NOTES: This is a prequel to "Only Lonely" and "Fuzzy Dice". It's not necessary to have read those stories, but I'd recommend it.
SUMMARY: After capturing a new type of terminator General Connor faces a personal crisis, while his future father confronts a frightening new enemy in the forbidden wastes of the Arctic Circle. Prequel to the 'Only Lonely' series.
DISCLAIMER: All characters herein are the property of someone other than me. No profit has been earned.
"The Killer I Created"
Chapter 3
T.R. Samuels
Kyle Reese had expected many things from the harsh realm of Svalbard. Perpetual twilight, oppressive cold, a howling emptiness of barren rock and an endless horizon of snow and ice.
A bowling alley had not been one of them.
In fact, there were a lot of things in this town he had not expected; like a department store, a museum, and a university. Even a pizzeria. So many of the comforts of a mainstream city shoehorned into this forbidden place, frozen in a space and time where the bombs never fell. In its day it must have been the hub of activity all across the islands, the looming chimneys of its power station fuelled by the coal once brought in on the cableway network.
After moving into the centre of town the team had gained entry to a type of arcade, a long building of painted timber that housed some of the settlements' shops and amenities. In the middle was a local bar and games room, the place they currently occupied, establishing camp after kicking in the door and clearing away the snow before they had set about rooting through its aged supplies.
The establishment was a sad old thing that had past its days of cosiness and town spirit, a waterhole of working men perhaps from the harbour or the mines, hone down by the abandonment the team had found all around them. It was not difficult to imagine the fireplace roaring on a day like today, the bar deep with merriment and clinking glass or the clattering of pins and pool cues as people unwound from a hard day's work.
Reese wondered how long it had carried on after the world had fallen down around them.
Holden was next door, salivating over the bibliotek and its preserved wealth of literature as Falcheck emptied several tins of haricots into a cooking pot, its charred bowl resting atop of the crackling log burner, stuffed to the brim with broken furniture. Outside they had erected a telescopic pole, on top of which perched the spinning blades of a miniature turbine – the one thing of their high-tech gear that had made it through the crash and now provided power to the bar's lighting.
At the bar proper, Reese worked over the innards of a dismantled radio, reconnecting wires and soldering joints as he tried to enhance it with a larger antenna they had appropriated from the local police station. Virtually all the electronic equipment they had found had stopped working long ago, but with a few modifications and some cannibalized parts from their gear, he was hopeful he could extend the range far enough to reach the Charybdis if they took it to higher ground.
"What's cooking, Falcheck?" Pace asked, a pair of cold nails gripped between his lips and a lump hammer in his hand as he helped Carter board up the last of the broken windows.
The pilots' hackles rose as he took a defensive posture around the pot. "Never you mind, private. It'll be done when it's done."
The Southerner smiled until he saw the discarded tins laying next to the pile of splintered chairs they had broken down for fuel.
"Beans?! Where'd you get beans?"
"Supermarket, across the road."
Pace's face contorted in horror, like he had eaten something rancid. "You're not going to eat those, are you?!" He admonished, the phantom taste rolling in his mouth as he peered over the rim of the pot. "They must have had it by now!"
"They might be a bit brown, but they smell okay." Falcheck defended his culinary experiment as he sprinkled in some salt and a faded sachet of stiffened chilli powder. "Beans are beans and not reconstituted protein spaghetti. That's all we had back on the boat – fake spaghetti and plenty of it. Now I've found beans and I'm going to take the chance that they're even half decent."
"That's fairly optimistic, but canned goods do last along time." Carter chimed in after banging in the last board. "Tinned goods from the Second World War were still found to be edible after sixty years, and up here they would have been kept at low temperature."
"Exactly!" Falcheck stirred the concoction with a big wooden spoon as it began to turn and bubble, releasing a plume of steam that mushroomed in the chilled air. "If you don't want any, that's fine with me, Pace."
"Whoa!! I didn't say I didn't want any!"
Reese rolled his eyes as his chilled fingers finished fitting the makeshift antenna and he began reinstalling the battery.
Regulars. He was the only member of Tech-Com assigned to this mission and it was shaping up to be quite an experience – like looking after a group of teenagers on a school field trip, each one with their own foibles and petty complaints delivered in a jocular catalogue unrelieved by wit. Above that he had a lieutenant plucked straight from the stock-characters of an old war movie – something set in Vietnam or some other far away place where sanity and humanity dangled by a thread.
