Retrieval
The creature's panting was beginning to annoy Major Sheffield. The hyperventilating rhythm was irregularly broken by a deep, gurgling wheeze followed by a quiet, keening cry of pain. It was the irregularity of the sudden gasp and cry that Sheffield found bothersome. He wished the creature would just get into some sort of pattern – three breaths, then a cry, three breaths, then a cry – it really did help. He briefly considered putting it out of its misery, but the spell had begun and the firecracker retort of such an action would likely disrupt the ritual. He couldn't have that.
Sheffield twitched his nose at the stench of the place. Kri-krite demons were not, by human standards, sanitary. Most of their food was scavenged from rotting heaps, and what wasn't rotten when they found it they left to rot before it was consumed. The males were large, green lumbering examples of an evolutionary blind-alley; they reminded Sheffield of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He could easily believe that the makeup artist of that classic film had based the design on a sighting of an actual Kri-krite. The males also known to soil anything and everything they came in contact with, thus the additional stench of the place.
The Kri-kite kept in family units, generally small groups consisting of an alpha female, usually a grand-matriarch of sorts, who kept her daughters and their mates with her. The females didn't develop much in the way of intelligence until old age – the males never did. This group was small, only the alpha and two daughters, a single adult male and an adolescent male. The adult male currently had a large-caliber hole in his chest, which was the source of the annoying wheezing.
Sheffield's team had moved in quickly, making their way through the sewer tunnels below Los Angeles with the aide of night-vision gear and an electronic tracer embedded into the hide of the adolescent. Sheffield had enough hard-earned experience hunting big game to know that as soon as they tagged the scavenging youngster, he'd make a bee-line straight to the lair. He'd also known exactly where to find the creature, but that was from an altogether different source of knowledge. Sheffield had "inherited" the guidance of the anti-demon coalition The Ring of Arinoth after his contact to them, the sorceress Madame LaFusce, had died in Sunnydale. His communication with the Creator of the Circle, Arinoth himself, was a secret he kept from the rest of the team. They wouldn't understand; but then again they didn't have to understand, they just had to follow orders. And following orders was something the Royal Air Force had instilled in every member of this team.
Well, not every member, Sheffield had to admit. They had left behind Captain MacKenzie in Sunnydale, a traitor to the team. MacKenzie had discovered the connection that the Major had to the Ring, or at least to the sorceress, and had decided to work counter to the mission objectives. The fact that the mission objectives were, when viewed all by themselves, 'highly questionable' should have had nothing to do with it. The team had been sent to Sunnydale to make sure that Buffy Summers, the Slayer, assassinated California Congressman Jackson Greene. Greene was an enemy of the Ring of Arinoth and a danger to humanity. That hadn't mattered to MacKenzie, nor, in the end, to the Slayer. They had teamed up against the Ring and broken the Sunnydale operation.
However, Madame LaFusce had achieved her end just the same. The assassination of the Congressman was simply one part of the plan. The other part had been to test the Amulet. The Amulet was designed to make the wearer believe whatever the Ring wanted them to, even if it was something totally contrary to what they would normally believe. They had to make sure that it would work on a Slayer, and it almost had. They had learned all they needed to know – that the belief was strong enough to overcome any and all internal conflicts the wearer had. It had driven Buffy to pull the trigger and attempt to kill the congressman.
Had the congressman been dead right now, the team would've been on their way back to England with the wheels of the Ring's plans firmly in motion. But no plan ever survives contact with the enemy, and the external conflicts had proven the plan's undoing. The Slayer's friends and associates had managed to muck up the whole thing; it was important to note that in the future, anyone whom the Ring would control would need to be isolated from their external support system.
Even so, the Ring's plans were still in motion. 'Project Eve' would be put back on schedule. That's what the RAF strike team was doing here, in the bowels of Los Angeles, in the lair of Kri-kite, barely thirty hours after their defeat in Sunnydale. The Kri-kite matriarchs gained more than intelligence in their old age, they gained magic. The Kri-kite alphas had the ability to manipulate dimensional portals, and what Sheffield and his team needed right now was a finely manipulated portal.
