James Cameron and Charles Eglee own Dark Angel. My use is in no way meant to challenge their copyrights. This piece is not intended for any profit on the part of the writer, nor is it meant to detract from the commercial viability of the aforementioned (or any other) copyright. Any similarity to any events or persons, either real or fictional, is unintended.
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XI – A Bang and a WhimperOkay, this is it, Max told herself as she took a deep breath, preparing for the worst. Set seemed absolutely beside himself with impatient anxiety in front of the door as Lydecker and Zack prepared to trigger the release to open the entrance to the chamber. The murmur from within grew into a louder chant, a tinge of frenzy beginning to surface amongst the words. Max had no idea what the people within were saying, but the tone was unmistakably bad.
"On three," Lydecker muttered. Set simply nodded stiffly, seeming single-mindedly focused on getting at his enemies. Alec, walking up next to Set, was obviously more nervous. He looked at Max, his eyes holding a hint of something she had never seen before. She almost fell over when she finally placed the emotion – regret.
"Sorry for everything I did to piss you off," he muttered to her, immediately drawing an angry stare from the colonel.
"Quiet, soldier," he warned. "This is neither the time nor the place. You can have your little heart to heart later." Alec nodded in reply, but Max knew what her friend was thinking – What if there isn't a later?
"Ready, sir," Zack commented as he finished poring over the ancient mechanism, apparently certain he knew how to work it.
"Okay, one…" Lydecker said, immediately falling silent as he counted off 'two' and 'three' on his fingers. On three, Zack tripped the release and a shrill, grating sound erupted from the millennia-old stonework. Max heard a counter-balancing stone give way within the wall, and in front of her the massive dark granite door rose slowly, revealing a horde of Familiars within, some of them sitting on the floor in lotus position, eyes closed and chanting, and others standing over them, unarmed but apparently acting as guards. Before she even had a moment to start counting to realize just how hopeless the odds were, Set was already within the room, opening up with his two MP-5's. He had removed the silencers – probably to increase fear and confusion within his foes by adding the deafening noise of automatic gunfire to the melee – and was moving with surgeon-like patience and precision through his enemies, reducing men, women, and even a few children to shredded meat.
Alec was right behind Set, his feet spread wide to help him steady himself against the jarring recoil of his large, intimidating M-60. If the noise from Set's weapons caused confusion, Alec's machinegun was inciting absolute bedlam. The thunderous report from the weapon reverberated off the walls, sending constant jolts of searing pain through Max's head as she dashed into the chamber, Lydecker and Zack close on her heels.
The unarmed Familiars, no fewer than three dozen of them, immediately began fighting back, seemingly unconcerned with the superior firepower possessed by their enemies. In fact, Max noted a fierce, fanatical look in their eyes that actually concerned her, despite her squad's apparent advantage. In the time it took Max to enter the room and find an enemy to take out, Set had already emptied both of his weapons' double-clips and was quickly beset by a rather large pure breed. Alec kept firing, though, trying to lay down enough fire to keep their enemies at bay. Many of those still living were fleeing through a small door into an antechamber, obviously buying enough time to regroup. Fearing there could be firearms in the back room, Max gave chase. "Zack, Deck, follow me!" she screamed, hoping that they had somehow heard her over Alec's gunfire.
Max ran into the small antechamber in full stride, hearing several knives ricochet off the wall inches from her, betraying the fact that the Familiars, as physically gifted as they were, were still a half-step slower than she was. She scanned the room quickly, noting the huge, dark pool that dominated the center of the room. Around the pool was a stone walkway, six feet around on three sides, and almost twenty feet wide on the far side, across from Max. Making sure not to slow at all, Max kept running around the pool, noting two Familiars break away from a small group on the wide side, quickly moving to cut her off. It was then that she saw them – two large, clay vessels, each large enough to hold at least twenty-five gallons.
Four men were standing around the decanters while a priestess was screaming at them in an unknown language, motioning toward the pool. Doesn't take a genius to figure out what's in those vessels and what they're plannin' on doing with them, Max told herself. Gotta stop 'em now, Max. The two Familiars lunged at her, only to come up with a solid grasp of empty air as she vaulted over them, surprising them with the decision to evade rather than confront. The priestess's four Familiars lifted the two vessels and began to move toward the pool, but before Max could reach them she felt a sharp tug from behind her as one of her two attackers grabbed her hair, done up in a ponytail, and yanked her to the cold floor. Her head bounced off the stone, and she fought to stay conscious as she heard the thunderous fire from Alec's M-60 suddenly cut out. The gunfire was replaced by the clanging of metal on metal and the screams of the injured and dying in the sudden, relative silence. Then she could smell the sickly sweet stench of her attacker's breath.
