To Sleep, Perchance To Dread

Prologue:

If there was a Hell, Josh certainly felt like he had been renting a space there for the past couple of days. He had managed to catch an annoying cold, one which hovered around with small symptoms – a sore throat at worst – but one which managed to cut his thinking capacity in half. As a result he'd been thoroughly mocked by Kat (doubly so after she bested him in a sparring match), answered concerned questions directed at him by Berto, and almost got run over because his mind didn't let him understand that the pedestrian lights were now red and a very pissed-off driver was hurtling towards him.

With a low groan of annoyance Josh sat on the edge of his bed before falling backwards, a pinprick of a headache starting to form in the vicinity of his third eye. Sleep. Sleep would be good, never mind that it was barely seven in the evening – he'd only had a few hours of sleep the night before.

Sleep and hope (with little conviction) that he would feel better in the morning.

Chapter One:

Anyone can escape into sleep,

We are all geniuses when we dream,

The butcher's the poet's equal there

- Emile M. Cioran

"Josh, wake up. Josh."

A woman's voice pierced through his dreamless sleep, his body recognizing that someone was gently prodding him in the shoulder. He stirred slightly, the prodding stopping when he did so, but when he made a move to settle back down to sleep some more the prodding resumed.

"All right, I'm awake," he managed to murmur, which seemed to satisfy the other occupant of the room. Blearily opening his eyes he saw that he was facing the window of his bedroom, the curtains open and the deep blue of the night sky indicating that it was quite late at night.

"Ah, you're up. I was beginning to wonder if I needed to summon Doctor Martinez over here," the woman continued, the lightness in her tone of voice managing to carry an undercurrent of concern.

At that, Josh's mind finally returned to full processing power. "Rachel?"

"Of course, who else would it be?" she replied, the undercurrent of concern turning in to a hint of panic. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Josh lied, turning around to look at Rachel. She was slightly more tanned than he remembered, her ash blond hair long enough to gently brush the top of her shoulders as she moved. She was wearing a dark blue pants suit; combined with the bag she had left on the bed and the bags under her eyes she had tried to subtly hide with make-up, he guessed that she had come back from a long day at work. "I just...was expecting you back sooner. Difficult day?"

"You have no...well, yes you do have an idea." Rachel paused to let out a heavy sigh. "I'm coordinating three teams across various time zones, all trying to hone in on a terrorist base. We had the people power to cover all three as we suspect two are simply decoys, but it's simply exhausting to try and keep track of them. The teams in Taiwan and Oman have turned in for the night, but the team in Angola is doing one last patrol before they too turn in."

"How close are they?"

"The team in Taiwan have reported a few false positives so far, but neither the Oman nor Angola teams have found anything remotely of interest."

Josh made a non-committal answer before he sat up in the bed, stretching briefly before looking around for a clock of some kind. Finding none, he instead had to resort to asking Rachel.

"Almost two in the morning. I'm going to get dressed for bed before I need to ransack some twenty-four hour coffee shops."

As Rachel stood up she moved the bag from where she had placed it on the bed, and in doing so enabled Josh to see a faint glinting on her left hand.

A wedding ring.

[ - ]

After Rachel had laid down in the bed next to him and fallen asleep, Josh's mind continued to race, thinking over events. The last thing he had remembered was feeling ill and falling asleep...the next he knew he was being prodded awake by Rachel, a much different Rachel than the one he knew...or thought he knew.

He took some time to ruminate over what had happened, and to try and figure out what exactly had happened. People didn't just suddenly wake up and find that somehow, the world had moved on drastically without them – at least, not without a cause or some kind of explanation. Okay, so he was missing a good chunk of his life, was that really such a big deal? That meant if he still worked at INTEC as an agent (which he was almost certain of) he'd be at least a good year, perhaps two behind in his abilities and ran the possibility of being devastated by an attack. Sure, he had no idea how the inner workings of INTEC had changed and what position he was now in – he was sure no one would wonder why Max Steel, super agent, had forgotten where he worked.

Sure, he'd be completely screwed if Rachel brought up anything relating to their relationship, and not just in the 'you're sleeping on the couch tonight' kind of screw up.

Josh quietly sighed. He was royally fucked in this situation. The only cause he could think of was that maybe his nanoprobes were malfunctioning – they'd developed to start giving him better memory recall; who's to say the opposite couldn't happen. The only problem was being able to admit without getting in to severe difficulties.