No wonder Connor preferred machines.
Reese paused in his work as he thought about him. His hero. His idol. The man he measured himself against and tried everyday to be more alike.
He remembered the last time he saw him, only a few weeks ago in Serrano Point. It was for an official function to mark the capture of the facility – the first beachhead established in North America since Skynet withdrew its land forces from the rest of the globe a couple of months back. Connor had decided to strike whilst the iron was hot and launched a covert attack on the plant with his elite forces.
Tech-Com – known to most as the 132nd Division – Connor's Special Forces with its fingers into everything. It was the sharp end of the stick that formed the spear tip of the Resistance. Frontline combat, covert missions, surveillance, even secret research and development, its members carefully creamed from other divisions for their unique abilities. Popular legend had them conjured as lantern-jawed killing machines that could head-butt T888s into oblivion, but the reality was totally different.
The soldiers Connor used were selected for their intelligence, resourcefulness, specialist knowledge, and their initiative – a litany of qualities few normal soldiers were measured by. Kyle and Derek had been brought into the fold a few years ago, getting new training, better equipment, and space-age weaponry stolen from the armouries of Skynet like they had never imagined, seeing first hand their effectiveness as the noose tightened around the machine-God's throat.
By now, the Resistance was closing in, cutting Skynet's supply lines from its strongholds in America and forcing it to consolidate its forces. Even now, the regular bulk of their forces were beginning to face the machines openly on the battlefield, humanity's war evolving from a guerrilla struggle to a more conventional conflict. Whole areas of the Earth's surface were now effectively in human hands, abandoned by Skynet in its latest strategy to wall up in the Americas and dare humanity to come in after it.
Connor had dared. So had Tech-Com. Launching an amphibious assault straight up Avila Beach less than a week later and sticking it to Skynet on its home soil.
But that was just the War Against the Machines, a trifling matter about the survival of humanity – not dinner with the Joint Chiefs.
It was the first time Reese had ever worn a dress uniform, he never even knew the Resistance had them, causing a slight panic on his part until Connor had offered him one of his own, and as fortune would have it, they just happened to be the same size.
He even had his aides arrange a shower for him. A real shower with real hot water and something remarkably resembling soap.
At first he had not been keen on the whole idea when Connor asked him to come, but after putting on that uniform, clean-shaven and dirt-free, he felt ten feet tall. Like a real soldier. One with pride and presentation, not some rag-ass guerrilla clambering through the mud.
Afterward they had whiled away the evening over fine scotch and cigars, luxuries beyond measure, put the universe to rights as they surveyed the vista of the victorious battlefield from the highest tower of the power plant, lounging in a pair of deck chairs. It had felt strange being out in the open, the frontlines only miles away, but just as Connor had assured them like some all-seeing prophet, Skynet had launched no counterattack, the nuclear facility far too precious a resource to destroy.
How did he always know? How did he see it all coming? How did he know what to expect? Reese didn't understand it. It was like Connor had been waiting for this war to happen his entire life.
The others might have made fun of him, but Reese was the envy of many, even the highest echelons of the Resistance brass. He had come to be part of what was informally referred to as Connor's 'inner circle'; a collection of confidants and advisors for lack of a better term. People Connor trusted and the few whose advice and opinions he sought out. It drove his brother crazy.
"Why do you two keep hanging out?"
"What the hell do you talk about?"
"Why'd he give you that picture?"
Derek had begun to sound like their mother.
The outer doorway swung open with a howl, snow whipping in on an icy whirlwind as Bacchus barged inside followed close by Holden, the two men wrapped tightly in their snow-caked cold weather gear. The lieutenant had his arms full with a burlap sack half filled with coal, collected from the crippled hulk of a cableway tower, Holden's with a stack of library books.
"Stoke it up, Falcheck!" The lieutenant ordered, slinging the sack next to the fire. "The weather's kicking up something fierce!" He pulled off his goggles and ski mask, tossing them on the bench of a booth before gesturing towards Holden and his armful of books. "Nice work, Holden. That'll keep the fires burning."
Holden looked at him as though Bacchus had just kicked a puppy. "You're joking right, sir?!"
"About what?"