"Not so quick after all, are ya, sweets?" he said mockingly. In a heartbeat he was upon her, his overly developed body straddling her thin frame. He held her down as his partner moved up and grabbed Max's head, turning it to face the four acolytes that were only a few short feet from the pool's edge, setting the vessels down as they removed the lids.
"Front row seats for the end of the world," the second one commented all too happily. "The culmination of prophecy – The Coming is upon us."
"No," Max gasped as the four acolytes reverently placed the removed seals on the floor and moved back to the decanters.
An unearthly silence descended upon the chamber, and Max thought of all the people – the normals – that would soon die if she didn't do something. Cindy, Sketchy, Kendra, Herbal… even Normal. And Logan. No – I have to do something! She reached deep down, summoning every bit of her strength, focusing herself for a desperate attempt at saving everything and everyone that she had ever known. Max violently convulsed every muscle in her body at once, throwing the Familiar on top of her off-balance. She felt him falling off to her right, and she struggled to rise to her feet, leveraging herself up with her left arm, only to be sent crashing back down to the floor as the second Familiar brought a crushing strike down on her head, all but knocking her unconscious.
"Not so fast," he muttered, surprising Max with his ability to gaze in awe at the ritual and also pay enough attention to her to prevent any escape. In a heartbeat she was once again pinned underneath the larger of her two attackers, and her mind sought any possible tactic she could employ to escape. There has to be a way, she thought desperately. But there wasn't, and a weak voice in the back of her mind was starting to admit that.
The two pairs of acolytes once again grasped the decanters, preparing to raise them, when a rapid series of gunshots rang off the walls. The priestess immediately collapsed and the acolytes were all knocked back, stoically trying to maintain their footing despite the unexpected salvo. Max was barely able to move her head enough to see Lydecker run into the room, in her transgenetically enhanced eyes seeming to move at a snail's pace, firing two 9mm's at the Familiars. She almost smiled at the irony of having the one ordinary in the battle be the one that held the fate of the world in his hands.
The colonel ran around the pool, advancing on the clay vessels. Max knew his simple plan - secure the decanters. They needed do no more than that. If the containers couldn't be dumped, humanity would survive. The four acolytes were all down and apparently dead by the time Lydecker reached them, fingering the release on each of his pistols and deftly managing to replace a full clip in each weapon before Max's assailants could even fully assess the situation.
"Let her go," the colonel ordered, training both weapons on the two Familiars.
"Put down your weapons or she dies," the smaller one returned. "We know what she's worth, you pathetic piece of mundane flesh. That's the only deal we'll make."
"It's over, you've been beaten," Lydecker shot back. "Don't make it worse for yourself by refusing to accept the situation."
"The front room has been secured," Zack reported as he and Set walked into the room, also training their weapons on Max's attackers. "Alec is finishing up our business in there." The two Familiars by Max glanced quickly at each other, both of them seeming to seek advice from the other.
"It's over," Lydecker repeated.
"Well, not quite," Zack said unexpectedly, an unexpected right elbow catching Set in the left temple just as he took off in a blur of motion, racing toward the colonel.
The next three seconds seemed surreal to Max, every event playing out in slow motion, allowing her to agonize over the reality of what she was seeing. Lydecker's eyes went wide as he watched Zack approach, appearing shocked as Zack raised his 10mm and fired a single shot that caught the colonel in the center of his forehead. Lydecker's body fell backward toward the floor even as the back of his head exploded, splattering blood, skull fragments, and brain matter all over the stone wall several feet behind him.
Max heard a sudden, high-pitched shriek, wondering at the similarity to her own voice but never realizing that she was the one screaming. Then Zack was at the decanters, not wasting a moment in knocking one over into the well's pool. Before he could reach the second one, however, Set was upon him, kicking the pistol out of Zack's hand as he began to rip into him with a razor-sharp kukri knife that glittered yellow-orange in the dim torchlight.