He was thankful that Rachel hadn't said anything too obscure, and that he was able to bull his way through their late night discussion, but he did have to wonder how long it would be before he slipped up. Knowing Rachel and INTEC's stringent – yet justifiably so – paranoia regarding a certain terrorist organization, the best he could hope for was some jail time and intense questioning.

At some point Josh managed to fall asleep; the next thing he was aware of was Rachel's pager going off, her getting ready for work and heading out the door some undetermined time afterwards. Not being able to fall back to sleep after that, Josh instead turned to checking over the house to see if it could give him any clues as to his current life.

Upon walking out of the bedroom, the first thing he saw was that he was still in his old beach house – rented or now bought he wasn't sure of, but at least it offered him some stability.

The spare bedroom looked as it always did – piled high with miscellaneous junk – and downstairs the living room and kitchen were mostly the same with only a few added touches; a few photo frames or paintings, some extra equipment in the kitchen. Fortunately, one of the added items in the kitchen was a calendar which allowed Josh to pin down the month and year: March 2005.

He was missing near-enough four and a half years of his life.

He had been thinking – hoping – that it wasn't too long, but considering his and Rachel's circumstances at work he had known that it needed to have been a reasonable amount of time.

Josh quickly flicked through the rest of the calendar to see if he could find any other hints, only finding out that his and Rachel's anniversary was on November twenty-third. Well, at least that was one fact he could memorize, he just had to hope no one asked about how it went.

"Hey, hermano, I see you're finally up," a voice said through the bio-link, and Josh smiled. Well, at least Berto was still around. "Enjoying your vacation?"

"Sure am, I'm just wondering where this whole check up on me came from. Aren't I supposed to be away from work during a vacation?"

"Naturally. But Rachel said you seemed a little out of it last night and asked me to check up on you when you woke up."

"It was nothing, just some...bad dreams. Bad, weird dreams."

"Care to share?" Berto asked just before the sound on Berto's side went silent.

"It's nothing to worry about. Besides, shouldn't you be more concerned over eating breakfast rather than quizzing me over every little intricate detail? I thought it was the wife who was supposed to do that," Josh added, putting a joking tone in to his voice just in case Rachel happened to be present in the ops room.

"If you're going to get technical, hermano, there are three people in your marriage."

"Yeah; me, Rachel and the annoying little voice in my head."

At that, Berto laughed. "I'll let Rachel know there's nothing to worry about."

[ - ]

It had only been a couple of hours since he had talked to Berto, but Josh was more unsettled now than before the two of them had spoken. Obviously him and Rachel being married wouldn't have been able to be kept from Berto, but from the way Berto had joked about it it seemed like it was common knowledge at INTEC.

And speaking of, Josh thought to himself as he picked up the faint sounds of a pager going off. Walking back to his bedroom he spotted a second pager on what he assumed was his nightstand and picked it up.

RPTNTIMD.

Not showing any signs of annoyance or surprise, Josh pocked his pager and began to make his way to the front door, picking up what he assumed were his house and car keys along the way.

As he walked out of the front door, another familiar sight greeted him: his car was in the driveway looking immaculate. Either Rachel liked the car herself, or didn't care that a young, handsome blond male driving it around was likely to catch peoples' attentions. Either way, Josh didn't really care – he got in and with a quick flick of the key in the ignition he began to make his way to INTEC.

As he drove away from the beach house, Josh marvelled at the fact that most of the area surrounding the coastal road he was driving on was still undeveloped; he hoped that was because people were wanting to keep it that way, and not out of some sense of worry about the spread of the 'undesirable' areas of Del Oro.

About fifteen minutes after leaving, Josh pulled up at a barrier to the underwater tunnel that linked Del Oro with N-Tek Island. He quickly scanned his work pass in to the machine and, with a satisfied beep, the barrier in front of him lifted and allowed Josh to drive across.

INTEC had quite a few underwater tunnels criss-crossing the nearby sections of the Pacific ocean, most of them linking some of the INTEC-owned islands (N-Tek Island, Blue Base, Baker's Island) with mainland Del Oro. Aside from the car-access tunnel, however, all the rest were only accessible through the magrail system or, failing that, one of INTEC's jets or helicopters if a situation called for their use.

As Josh pulled in to one of the empty parking, he spotted a familiar female standing watch.