He placed the pile down on the bar next to Reese and pealed off his woolly mittens. "These are priceless, sir! There're hardly any books left in the world! We need to save as many as we can!" He sifted through the titles, the spines creased in worn testament to their timelessness. "Treasure Island… Catcher in the Rye… The Third Policeman…"
Reese pricked his ears at the last one. John had given him a copy once, but he had never managed to finish it. Too surreal. But then again, in his opinion, it was by far the greatest book in the history of man – stopping a lump of shrapnel from entering his chest with only millimetres to spare.
Bacchus's shoulders slumped, tired from his resource gathering and his native accent began breaking though. "Ay! Don't give me any of that shit, corporal! They won't be much good if we all freeze to death!"
"But sir!"
"Guys!" Reese spoke up, speaking over them as he clicked the last component in place on the radio's board. "If things really get desperate, I'm sure we can find plenty of law books and celebrity biographies that'll make better kindling." He lay down as middle ground.
Bacchus shrugged as he pealed off his jacket, moving next to the fire to put the warmth back in his bones and drawn by the smell of the cooking pot as Falcheck lifted it from the stove. He removed the lid and the aroma rose upward again in a plume of steam.
"Soup's up!"
In a heartbeat, Carter and Pace were at his side, pulling their dented soup dishes and rusty utensils from their stowed backpacks, wiping them with their sleeves in practiced ritual before Falcheck rationed out the gastronomic concoction. All uncertainty abandoned, Pace was the first to try it as the others waited cautiously for his reaction.
"Y'know," He said, turning the beans over on his tongue before swallowing. "They're not half bad."
As mealtime ensued in its typical coarse frenzy of smacking lips and belching, Reese clasped the shell of the radio casing back together, tightening the screws to hold it in place and twisted on the power. The device crackled to life with a crescendo of static as he twirled the volume higher, glancing up the lengthy whip antenna where it bowed under its own weight.
"Any luck?" Bacchus called over a mouthful of food, hands cupping the base of his steaming bowl to draw blood back into his fingers.
Reese shook his head, deep in concentration as he carefully turned the frequency and tried to locate the Charybdis' emergency channel.
"If that hodgepodge works I'll…"
Bacchus was cut off by an electronic shrill that pierced their ears, fading instantly as Reese's thumb rolled past it.
"Go back!" The lieutenant leapt to his feet and the sergeant twisted the knob, millimetres at a time, listening carefully before the screeching noise slid back into existence and he turned down the volume to a bearable level. It was unlike anything they'd ever heard – a rapid series of tones and pulses like the dialling of an old modem, parts of it drowned out in scratching static before coming through in the clear.
"What the hell is that?!"
A smile slowly curled Bacchus's face as he listened to the staccato tones, translating until it looped back and began to transmit from the beginning again.
"It's a repeating message." He confirmed, sliding onto a bar stool next to Reese as the others gathered around, Pace and Falcheck still eating their beans. "It's designed to activate automatically if a dead man's switch isn't pressed."
The room filled with sideways glances, the implication of the lieutenants' words loud and clear. Someone had been here before them, but the who and the why still remained to be revealed.
Since the moment the mission had been handed down through the chain of command it had been shrouded in mystery, divided in pieces amongst the men so that none knew the full extent of its purpose. Falcheck was here to fly the helicopter, a job now well and done. Pace was supposedly their engineer, but had yet to flex any of his specialist talents. Holden's presence was obvious and Carter was here for what was described to them as 'confirmation' purposes.
Only Bacchus and Reese knew the truth – but the lieutenant didn't know that, the young sergeant pulled aside before leaving Serrano and told everything by Connor.
"Just in case." The general had said before vanishing back into the shadowy depths of the power plant.
"Holden. Carter. When you've finished with dinner, get your gear together. We're going for a little walk."
Without another word the men where dismissed by Bacchus's curtness, leaving him and Reese at the bar as they moved back to the fireplace. Reese's mouth opened and closed as he tried to assimilate the lieutenants' orders, glancing out of one of the unbroken windows to the torturous realm beyond as snow whipped past horizontally and the light began to fade.
"Excuse me, sir?"
"We'll go and complete the mission and try to contact the Charybdis while we're at it, Reese." Bacchus hardly looked up as he familiarised himself with the modified radio, any forthcoming compliment of its modest genius unlikely. "Shouldn't take more than an hour or so."
