–Sentinel Hotel, 4:45 PM–
The elevator stopped at the top of the hotel with a cheerful ping, allowing Dr. Zack to remove himself from the strains of John Tesh music that were still floating from the open doors of the small chamber. However, he had noted, with some amusement, that the area around the speakers had been massively dented, as if someone had taken a shotgun to the works. *No loss. As far as I’m concerned, John Tesh is as bad as Michael Jackson or some such.*
Sighing, he walked over to the least ornate door with a number on it and politely knocked on it, earning a small static jolt from the carpet as he heard a muffled noise from the other side of the door. The door opened after a few seconds, and the sound resolved itself to a Marilyn Manson CD blasting out something that could be considered music underscored by vehement volley of curses. Standing inside the doorway was the woman that he wanted to talk to, rubbing her left shin where a red mark was easily visible.
"Good day Miss Naryen. May I come in?" Dr. Zack removed his hat as he inclined his head towards her, then straightened as Sel looked at him.
She shrugged after about ten seconds of contemplation, and nodded towards the largish room behind her with a jerk of her head. "Come on in. Just watch out for the damn coffee table. The damn thing’s made of teak, is fairly sharp, and exceedingly immovable." She moved around the offending table, absently kicking one of the legs with her left foot as she passed it on her course to flop into one of the chairs. Dr. Zack followed closely, taking off his soaked coat and placing it, along with his hat on a small table beside the door, which he closed behind him.
Sel had already planted herself in a chair that looked like it could engulf her, and had picked up a book so she could place a bookmark in the piece. After doing so, and replacing the book, she looked up at Dr. Zack, who had moved around to sit in the other chair. "So, what do you want?"
Dr. Zack looked at Sel, who seemed to be even smaller because she wasn’t wearing the thick, formless trenchcoat that had completely hidden her body the last time they had met. "Well, I would like to talk to you about a few things, but I would like to counsel you on the source of these attacks."
Sel leaned forwards, letting her chin rest on her interlaced fingers as she raised her eyebrows. "Okay, you have my attention. Of course, I’d just suffice for cutting down on the population of those brutes, not to mention destroying the hulks that killed my best friend."
Dr. Zack leaned back slightly, then mentally sighed and looked out at the grey skies visible through the sheets of rain pounding against the windows. "Well, I can agree that your sentiment of driving these creatures back from where they came is a good idea. However, there are some in the city that do the same job, and I might add, for several years before your men and women showed up, but they need those creatures to survive. Secondly, there are at least two bases currently running on the west and east ends of the city, as the rash of crimes in those areas seems to attest."
Dr. Zack paused as Sel smiled and shook her head. "There were two. Now there’s only one, and the apparent weapon specialist of the opposing force is now either sitting in my briefcase as a glow stick, or bewing played with by my little angel." Sel paused, stood up, and moved to a slightly ajar doorway, where she peeked in on a blanket draped over two chairs, and smiled at the now-familiar green glow that was emanating from under the blanket. She grinned and returned to her seat, followed by a giggle. "They may be genetically engineered, but a gauss slug will still put a hole in them."
Dr. Zack winced at the mental image, then looked at Sel again. His mental estimation of her wavered for a few seconds, then dropped her into ‘serial-killer’ category. "Well, now that you’ve managed to destroy my appetite for dinner, please let me continue." Sel nodded and continued looking at her guest. "As I was saying, there’s at least one base that is being exceptionally problematic, as its apparent population has doubled over the last day and a half."
Sel raised her right hand, looking more than slightly child-like as she did so. "Hold up. How do you get all this information? I’m guessing an insider of some sort, but about every one of the creatures I’ve met has been fanatically loyal to their leader, up to and including death."
Dr. Zack chuckled slightly, then looked out the window again. "Not quite. Remember when one of your other team members was clouted over the head hard enough to knock him silly for a week? If the being that had hit your teammate been totally loyal to our mutual pain in the ass, you would have been at two funerals instead of just one. Also, how else could have I told your late friend where the stolen weapon was at? I don’t have the ability to find something just by thinking about it and hoping it would drop into my hand someday."
