Quota 0/391 – 20 days left to start the next quota (just as a note: "Tirelire" means Piggy bank in french)
Victor got up at around 6 AM. He still felt a bit jet-lagged, but he was feeling far more refreshed than after his previous nights. The 14‑hour time difference had hit his internal clock like a bulldozer, and it had taken him nearly four days to recover.
"Even though it's still not the hour I'd like to wake up at, better than nothing I guess..." he thought as he climbed out of bed.
Outside, the city still appeared to be asleep and it would take more than an hour before coming to life. Victor left his hotel room, making sure to grab his bag. He had already dropped off his shovels at the back of "Tirelire," the vehicle they'd retrieved from the middle of nowhere a few days ago. Olivia had named it like that because she thought it was as adorable as a little pink pig. Victor couldn't quite see what was so cute about a multi‐ton tree‐uprooting truck, though he did admit that its massive bumper did resemble a little pig's snout.
"As long as she doesn't start renaming the other vehicles, I'm fine with it," he mused aloud as he stepped into the elevator.
Two days earlier, they'd gone to pick up the order that Olivia had placed through her Mongolian contact on an abandoned lot. Shirley seemed to have taken a particular liking to the tank, the missile-launching vehicle, and the self-propelled mortar. There was also an ammunition truck whose cargo he had unloaded into Tirelire's trailer, which was now stuffed to the brim. Among the munitions were all sorts of surface missiles, a few reserve shells for both the mortar and the tank, as well as dozens of rockets, hundreds of grenades, and almost a thousand assault rifle magazines.
Victor doubted they'd need all that, but since he wasn't the one footing the bill, he wasn't about to complain.
However, there was one problem with having so many vehicles: Victor would have to drive one of them. Shirley had chosen Tirelire so she could indulge in her urge to deforest, while Nathaniel had opted for the tank because he'd driven one in his youth. That left only Victor and Olivia to split between the mortar and the missile launcher, the latter being the easier ride due to its lighter weight. Unfortunately for Victor, Olivia wasn't old enough to have a driver's license and had never bothered to get one. This meant that he would have to spend several hours at the wheel of a vehicle weighing several tens of tons.
Several hours indeed, since they had nearly 150 km of tundra to traverse to reach their objective, and both the terrain and the vehicle severely limited their cruising speed. That was also why he'd set off so early; any technical problem would take hours to fix.
Victor met up with the others inside the restaurant, and after a quick breakfast they set off by car to collect their vehicles. They had driven the tank and the other two close to Tirelire so they wouldn't have to take any detours, a move that at least gave Victor a foretaste of the driving ordeal that lay ahead.
After a few minutes on the road, they arrived at the rendezvous point. No tow truck had come by to try hauling one of the armored vehicles, or at least, none had visibly succeeded. The small convoy of war machines hadn't moved an inch. After checking that the trailer's contents were intact, everyone climbed into their respective vehicles.
It wasn't the steering wheel or the sheer weight of the machine that troubled Victor most : it was in fact the gearbox. Although it looked modern and inconspicuous, it stubbornly refused to budge, forcing Victor to use his entire body weight just to shift gears. That wouldn't be a problem if they only had a few minutes of driving, but he knew it would become one during their journey.
"Is everyone ready?" Shirley asked over the walkie-talkie mounted on the dashboard. The group had discovered that the little device featured built-in real-time translation, a handy feature for the quota to come.
"Ready."
"Let's go."
"Are we there yet?" answered the other three in response to Shirley's question.
"Well, let's go then!"
After giving the signal, the four vehicles set off onto the small, bumpy path. Victor took several seconds to clear the first hurdle and ended up being the last to leave, occupying the final spot in the column. The group had already agreed on the route, their cruising speeds, and the breaks they'd take along the way. They settled on 30 km/h on roads, 25 km/h across the tundra, and 40 km/h in the birch forests, with Tirelire needing a bit more momentum to uproot every tree in its path. Since they were short on fuel, Victor had to push himself to maintain those speeds and the right gears. A task that felt like a slow, painful death for his arm and the rest of his body.
After 100 km of off-road driving, his body finally gave out. Just after the group had paused to stretch their legs, munch on some cookies while sipping water, as the vehicles were about to set off again, the self-propelled mortar remained motionless. It wasn't after several minutes of radio silence that it finally roared back to life. The walkie-talkie had lit up several times with inquiries about what was wrong, but Victor was too busy issuing instructions to answer.
However, those long minutes had a silver lining: he no longer had to shift gears manually. His Jester pet had taken the passenger seat and was now using his one hand to change gears. What had seemed so physically demanding for Victor's frail frame seemed to pose no trouble for the little music box.
Speaking of music, the Jester hadn't even attempted to "wind up" his own box. Instead, he was dutifully following Victor's order, using his little white arm to grasp the gear stick.
'It's a good start if I can control him like this,' Victor thought, before his imagination began to wander. 'If need be, we could even recreate that famous scene, each of us in our own vehicle before splitting off in different directions…'
The group tackled the final 50 km in one go, only stopping a few kilometers from their destination by the edge of the frozen lake. They couldn't get any closer anyway as the thin sheet of ice wouldn't support the weight of these behemoths. Victor mentally recalled Jester, who took several seconds to disintegrate into ashes floating inside the vehicle. Those tiny particles then converged into a single point to reassemble into a miniature version of Jester, which Victor promptly clipped onto his keychain before stepping out.
Outside, Shirley and the others were already waiting, everyone busy stretching and shaking out their legs.
"Is there no house?" Victor asked as he approached Olivia. The landscape was so flat that the group could see for several kilometers in every direction, especially across the middle of the lake. Victor had been expecting a house like during his previous quotas or even a castle, but there was nothing.
If one of the system's advantages was being able to secure part of the quota before descending into the tunnels, they wouldn't be able to count on that without a house. To confirm his fears, Olivia replied after pulling a bag from her vehicle:
"I doubt we'll find an underground house. If we're lucky, we might stumble upon the remains of a Cold War Soviet bunker but otherwise, we'll be facing the tunnels straight away."
Leaving Olivia to her last-minute settings as she climbed into the tank to configure it, Victor joined Shirley, who was chatting a few meters away from Tirelire and its trailer. He still couldn't understand them, but Nathaniel was clutching his mysterious briefcase, and Victor was curious about what was inside. After all, stranded in the middle of nowhere while being more than 150 km away from civilization, there wasn't a prying eye around. Under the expectant gazes of Victor and Shirley, Nathaniel opened his prized briefcase. Inside, there wasn't a sci‑fi gadget or a nuclear warhead as Victor might have imagined, but rather something orange.
'Are those suits?' Victor wondered, a hint of disappointment in his voice.
He didn't seem nearly as disappointed as Shirley. After all, he still hadn't gotten used to the Russian climate and wouldn't mind having something warm to wear, especially with a snowstorm forecast in two days and temperatures expected to drop to –30 °C. It was already chilly at 7 °C and Victor couldn't even imagine what his illness would do in that weather.
'But why do I feel like I've seen that orange suit somewhere before?' he wondered while searching in his memory.
10:30 PM
'Still no bears on the horizon,' Victor thought as he looked up from his tablet. The others had spent the day checking their equipment, while he was sitting on a chair that he had bring on the tank's roof, scanning the horizon. His tablet was supposed to emit a shrill sound if anything came near the sensors they had buried earlier in the afternoon, but for now there was complete silence. No rabbit or fox had even peeked over the horizon, and Victor had spent the day bored out of his mind.
Still, he wasn't unhappy. The upcoming days were regardless sure to be packed with action and he had to be ready for it.