Wilhelmina “Bill” Briggs
Etsicitty was fucking annoying.
Bill’s elbow started healing almost as soon as he broke it, though she had to do a one-handed push-up to get to her feet. The ribs, though, were sending spikes of pain through her and making breathing difficult.
Fucking Hell. So he wasn’t just a boy scout after all. The fucker moved so goddamned fuckin’ fast she couldn’t see what the fuck he’d done. One second she was about to close with him and stab the fucker right in the heart, and the next—
And now he was running away, too!
Didn’t matter. He was unarmed, and a long way from help, and he couldn’t heal like she did.
She drew the gauss pistol. She’d been hoping to enjoy cutting on him a bit, but if the monkey-raping fuck wasn’t gonna play ball then she’d happily settle for shooting him instead. She had a second knife anyway.
There was a clear, straight stretch of trail. She paused, lined up a shot….
The pistol kicked in her hand like somebody had hit it with a baseball bat and a tree branch several feet above Etsicitty’s head exploded in a shower of splintered wood. He yelled in fright, covered his head, jinked and dodged.
Cursing all the things that were way more difficult to do one-handed, Bill put her head down and charged after him. At least if she hit him he’d be fucked, but she needed to be closer.
Shit, the fucker could run. But Bill had clocked herself at more than thirty miles an hour thanks to the Cruezzir. Branches and sticks whipped her face and stung her arms as she opened up to full speed and started slowly closing the gap. Too slowly.
…Fuck. He’d been running for miles and he could still pour on the speed…too fuckin’ bad he had to die. Boy scout was a fuckin’ specimen. She’d love to drug his pretty ass up and put that huge dick of his to proper use…hell, Bill bet he’d have lasted for weeks before he broke.
She grinned as she rounded a bend and found she’d halved the gap.
Too bad they’d never get to find out together…
Julian Etsicitty
How? Fucking how?!
Julian was fast. He knew he was fast, fast enough to embarrass nearly anyone. But the crazy bitch chasing him with a fucking cannon could run like the goddamn Terminator.
…The sharp bit of wood in his foot from the tree she’d exploded wasn’t helping, either. Fuck running barefoot. Thank God it wasn’t in the sole of his foot or he’d be hobbled…and dead.
As it was, it just hurt like a motherfucker and bled everywhere.
Just got the fucking thing regrown, too…
Welp. If he got through this, it’d be another visit to Nofl, maybe. Or whatever. He gritted his teeth as he got back on the straight path to Little Rock, breathing hard, and glanced over his shoulder.
She was big, yeah. Easily the biggest woman he’d ever seen, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred pounds and not a scrap of it was fat. She was as big and as dangerously muscled as a lioness, and probably just as dangerously fast. Her expression was pure feral murderous glee. He’d never seen somebody look so genuinely psychotic before.
The real problem, though, was the gun. Julian could out-wrestle Ten’Gewek and even a bunch of the HEAT’s troopers on a really good day, especially if he’d had a nice good rest and a nice big meal. Now, he was half-spent from being twenty miles into a long-ass run after a morning workout, and he was deliberately running on something close to empty, too.
Not really a good hand to be working with, but escape wasn’t looking like an option. He’d have turned and faced her, if not for that fucking gun.
When Julian had been about fourteen his Grampa had taken him to a historical re-enactment, and they’d seen a musket being fired. The historian had bragged up the gun, and mentioned how a lead ball that big and that fast didn’t leave men to elegantly clutch their chest and collapse; It left their arm twenty feet away in a ditch.
The musket had sounded a lot like that pistol.
The crazy bitch took another shot as if to prove the point, and drilled a crazy cracked bullseye in the side of the Little Rock. The round missed Julian so closely that it felt like a stinging slap on the arm.
Well, nothing for it. He’d need to risk a fight. He gritted his teeth and vaulted the rock, just like he’d done before, slithered down the other side and ducked low. She’d have to get close to draw a bead on him, and he just prayed that—
“WURF!! WURF!!!”