Max could feel the shock in the two Familiars holding her, and she took advantage of their momentary lapse in concentration by rolling suddenly to her left, throwing the larger one off of her and into the water. The smaller of the two men looked at her in surprise, just in time to see her hit him in the throat with a knife-hand chop that left him with a shattered trachea. Max left him to suffocate slowly as she stood, trying to figure out what to do next.
Zack had drawn his survival knife and was attempting to subdue Set even as he tried to explain himself. Max noted that her onetime commander was failing in both respects. "It had to be done," Zack screamed as Set parried a strike, allowing Zack's knife to glance off of his own as he sent out a kick that jarred the other X5. "Don't you see?" Zack pleaded. "The ordinaries want us dead! I say let them all die, before they can kill all of us. We can't beat them in a war, Set, you have to see that… there's just too many of them. But if we kill them all now, all that's left for us to deal with is the Familiars." Zack quickly ducked under another kick and tried a counter-punch of his own, all the while keeping distance between himself and his foe, struggling to catch his breath enough to continue making his case. "With the ordinaries out of the way, we'll at least be able to see the Familiars coming at us," he gasped. "We'll only have one enemy to deal with. We'll be able to create a world just for us, for the transgenics. It's the right decision."
"Wrong," Set growled, refusing to be drawn into a debate as he continued to seek an opening in his opponent's defenses. As they continued fighting, Max simply stood passively, gazing blankly at her brothers as she tried to figure out what to do next.
"I boosted the signal," Logan's voice announced, now coming through perfectly clearly. "Max, what's going on? Did they succeed? Report."
"We lost," Max muttered. "Oh my God, Logan, we lost." Her stomach lurched for a brief moment, just before it went about tying itself up in knots. Logan is going to die, she realized. She could see the snake's blood slowly diffusing through the pool, the sticky liquid shimmering like oil on the surface of the water. She could now see a definite current in the seemingly still pool. The blood... the plague... it's going to get out into the world. There has to be a way to stop it! She looked around, trying to find someone to tell her what to do next. But Lydecker, her old mentor, now lay dead, and Zack, the one X5 she had trusted implicitly, had betrayed them. "Logan," Max said quickly. "What can I do?"
"You have to let me know what's going on, Max," he responded anxiously.
"We don't have time for that," Max answered, her voice cracking painfully as she spoke. She kept watching Set and Zack go at it, and suddenly Set saw the mistake he had been waiting for – Zack lunged just the slightest bit more than he should have. In a lightening-fast counter-strike, Set slashed him on the forearm, causing Zack to pull back too quickly. He lurched awkwardly as he placed too much weight on his left leg, and Set pursued hungrily, attacking low and slicing a deep gash through Zack's thigh. In a flash he rounded off his backswing and sent a second strike across Zack's suddenly exposed abdomen, the kukri knife carving through Zack's vest and sending a spray of blood into the air.
Zack started to gasp for air, and immediately gave ground, obviously conceding the fight to his opponent as he mustered enough strength to get around Set and bolt for the door. "What the hell is going on?" Alec asked as he entered the antechamber, getting bowled over by Zack before he could even finish his question.
"Zack!" Max yelled, part of her still seeking answers, both to why he did what he did, and what she should do next to fix the situation.
"Let him go," Set spat. He turned and looked at the pool, for the first time allowing confusion and a hint of panic to enter his eyes.
"What's going on?" Logan asked again. "Max? Alec? Zack? Do you copy?"
"It's all over, Logan," Set muttered as he drew a 9mm from the small of his back and fired into the pool, killing the last Familiar and adding a new patch of blood to that of the snakes. "The Familiars succeeded. The blood was released."
"Oh my God," Logan replied. "The plague --"
"-- won't happen," Max interrupted. She unstrapped her vest and dropped it to her side, then took off the sheer black tanktop underneath, leaving only a black exercise bra covering her torso. She cleared her mind, making certain not a single thought was present to distract her. This is time for action, not for thought, she told herself. "I love you, Logan," she said as she looked at Set and Alec, smiling broadly. Zack caused this, she reminded herself. Seems only right that he should give something back in order to make it right. In a quick movement calculated to be fast enough to prevent interference, she drew her 9mm – the weapon she'd sworn not to use on anyone – at least not anyone else, she clarified, and fired one shot straight into her chest, piercing her heart and instantly producing a fountain of blood. An almost imperceptible squeak escaped her lips as her body fell into the water in front of her. "The antigen in your blood is hundreds of times more lethal to this bacteria than the bacteria is to an ordinary," she remembered Lydecker telling her. "In effect, your body naturally produces an organism that can wipe out the Familiars' plague." It all made sense to her, and she knew now the real reason for Lydecker having brought her along. It wasn't so that he could use my blood to treat anyone that was exposed to the snake's blood, she realized. That wouldn't have endangered the mission at all… it takes too long for the onset of symptoms for that to be a concern. It was in case they failed that they needed me. Like Zack said back in Seattle – "if we fail, if everything goes wrong that can go wrong, he says we need Max to be there. Apparently she's the last thing we have to fall back on." She knew Deck had planned for the possibility of the mission being fubar'd.
