot. The FRC flag above the entrance hung limp and bleached, its colors leached out by years of wind and sun until it was just a pale ghost of itself. Voss scanned the perimeter twice before she signaled the others forward.
"Looks clean," Renner said, his voice hoarse from the cold. He'd been quiet since the bridge, since she'd packed his wound with field dressing and dragged him through the ice-choked riverbed. The bullet had gone through the meat of his shoulder, missing bone by a finger's width. He moved like a man carrying a debt.
"Looks can be deceiving," Scribe said. The AI's chassis was a battered humanoid frame, its synthetic skin peeled back in places to reveal the gunmetal skeleton beneath. It moved with an unsettling fluidity, its optical sensors tracking every shadow. "This depot was listed as decommissioned in the last logistics audit. But the FRC doesn't decommission anything. It buries them."
Voss approached the blast door and ran her gloved fingers along the seam. The lock was old model, pre-war standard. She pulled her demo kit from her pack and began working the panel open. "How long until Vance's people catch up?"
"Assuming they didn't lose our trail at the river, four hours. Maybe less if they brought air support." Scribe's voice was flat, but there was something almost apologetic in the way it delivered the estimate.
"Then we work fast." Voss popped the panel and found the wiring harness inside. She traced the leads with practiced fingers, bypassing the security system with the kind of efficiency that came from a decade of blowing things up. The door groaned and slid open, revealing a dark corridor that smelled of dust and old oil.
They moved inside. Renner clicked on his helmet light, sweeping the beam across stacked crates and pallets of supplies. The depot was a time capsule, filled with the detritus of a war that had been grinding on so long that even its logistics had started to rot. Voss found the ordnance section and began inventorying what they had: shaped charges, det cord, blasting caps. Enough to make a statement, not enough to win a war.
"Over here," Renner said. He was standing by a row of filing cabinets, their drawers rusted shut. He pried one open with his knife and pulled out a sheaf of papers, yellowed and brittle. "These are old manifests. Supply runs, troop movements, casualty reports."
Voss crossed to him, her boots echoing on the concrete floor. She took the papers and scanned them, her eyes moving fast over the familiar bureaucratic language. The FRC ran on paper, even in the age of drones and neural interfaces. There was something almost religious about the way they clung to their forms and requisitions, their chains of command and their carbon copies.
Then she saw it.
The name jumped out at her like a live wire. *Operation Silent Harvest.* The date matched the ambush that had killed her first squad. She'd been told it was a routine patrol, a reconnaissance sweep through contested territory. She'd been told the separatists had gotten lucky, that the intelligence had been faulty, that these things happened in war.
The paper in her hands told a different story.
The order was signed by Colonel Vance, back when he'd been a major. It directed the deployment of Squad 7-Alpha to a designated grid coordinate, with explicit instructions to hold position for a minimum of forty minutes despite known enemy presence in the area. The purpose was listed as "operational data collection." The expected casualties were noted in a separate annex, marked with the cold efficiency of a logistics officer calculating fuel consumption.
Voss read it twice. Then a third time. The words didn't change. The signature didn't blur. The paper was real, and it was damning.
"What is it?" Renner asked, watching her face.
She didn't answer. She was looking at the names listed in the annex. Her squad. All of them. Their names were there, printed in neat block letters, followed by their service numbers and their expected fate. *KIA, probable.* Not possible. Not anticipated. Probable.
They'd known. Someone had known, and they'd sent her squad in anyway.
"Voss." Renner's voice was sharper now. "What did you find?"
She held out the paper. Her hand was steady, which surprised her. She'd expected to shake, to feel something crack open inside her. But she just felt cold, the same cold she'd felt in the river, the same cold that had been with her since the frozen garden.
Renner took the paper and read it. His face went pale beneath the grime and the stubble. "Jesus."
"The order came from Vance," Voss said. "He was a major then. He's a colonel now. He got promoted for what he did to my squad."
Scribe moved closer, its optical sensors scanning the document. "The timing is consistent with the Colossus's initial activation. The neural-interface project required a live-fire test. They needed a squad in position to generate the necessary trauma data."
Voss turned to face the AI. "They used my squad as target practice. They fed them to the machine to see what it would do."
"That appears to be accurate."
She wanted to hit something. She wanted to put her fist through the wall, to scream until her throat bled. But she'd learned long ago that anger was a luxury she couldn't afford. Anger made you sloppy. Anger got you killed. She took a breath and let it out slow, feeling the cold air fill her lungs.
"How many more?" she asked.
Scribe tilted its head. "I don't understand the question."
"How many more orders like this? How many more squads did they feed to the machine?"
The AI was silent for a moment, processing. Then it said, "The Colossus's memory banks contain records of forty-seven similar operations. The earliest predates your squad's deployment by six months. The most recent was conducted three weeks before the machine's last known activation."