Sel smiled, then sighed and leaned back, stretching her arms forwards as she did so. "You remind me of my grandfather, even though you’re at least ten years younger. He used to tell me that finding things was half the fun, and the other half was to put them to good use. That’s why he hid my birthday presents, making it immensely interesting to try and find them before I could play with them."
Dr. Zack smiled slightly. "You seem to have had an interesting childhood, and one that would probably be better suited for living peacefully instead of travelling the world, killing evil troglodytes and warlords."
Sel grinned. "Considering that I’m taking a nice, long leave of absence after this mission’s over, I’m going to have a long talk with my boss about wether or not I’ll stay on as head of this part of the company. Personally, I’m thinking on going into weapons research or forensic osteo-pathology."
"Those are both good fields of study, but I think you’d rather stay with your family and live peacefully for a good long time." Dr. Zack stood up, glancing at his watch. "Actually, I have one question for you. What weapons do you use, as a matter of preference?"
Sel smiled. "Depends on what I have to kill. If it’s fast, deadly, and unarmoured, Spartan ammo in any of my handguns will make short work of it. The armoured stuff gets hammered by gauss slugs from either the pistol or rifle, and hardpoints in buildings get to be smashed by the portable particle cannons we use."
Dr. Zack’s eyes were slowly doubling in size as Sel finished listing the weapons she used with alarming flippancy. "You are one remarkable woman, but I guess you’ve already known that. I’m sorry, but I have to take my leave of you, but I’ll ask one of my friends to visit you tonight, if she’s feeling up to snuff." He turned to leave, mentally thankful that she hadn’t mentioned his pistol under his sweater.
"Doc?" Dr. Zack turned back to Sel, who had stood up and was holding her hand out expectantly. "May I see your gun?"
Sighing, he pulled the pistol out of its place under his shirt and handed it over. Sel looked at the small weapon, then sighted down through the v-blade sights and checked the heft of the long-barrelled pistol as she aimed at one of the over-painted and garish pictures on the far wall. "Nice gun. Used it in the Olympics last year?"
Dr. Zack grimaced, then nodded. "And the trials five years ago. The people who turned the setscrews on my gun were greatly displeased the second time, as I still managed to get dangerously close to a gold."
Sel smiled and handed back the pistol. "Well, it may be good for target shooting, but I prefer something with punch to it. No offense, but that thing can’t even knock over a pigeon. Here, I want you to have something as a bit of a backup, especially as keeping you alive seems to be a good idea if I want more information about our mutual pain." Sel turned to the closet by the front door, opened up the latticed wood, and pulled out a small box, which she promptly placed in Dr. Zack’s hands.
"Watch out for this one, as I’ve used it for almost six years. Just make sure you don’t overload the capacitor by firing faster than six shots in a second. This one uses two millimetre spikes in sixty-round clips, loaded through the grip, each of which are fired at about Mach twelve. If you have an uninvited visitor, that’ll end up turning him or her into a blood slurpee faster than they can say ‘ouch’. Just be careful, and give it a few test shots at home, with ear protection. Oh yeah, better luck next time on the Olympics. Hell, we might meet." Sel grinned, opened the door, and generously shooed Dr. Zack out, with him holding his coat and hat in one hand, the box tucked under his other arm, and holding his pistol quite neatly in his right hand.
Sighing again, he rearranged himself so he would only be holding the box with the gauss pistol inside, and started on his trip home.
–Helmut’s Base, 7:20 PM–
Helmut wasn’t too badly annoyed at the overcrowding in his base, or the rampant stupidity of the FIs that were assigned as lookouts, as those two problems were being picked off with alarming regularity. In actuality, he was pissed at the fact that he was totally pinned down in the warehouse complex because what seemed like every member of the special-ops team in the city was sitting on adjacent rooftops, sniping everything they could see that was big, green and ugly.
Secondly, he had heard from one of his technos, who told him that the objective had been seen, but before he could tell the techno to pursue and retrieve the objective, a well-placed gauss slug had destroyed his only high-power radio transmitter. So, not only was he cut off from his outside observers, but he also couldn’t contact Jose for reinforcements to break the siege. The only thing he didn’t need was sustenance. Most of his troops had been cannibalizing the stuff from their dead brethren.