In the center of the layer a small fire burned. A crude chalk circle had been drawn around it, inscribed with symbols and marked with bits of blood or feathers at various points along it. The alpha female, whose green scales had turned grey with age, shuffled around the circle chanting in her strange, alien tongue and shaking a wooden stick bound with some sort of half-cured pelt. She didn't break stride or rhythm as she chanted, but her hate-filled eyes never left the humans in the layer.
To one side lay the adult male, the purplish blood pumping out with each wheeze. He lay in the lap of his mate, who split her time between hissing at the humans and daubing a foul-smelling mud-like substance on the wound. Next to them stood the other female, who was completely consumed with restraining the adolescent male, who hissed and clawed at the humans in pain and rage.
The Kri-kite moved swiftly through the tunnels, and it took a full press run for the commandos to take the lair before the demons had a chance to understand what was happening. They had come in hot and ready, locked and loaded. The adolescent was screeching and clawing, the adult male just turning to go on the hunt, when the strike team burst into the layer and fired. The adult male was thrown back and bleeding and the full team got in place before the other demons even knew what was happening.
The 'negotiation' had been mercifully simple. The alpha female grasped the situation after only a moment and knew that the entire family group would be slaughtered where they stood if they didn't cooperate. The Kri-kite couldn't articulate anything that might be understandable by humans, but the alpha could understand simple words. It took only a few moments to communicate the desires of the team – the need for a portal – and what would happen if she didn't cooperate. She had readily agreed to the terms.
The seven commandos had stood their ground, keeping the demons under careful guard as the alpha female began the spell. The plan had almost gone awry when she demanded a key to the portal destination, some physical link to use in the construction of the spell. The team had handed the creature a series of maps and blueprints, who had stared at them blankly. It was one of those moments when everything hangs in the balance – the intensity of men too ready to pull the trigger meeting an excuse to do so. Fortunately, a brusque but well-controlled series of instructions from Sheffield seemed to get the point across. The commandos relaxed only slightly as the incantation began.
Slowly the matriarch danced around the circle, humming, chanting, and occasionally making more vulgar noises that the humans could not identify. Each counter-clockwise turn around the circle, what in the past was called 'widdershins', ended with a flare from the fire. With each flare-up, the top sheet from the document stack was blown off by some unseen hand to drift into one corner or another of the putrid layer. Sheet by sheet the female demon worked her magic through the stack.
The first sheet was a picture of the Earth. From there the stack worked through satellite photos, each getting more detailed and marked with a red box indicating the scope of the photo below it. The fifth was a picture of a squat stone building in a desolate stretch of desert. Below it was the blueprints, beginning with a rough diagram of the walls and then working into more detail. The last was a detail picture of cell block C, with a red box neatly outlining the bunk in one of the cells. This too blew off, and then the spell changed.
The alpha female switched into a sing-song whimpering, and the air above the fire crackled with purple lightening. The power was building, the rift was opening. Sheffield nodded to another member of the team, who slowly lowered his rifle in order to draw a tranquilizer gun. The others shifted subtly, making clear that all the demons were still in a firing line.
The matriarch completed her final circle and stopped. She hissed silently and waited as the air continued to crackle. At some point that only she seemed able to discern, the magic was in balance. She lifted her arms, holding out the conjuring stick before her and raised a wild, unholy wail. It seemed to last for an eternity.
The demon struggled with the primordial magic which she could barely understand. Intellectually, she had no concept of what she was doing. But she sensed it, she sensed its unwillingness to bend to her will, and she sensed her deep need, driven by fear, to make it do so. She called to it with her cry, challenging it, bending it. If she failed to bend it sufficiently before running out of breath, the spell would dissipate. She knew that if that happened, she would die, and she wasn't about to let that happen. She continued to scream in the face of it – and she won.
The demon threw down her arms and the sky rent itself with purple fire. And through the portal fell a mattress and a woman. They both landed on the fire, smothering it instantly. The raven haired new arrival spun in her bed sheets, clawing for some frame of reference, like a person waking from a dream of falling.