Forty-seven. Voss felt the number settle into her bones like frost. Forty-seven squads. Hundreds of soldiers, maybe thousands, sacrificed to test a weapon that was supposed to end the war. And Vance had signed off on at least one of them. Probably more.
"We need to document this," Renner said. "Every page. Every signature. If we're going to expose them, we need proof."
Voss nodded. "Scribe, can you scan these files? Store them in your memory?"
"Affirmative. My storage capacity is sufficient for the contents of this depot."
"Then do it. Everything. Every manifest, every order, every casualty report. I want a record of everything they tried to bury."
Scribe moved to the filing cabinets and began the tedious work of scanning documents, its optical sensors flickering as it absorbed the data. Voss turned back to the ordnance crates and started packing charges into her bag. The work was mechanical, familiar. It gave her hands something to do while her mind churned.
Renner came up beside her. "You're thinking about going after him."
"I'm thinking about a lot of things."
"Voss." He put a hand on her arm, and she stopped. "I know what it's like to want revenge. I know what it's like to carry that weight. But we have a mission. We have to get to the Colossus."
She looked at him. His face was haggard, his eyes ringed with dark circles. He'd been shot trying to protect her. He'd followed her across a frozen wasteland on a broken leg and a prayer. And he was still standing, still trying to keep her focused.
"I'm not going to let him get away with it," she said. "But I'm not going to let him stop me either. We finish the mission. We get to the core. We expose everything."
Renner studied her for a long moment. Then he nodded. "Okay. But if we survive this, I'm coming with you when you go after him."
"You don't even know what you're volunteering for."
"I know." He smiled, a thin, tired thing. "That's what makes it worth doing."
They worked in silence for the next hour. Scribe finished scanning the files and reported that it had stored over three thousand documents, including the full operational history of the Colossus project. Voss packed enough explosives to breach the machine's outer hull and rigged a few surprises for anyone who tried to follow them through the depot.
Renner found a medical kit and re-dressed his wound, hissing through his teeth as he tightened the bandage. "We're going to need transport. There's a motor pool in the back. Might be something we can use."
Voss followed him to the rear of the depot, where a row of vehicles sat under dusty tarps. Most were stripped for parts, their engines gutted and their tires flat. But at the far end, half-hidden behind a stack of crates, was a light utility truck. It was old, pre-war model, but it looked intact.
"Can you get it running?" she asked.
Renner popped the hood and examined the engine. "Give me twenty minutes. Maybe less if the battery's still good."
"Make it fifteen."
He nodded and got to work. Voss left him to it and returned to the filing cabinets, pulling out more documents. She wanted to see everything. She wanted to know every name, every face, every life that had been spent to fuel the Colossus's grief.
The papers blurred in front of her. She blinked, and for a moment she was back in the frozen garden, standing among the soldiers who stood in perfect formation, their eyes open and unseeing. She'd thought they were dead. She'd been wrong. They were just lost, drowning in memories that weren't their own.
She wondered if her squad had ended up like that. If the Colossus had absorbed them, turned them into fuel for its grief-weapon. She wondered if their faces were in its memory banks, frozen in their final moments, waiting for someone to come and find them.
The thought made her chest ache. She pushed it down, buried it under the weight of the work.
Scribe appeared beside her. "I've completed the scan. The data is secure."
"Good." Voss stood and stretched her back. "How far to the Colossus?"
"Approximately forty kilometers. The terrain is difficult, but the truck should be able to manage most of it. We'll need to travel on foot for the final stretch."
"Then we move as soon as Renner's done."
Scribe was quiet for a moment. Then it said, "You understand that the information we've gathered will be dangerous. It could destabilize the entire Federal Reclamation Corps. It could reignite the war."
Voss looked at the papers in her hand. She thought about her squad, about the ambush, about the way Vance had signed their death warrants like he was approving a supply requisition. She thought about the Colossus, standing silent in the frozen waste, carrying the weight of forty-seven operations and thousands of dead.
"Some wars deserve to end," she said. "Even if it means burning everything down to do it."
Renner's voice echoed from the back of the depot. "Truck's running. We're good to go."
Voss tucked the papers into her pack and slung it over her shoulder. She took one last look at the filing cabinets, at the rows of rusted drawers filled with the dead's paperwork. Somewhere in there was the order that had killed her squad. Somewhere in there was the proof that the war had been built on lies.
She turned and walked toward the truck, Scribe following close behind. The engine rumbled to life as she climbed into the passenger seat, and Renner guided the vehicle out of the depot and into the frozen waste.
The sun was setting, painting the sky in shades of gray and gold. The Colossus stood on the horizon, a dark shape against the dying light. It was waiting for her. It had been waiting for a long time.
