Girls' Frontline Fanfiction: Tsar of the Mountain

A Tsar's Reply

"You..." Scarecrow hissed in a low voice as her eyes returned to Zeldri. "There's no artillery to save you. No t-dolls to rush to your aid." Scarecrow floated towards Zeldri and stopped a few feet away from him. She used her repulsers to float just above his eye level so he would have to look up at her. "Your last 'gambit' is to hide behind the empty shell of a nuke?" She gestured to the Heart that sat silently on the floor behind Zeldri.

"Empty shell?" Zeldri gently pushed himself off the computer cart and walked towards Scarecrow. "You make it sound like the Heart is just a big paperweight."

"Of course it is," Scarecrow retorted. Her drones flew down and tried to get in Zeldri's face, but he brushed them aside and stood a mere three feet from the Ringleader. "Your government wouldn't hand over an active nuclear weapon to a PMC. You can't bluff your way out of your death, this time, Griffin Commander."

"No, you're right in that Russia wouldn't hand over a nuke to just some PMC. But, for an intelligence and reconnaissance doll, you seem to be overlooking quite a few details."

"..." She had him surrounded and his base completely occupied. If he wanted his last words to be useless dribble, then so be it. "Tell me then, Griffin Commander, what is it that I've overlooked?"

"First, you seem to be ignoring who else is in the room with us." Zeldri glanced over his shoulder at K11. "Someone who I've had working on the Heart for quite a while, now."

"...A t-doll?" Scarecrow scoffed as she followed his gaze, "You expect me to believe that some t-doll can re-arm a hydrogen bomb?"

"She's not 'some t-doll', she's the perfect one for the job." Zeldri's eyes never faltered as he stared into Scarecrow's analyzing gaze. "Surely you have some kind of info on the t-dolls Griffin fields?" His taunting was getting annoying, so Scarecrow decided to link back to the Sangvis network and pull the file they had on the K11 t-doll variant. It seemed like the K11 was a lab junky doll and supposedly had a few things stored in their neural cloud; astronomy, anatomy, chemistry, mechanical engineering, physics (electromagnetism, quantum, nuclear)...

"...Not enough." Scarecrow decreased the power to her repulsers which caused her to hover down. She was now directly at eye level with Zeldri and the two matched the other's gaze. "Even on the off chance your K11 contains all the required knowledge to re-arm a nuke, you lack the required components to do so." Her eyes shifted to the Heart as she continued, "The AN602 is a hydrogen bomb, and I doubt anyone, even you lowly humans, would be stupid enough to leave depleted uranium lying around. Especially enough to re-arm an AN602."

"While you'd be surprised at that," Zeldri remarked in a not completely sarcastic manner, "This leads to the second thing you're overlooking; my staff."

"Your staff?"

"There's a man named Horris Strolcha on my base who has a knack for getting things he's really not supposed to. You should know since you've felt his influence first hand in the form of the artillery shell that defeated you, last time."

"...!" Scarecrow immediately connected to the Sangvis network and used all her processing power to dig through everything she could, public and classified, for info on Horris. What returned from digging through stolen files was an FSB list of suspected 90WISH members with Horris' name on it. She already knew of 90WISH which caused Scarecrow's eyes to narrow. If, and this was a really big if, K11 had all the knowledge necessary to do so and Horris provided the material needed... Scarecrow looked over to K11. T-dolls were known to be bad liars so she might gain something by studying K11's reactions. But, all she could make out was the genuine fear K11 had as she stared at Zeldri in horror. It was the kind of horror one experiences after they realize a terrible mistake they've made.