The pistol fired again as a furry black, brown and white missile shot out of the woods. Then there was a furious riot of snarling and human shrieking.
Oh fuck no please—
He darted back around the rock. The crazy psycho bitch was rolling on the ground trying to fend off the enraged dog, gun discarded in the grass next to her. Before he could act, Bozo got his teeth around her throat and SHOOK.
There was a grisly crack. She gurgled, spit what sounded like a curse, yanked a knife from a sheath on her hip and stabbed.
“NO!!”
Julian leapt forward, heart leaping into his throat, but Bozo wasn’t done. The dog made a noise he’d never heard come out of a canine throat before, shook his head viciously and ripped…
Blood went everywhere. It soaked Bozo’s head, soaked the dirt. A spray of it jetted in Julian’s face and blinded him. He groped forward, found the gun under his hand and wiped his face clear…
But the fight was already over. The crazy bitch’s desperate attempts to hold closed a throat that wasn’t even there anymore weakened, became a few frantic spasms, then failed entirely. A horrible rattling gurgle bubbled out of the disgusting mess Bozo had made of her neck and she slumped, eyes staring glassily at the sky.
Bozo spat out a gobbet of gristly meat, limped a few steps away, whimpered, then sagged to the grass.
Julian was at his side in an instant. The knife was still buried between the dog’s ribs. He knew better than to pull it out, but…
…But that just meant there was nothing he could do. Bozo coughed, whimpered again, and licked his hand. His tail thumped a few times, weakly.
Julian realized he was weeping. He stroked Bozo’s head.
“Good boy…” he whispered. “…Good dog…”
Bozo’s tail thumped the ground one last time, then he rested his bloody chin on Julian’s knee and shut his eyes. Julian scratched behind his ears, Bozo gave a kind of grumbling sigh…
…and was gone.
When Julian’s protection team finally caught up two minutes later, they found him sobbing brokenly.
Date Point: 16y6m2w2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Gabriel Arés
Meeting the ambassador was a courtesy. But it was, Gabe felt, an owed courtesy.
He did after all bear some blame for the debacle with Julian Etsicitty and Wilhelmina Briggs that had, mercifully, played out far in the woods out of the public eye.
The fallout was far-reaching. The SOR’s beloved regimental mascot had fallen, an influential local figure who—worse—also happened to be a US government official had been attacked and survived only by the barest margin, by the woman right at the top of the USA’s most wanted list, who had somehow been smuggled into the city that he, Gabe, protected.
And it had happened only a day or two after Gabe had personally stripped the Special Envoy’s three-man security team leader of his firearms license.
Ambassador Rockefeller was being cruelly understanding about it all. Understanding… but firm.
“You understand of course that we would very much appreciate an explanation,” he said.
On that point, Gabe didn’t technically have to give him an inch. Pragmatically, though… perhaps an inch wasn’t too much to ask. He was treading on potentially very thin ice.
“There was an irregularity,” he said, calmly. He’d broken out his cane again, even though he technically didn’t need it nowadays thanks to the nerve regeneration. But it came in handy as a prop sometimes, to make him seem older and more harmless than he truly was.
He doubted whether Rockefeller was fooled, but the point was not to fool him.
“It must have been quite an irregularity,” the ambassador said.
“The kind that might be nothing, but which a man in my position can’t ignore,” Gabe replied.
There was a brief, wordless kind of a standoff.
“…A valued and well-liked member of my staff was attacked, Mister Arés,” Rockefeller said, breaking it. “I find it hard to be content that he was left vulnerable over an irregularity.”
“Mister Etsicitty is a good friend of my son’s,” Gabe reminded him. “I’m as shaken by the attack on him as you are. If you want my assurance that I would never knowingly endanger him…”
“No, no. I appreciate that you would never knowingly, do so…” Rockefeller agreed, pointedly.
“If only we could see the future,” Gabe said. “Like I’ve always said to my kids, the best you can do is be true to yourself, uphold your oaths and stand firm on your principles. It’s not a perfect strategy, but it usually steers us right.”