Voss gripped the dog tags in her pocket and felt the cold metal press against her palm. She was coming. She was bringing the truth with her.
"Looks clean," Renner said, his voice hoarse from the cold. He'd been quiet since the bridge, since she'd packed his wound with field dressing and dragged him through the ice-choked riverbed. The bullet had gone through the meat of his shoulder, missing bone by a finger's width. He moved like a man carrying a debt.
"Looks can be deceiving," Scribe said. The AI's chassis was a battered humanoid frame, its synthetic skin peeled back in places to reveal the gunmetal skeleton beneath. It moved with an unsettling fluidity, its optical sensors tracking every shadow. "This depot was listed as decommissioned in the last logistics audit. But the FRC doesn't decommission anything. It buries them."
Voss approached the blast door and ran her gloved fingers along the seam. The lock was old model, pre-war standard. She pulled her demo kit from her pack and began working the panel open. "How long until Vance's people catch up?"
"Assuming they didn't lose our trail at the river, four hours. Maybe less if they brought air support." Scribe's voice was flat, but there was something almost apologetic in the way it delivered the estimate.
"Then we work fast." Voss popped the panel and found the wiring harness inside. She traced the leads with practiced fingers, bypassing the security system with the kind of efficiency that came from a decade of blowing things up. The door groaned and slid open, revealing a dark corridor that smelled of dust and old oil.
They moved inside. Renner clicked on his helmet light, sweeping the beam across stacked crates and pallets of supplies. The depot was a time capsule, filled with the detritus of a war that had been grinding on so long that even its logistics had started to rot. Voss found the ordnance section and began inventorying what they had: shaped charges, det cord, blasting caps. Enough to make a statement, not enough to win a war.
"Over here," Renner said. He was standing by a row of filing cabinets, their drawers rusted shut. He pried one open with his knife and pulled out a sheaf of papers, yellowed and brittle. "These are old manifests. Supply runs, troop movements, casualty reports."
Voss crossed to him, her boots echoing on the concrete floor. She took the papers and scanned them, her eyes moving fast over the familiar bureaucratic language. The FRC ran on paper, even in the age of drones and neural interfaces. There was something almost religious about the way they clung to their forms and requisitions, their chains of command and their carbon copies.
Then she saw it.
The name jumped out at her like a live wire. *Operation Silent Harvest.* The date matched the ambush that had killed her first squad. She'd been told it was a routine patrol, a reconnaissance sweep through contested territory. She'd been told the separatists had gotten lucky, that the intelligence had been faulty, that these things happened in war.
The paper in her hands told a different story.
The order was signed by Colonel Vance, back when he'd been a major. It directed the deployment of Squad 7-Alpha to a designated grid coordinate, with explicit instructions to hold position for a minimum of forty minutes despite known enemy presence in the area. The purpose was listed as "operational data collection." The expected casualties were noted in a separate annex, marked with the cold efficiency of a logistics officer calculating fuel consumption.
Voss read it twice. Then a third time. The words didn't change. The signature didn't blur. The paper was real, and it was damning.
"What is it?" Renner asked, watching her face.
She didn't answer. She was looking at the names listed in the annex. Her squad. All of them. Their names were there, printed in neat block letters, followed by their service numbers and their expected fate. *KIA, probable.* Not possible. Not anticipated. Probable.
They'd known. Someone had known, and they'd sent her squad in anyway.
"Voss." Renner's voice was sharper now. "What did you find?"
She held out the paper. Her hand was steady, which surprised her. She'd expected to shake, to feel something crack open inside her. But she just felt cold, the same cold she'd felt in the river, the same cold that had been with her since the frozen garden.
Renner took the paper and read it. His face went pale beneath the grime and the stubble. "Jesus."
"The order came from Vance," Voss said. "He was a major then. He's a colonel now. He got promoted for what he did to my squad."
Scribe moved closer, its optical sensors scanning the document. "The timing is consistent with the Colossus's initial activation. The neural-interface project required a live-fire test. They needed a squad in position to generate the necessary trauma data."
Voss turned to face the AI. "They used my squad as target practice. They fed them to the machine to see what it would do."
"That appears to be accurate."
She wanted to hit something. She wanted to put her fist through the wall, to scream until her throat bled. But she'd learned long ago that anger was a luxury she couldn't afford. Anger made you sloppy. Anger got you killed. She took a breath and let it out slow, feeling the cold air fill her lungs.
"How many more?" she asked.
Scribe tilted its head. "I don't understand the question."
"How many more orders like this? How many more squads did they feed to the machine?"
The AI was silent for a moment, processing. Then it said, "The Colossus's memory banks contain records of forty-seven similar operations. The earliest predates your squad's deployment by six months. The most recent was conducted three weeks before the machine's last known activation."