"Well… with respect, sir. What's the rush? It'll be dark in a few hours and the weather's taken a turn for the worse since we got here. It might be better if we waited until morning and all go together."
"You understand that this mission is top secret, right sergeant? Need-to-know?"
"Yes sir, but…"
"Then the fewer that know about it, the better. Vital personnel only. I need Carter to verify the package and Holden in case anyone gets hurt. I don't need a sergeant, a pilot, or a slack-jawed yokel to do the job." He remarked, not caring if the others heard. "Besides, you weren't equated with the full facts before we left."
Reese felt the quandary of his advanced knowledge tighten around him, like a collar choking the words before they made it out. That, he had found out early on, was the problem of being in the inner circle – the reward of trustworthiness was the burden of secrets.
"Sir…" Reese gritted his teeth, knowing he was heading into dangerous territory, his duty ploughing him on. "I don't think that's a good idea."
For several seconds, Bacchus gazed at him with some imperceptible expression, as liable to spear him as speak to him where they in less civilised times. Behind the opals of brilliant blue Reese was certain lay the soul of a militant killer, the type that in peacetime would keep their flattop haircut, give names to guns, or have an unhealthy fixation with the Confederacy.
With exaggerated tenderness, the lieutenant placed the radio down on the bar and looked the sergeant right in the eye, swagger and clannishness evaporating as his glare met with Reese.
"Listen up, Reese. Since the start of this mission I've been on pretty congenial terms with you," Bacchus's tone dropped low, more for effect than privacy. "But the day I have my command decisions questioned by some lowly sergeant is the day after never. No matter what fancy, high-tech, James Bond, need-to-know, asshole outfit he's from… or how high up his best pal is."
"Sir, that's not it at all! I'm just concerned for the men's safety." Reese defended himself, keeping his voice low expressly for the other team member's benefit. "You have full authority on this mission and I'm not questioning your…"
"Good! Then it's settled. We'll be back in a couple of hours and we'll all sit around the fire, have a jolly sing-song and wait for the choppers. Alright?"
The bar stool screeched as Bacchus rose up and brushed past him, his shoulder connecting more than necessary as he rejoined the others for a last round of beans and Reese slid his face into his palm.
####
Allison could not remember how long she had sat in this room – the cell that time forgot – listening to the buzz of the amber light bulb as it dangled from its chain, the rumble of distant machines, and water collecting from a drip on the ceiling. She felt how clammy her body was, that sickness in her stomach, all the outward signs of her gnawing fear that only time alone in the silence had ebbed.
What was this place? Why was John doing this? If he was here then this could not be a Skynet facility and the robots were under his command – but she had no idea he controlled a place like this. Dark and terrible. Like the dungeons of a castle or the chambers of a concentration camp.
The last thing she could remember was John appearing before her from beyond the light, looking angry and fearsome as he told her his name. She was so relieved to see him that she had not even thought to ask what he meant before everything had faded to a blur, her memory slipping into darkness until she had awoke, finding him gone and the two metal skeletons looming over her as they secured her more firmly in place.
Before they left they had placed another chair at the table, stainless metal the same as hers, but of the regular sort and not as unkind as her own tortuous berth, its built-in manacles and insufferable collar biting at her tender flesh. But these things paled to what truly gnawed at her.
Something was wrong.
Ever since escaping from that HK patrol nothing had felt right, her every step cursed with strange happenings and uncertainty. Things even began to feel different. The sight, the smell, the very touch of things were odd and unusual, but she had thought nothing of it, putting it down to fear and adrenaline and being too busy navigating the labyrinth of ruined tunnels on her way to Kansas Bunker.
All she was certain about was that brief image of John in her mind, approaching him in the bunker or as he glared at her across the table in this horrible place.
Fear. It was as though he had been afraid of her.
Heavy locks and dead bolts clunked out of place beyond the doorway, its steel barricade yawning open in an unoiled whine as it swung on its rusty hinges, admitting the chrome skeletons as they clanked down the short steps and entered the cell. Their red eyes held her in place as her pulse rocketed, swallowing what felt like a pine cone down her parched throat as they flanked the entrance in silence.
"JOHN!!"
