“Have the DNI taken Lawrence or anyone else in?” Aster whispered to Felix.
“Not that I know.” Felix replied, keeping a wary eye on the watchful DNI agents, “plus, Lawrence was still at the Loki facility. He wasn’t due back until tomorrow.”
“I guess we can’t help him, then,” Aster said resignedly, “The rest of us will be lucky not to get blackballed for this.”
THE MOON
Death was all around, and plenty of blood too. It stained the floor in semi-congealed pools, and was spattered across the bullet-riddled walls in violet stains. Freshly murdered corpses were strewn across the darkened hallways, the flickering of the half-dead lights giving briefly illuminated snapshots of the slaughter. The din of an alarm was just audible, barely registering through the deathly silence.
Gabriel stepped over the bodies, the sickly squelching noise his boots made puncturing the morbid quietude as he walked down the corridor, surveying the grisly scene before him, the nightmarish aftermath of an ambush. By the time the crew had realised they were under attack, it had been too late to escape. Some had died fighting, others while fleeing, unable to find a hiding place in time.
But there was at least one survivor. Gabriel heard a scrabbling sound from around the corner, and he followed it, taking care not to trip over the corpses. He turned into a side chamber where the ship’s escape pods could be accessed. The straggler was there; he had found an unused escape pod and had his back turned, frantically jabbing at a control panel to get the pod’s door to open. It was too late.
The sound of footsteps entering the chamber made the straggler freeze up in cold terror. He turned around to face the sinister figure that had been stalking him, his silhouette just visible through the shadows. Gabriel stood in the doorway and raised his weapon, taking aim squarely at the target’s head, ready to finish what he had done. The straggler stared back, the certainty of his imminent death evident in his eyes.
Or ‘its’ eyes, rather. Despite the expression of palpable fear, they were still the beady eyes of a cold-blooded reptilian xenotype with inhuman, slit-shaped pupils. There was no reason to anthropomorphise or empathise with it.
Gabriel felt nothing as he pulled the trigger.
* * *
Gabriel awoke with a start. Just like usual, the cold sweat was absent, and the panicked drum beat of his heartrate quickly subsided as the seconds ticked by. But unlike the previous night, there was a lingering feeling present; an undercurrent of uneasiness about the memory. Aliens came with many different faces, but fear looked much the same on each one. It never bothered him at the time, so why would it bother him in his dreams?
He was laying down on a set of cargo boxes in an inconspicuous corner of the vehicle bay, an excellent place to have a powernap, being quiet and out of the way. Also, when the time came to depart for the mission, he and the squad would do so from here, anyway. There wasn’t much in the vehicle bay, apart from the two Wolverine-class APCs secured to the ceiling, most unnecessary cargo having been cleared away.
Looking around, Gabriel noticed the operators gathered at the opposite end of the vehicle bay. They were holding an impromptu bench-press competition to pass the time, taking turns lying down on a set of boxes and lifting a weighted bar. Extra weight was added after each round to see who would reach failure first. They were even using actual weight-disks, instead of an artificial gravity-assisted set-up.
“…8…9…10!” the squad cheered as one of the operators completed his set and strained to put the barbell back on the rack above him. Sweating buckets from the workout, the operator lifted himself up off the boxes and took a water bottle offered to him, draining it in one go before wiping his face down with a cloth. As he re-joined the others, another operator took his place, laying down on the boxes and preparing to lift the heavily weighted bar.
Gabriel watched them as they steadily upped the weight on the barbell. Everyone’s combat armour had to be attached and removed using special machinery, so they couldn’t take off their armour to make it a fair measure of their actual strength. Gabriel’s own armour and physical enhancements were far superior to those of his squad, so heading over to join them with two unfair advantages was out of the question.
No matter. The whole thing was a pointless exercise. Even with armour, the resulting muscle strain and soreness would negatively affect combat performance, even with delayed onset. Furthermore, each operator’s combat armour, combined with surgical enhancements, significantly boosted their physical strength, thus limiting the need for intensive bodybuilding regimens, let alone idiotic displays of muscle power.
Gabriel decided to keep that to himself; telling them what he thought of their competition wouldn’t be good for unit cohesion. After all, they were about to embark on a high-risk mission with a good chance that one or more of them wouldn’t make it back. As silly as they were, he understood that these little bonding rituals were important for squad morale, not unlike the morning group hugs with his children…
Why did he even need a squad to accompany him?
The question re-surfaced unbidden in his head, still unanswered. Voidstalkers were lone-wolves trained and equipped to operate without support for long periods of time in the most hostile areas. Not needing a squad to back you up – or slow you down – was the whole point of voidstalkers. And yet, that wasn’t what bothered him about it.
The director-general must have had a good reason to put him in charge of a squad of operators for this mission – or so he assumed and so he wanted to believe. She always had plans and schemes churning in her mind – that was her job after all – and trying to discern what they were was about as useful as tarot card reading. Perhaps he should have asked her reasons when he’d had the chance.
The operators finished another set of weight-lifting, their cheering interrupting Gabriel’s speculations about his superior’s motivations. Their competition wasn’t just frivolous, it was wasting time. His squad members weren’t children, they were grown men who needed to get ready for the mission ahead.
He also needed to get his own equipment pack fitted.
“This is VS-one-seven-zero-seven,” Gabriel radioed the bridge, “what’s our ETA?”
“We’ll be landing in fifteen minutes, sir.” The ship’s captain replied.
“Understood.” Gabriel jumped off the cargo boxes and left the vehicle bay through a side door which brought him to the ship’s armoury.
The walls of the armoury were lined with racks of assault weapons, sidearms, metallic ammunition blocks kept in sterile cases, and assorted explosive ordnance. At the other end of the armoury was a special platform and frame equipped with robotic arms for fitting equipment modules to the back of a suit of armour. The rest of the squad had had their equipment modules fitted back on Asgard. Gabriel’s own module had to be installed separately.
The armoury technicians were expecting him. Without exchanging a word with them, Gabriel stepped onto the platform and turned his back to the frame. A cylindrical object was extracted from a special storage safe by a pair of robotic arms and mounted onto the slots on the back of Gabriel’s armour. Then a complicated set of mechanical locks on the cylinder interlocked with those on Gabriel’s armour, locking the module in place.
Then came the delicate part. The chief armourer opened up a second safe and removed a key with a complicated geometric arrangement of teeth. Then with the utmost care, he opened up a slot on the bottom of the cylinder and inserted the key. Once it was all the way inside, he turned it 180 degrees clockwise, causing the light to change from green to red. Then with equal care, he removed a tiny sub-key from inside the primary key and returned it to its safe, the slot on the cylinder sealing itself automatically.