He stressed the word ‘oaths’ just enough to make it the focus of the sentence.
“Mister Arés… I hope you appreciate that to my knowledge, Mister Hoeff has only ever done his duty, and his job, and upheld his own oaths…”
Gabe gave him a long, slow look. That, he felt, was the closest thing he was ever going to get to an outright admission of foul play at the very highest level.
“I… appreciate that,” he said. Neither man broke eye contact. “And I hope you appreciate that sometimes… events just have a kind of momentum to them, don’t they? When everyone involved is true to themselves and their duty as they see it, the future can become a fixed thing.”
“That is precisely my worry. I am hoping this unpleasantness won’t escalate any further.”
“There, Ambassador, I think I can ease your worries. I had a breakfast meeting up at the Palace this morning. The Prime Minister has graciously accepted my resignation.”
“She has?”
“Yes. I… Well. My son and daughter-in-law tell me they intend to have a large family. And the tragic case of Secretary Guillory has made me see that I wouldn’t want, uh, work-related stress to drive me into an early grave and deprive them of their abuelo…”
“No…” the Ambassador agreed. “…No, I suppose not. But I hope you’re not falling on your sword over this affair, that’s not what we’re asking for.”
“I know. Thank you. But I still think the time has come to pass the torch. I’ve been in this job for ten years!”
Rockefeller nodded. “What will you do in your retirement? Write a book, perhaps?”
Gabe shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I like my privacy… and my discretion.”
That was the thing he knew he had to believably convey. Fortunately, Rockefeller seemed happy enough. He smiled warmly, stood, and extended his hand.
“Well, if you’re determined to bow out of public life…”
“I am,” Gabe assured him, and shook his hand. The Ambassador’s grip was firm and warm, and he added a clap on the shoulder for good measure. His smile reached his eyes, too.
Gabe wasn’t reassured. But it was probably out of his hands at this point. He’d retire, and keep his head down, and… Well, hopefully when he inevitably did pass on, it’d be in thirty or forty years with a legion of grandchildren around his hospital bed.
One thing was for certain: he wasn’t interested in playing the game of state any longer. Not for these kinds of stakes.
Hoeff was leaning against the wall outside the embassy when he left. Arms folded, waiting patiently. They made eye contact.
“…Heard you’re stepping down,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Think you’ll be able to stay away?”
“I have plenty of good reasons to. And plenty more to come.”
“…Good.” Hoeff straightened up and took a step closer. His voice was low and quiet. “…You nearly got my best and just about only genuine friend killed, Gabe.”
Gabe stood his ground. “…I don’t think either of us want to have a really candid conversation about that,” he said.
“…No. Prob’ly a bad idea.”
“We were friends just a few days ago, you know.”
“Yeah. We were.”
Gabe sighed. He knew an utterly impenetrable wall when he saw one. “Well, then… I wish you the best. I’m going to miss golfing with you.”
Hoeff nodded. He didn’t say anything else, just turned and walked away. Gabe got in the car and went back to his office. There was about a month of cleanup and transitional work to do in making sure his successor, whoever they’d turn out to be, could pick things up and carry on smoothly. Somehow, he doubted he’d have a hand in selecting them.
But that was okay.
He’d done enough.
Date Point: 16y7m AV
Abergerrig, New Belfast County, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Daniel “Chimp” Hoeff
It was a shame, really. Jobs like this had a way of tarnishing the souls of big damn heroes like Adam. But sometimes, the job—the mission—was way more important than the poor fucks tasked with carrying it out.
That was the thing, though. Adam volunteered for the mission, and even cut his own leave short.
The whole Regiment was out for blood. In Powell’s own growling words, the APA were ‘going to fookin’ pay for Bozo.’ Hoeff sympathized, he’d liked the dog too. But for him, there were a few other personal layers to it.
