Prologue
The black figure descended in slow motion through the shattered glass of Dr. Perry's penthouse skylight. The warrior landed on the floor with the grace of a Samurai from the future.
Stunned, the white robbed scientist turned to face his opponent. The doctor was well into his seventies, with little but long portions of grayish and curly hair barely covering both sides of his head, just above his earlobes. He may have looked like one of the three stooges, although he was one of the foremost scientists at the present time. Had this night never found him, he would have being awarded a Nobel Prize. It was too late now.
The dark figure pulled a black anodized aluminum gun. The doctor had never seen anything like it. It was small and seemed light. A series of flashing blue laser lines oscillating from left to right, up and down on the victim's chest, gave the spooked scientist the impression this was no ordinary gun.
"Doctor Perry" Krakeded, the black figure, snapped him out of his fight or flee trance. "I am sorry to invade your privacy like this, but I am here to secure some technology you are now harboring."
The doctor thought of moving out of the menacing blue ray scanning his entire body. For a fraction of a second he felt some of his muscles twitching in unison. But the smallest movement resulted in the blue ray spreading farther and faster. If this weapon's intent was to kill him, running was not going to aid him. Not unless he could run faster than the speed of light. "You cannot outrun light, son!" a memory reverberated at the back of his mind reinforcing the very well known notion.
"Doctor Perry" The shadow continued, slowly and menacingly walking toward the profoundly scared scientist. "I truly suggest you cooperate. I do not want to harm you. But if I must, I will shoot you down. It will not be pleasant either to you, or me."
"You are going to kill me!" The doctor finally spurted out. "You are going to kill me like you have killed the others, aren't you?"
The doctor was onto something the dark figure did not expect to hear. It was true. Krakeded, the menacing dark figure, had been killing other scientists. However, all of these killings had been made to look like fatal accidents. Having Dr. Perry being so convinced all of his colleagues had been murdered, was not too reassuring.
The dark figure gestured his left wrist wrap close to his mouth. "FIIRK BLERKITRUP. FRAKE TRAQUEE!" Krakeded said to a microscopic microphone lodged onto his wrist.
"What are you doing? Why are you here? Who sent you?"
"Doctor, do not let me get hasty…" Krakeded said as he pressed the trigger. The blue lines went ahead and did their damage, with four lacerations, one on each arm and leg, allowing for Dr. Perry's blood to ooze out. It was not meant to be lethal or incapacitating. Just a demo of what the master gunner had in store. "The technology… Now!"
"I don't know what you are talking about…" Dr Perry interjected. "You are not going to get away with this, young man! I have cameras recording everything transpiring under this roof. Soon everybody will know your identity!"
The assassin could have sworn he saw a hint of a smile draw on the scientist's mouth. A smirk. A deadly one at that. If those cameras were truly recording as the scientist had warned, his mission was not heading on the right path. "Old man, you do not expect me to buy your bluff, right? I already checked for cameras before I came in. I can assure you the perimeter has been cleared and it is just the two of us inside this room. So how about you start handling the information I came all this way for? This is the last time I ask nicely!"
Now the scientist was laughing. And laughing hard! "Did you check for cameras, you say? I suppose you were not clever enough to run an infrared scan, did you? Because I assure you they are invisible to your eyes!"
And there it was again, the scientist's triumphal smirk. Reluctantly, the assassin decided to run a thermal and an infrared scan using a series of highly sophisticated sensors on his rounded cylindrical visor. Whereas he had been seeing everything in a bluish color, it all turned to a reddish tone. And sure enough there they were. Enclosed by his visor targeting computer with a blue box, about five cameras spread over the entire large room laboratory with the main character being the assassin plotting to kill the scientist and steal the information he had so hard worked to come by.
"Ahh! You see the cameras now, my young one…" the scientist retorted. "You see, I have covered them with a metamaterial. If you do not know what this is, think of it as a material with a negative refraction index. Light is made to go around it, making the covered item completely invisible to human eyes. Clever, wouldn't you think?"
"Very..." Krakedead thought to himself not wanting to concede defeat. Not yet. One thing was for certain. Those cameras needed to be destroyed. So one by one he allowed his targeting computer to coordinate a series of gorgeous bluish plasma bolts to be fired from his highly advanced weapon.
The scientist would have wanted to see the beautiful display of lights, but this was instead his only chance for a quick move.
Doctor Perry ran to the other side of the room where his other experiment station, filled with junk, stored his single ticket to salvation. Throwing every single piece of metal, wire and old burned boards, he managed to open a compartment from which he pulled a small gun. His own design!
Krakeded had shot the very last of the five cameras and was doing another scan just to make sure there were no other security breaches that may endanger his mission further. It was all clean. In what seemed to be fractions of a second he had managed to improve his chances of success. He had been fast, but not fast enough.
When he returned to pointing his weapon to the doctor, he found it was him now the target of a gun. Both of them were now at the end of an eyesight. Whoever was to shoot first, would win.
Krakeded did not want to shoot. He wanted to know where the files for Dr Perry's invention were being stored. He could go through the hassle of looking for them himself but that would have been too boring. Oh no. Krakeded liked to be the hunter. He wanted to instill fear in his prey and get the files by brute force.
Dr. Perry on the other hand felt this was his chance to find out who had been killing the other scientists. He was dead anyway, why not try to find out who was behind all of this?