"Hey, Steel, was wondering when you were going to get here," Kat said by way of greeting as she walked over to where Josh had decided to park. Josh said nothing in return, instead his answer was him simply changing in to his alter-ego, Max Steel. "Rachel's been wondering where you were."

"Rachel's here?"

"Uh, yeah. She came in about three, four hours ago to coordinate a ton of agents. Turns out the team in Azerbaijan found something important. Come on," Kat added, gesturing over to one of the numerous elevators scattered around the car park. "She's been waiting for you to get in before she briefs everyone."

"Angola," Max replied, following Kat's lead.

"What?"

"The team was in Angola, not Azerbaijan," Max clarified as the two of them stepped on to an empty elevator, Kat pressing the button for the briefing room floor.

"Whatever, Steel. Not all of us have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the world, especially not when they were knocked about during a mission."

A moment after Kat said those words, Max was suddenly aware of bandages on the upper bicep of her right arm, as well as a faint, almost-healed cut trailing across her right cheek.

Before he could say anything, the elevator dinged to announce their arrival at their requested destination, and Kat briskly walked out of the elevator, Max hurrying to keep up. Kat had evidently known which room the briefing was to be held in as she led Max to one of the lesser-used rooms through a maze of corridors. Eventually she stopped at a room marked with the number four and opened the door to let Max in.

A quick sweep of the room allowed Max to ascertain just how many people were already waiting, and how many of them he knew. The time he took between walking through the door and sitting down allowed him to calculate both: twenty-six people in the room, and he knew eighteen of them. The eight he didn't know all looked reasonably young – new recruits Max presumed – and one of them walked over to greet Max as soon as he was seated.

"Oh, hey Max, I, uh, didn't think you'd be attending this meeting," the man said, looking quite anxious: his eyes spent only a few seconds focused on Max, then darting away to look at something else in the room before he returned his gaze to Max.

"What made you think that?" Max asked cooly, but before he could get his answer Rachel stepped through the door. As soon as the door to the meeting room clicked shut, all attention was on her. Nothing was said, however, until she had taken her position at the front of the room.

"As many of you are aware, INTEC has been coordinating various teams across the globe to close in on a new terrorist threat that we have gained intelligence on. Sections of my team were assigned to investigate rumours and intelligence, and last night one of the teams found valuable information."

There was a slight pause as the projector flickered to life, showing a picture of a heavily-secured building next to where Rachel was standing.

"One of my agents, Steiger, was able to take this picture and transfer it before the team was ambushed. Two of the team have been taken hostage, while a third was carried a short distance away and left for dead in what they thought was an abandoned part of the country. However, a passing local found them and called for medical assistance – they have yet to regain consciousness, but when their scheduled check-in time passed I and some other agents were notified. Those agents who were closest have already been reassigned to Angola and are making their way to the country to investigate.

"As we are unaware of the complete circumstances of this situation, it has been agreed that extra agents are to be sent alongside those already reassigned." As those words were spoken, Rachel and Max's eyes met, and he saw a small glimmer of concern in Rachel's eyes. Before he could process it, though, Rachel had already moved on.

"Alvarez, Maple, Saliba, Rosenblatt, Neth, Steel. You six will be sent to Angola and liaise with the other agents already en route. We don't want any heroics," this was said with a pointed look at Max and one of the other agents. "We want to ensure the safety of Steiger and the other agents. Good luck."

[ - ]

Once the mission briefing was adjourned, Rachel had disappeared ahead of the rest of the other agents. Those who had been assigned to Angola, Max included, made their way down to the hangar. There were a few people milling around the various planes and jets that INTEC used, but the majority of the occupants were huddled in the far corner against an almost pure black jet. It looked very similar to Simurgh, one of the jets that Chuck's team had developed before Max had joined INTEC – it was of a similar design but looked a lot sleeker up front, with a small bulge in what could only be thought of as its stomach.

As Max walked up to the vehicle, some of the people in the huddle broke off and walked in to it; the rest gradually dispersed either back in to the rest of the hangar or disappeared back in to the main area of INTEC. None of the people he passed were overly interested in him; before long he was aboard the plane and heading towards where he suspected the fuselage was.

He'd guessed right – ensuring that any questioning would be left until hopefully after the mission – and settled in with some of the other agents, closing his eyes and tuning out the quiet hum of voices. Before too long, the pre-flight checks were over, the plane's engines roared to life, and the aircraft was airborne and carrying a reconnaissance and rescue crew to Angola.