The APA had promised to kill the scientists on Akyawentuo. That included Claire. That was a fuck-up: The Lads liked the scientists, some had even visited here and there. But fuck that. Claire was his to protect, and there wasn’t much that filled Hoeff with murder more than the idea of somebody wishing her harm.
Then there was Julian, who was still badly shaken. He was a brave, tough man, but everyone had their limits, and despite everything he was a gentle soul at heart. He was a lover, a dad and a provider, and only took up the sword reluctantly. The attack, and surviving only at Bozo’s expense (or at least, that was how he saw it) had rattled him to his core, and Hoeff hadn’t had the chance to properly check on him while planning this raid.
Hoeff had found himself growing awfully protective of the big slab over the years. For more than professional reasons. His family too. Hopefully Xiù and Allison would be all the help he needed, though they too were understandably freaked.
Tonight, all of that would be answered for.
The APA cell in New York had gotten a bit sloppy with their communications discipline after their leadership were taken out. They’d made the number one cardinal mistake that a terrorist could never, ever afford: they’d sent a message to another cell.
And from that, the NSA had in short order blown apart nearly the entire organization. Raids were going on everywhere on Earth, he’d heard. Literally hundreds simultaneously, plus strikes in Franklin, New Botany and Nouveau Acadia.
In less than a night—no, in less than an hour—there would be nothing left of the APA. Most of those raids would be big, splashy affairs with lots of praise going to the local SWAT teams or whatever. For good reason, to be sure, but a few of these cells weren’t simply wannabes who might be reformed with a taste of Lady Justice. No. Some of these cells were simply going to be exterminated, including all of them on Cimbrean. Hoeff’s contribution to that butcher’s bill would be the three dozen or so targets he and the HEAT were about to service.
This cell had been the one that sheltered Bill, had served as a command-and-control node. This one had to be snuffed out entirely, all its evidence preserved, and its ringleader saved, if possible. Some of Hoeff’s former associates wanted to talk with the leader…
The heavies were there for three reasons. Firstly, the six of them were hands down the fastest men alive. Speed was everything in these things, and if you had the assets, you may as well use them. Secondly, Hoeff poached the veteran Aggressors because they were the most capable raiders on the team, and had experience with these types of missions. And thirdly, the Protectors were there to manage the perimeter, waiting outside at a fair distance.
Their job was to deal with squirters and any possible unexpected cavalry, especially if their targets had more Cruezzir monsters waiting to strike. Nobody out-ran, out-muscled, or out-fought the Protectors. Not even Firth, the one exception left standing, could humble Arés on anything. They were ruthlessly selected, trained to an utterly peerless degree, and superhumanly capable. There wouldn’t be any hope for anyone who escaped Hoeff tonight.
It had been a bit of a job getting night raid uniforms and equipment for them all, but it was that or the EV-MASS in dark grey, and that would have been too obvious. Would have involved a lot more people being brought in on the mission too, which made a leak much more likely. Oh well, needs must.
And so there they were, crouched in the rain, ready to do violence on behalf of the innocent.
Abergerrig barely existed: it was basically just a bridge over a shallow, rocky river, surrounded by a bunch of farms. But those farms were a long, long way even from New Belfast, and they, along with the fishery and the forestry plantation, had needed somewhere to put a few essentials like housing, telecom infrastructure, a general store and a vehicle charging station. So a village had been arbitrarily sketched in on the map at the only local landmark and thus Abergerrig had been born. Its population of forty-six souls lived so far from Folctha itself that even on Cimbrean’s rare clear nights there would have been no hint of light pollution from the city lights.
Tonight was not a clear night. Tonight, the usual rains had picked up a little extra from somewhere. It wasn’t raining heavily, but the droplets were fat and slow and cold. There was a lot of water coming down.
It made for pretty good concealment as the team drew near to the target farm and Hoeff skulked ahead, staying low in a drainage ditch until he was close enough to survey it.
His scope didn’t give a shit about the dark and the rain. When he looked through it, he could see the farm clearly, and more importantly the APA’s sentries. The nearest was a guy in waterproof overalls and a rain jacket standing out front of the farmhouse with what looked like a varmint rifle tucked away in the shadows behind him, ready to grab on a moment’s notice.