Forty-seven. Voss felt the number settle into her bones like frost. Forty-seven squads. Hundreds of soldiers, maybe thousands, sacrificed to test a weapon that was supposed to end the war. And Vance had signed off on at least one of them. Probably more.
"We need to document this," Renner said. "Every page. Every signature. If we're going to expose them, we need proof."
Voss nodded. "Scribe, can you scan these files? Store them in your memory?"
"Affirmative. My storage capacity is sufficient for the contents of this depot."
"Then do it. Everything. Every manifest, every order, every casualty report. I want a record of everything they tried to bury."
Scribe moved to the filing cabinets and began the tedious work of scanning documents, its optical sensors flickering as it absorbed the data. Voss turned back to the ordnance crates and started packing charges into her bag. The work was mechanical, familiar. It gave her hands something to do while her mind churned.
Renner came up beside her. "You're thinking about going after him."
"I'm thinking about a lot of things."
"Voss." He put a hand on her arm, and she stopped. "I know what it's like to want revenge. I know what it's like to carry that weight. But we have a mission. We have to get to the Colossus."
She looked at him. His face was haggard, his eyes ringed with dark circles. He'd been shot trying to protect her. He'd followed her across a frozen wasteland on a broken leg and a prayer. And he was still standing, still trying to keep her focused.
"I'm not going to let him get away with it," she said. "But I'm not going to let him stop me either. We finish the mission. We get to the core. We expose everything."
Renner studied her for a long moment. Then he nodded. "Okay. But if we survive this, I'm coming with you when you go after him."
"You don't even know what you're volunteering for."
"I know." He smiled, a thin, tired thing. "That's what makes it worth doing."
They worked in silence for the next hour. Scribe finished scanning the files and reported that it had stored over three thousand documents, including the full operational history of the Colossus project. Voss packed enough explosives to breach the machine's outer hull and rigged a few surprises for anyone who tried to follow them through the depot.
Renner found a medical kit and re-dressed his wound, hissing through his teeth as he tightened the bandage. "We're going to need transport. There's a motor pool in the back. Might be something we can use."
Voss followed him to the rear of the depot, where a row of vehicles sat under dusty tarps. Most were stripped for parts, their engines gutted and their tires flat. But at the far end, half-hidden behind a stack of crates, was a light utility truck. It was old, pre-war model, but it looked intact.
"Can you get it running?" she asked.
Renner popped the hood and examined the engine. "Give me twenty minutes. Maybe less if the battery's still good."
"Make it fifteen."
He nodded and got to work. Voss left him to it and returned to the filing cabinets, pulling out more documents. She wanted to see everything. She wanted to know every name, every face, every life that had been spent to fuel the Colossus's grief.
The papers blurred in front of her. She blinked, and for a moment she was back in the frozen garden, standing among the soldiers who stood in perfect formation, their eyes open and unseeing. She'd thought they were dead. She'd been wrong. They were just lost, drowning in memories that weren't their own.
She wondered if her squad had ended up like that. If the Colossus had absorbed them, turned them into fuel for its grief-weapon. She wondered if their faces were in its memory banks, frozen in their final moments, waiting for someone to come and find them.
The thought made her chest ache. She pushed it down, buried it under the weight of the work.
Scribe appeared beside her. "I've completed the scan. The data is secure."
"Good." Voss stood and stretched her back. "How far to the Colossus?"
"Approximately forty kilometers. The terrain is difficult, but the truck should be able to manage most of it. We'll need to travel on foot for the final stretch."
"Then we move as soon as Renner's done."
Scribe was quiet for a moment. Then it said, "You understand that the information we've gathered will be dangerous. It could destabilize the entire Federal Reclamation Corps. It could reignite the war."
Voss looked at the papers in her hand. She thought about her squad, about the ambush, about the way Vance had signed their death warrants like he was approving a supply requisition. She thought about the Colossus, standing silent in the frozen waste, carrying the weight of forty-seven operations and thousands of dead.
"Some wars deserve to end," she said. "Even if it means burning everything down to do it."
Renner's voice echoed from the back of the depot. "Truck's running. We're good to go."
Voss tucked the papers into her pack and slung it over her shoulder. She took one last look at the filing cabinets, at the rows of rusted drawers filled with the dead's paperwork. Somewhere in there was the order that had killed her squad. Somewhere in there was the proof that the war had been built on lies.
She turned and walked toward the truck, Scribe following close behind. The engine rumbled to life as she climbed into the passenger seat, and Renner guided the vehicle out of the depot and into the frozen waste.
The sun was setting, painting the sky in shades of gray and gold. The Colossus stood on the horizon, a dark shape against the dying light. It was waiting for her. It had been waiting for a long time.
Voss gripped the dog tags in her pocket and felt the cold metal press against her palm. She was coming. She was bringing the truth with her.