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you better fucking believe there were some changes. Handlers were allowed to go after their partners, even if it meant risking their own lives. We weren’t considered assets anymore, we were half-assets. For the first time the army saw us as teams, that a dog wasn’t just a piece of machinery you could replace when “broken.” They started looking at statistics of handlers who offed themselve...
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It didn’t matter where you were from, what your culture or background, the feelings were still the same. Who could suffer that kind of loss and come out in one piece? Anyone who could wouldn’t have made a handler in the first place. That’s what made us our own breed,
THE HOLY RUSSIAN EMPIRE
In order to understand how we became a “religious state,” and how that state began with a man like me, you have to understand the nature of our war against the undead. As with so many other conflicts, our greatest ally was General Winter.
We needed those winter months to reorganize our forces, marshal our population, inventory and distribute our vast stocks of military hardware.
We had a very high casualty rate, most of it in urban combat, and most of that due to faulty ammunition.
“Cugov”
We weren’t as neat and organized as your army.
It was inefficient and wasteful and resulted in too many needless deaths.
we stopped going into the cities and started walling them up during winter.
We didn’t have L pills83 like in your army. The only way to deal with infection was a bullet.
To kill your comrade, even in cases as merciful as infection, was too reminiscent of the decimations. That was the irony of it all. The decimations had given our armed forces the strength and discipline to do anything we asked of them, anything but that.
For a while the responsibility rested with the leadership, the officers and senior sergeants. We couldn’t have made a more damaging decision.
We began to see a noticeable degradation among our field commanders. Dereliction of duty, alcoholism, suicide—suicide became almost epidemic among the officer corps.
“suicide by combat.” He volunteered for increasingly dangerous missions,
Second Decimation,” the fact that almost one in every ten officers killed themselves in those days, a decimation that almost brought our war effort to a crushing halt. The logical alternative, the only one, was to therefore let the boys commit the act themselves.
Officers killing soldiers had cost us too many good officers, and soldiers killing themselves had cost the Lord too many good souls. Suicide was a sin, and we, his servants—those who had chosen to be his shepherds upon the earth—were the only ones who should bear the cross of releasing trapped souls from infected bodies!
that is the message that spread first to every chaplain in the field and then to every civilian priest throughout Mother Russia. What later became known as the act of “Final Purification” was only the first step of a religious fervor
[Deep Glider 7 looks more like a twin fuselage aircraft than a minisub.
the U.S. Navy’s Deep Submergence Combat Corps (DSCC).
My war never ended. If anything, you could say it’s still escalating. Every month we expand our operations and improve our material and human assets.
trying to find them, track them, and predict their movements so maybe we can have some advance warning.
scuba gear or titanium shark suits, are you, because that crap’s got nothing to do with my war? Spear guns and bang sticks and zombie river nets…I can’t help you with any of that. If you want civilians, talk to civilians. But the military did use those methods. Only for brown water ops, and almost exclusively by army pukes.
My war was strictly ADS. Atmospheric Diving Suit. Kind of like a space suit and a suit of armor all rolled into one. The technology actually goes back a couple hundred years,
that sort of technology fell by the wayside when scuba was invented. It only made a comeback when divers had to go deep, real deep, to work on offshore oil rigs.
That’s what an ADS does, its depth and duration only limited by armor and life support.
“Submersible.” A submarine can stay down for years, maintaining its own power, making its own air. A submersible can only make short duration dives, like World War II subs or what we’re in now.
The very nature of an ADS, the fact that it’s really just a suit of armor, makes it ideal for blue and black water combat.
it never happened to us. There was no risk of physical danger.
No one ever dives alone, and I think the longest any ADS diver has ever had to cool his heels was six hours.
Some of the older ones dated back to the seventies, the JIMs and SAMs.
We had three basic U.S. Navy models: the Hardsuit 1200, the 2000, and the Mark 1 Exosuit.
The hardsuits were big enough to allow your arms to be pulled into the central cavity to allow you to operate secondary equipment. What kind of equipment? Lights, video, side scanning sonar.
What kind of weapons did you use? At first we had the M-9, kind of a cheap, modified, knockoff of the Russian APS.
At the depth we needed, they imploded like eggshells. About a year in we got a much more efficient model, the M-11,
The only problem with it was that DeStRes thought production was too expensive. They kept telling us that between our claws and preexisting construction tools, we had more than enough to handle Zack. What changed their minds? Troll. We were in the North Sea, repairing that Norwegian natural gas platform, and suddenly there they were…We’d expected some kind of attack—the noise and light of the construction site always attracted at least a handful of them. We didn’t know a swarm was nearby. One of our sentries sounded off, we headed for his beacon, and we were suddenly inundated. Horrible thing
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the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have this “ZeVDeK”—Zero Visibility Detection Kit—with color-imaging sonar and low-light optics. The picture is relayed through a heads-up display right on your face bowl like a fighter plane. Throw in a pair of stereo hydrophones and you’ve got a real sensory advantage over Zack. That was not the case when I first went exo. We couldn’t see, we couldn’t hear—we couldn’t even feel if a G was trying to grab us from behind.
the one fundamental flaw of an ADS is complete tactile blackout.
That night at Troll…our helmet lights only made the problem worse by throwing up a glare that was only broken by an undead hand or face.
The civilian oil workers, they wouldn’t go back to work, even under threat of reprisals, until we, their escorts, were better armed.
That was how the DSCC came into being as an official outfit. Our first mission was to protect the rig divers, keep the oil flowing. Later we expanded to beachhead sanitation and harbor clearing.
beachhead sanitation? Basically, helping the jarheads get ashore. What we learned during Bermuda, our first amphibious landing, was that the beachhead was coming under constant attack by Gs walking out of the surf. We had to establish a perimeter, a semicircular net around the proposed landing area that was deep enough for ships to pass over, but high enough to keep out Zack. That’s where we came in. Two weeks before the landings took place, a ship would anchor several miles offshore and start banging away with their active sonar. That was to draw Zack away from the beach. Wouldn’t that sonar
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That was a massive, combined operation: mesh divers, ADS units, even civilian volunteers with nothing but a scuba rig and a spear gun.
City. I know grunts like to bitch about fighting to clear a city, but imagine a city underwater,
The worst…the worst was having to clear a sunken ship. There were always a few that had gone down within the harbor boundaries.
the bottom. It looks like a desert wasteland, glowing white against the permanent darkness. I see the stumps of wire coral, broken and trampled by the living dead.]
How do they do it? How are they still around? Nothing in the world corrodes like saltwater. These Gs should have gone way before the ones on land.
So why not the rest of them? Is it the temperature at these depths, is it the pressure? And why do they have such a resistance to pressure anyway?
We got a hot one, pretty healthy rad count. Must be from the Indian Ocean, Iranian or Paki, or maybe that ChiCom attack boat that went down off Manihi.
This is one of the last manned recon dives. Next month it’s all ROV, 100 percent Remotely Operated Vehicles.