[b][color=green]Porto de Santos, Brazil[/color][/b]

AI observes the event occurring while it's still incredibly minor, manages to save the whole convoy by giving them this warning

Campbell hated escort duty. It was a rare thing, but almost always horrifically boring, involving little more than sitting in an armored truck (or personnel carrier) as a convoy moved along city or rural roads, both waiting for and hoping something wasn’t going to happen. He faintly remembered the few times something exciting happened.

Occasionally, that’d mean scrambling out of the vehicle he and his squad had been stuck in, cooking a mutant jungle cat to ash with an experimental plasma rifle while First Lieutenant Caldeira
roasted a swarm of overgrown insects with a flamethrower; other times, it meant watching from inside of an IFV while their autocannons vaporized some unfortunate, especially large mutant that was in the way.

“Hey, First Lieutenant.  You remember the last time one of these actually went badly?” Elliot asked. All at once, the two remaining sets of eyes in the fireteam turned toward the giant of a woman in her armor - with no need for jungle camouflage, they’d been clad in thick grey combat uniforms, armor plates slung over top experimental exoskeletons. It was based on the French shit, they’d been told, and it worked, but the batteries still weren’t up for snuff. You could still hear the things [i]whirr[/i] when people moved, too - even when they simply turned to face someone.

She tilted her head to one side for a moment, probably chewing her lip behind her helmet as the armored Rheinmetall truck trundled along beneath them. It was a smooth ride, at least - he couldn’t even feel the potholes.

“Don’t really remember, exactly. Almost six months? I mean, we’ve had firefights, but it’s mostly just killing animals already half-dead from NLC exposure and shit.” She shrugged, her arms slung over the IMBEL machinegun in her lap, a bulky box magazine between her legs. To Campbell, it almost sounded like she was complaining.

“Hey, why don’t you ask Oh-Seven? Doesn’t it record all that stuff?” Came a small voice from the seat next to him. Diaz shrugged.

“Oh-Seven, how long has it been since the last... Major incident?”

“It has been approximately five months, twenty-eight days, three hours, and-”

“That’s enough.” Campbell sighed, leaning back in his seat. He stared across the truck’s compartment at Otávio, obsessively combing through a bag of medical supplies, then at Adalia and her long-barreled rifle, and found himself wondering how the hell he’d gotten here.

He missed Windsor. It’d been years since he’d been home, and as much as Brazil had become a home to him much like it had for Adalia, but he still missed home. It still felt wrong not being there, especially now, with his friends and even some of his family throwing off the American yoke. He missed travelling a hop skip and a jump across the border to the Detroit megacity, on those few occasions when he could visit the American friends he had there. He missed the first time he travelled through the highway tunnel. He missed exploring the Ojibway parks. He missed the Tim Hortons apple fritters. Hell, through his haze of nostalgia, he even missed his fucking training sergeant. The man wasn’t awful, but... Still, was he going insane? Maybe, he thought. He could’ve been at home. He and Adalia could’ve been in their home countries, he thought, fighting for freedom, but instead he was sitting in an armored german truck staring at a stupid goddamn box with some stupid goddamn bullshit inside.

He noticed Enéas looking at him, staring as he was, or... he thought he did. He couldn’t tell beneath the faceless, thick-lensed helmets they all wore, and especially not the extra bulk of his grenadier’s armor. Usually, Enéas was more talkative, but... Today, he was quiet. Maybe he was thinking the same thing? Was the cabin fever getting to him too?

All he knew was that, in that moment, he hated that fucking black box that held whatever the hell it held inside of it. What was it, he wondered? A sparkling purple alien dildo? Some weird alien supergun? Something’s brain? Probably something to do with all the FTL news going around? [i]Probably[/i], he guessed. It’d been some time since he’d heard of an artifact escort that involved multiple cannon-armed IFVs, on top of a police escort, on top of police helicopters watching from the sky. The internal cover story was that it was a transport of a large volume of unusually concentrated Langium, and while his team was informed they were transporting an artifact, they hadn’t been told exactly what it was. That meant it was incredibly, ludicrously important. He hoped so, at least.

“Captain Campbell, please tighten the locking clamps on the containment unit. I am detecting an unusual outward distortion of the truck’s chassis.” Intoned Oh-Seven’s voice.

“What are you talking abou-”

Suddenly the truck [i]bounced[/i], as if it’d run over a bump the size of a beachball. Elliot stumbled forward, reaching for the containment unit in a panic - yet as he advanced toward it, he felt it pushing back against him, forcing him back against the wall like the rest of his comrades. It was like he was trying to grind a train to a halt with his bare hands, and yet...

The exoskeleton’s servos audibly whined, but he managed to grip one of the locking clamps nonetheless, barely able to hold himself there. 

[i]I am not getting pancaked because of some goddamn alien trashpile! Come one, come on...[/i] 

Wrenching his hand to one side with a grunt of effort, he turned the lock... And, suddenly, all the force pressing against him evaporated, coaxing sighs of relief from everyone inside the vehicle.

“Oh-Seven, what the fuck just happened? How did you [i]notice[/i] what was happening?” He asked, audibly gasping.

“I was assigned to monitor the vehicles outside of my usual mission parameters, and noticed an unexplained physical distortion in the upper chassis.”

“[i]Fuck.[/i] I felt that thing pushing back on me. What the hell [i]happened[/i]?” He groaned, rubbing at his helmet.


[i]I wonder what it was like before all of this alien bullshit.[/i]