"Max, no!" she heard Alec shout. She was beyond caring, though. She felt the water in the pool wash over her, and she was surprised to find herself wondering why the water was so cold… so very cold. Shouldn't it be warmer? We are in a desert after all. Her mind started to grow fuzzy, and thoughts began to merge into each other. She knew the sensation well - she was dying. She could remember the feeling from the raid on the Gillette Manticore facility. But no one is here this time to put me back together, she realized without caring. This time it's for good, Max. Well, like you said - seems you're pretty messianic. And after all, is there anything more messianic than dying for the cause?
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No, not like this! Alec thought desperately. He ignored the fact that Max had told Logan that she loved him. He also ignored the fact that she hadn't appeared to have any similar words of affection for him. All that mattered was getting her out of the water, getting her to a doctor so that he could save her, so that he could let her know everything he had thought and felt... and stupidly left unsaid. He was hardly conscious of the fact that he was running toward the pool until he felt the wind knocked out of him as Set tackled him to the floor.
"You can't pull her out," he yelled into Alec's face. "She knew what she was doing, Alec. We have to let her blood drain from her body. That was the whole point."
"What's going on?" they heard Logan ask again. "Max? Max?"
"She's dead," Set answered evenly, not a hint of pain or sympathy in his voice. "We can only assume, from everything that the colonel told us, that the antigen in her blood is destroying the pathogen that was released. The Coming may have been averted. We'll give her body a few more minutes in the water, and then we'll return to base." Alec suddenly ceased struggling as he heard Set's words. Somehow, in that one instant, everything became painfully real to him. Max is dead, soldier. At least have the tact to wait until you're alone before you get all emotional.
"Oh, no," Logan muttered. "You may need a change of plans, Set. I'm reading a small armor unit closing on your position."
"The Familiars have armor?" Alec asked incredulously, the unexpected development making it infinitely easier to pull himself together. "You've got to be kidding."
"It's not the Familiars," Logan answered. "They're Israeli regulars. You have to pull out now."
"Copy that," Set replied. Alec knew the situation all too well. After the end of the War of '13, Israel had closed off its borders to everyone and became a veritable police state. Unidentified trespassers were shot first and sometimes identified later. Questions were never asked. It was the only way Israel had been able to survive ever since the great Arab leader, General Mehmet al-Quryash, had united the majority of the Arab nations after the War of '13. The entire Middle East was arguably more of a powder keg now than it had ever been, and interlopers like Lydecker's team had a tendency to simply disappear.
"Fish her out of there," Set told Alec. "Let's just hope she was in there long enough to do what she wanted to." As Alec pulled Max's body from the water, he quickly stopped to check her vitals, hoping that she was still alive, that there would still be some way to save her life even after she had decided to surrender it. "Let's go," Set muttered, pulling Lydecker's body off of the floor and throwing it over his left shoulder as he simultaneously grabbed one of the handles on the remaining decanter with his right hand. "Take the other side," he told Alec. "We'll take this up the hall a bit and dump it safely away from the pool. If the Israelis come in here and find the blood, they'll never make it out alive to tell anyone what happened in here." The two transgenics lumbered along as quickly as they could, carrying their burdens with care. Once in the hall they dumped the blood, and then raced up through the catacombs, hoping to reach the outside before the Israelis arrived.
Near the exit, Set stopped a second time and picked up Krit's body, not even bothering to tell Alec that he was dead, also. Moments later they were above ground, dashing across the sand as quickly as possible, barely making it to their Humvee before the armor unit came into view. Only when they were safely back at the Mossad bunker, hidden from the pursuing Israelis, did either Alec or Set even look at the other.
To be continued............................................
