Land of Nod
The Land of Nod is an American slang term for a physical location where certain activities and passivities are performed. Or not performed.
“I'm pickle Rick!”
In New York and Massachusetts, its s place where heroin addicts can safely "nod off" when high In Kansas, it's where lazy immigrants go to avoid work, take a nap and stay on the clock. In Somalia, wealthy NASCAR racers travel to the Land of Nod seeking racing fuel, nitrous oxide tanks and kiwi fruit. In Greenland, those whose mothers have some Danish anscestors lob napalm and feces at the Land of Nod to appease wrathful gods and spirits.
As the last of a fleeting sun's castings winked at the strike team, Gordo stopped before the edge of a clearing, solving the billions of simple equations a second needed to produce a complete understanding of the tactical and strategic milieu with his shimmer-amplified mind. The team received copies of this understanding, each tailored to the soldier uploading the terabytes of compressed data.
Flail, Gordo's second on field ops, zipped a POV snippet that revealed a carefully concealed armor trap, repurposed to take out such infantry as their own, 33rd Flensing Battalion. Rendered invisible for all intents and purposes, they crept forward, avoiding the thermite and white phosphorous armored vehicle obstacles. In twelve minutes they were among the enemy, each soldier having picked their one to three targets.
When Flail sent the go signal, the mass murder began and ended quickly. Tomahawks and knives were the tools of the day. Relative quiet needed to be maintained, for there were an estimated 4000 combat troops behind the play wall of the camp they'd been sent to infiltrate. Camara carried todsy's gift for the Bugs, a lovingly crafted pseudovirus that would liquefy bug brains in short order. Testing on their "pets" proved very hopeful due to instantaneous transmission to master bugs once their surrogate killers were exposed.
No one knew much about the bugs. Not how they communicated, how they thought, what they valued; not much at all. It was surmised from detailed observations and analyses that the 3 meter long, fire breathing soldier bugs were fitted out with technology that allowed the larger but much weaker controller bugs to direct them in battle.
Heads and forelegs were separated from bodies and the entire squad of 29 soldier bugs was dead in the space of 0.784 seconds. There was no time to raise an alarm. To the controller bugs inside the base, it was as if the squad had gone to sleep. Indeed, this was normal behavior. The Raiders would "sleep" as a group with no feedback to their masters. There was no way to gauge how long they'd remain this way. The longest documented "sleep" was almost five days.
Kringle and Louiselle launched hundreds of drones containing the virusesa. They crawled, skittered and flew into the compound, seeking targets and dispensing poisons.