[ - ]

Upon arrival at Luanda, the new team was greeted by Andre Santos who had given them the rather unwelcome news that the agents were being held on the east side of the country, close to the municipality of Cameia. They were, however, on the far west side of the country, necessitating a very long and (at least in Max's mind) aggravating trip across the country via local plane, including an overnight stop in Kuito.

The more time they spent travelling, the more aggravated Max got – surely this was an emergency situation, and the quicker they got there the better. Why Rachel had decided to mobilise agents from the US instead of calling on those more local to Angola was something which had been annoying him since the briefing – if he made some tentative and rather flimsy links, he could see why Rachel had requested him to go, but four rather new agents? Not to mention the sheer number she'd requested – if this was as bad as he suspected, subterfuge and a much, much smaller team would have been better utilised. They would have been able to move quicker, not drawn as much attention, and certainly not contain agents who had barely passed the training exercises.

Giving a brief shake of his head to clear those thoughts, Max settled down and attempted to get some sleep.

[-]

Approximately sixteen hours later (Max wasn't counting down the wasted hours, not at all) he and a group of three others, two of whom barely had a year's experience with the agency between then, were huddled in a clump of trees, watching a hastily-built and rather unstable-looking building in the middle of nowhere.

There was nowhere that looked even remotely like the image Rachel had showed them in the briefing and there was nowhere he could see that they'd be able to keep hostages, not even if they'd managed to dig out a makeshift basement.

"Saliba, keep check. Maple, follow me. Steel, stay put," Andre Santos ordered, having accompanied the agents across the country and was now leading the group. Saliba and Maple acknowledged his commands, and so did Max after a few seconds and a pointed look from Andre that could rival some of Rachel's at times.

Maple and Santos stepped out, moving cautiously towards the building. Saliba shifted away from their hiding place, keeping within the cover of the trees as he circled the perimeter of the building.

The further away the three other agents got, the more frustrated Max got. There was nothing here, no armed terrorist group with a bunch of hostages, no world-ending plans being discussed in that building. He wouldn't be surprised if it was occupied with a family trying to make a home – heck, he wouldn't be surprised if it was empty, beds long since vacated in search of a life less cut-off from neighbours, hopes and dreams carrying them far.

A low whistle caught Max's attention, and he looked up to see Saliba gesturing to Max, making a couple of brief arm movements.

Coast clear. No one around.

Before Max could ascertain if Maple and Santos had gotten the same message, Max stepped forwards from the cover of the forests, striding confidently and quickly towards the ramshackle building. As he got closer, the signs of decay became more pronounced, weeds and various other plants starting to climb up the outside of the building. The door was buckled slightly inwards, as if someone had come along and tried to kick it open.

The door opened with a sharp snap, the weakened material breaking it two upon being exposed to Max's probe-enhanced strength. A quick glance inside showed a long-abandoned building coated in dust and with more plants growing from the floor.

A quick audio check revealed no living animals nor humans within the building, and Max turned back towards the door. Saliba was standing there, possibly having hurried over when Max broke his cover, not being able to move quickly enough to intercept him before he broke down the door. Saliba's eyes darted to the left, the direction Santos and Maple had headed, before resuming contact with his own. Saliba backed away a few steps, allowing Max to walk towards the door, wondering what was going on. Max had missed where Santos and Maple had gone after their initial approach of the building, yet if they'd been captured or found something of higher interest, Saliba would have noted Max.

"Everything okay?" Max asked quietly. Saliba, who had been scanning the nearby woods, abruptly turned his head back to Max and gulped nervously.

"Uh, yeah, everything's fine. Santos and Maple went off to investigate, see if there were any other buildings like this one nearby. This one's been abandoned for a while, but it might not be the only one here."

"Right," Max said, walking past Saliba and started to head in the direction the other two agents had taken. He'd only gotten a few steps when a hot, searing blast hit him just to the left of his sternum. He gasped, instinctively putting a hand to the site of the injury, encountering a wet, sticky substance.

Blood.

His blood.

He felt his heart flutter, blood flowing out and down his chest, down his back. Pain, almost unbelievable pain. He staggered, vision going dark, unable to balance on his own feet. He collapsed on to the ground, chest first, the blood darkening the forest floor.

His last moment of consciousness he was barely aware of the click of a gun, the ting of metal being kicked deep in the forest, out of sight, and a voice talking in to a communication device.

"Saliba here. He's dead."