"Come on Doctor!" Krakeded went first. "You know what I can do. Will you be fool enough to think that you can outsmart me? If you shoot I will evade the bullet at the same time I fire my gun. You can't win. You have already seen I must be the deadliest warrior on this planet!"
"That is true, my black costume friend" The scientist conceded. "There is only one tinsy little problem for you, though?"
"Really doctor, and what would this tinsy little problem be?"
"That you have not watched what is it that I can do." The doctor said at the same time he pressed the trigger on his gun."
Krakeded's visor went nuts. At first he thought he had seen the doctor's finger muscle move. His computerized visor thermal scanning function showed a change in temperature. At the same time a very bright light was jettisoned from the doctor's gun barrel. But it was too fast!
He would have started to dodge the missile, but his legs would not respond. A command from his brain to his right hand index finger to pull the trigger followed, but this one was as well equally unresponsive. Puzzled, Krakeded looked down as if the answer could be found lying in the floor.
Streams of blood were coming out of his body. He never felt what had punctured him. He never even saw anything hitting him.
"You see my good friend, I did not fired a bullet." The scientist smiled triumphantly. "This is what I call a Pulsar Gun. It is made of the same neutron concentration of a Pulsar star, although in a considerable smaller scale, of course. Not even traveling faster than the speed of light could you have evaded the neutrons. You were not that fast anyway, were you?" The doctor joked.
Krakeded's knees landed on the floor. He grabbed into his last effort to raise his gun and shoot, but the scientist kicked Krakeded's gun from his right hand long before he could lift his numbed member, a measly inch from the ground.
Krakeded breathing grew erratic. He knew this was the mission he would not complete or get out from. One last effort to stand in his feet again, but instead he landed on his chest.
The black suite was protecting him somehow. But the neutron pulsar had gone through front and back out of his body. For the first time he wished there were other team mates that could come to his rescue. But this operation required him to work solo. This was it!
"Now, now…" The scientist sat besides the fallen warrior. "What do we have here?"
Dr Perry looked at the black costume in search for a zipper of some kind, but there was none to be found. Instead he had to use his pocket knife to open an incision on the black mask. The fabric was resilient but eventually gave up. Pulling as hard as he could, the mask torn into pieces, came out revealing the identity of his perpetrator.
The young man, most likely in his twenties, he had never seen before. That did not come as a surprise. A human with silver eyes, on the other hand, did cause some internal commotion. Blood started to ooze from Krakeded's mouth.
"Why are you doing this? You seem to be so young!" The scientist said with sorrow, an image of his oldest son been killed in battle during the Persian Gulf War, vaporizing in the back of his mind. "Are you like that Una Bomber fellow? Why are you killing us?"
Krakeded body started to mildly convulse and twitch. The scientist would have wanted to heal his opponent but he simply had no idea how. Even if he had been a medical doctor, there was no technology to fix the damage the pulsar had caused. He could picture the results being too many ruptured organs. He knew what would come next.
"Listen. I am sorry! I did not want for our encounter to end this way" The scientist said as he turned the body of the dying soldier to face up. Then he dragged the almost dead body to have his head lying on his lap.
"I am sorry…" Krakeded still had strength barely enough to talk. "But you will all have to… die… anyway." Krakeded coughed more blood. "Doctor… You are dead!"
He must be delusional, the doctor thought. "Listen, young man. What you don't realize is that had you succeeded in killing me, the entire invasion of my premises would have been sent via email to my colleagues. It is all recorded in a hard disk on a secured server. Every night I enter a password. Had I failed to enter the password tonight, because you did manage to kill me for example, the hard disk content would have been distributed. Eventually we would have caught you, anyway. Just like I did, I guess..."
Krakeded laughed faintly. He wanted to laugh harder, but the effort made him cough more blood.
"It is pretty clever, don't you think?" The doctor laughed along with the beaten warrior.
"It is… very clever… doctor" Krakeded added. "Which is precisely why I am la…" Krakeded's last breath carried his last word. The doctor could not understand it completely but it felt like "laughing".
"Which is precisely why I am laughing?" The doctor pondered. "But you are dying, my son…"
And in a split second, Dr Perry realized what the young dark figure had meant. But it was too late. On the now deceased warrior's belt, a flashing LED followed by a synchronous beep, gave it all away.
The doctor had implemented a means to screw the intruder one way or the other. If said intruder was successful in killing the scientist, the entire content of what had just transpired would be securely sent to the authorities. And in a very similar fashion, the warrior had devised a way to secure his mission in the event it was him who was killed.
The doctor grimaced back, letting Krakeded's inert body hit the marble floor. Crawling on his butt back to the wall, the doctor found a good grip to get himself back on his feet.
The LED and the beeping frequency were growing faster. Apparently there was some sort of a timer which started as soon as some bio rhythm function, like a pulse or heart beat, came to a halt on Krakeded's suited body.
Dr. Perry started to run towards the large pent house door, hoping the explosion was not large enough to get him. His wish did not come true. It would have matter little how far away from the body he had been, the Nova like explosion disintegrated him either way.
In a flash, the penthouse was obliterated to memories along with Dr. Perrys experiments. Down on the streets, pedestrians hit the ground as the pavement rumbled. Debris, more like dust, covered them in a ghostly white.
When the strongest of them managed to regain their posture and gazed upon the highest point on the shaken building, what they saw was an upper floor totally annihilated, vaporized, as if a giant laser razor had shaved it out from existence.
That night at 12:00 AM, Dr. Perry's server, on a remote and secured location, sent four identical emails.