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The shock of the landing jarred her, despite the absorbent foam surrounding her. The capsules had punched through the reinforced concrete-and-steel room of the building without much more effort that then would have needed to penetrate dirt. Looking like sycamore-seeds drifting in the wind, albeit at phenomenal speeds, the capsules had been brought to a halt before they went straight through the building and into the foundations by a series of vanes that spread from their upper surface during the descent. It had been the vanes catching and holding into the roof, then several of the floors below as the capsule crashed through, that had been the most turbulent part of the whole trip down.
This had been the Elder's plan, and source of amusement. The Penetrator capsules were the usual way large hunting parties sent individual or small groups of hunters to a planet's surface, removing the need for a large ship trying to land inside the hunting grounds and risking alerting the prey. They were designed to insert hunters into many different environments, some inimically hostile to most anything, and in that regard they were perfect for this. Mere pyode amedha reinforced construction was no barrier to the Penetrators, and in one fell swoop, the hunting party had not only bypassed the hardened construction, but the security outside as well.
Once the capsule had stopped moving, she pressed against the back wall with her hand, the only part of her that wasn't cocooned by the protective foam, tripping the switch plate placed there for just this purpose. In an instant, the foam evaporated, the capsule filling with some gas rendering it into nothingness, but she wasn't concerned, her mask continued to provide her with her oxygen needs, At the same time, the front of the capsule separated forcefully, falling away to land on the floor in front with a clang.
She stepped out of the capsule, already cloaked, her senses alert, her sensors scanning even more so, and spotted a crawling movement over to one side. She saw no other threats in the area, so she took her time walking over to the man, who looked to be in shock from having a two-story dagger of alien metal come in through the roof. She felt no pity for him, or hatred for that matter. She knew that there would be no innocents in this place, only prey.
With a clench of her fist, the wristblades on her right wrist shot forwards and she turned off the cloak, shimmering into view before the man, who simply looked through her, gibbering. With one quick flash of silvered blades, a sheet of red splashed against the nearby wall. She left the body where it fell, unmolested. She intended only certain trophies this hunt. The others had been told what to look for, and asked to leave those she had described alone. They were hers. They'd readily agreed, there would be more than enough trophies to satisfy even four Yautja when this night's hunting was done.
As she looked around, locating the door out of the room her capsule had deposited her, she admitted to herself that the plan to use this as a trap for her had been a pretty good one - once upon a time. This would have been a trap that would have snared her easily, if she'd even managed to get this far. That was the old hunter, however – pyode amedha, ill equipped, and ill-prepared. Against her now - a blooded hunter clad in the armor of the Yautja, finally accepting of herself - the trap seemed childish, almost no challenge.
Orienting herself from the schematics of the building they had studied, produced in hologram on the Yautja ship by its sensors after a cloaked fly-by earlier, she headed towards the nearest stairwell, cloaking herself once more and loosening the bindings that held her various weapons to her armor so she could use them quicker. Alarms started belatedly going off throughout the building, but they were far, far too late.
-
"God dammit!" Wen yelled as he surveyed the damage. One of the alien Penetrator capsules had punched through the rooms he had appropriated for his own within the fortified building, and as the alarms began blaring their warning he looked through the cloud of dust that had once been steel reinforced concrete floors and ceilings trying to locate the rest of his people.
Quickly he rounded up a handful of the touch and brutal Tong members, and they slowly approached the gaping hole ripped in the floor of what had been his large personal suite. Torn reinforcing bars jutted up at warped angles, forming a perimeter of jagged iron around the hole, and as he peered tentatively over the edge he could just see the dull gray alien metal of the capsule a level below, the retarding vanes spread out to hold it from falling further. Wen blinked as he thought he saw movement in the shadows, but without warning three tight laser-red beams glittered in the dust and darkness, coming to rest on one of his men on the other side of the hole.
He watched in shock as a bolt of red energy came blasting up from below, turning the man across from him into a rapidly expanding cloud of superheated steam and blood, and he fell backwards and scrambled further way from the hole while the red beams tracked onto another of his men, slow to realize the danger, before another glowing bolt of death followed with similar results.
"Out! Get out!" Wen screamed, clambering to his feet and running towards the doorway. He could hear the sizzling of ionized air behind him time and again, feeling the floor jump as the edges of the energy bolts skimmed across the edges of the hole, but his men had finally realized the danger and were skirting the gaping maw leading down into hell as they followed their leader out.
Once beyond the doorway, he quickly took stock of his remaining effectives, slamming his fist into his other hand in rage when the count came up much shorter than it had before entering the room. He whirled at a scrabbling noise from the corridor beyond, raising the large bored pistol he had brought with him when they had relocated to their new headquarters a few days before, but relaxed when he saw a handful more of his men. His face brightened when he saw the long tube one carried cradled in his arms, the diamond-shaped warhead of a rocket propelled grenade showing at one end.
He motioned to his people, and they formed a wedge around him before the group moved purposefully down the corridor towards a stairwell.
"Whatever the fuck that was, it's gonna to regret dropping in on us" he snarled, half to himself.
-
Issoti rocked frantically back and forth, sitting on the edge of the folding frame bed that had been set up for him when they had taken this wing of the building for his area. Barely able to contain his bulk at the best of times, the hinged metal joints creaked ominously in time with the the strain of his weight in motion. Most of his crew had run when the building had shook as the Penetrator capsules came crashing down through the roof, leaving him with a brief handful of nervous looking mobsters forming a loose circle around him, guns drawn and pointing at nothing in particular.
"There ain't no such thing as aliens, there ain't no such thing as aliens" he muttered hysterically, his eyes wild. "It's some new S.W.A.T. Team thing, they must have used explosives to come in through the roof. "There ain't no such thing as aliens!"