This was Folctha after all. It was still a British colony in its weird, unique, cosmopolitan way, and they’d inherited that British squeamishness about firearms. Shotguns and rifles were farm tools, and tightly controlled.
In the back of his head, Hoeff idly wondered if a varmint rifle could even hurt some of his HEAT friends. Arés and Firth might just be mutant enough to ignore something that small, but still: They were dealing with the APA here, a terrorist group who’d managed to get their hands on Cruezzir and a madwoman to pump it into. They had more serious hardware in there, Hoeff had seen it over a week of scoping the place out.
Which was why he was covered neck to feet in the latest full-body scale armor. It was thin enough to conceal under a baggy T-shirt, though it was still heavy as shit and noticeably bulky, even if it didn’t print much through the clothing. His HEAT bros were doing the same: no EV-MASS this time. It was hard to run a covert operation when you had giants stomping around in like a half-ton of armor or whatever the fuck it was.
The heaviest stuff they had fit Christian perfectly, and Arés was so fucking big, a man couldn’t hardly tell he was wearing armor at all. Hoeff would need to rethink his tactics if he’d be playing with HEAT again in the future. Supersoldiers changed all the rules.
All of that flit idly through his head as he scanned the scene waiting for…bingo. He grunted in satisfaction when he saw a second sentry come around the side of a barn. Sure enough, this one was packing something more serious than a varmint rifle: a Sinaloa.
The Sinaloa was a cheap homemade gauss rifle that some cartel shitstick had leaked the blueprints for onto the Internet years back. All you needed to make one was a half-decently equipped workshop and some innocuous mail-order parts. Vehicle batteries, some EM-field generator capacitors, copper wire, steel bar stock… The kinda stuff that really wouldn’t look out of place on a farm.
Being cheap came with disadvantages: It wasn’t exactly accurate, the power cells and capacitors were external so they had to be worn in a backpack or on a harness, and the ammo was pure steel rather than the ballistically superior lead. The HEAT got around steel’s inferior ballistic properties by using a jacketed lead round with a ferromagnetic plug at the back, but it was cheaper and easier to just cut down and turn some bar stock on a lathe.
Too bad Hoeff couldn’t realistically wield a Grid. The lightest version the HEAT had was over twenty pounds, and while he was strong enough to easily manage that these days, why bother? A SCAR was much lighter and almost as effective. Okay, definitely not as good as ‘Horse’s fuckin’ cannon… But Hoeff could barely lift the damn thing in the first place, so fuck that noise.
Still. For all its flaws, that Sinaloa wasn’t nothing. It was a fuck of a lot more than a varmint rifle or a birding shotgun, at least. The roaming sentry stopped to chat with his stationary colleague, then carried on his circuit, weaving through and around the farm buildings and equipment, following his usual course.
Approach was always the tricky bit. Hoeff had been casing the target for a week with sensors and his own Mark I eyeballs, reporting back the details to the team so they could plot out the details of the raid. Their defensive posture was sound, really, but it was basic, and repetitive. It had only taken Hoeff a few hours to nail down their patterns.
The roaming sentry was their first major problem. He covered the gaps Hoeff’s heavy backup would have to sprint through once the game was on, which meant that sentry had to be serviced first, quietly and unnoticed.
Time for Hoeff to earn his pay.
He crawled on his belly in chest-deep running rainwater at the bottom of the drain. Gettin’ soaking wet was normally a problem as it left sign everywhere, but this time it wouldn’t matter much. He crept along, silent as an alligator, and waited for the roaming idiot to stop like he always did to smoke under the open-sided tractor shed at the farmyard’s east end, right next to the drainage channel.
Lucky for Hoeff, he decided to take a piss against the tractor’s wheel tonight. Slowly, Hoeff raised himself out of the water and drained dry for a moment, unnoticed under the sound of rain on the thin fibreglass roof. He let the target finish up, then exploded forward and drove his best knife right through the rear of the target’s neck and into the base of his skull.