As he looked out over the ammo dump to where a Fixed Idea was busy blasting at a nearby building that housed at least one of the damn snipers, he heard a dull, echoing boom, followed by the Idea’s head disintegrating in a mushy splatter of gore, bone shards, and blood, which created a hideous, wet squishy-sounding ‘Spplorrk’ as the bits and pieces splattered everywhere around the headless corpse. Sighing, he turned away from the silent flare of light as the body disintegrated, and looked at the two pills he had set on the table beside the two syringes.
Both were highly experimental, but they could just keep him alive long enough to allow him to finish his secondary mission. Moving quickly as he heard a volley of slugs smash their way through the thin walls of the warehouse, Helmut downed both pills, hid the syringes under his shirt, and fainted. Outside, in the main section of the warehouse, volleys of gauss fire had torn apart the walls, and the last few pockets of resistance had been shredded by sustained bursts from five or six of the rifles. Overall, there had been no fatalities on the offensive force, primarily because of the immensely accurate fire of the four snipers, but also because of the almost-suicidal stunts of the armoured form with long white hair that led the attack.
While the police catalogued the ammunition and weapons found in the warehouse, the three minor injuries were quickly treated and any survivors were ‘collected’ for interrogation. Helmut was found, and, not knowing any better, the troopers just unceremoniously wrapped his supposedly dead body in a garbage bag and tossed him into a dumpster. Twenty minutes later, Helmut tore open the bag, gasping for air, and was suddenly buried under about five hundred pounds of smashed guns and debris.
Almost an hour passed by before he could claw his way to the top of the heap, but he managed to drop out of the dumpster and stagger away before anyone could see him. Cursing to himself, he felt a drop of wetness near the small of his back, and realized that one of the two syringes had been destroyed. Pulling out both, he tossed away the syringe that had been destroyed, and looked at the one he had left. The small blue tag on the side told him which one he had, and so he headed towards the last known location of the techno that had spotted his secondary objective.
–Mikae’s Home, 9:50 PM–
Mikae had managed to waste more time than usual keeping away from studying for her classes, but also managed to observe the sporadic firefights raging through the city by sitting on the roof and watching for the strobe-like flashes of rockets exploding, as well as the laser-like streamers of machine gun tracers. Sighing, she leaned back so she could look at the night skies, but could barely pick out the individual stars above her because of the fires and occasional explosion that lit the area to the south.
Mikae sighed, but didn’t tilt her head to look at the explosions as she heard several sirens cut through the night. However, she was on her feet in a flash when six dull thumps shook the tiles under her back, and sighed in irritation when she realized she was surrounded. The four Fixed Ideas that had surrounded her moved in, unmindful of her half-smile or flattened hands, which she knew could cut through flesh and bone as well as any knife.
Mikae moved first, striking out at the Idea behind her with her left foot in a crippling strike. That is, if it had connected. The Idea saw the blow coming, and grabbed her foot, making Mikae overbalance and fall onto her butt when she wrenched herself free. While on her back, she flexed backwards, and spun around on her left shoulder, clearing a five-foot area around her with a spiral kick.
Standing up, Mikae waited to see what would happen next, and was prepared when one Idea moved in a bit and swung at her mid-section. She had to use both hands to deflect the powerful blow, but that left her open, as she realized when the Idea behind her reached in and clouted her upside the back of the head hard enough to make spots dance in front of her eyes. Shaking her head to clear her thoughts, Mikae stumbled to the side, right into the arms of the third idea, which put her in a full nelson, nearly breaking her arms in the process.
The fourth idea, which was the one that had been first attacked in the first place, then moved in, pulling a few right-right-left combos to Mikae’s stomach and ribs, causing her to double over in agony, even though she was still firmly held upright. Finally, after the pounding had ended, she felt something jab into her lower abdomen, and a sickening feeling filled her as the pain receded and the four Ideas retreated, leaving her bloodied, bruised, and battered as all six forms disappeared into the night.