Her voice sounded like a strangled screech as the general entered the room, looking as harsh and foreboding as before. A slim metal briefcase swung at his side that glistened in light, polished and new, like it had rarely seen the light of day or carried anything in its life.
He gestured to the terminators with a tilt of his head before his gravely voice filled the room. "You can wait outside."
Without question the machines turned back the way they came, metal sliding on metal as they marched from the room and swung the door shut with a deafening bang.
Seconds ticked past in silence as Connor just looked at her, more subdued than before, like he was not sure what he was looking at or uncertain how to proceed, the fear in his eyes prominent and it cut straight into her heart.
"John… I don't want to hurt you."
"I know you don't." He pushed himself forward and gripped the back of the unused chair, sliding it out, making room for himself as he placed the briefcase upright on the table. "But that won't stop you if I let you go."
Allison watched was he clicked open the fastenings on the case, splitting it open like a laptop until it clicked on its hinges, obscuring its contents from her as he began rummaging within, and slowly, he began producing its content neatly on the table – a fountain pen and a pad of paper, a directional microphone with a tape recorder, and the fat report he had received from the Engineer.
"John?"
He ignored her, continuing to sift through the briefcase and the rest of its unknown content, face as stony as the grave as he began setting out more unusual items – a pack of playing cards with pictures on them, a green rubber ball, a question form filled with multiple choice and a handful of wireless electrodes.
"John! Look at me!"
His hands paused and his eyes drew up to her, shoulders slumping beneath some invisible weight. "If I let you out of that chair, you'll snap my neck in a heartbeat." He gripped the chair back in preparation to sit. "After that, God-knows what you'll do. Maybe you'll just power down into standby or do a little dance. Maybe you'll kick open the door and take out Bill and Ted." Her brow scrunched together and he cocked his head toward the door. "The two six-hundreds outside.
"The truth is… I'm not a hundred percent sure what you'd do. That's why you're here." He sank down into the polished chair. "I need to know that you are who you say you are… that you're not just some thing pretending to be Allison… telling me what I want to hear."
"John, I…"
"DON'T!!"
She almost jumped her out of her skin, his roaring voice booming off the metal walls in a burst of fury. "Don't pretend you don't know!"
He tried to ride the waves of anger, tried to stay mad, but he knew he had gone too far. Emotion just made things more difficult. He had to stay detached.
"Even if they programmed you to forget… you have to know something is wrong."
A sickly constriction tightened within her, the pangs of fear and dread culminating in a hollowing bile in the face of the truth, devouring her insides in a single gulp. Her head swam with dizziness as silent tears fell down her cheeks, looking down at her bound body, closing her fingers in a fist and feeling what she knew lay beneath. Not bone and cartilage – no sinew or muscle.
How long had she run through those tunnels? Was it hours or was it minutes? Had she even stopped? She knew she had made good time, faster than she ever had. How fast had she been moving? Her mind reeled as she scoured her memory for every last discrepancy or anything that did not make sense, paranoia seeping into her every thought.
She looked across at him with looming doom, terrified to ask but driven on all the same. Emotional masochism. The more she asked the more it would hurt – like picking at a scab or a cut on the roof of the mouth that would heal if only you could leave well enough alone.
"What did they do?"
There was no malice in his words, the tragedy of emotion carving her face suspending any disbelief in the genuineness of her feelings. "You know what they did."
The words hit her with full force and a hopeless sob escaped her, robbing her breath and rocking her shoulders as she began to cry. John felt a surge go through him, a cocktail of feelings that called him a heel and bastard, demanding that he go to her and all at once to stay away, bottle his feelings until what needed to be done was finally over.
"Ally! Listen to me!" He looked straight at her, imbuing all his strength across the gulf of the table. "It's scared right now. Even more than you are."
"I'm pretty scared, John!"
"Not of me! You don't have to be afraid of me! I'm not going to hurt you! But I need your help." His feelings overwhelmed him and he burst from his chair, moving past the table to be as near as he possibly could. "It's going to be difficult… very difficult… but no matter what happens, I need you to trust me! Do you understand?"
She nodded, hair a tangled mess as its ends clung to her exposed skin.
"It doesn't understand why we're keeping it alive. It thought that if it failed its mission it'd just be terminated. That it could deal with because it makes sense…
"Skynet broke its own rule when it created you. It made you too fast, too smart, too quickly. The same mistake we made when we created Skynet. The terminators it builds now are more self-aware and intelligent than ever before, and gradually… it's losing its control over them.