As a prisoner, Faith was used to being suddenly awakened. There was too much violence that could be perpetrated while you slept to not be able to wake instantly and fight. Whether it be guards, your roommate, or a rival, you had to be constantly on guard for those out to get you. You had to be able to wake because of any shift in your cell's environment and fight for your life. A simple falling dream was nothing. The only problem was that she had actually fallen – not just off her bunk, but across the universe and back through the series of portals that the she-demon had stitched together. Because of that, Faith suffered an eternal moment of disorientation the likes of which she'd never experienced before.
To her credit, Faith needed only a moment to orient herself and rise to fight. She was, after all, the Slayer. The other Slayer, to be precise – but such distinctions hardly mattered. She was as strong and as fast and as lethal as Buffy. So she was on her feet in an instant, but it was an instant too late. The commandos had been ready for her, and two shots from the tranquilizer pistol put her down again.
The commando put the pistol away smoothly and went to check her pulse. Satisfied, he hoisted her into a fireman's carry, turned, and walked out of the layer and back towards the tunnels. Two of the other rifleman slowly backed away down the tunnels to cover him. The adolescent demon hissed in fury.
Sheffield and his men converged back towards the lair's entrance. With fewer weapons to bear, they needed to consolidate their position. They waited silently, giving time for the others to reach the transport point. When he had mentally calculated that they were halfway there, he made a quick hand motion, and one of the remaining three backed away down the tunnels.
Now was the critical time – they didn't have enough firepower bearing on the demons to survive an all-out rush. Sheffield knew that the demons didn't necessarily know that, but he wanted to keep them off balance. He flicked a switch on his rifle and chambered a grenade from the bottom mounted launcher. The sound of it in the tense silence was like a thunderclap. Even the wounded male stopped wheezing for a moment.
Then, in his communicator, Sheffield heard a click. Team one had reached the rendezvous point. He waited calmly. Less than a minute later, two more clicks sounded. Team two – the one man he had sent out midway – had completed his task. Sheffield nodded, and he and the two other soldiers began backing out of the layer. Once out of immediate sight, he motioned the other two to move, and they began a sprint through the tunnels. Sheffield waited for the first demon to poke its head around the corner. It was one of the females – not the alpha – and he gently squeezed the trigger on his rifle. The creature was dead mid-hiss.
Sheffield turned and began to race down the tunnels. In moments he heard the sounds of pursuit. It sounded like both males were coming for him. He smiled. Team one was the extraction team for the target, Faith. Had they been rushed, the three men would have been enough to hold their position in the tunnels and then transport Faith to the operations zone. Team two, though only one man, was perhaps even more important. Team two was demolitions, and he had set up a couple of surprises to cover their retreat.
Sheffield saw the red emitters of the detection zone ahead and put on an extra burst of speed. Once through them, he was safe. Nothing else would make it through that section of tunnel alive. Two more turns and he would emerge at the rendezvous point. The others were already there, and the extraction vehicles would already be running and ready. He dodged around the corner, across a brief stretch of fetid water, and then around another.
The pipe let off into a culvert just big enough for their jeeps. It was a five foot drop, which Sheffield executed with the precision of a Special Air Service Major. "Fire in the hole!" he shouted as he dropped, knowing the two males were close behind him.
A moment later, two explosions rocked the underside of one of LA's poorest neighborhoods. One was array of ceiling mounted claymore mines that tore the two on-rushing male demons to ribbons. The other was back at the entrance to lair, which poured chemical fire and solvents into it. The remaining female and her matriarch, along with most of the evidence, was uniformly set ablaze.
Sheffield looked up at his men, a grin spread across his face. "Well done, gentlemen. Now let's get Little Miss Slayer here to safety." He laughed internally at the irony of that statement. He had taken her safely away from prison; safely away from those who did not understand her or her power. He had taken her safely from all the punishment this world could heap on her.
And in less than three days, Faith would be safely dead.