It was a clean service, and perfectly quiet. Hoeff caught the sentry and frog-marched him over to the ditch where wouldn’t be seen, then laid the body down, out of sight. He took a moment to wipe his laser-projection night-vision sunglasses clean—thank you, Clan Whitecrest—then raised his SCAR and tucked it into his shoulder.
That was the sign for the HEAT to get moving. And boy howdy did they. Hoeff could actually feel the giants’ footsteps thumping softly through the ground and before he knew it, they had all quietly serviced their targets, cleared away the bodies, and pre-positioned for the breach.
From his position, Hoeff watched the Protectors in action. It was…awesome. Biblically so.
Arés…well, he wasn’t Adam at the moment. He was Warhorse, who was a very different man. He’d serviced two sentries almost simultaneously by backhanding the first upside the head, throwing him over a shoulder, then taking a handful of light-speed bounds right across a clearing towards his next target, which he serviced with the most brutal display of casual strength Hoeff had ever seen. All Warhorse had done was wrap an arm around his target’s chest and gave the quickest, most perfunctory squeeze, like anyone might as a friendly little hug. There was a muffled crunching sound, and the target went instantly limp. Warhorse ducked behind the shed and let the bodies hit the floor, both utterly lifeless. He moved on to his next targets without a moment’s hesitation, and serviced them all with unstoppable force.
Baseball’s targets were serviced with a similarly perfunctory display of brutality and might. Irish, the youngest of the three, was a newbie at this particular dark game, but if he had any nerves about it, Hoeff couldn’t see them. All three clicked their throat-mikes at the same time. Twelve targets serviced in only a few seconds. Damn.
The Aggressors were of course impressive as well. They operated more like Hoeff did and let their skills speak for themselves. The inner sentries needed a bit more of a quiet approach, and while the Protectors were quiet and seriously skilled, the Aggressors were utterly silent, even Righteous. All the inner sentries were serviced in less than half a minute, well before anyone had time to report trouble or check in with the guards.
Hoeff was pretty sure Firth enjoyed the work, on some level. The thrill of the hunt, the pleasures of the kill… Hoeff had long since gotten over it. To him, this was mostly just taking out the trash. As for Murray… probably the same, though Murray had a certain artistry with the dagger that spoke to more going on under his calm face than just cleanly doing his job.
Blaczynski was harder to read, but there was a stone cold killer underneath all the tattoos and the playfulness. The three of them nodded silently, and stacked up into position.
Readiness check. All the sentries were clear. Video surveillance was obviously not a problem, because nobody inside had responded. They were either stupid, or asleep and stupid, and either was good luck. With a nod, the Protectors blitzed back to the far perimeter, ready to catch and service.
Hoeff was on point for this because they were hoping for an evidence-free raid, and he had the most experience in these types of missions. The key was keeping quiet. No painting the walls and leaving carnage for the police and press to fret over, at least not if it could be helped.
Fortunately, his three Aggressors had all played such games in their previous lives. Hoeff still had trouble believing a seven-foot-and-change juggernaut could move without a sound, but he could and it was more than a little alarming.
And wouldn’t you know it, Firth wouldn’t get much opportunity to show off his ninja-giant skills, because they apparently had just the fuckin’ best worst luck ever. Right as he was about to silently breach the door, some idiot decided to step outside. Hoeff wasted no time: the target had just enough time to blink in surprise at him before Hoeff’s fist crushed his throat. Before he could choke or make any noise, Hoeff followed up by tripping him, then snapping his spine.
Not silent enough. A dog started barking frantically inside the farmhouse. There were footsteps, a raised voice, the whine of a Sinaloa being charged.
Oh well. Carnage it was. He and his best friends were there to slay evil. They each did it for their own reasons. For ideals, for purpose, for justice. Hoeff could dig all of that. He’d do it for Claire, and Julian. And… hell.
For Bozo.