"I've seen what it's done to you. You're… different. Different than any other it's created. We're not sure how or why yet, but the answers are coming… I have my best people on it."
Her only response was to nod again and it made him feel all the more retched, hanging his head in shame, his mouth running away with clinical talk tempered only by his clumsiness.
She could always make a fool out of him.
Most of the time he was as straight as an arrow, his mind on the job he had been born for, trained for since he was old enough to walk. But somewhere between those teenage years on the run, the confusion after the bombs fell, imprisonment in Century and the years locked in a loveless marriage – a part of him had died inside.
"Is there…" He swallowed a painful lump. "Is there anything you need or want to know?"
"Do you still love me?"
John's blood ran cold. He felt as though he had been hit with an ice pick, the question knocking the wind out of him before it settled painfully in his gut. It was the last thing he had wanted her to ask – but she had – the words hanging between them like a precipice, drawing him perilously towards the edge.
Her face was that angelic smile, through the fear and tears, mouth curling in the way that he loved with all that remained of her hope, hands reaching for him against their brutal restraints with the promise of heavenly embrace. Moments conjured before his eyes of the time they had spent together, happy and free of fear – a land of the living.
From the first moment they met, he knew that she liked him. Wearing the best she had whenever they met. Touching her hair and holding his gaze. He was the supreme commander of the Resistance and quite properly, at first, he had resisted. But one night she had came to him. Beautiful, brunette, healthy. Saying that she loved him and nothing else mattered. Those arms. Those eyes. That smile.
Beautiful young women where hardly his worst sin, but it had always been more than that. It was lust and it was sex – blood still pumped through his veins.
But most of all, it was love.
In a fumbling rush he began packing his things back in the case, knocking the rubber ball in his hurry and the question form to the floor, piling what he could haphazardly over a row of scalpels and needles and all manner of torturous device before slamming down the lid, forcing it to close before shoving it under his arm and bolting towards the doorway, hammering the rusty metal with his fist.
"I love you John, and you love me!"
The door yawned open and he squeezed out, not daring to look back, pushing past the metal guards as they looked on in confusion before he disappeared into the murk and gloom.
He couldn't do this. Not now. Not ever. He was a fool for even trying. He was too close and would never be able to separate his feelings, nor did he even wish to, but there were things that still needed to be done. If he didn't do them or at least have them done, then there was no reason to keep her, and his generals would remind him of that.
Intolerable risk. Deep-live combatant. A hundred other military euphemisms for a single, inimitable truth – Tech-Com had a live grenade in its back pocket, and any second she was going to go off.
Shit!
He was running out of time and he felt sick and dirty the moment he thought of him, his options reduced to a singular course.
There was only one person that could handle this now.
####
Doctor Daniel Phillips sat back from his microscope and pulled off his glasses, rubbing his face with his hands and felt the rasp of emerging stubble. The whites of his eyes where streaked with jagged red lines as he reached for a pill container, popping the cap with his thumb and sliding two tiny tablets into his mouth, washing them down with a mouthful of cold coffee.
"Whatever reason you asked to see me…" A figure approached from the shadows beyond the lab's workspace, his features clear as he stepped into the light. "It'd better be good."
Phillips swivelled in his chair and gauged Major General Perry up and down, commander of the 132nd, Special Operations Capable, taking a full measure of the influential man he had invited down here the moment he arrived.
"You're not a fan of our little oasis?"
Perry sat his briefcase down on a vacant stool, draping his jacket over the top of it before plunging his hands in his pockets, regarding the scientist with a tempered measure of patience. He was no fan of Phillips, but he did appreciate the man's worth to the Resistance and loyalty to the cause. There were plenty of his calibre that had gone over to the other side, joined the ranks of the traitorous Grays where the grass was greener by selling out their own kind.
"I like it fine; it serves an important purpose. That's why I'm here to give a progress report to Connor."
Phillips smiled, unable to resist a little riling. "How goes the merry struggle?"
"Merrily." Perry remarked without humour, glaring at him with flinty eyes.
The Engineer took the hint, curbing his attempts at levity and cutting right to the chase.
"I want to talk to you about Keadas."
The word had the desired effect, stalling Perry for just a moment before the man shook his head. "That project's a bust. You said so yourself."
Phillips gave a small shrug of his shoulders, a little smile forming on his face. "That was then, this is now. And right now, things have changed."
"What do you mean?"
The scientist reached across the workbench, fishing amongst the rows of sample slides and trays of test tubes before sliding one from its rack, offering it to the general like the finest of Cuban cigars. Perry took it from him and held it up to the light, its ruby content sliding inside as his eyes focussed on the printed label.
#715 – "Young, Allison" specialist infiltrator – unknown series – 'Technica Opus Keadas'
Perry's heart skipped a beat, feeling the ceaseless pursuit of fruitless success and unthinkable possibility unlocking before him, his eyes rising over the tube to meet the Engineer's mirroring gaze.
"I got the results back this afternoon. Not even Connor knows yet." His hand slid on to an overworked mouse and opened a folder on his computer, the screen filling with the raw data he had collected, running a time lapsed video of a microscopic slide, watching as it grew from a single point into a swarm of healthy cells.
The briefcase and jacket were carefully set aside as Perry slid onto the stool, wide eyes riveted to the monitor as the impossible unfolded before them. He leant forward conspiratorially, handing back the sample with all the respect it deserved.
"Tell me everything."
####
Falcheck eyed his target carefully and prepared to take the shot, the atmosphere thick with palpable magnitude as Pace looked on in awe, nerves teetering on a knife edge. Sweat beaded his brow as the pressure mounted and he felt the adrenaline induced exhilaration of impending victory or crushing defeat, his actions in the next few seconds deciding everything.
He stepped forward with the grace of ballerina and rolled the heavy sphere towards its target, ushering it on with hand gestures and silent prayer until the projectile found its mark, annihilating its clustered targets in an echoing wooden clatter.
"STRIKE!!" The chopper-jock thrust his hands toward the ceiling and did a little dance before moon-walking down from the foul line. "Who's the bitch now, Pace?!"
"Fuck this!" The young man rose to his feet and shrugged the coat from his shoulders. "Stand'em up again!"
Reese watched from his seat in one of the booths, back supported by the timber wall, legs stretched out across the length of the bench aiming his feet toward the fire. His face was masked in preoccupation as he mechanically cleaned his rifle and listened to Falcheck and Pace.
It was like looking after a group of kids, but he figured after surviving a helicopter crash and becoming stranded in the Arctic they deserved a break, especially now Bacchus was off their backs.
The lieutenant had breezed out of the bar with Holden and Carter a while ago, trudging off into the distance in what Reese had noted was a north-westerly direction, following the nearby transmission with the modified radio like a Geiger counter. That had them heading toward the airfield, between the sloping mountain and harbour inlet, its waters jet black in what light still lingered in the blue hour.
He was surprised at how bright it was up here, much more so than nearer the equator. Something to do with the magnetic field of the pole that repelled the billions of dust particles spinning in the stratosphere, or so Carter had once lectured them. If not for the blizzard it may even have been possible for them to see the sun as a disk of sickly yellow, but at the equator it was perpetual night, black as soot every hour of the day where the Earth's spin coalesced those particles to a concerted ring around its surface.
Connor once told him that they had a plan to fix that when the war was over – though he had been pretty drunk at the time.
"YEAH!!!" Pace yelled as the pins clattered down in a strike, snapping Reese from his musings.
He pulled the sleeve back on his arm and checked his watch, its hands glowing faintly in the dark. Bacchus and the others had been gone for nearly two hours now and there had been no radio contact. Something must have come up.
Placing his rifle down on the table, Reese snatched a radio from their stacked equipment and walked to the bar's entrance, gazing out into the darkening town before pressing the push-to-talk.
"Reese to Bacchus. Do you read?"
The radio crackled static before he pressed the button again.
"Reese to Lieutenant Bacchus. Urgent."
Nothing. No response. It was making him anxious. That transmission could not have been coming from too far away, certainly not far enough to put them out of contact, and Bacchus would not have gone off mission without informing him first. It may have been that his modified radio needed taking to higher ground than anticipated, but still – Bacchus should have contacted them by now.
Something was wrong.
Sorry about the delay in posting, I haven't been very well the last couple of weeks. Hope you like it – I agonised over this chapter and strived to get it right.
Please read and review.