His men eyed each other nervously as their boss' voice rose before he was reduced to simple gibbering. Their loyalty, such as it was, was being tested to the extreme by staying with him, and they might have been forgiven for being more interested in the added security of their numbers than any desire to protect him from whatever it had been that had broken through their defenses with such ease.
The air had been filled with the brief faint screams of men and women, coming through the hastily barricaded door. A few times there had been frantic hammering knocks on the thick wood, but none of them had dared to go near the furniture stacked high blocking it from opening to even risk calling to find out who it was, and soon the knocks had stopped coming. None of them felt any remorse that their friends and colleagues might be dying as a result of their hasty attempt to protect the room, not that friendship was a concept that came to them easily in the first place.
They looked nervously at their boss, wondering if they'd made the right choice. He had obviously lost it, cracking up completely, but his people had spent so long in an organization that didn't exactly encourage independent thought that none of them was willing to step up and take charge. As the wall to one side of the door exploded inwards, showering them in a rain of molten concrete and plaster, their choice became obviously the wrong one.
Issoti squealed at the noise, shielded by distance from most of the debris. Two of his guards weren't so lucky, liquid splinters of stone and wall shredding them in an instant. The rest instinctively brought their weapons up to point at the hole, but before any of them could recover from their surprise the Second was on them.
As he jumped through the hole, the Second realized that the dust from the exploding wall, kicked up by the explosion when he had used his plasma weapon to make an entrance to the room, was swirling around him. For a moment he cursed himself for forgetting that, even cloaked, he could be spotted by the disturbance of his passage through the vaporized material. Not realizing the humans inside were still yet too distracted to take advantage of this, he raised his arm and snapped off two quick shots, the Y-shaped arrow tips from the weapon in his hand cutting through the air to slice through the flesh and bone of one human's chest.
The human went down, and he tracked on the other five in the room. One was unarmed, and he discounted that one to concentrate on the other four, who had regained their senses enough to fire wildly towards the hole he had made. Safely out of the path of the bullets, he paused to evaluate the situation and decide how to take them. He noticed that the instinct of pyode amedha to group together, for safety in numbers, had made the four bunch together, and he briefly considered using the disc hanging from his belt, one throw and it would cut through two of them in one pass. He mentally shook his head, that would be too easy, if rather elegant, instead walking towards the four.
As he drew closer, he turned off his cloak, and as the eyes of the humans widened in fear he clenched his fist, deploying his wrist blades and driving them into the stomach of the nearest human, the uppercut motion of his strike lifting his prey off its feet with a choking cry. The other three humans turned and began firing towards him, but their bullets mostly hit the prey impaled in front of him on the jagged blades. Those few that reached him sparked as they ricoched off his armor, leaving bright gashes in the dull gray metal.
He growled angrily, these humans were no challenge if they were this stupid. With a shake of his arm, he threw the body of the prey from the blades towards the three remaining armed humans, and roared his annoyance. The three humans tried to dodge the corpse of their colleague, but only one managed to avoid the two hundred pounds of dead weight, the other two going down underneath the blood remains. The one fortunate enough to get out of the way froze as the bone-chilling sound of the hunter's roar reached him, and then was dead himself, his head rolling onto the floor with a hollow thud.
The Second turned towards the remaining two armed humans, trying to extricate themselves from underneath the body he had hit them with, and strode over, removing the spear from the back of his armor as he did so. He placed one foot on the neck of the nearest human then cocked his head towards the other, ignoring the feeble struggles and flailing hands hitting his shins of the hapless prey. With disgust, he flexed the handle of his spear, and as it extended to its full length one end slammed through the other human, penetrating deep into the concrete floor. As blood gushed from the human's mouth, he retracted the spear, then extended it again, this time through the man's head.
He looked down to the man under his foot, the heat sensitive vision of his mask revealing the bulging eyes and skin growing colder from lack of blood and oxygen, and he leaned forwards slightly until he heard the distinctive crack of the man's neck snapping and the body went limp. He lifted his foot and turned towards where the fifth man should have been, but found the room was now devoid of living humans, the last one had had escaped while he dealt with the armed prey. He let out a roar of anger towards the ceiling, were there no challenges this hunt?
-
The sound and vibration throughout the building had reminded Ito of an earthquake he had once felt, when he had visited Japan as a youth. But he knew this wasn't an earthquake. He had been expecting the creatures to attack in some unexpected way, and had planned for most of the contingencies he could think of, but this had was much more than unexpected, it was unbelievable. He hoped that his plans would stand up to the assault.
"I still have one advantage they are not expecting, I think" he commented mildly to his companion.
She was not handling things with anywhere near as much equanimity as he was, he could tell. The whites of her wide eyes were clearly visible even in the soft lighting of the room he had made his personal quarters.
"You're out of your damned mind!" she snapped back. "You can't be thinking of ..." He raised a hand to her lips and she quietened instantly.
"I can, and indeed I am, and in fact, I shall. I would be out of my mind not to use all the resources I have available, do you not agree, Miss McCullough?" She looked at him mutely, an anger building up inside her to offset her terror.
"Did it ever occur to you what will happen if it beats them? It'll come looking for us too." He simply smiled at her, standing and motioning her to join him. Sullenly she complied, and the two of them walked through the sole door to the room and into a short corridor. He led her towards a heavy metal door, which opened before he reached it, and they stepped into the darkness of the room beyond.
Blue light reflected a glow on the faces of the people inside, the TV monitors lining the walls flickering between unviewable static and images of scenes that perhaps would have been left unviewed. Ito led her to one side where a solitary monitor had been set up and gestured to the image. Despite herself her eyes were drawn to the picture of a black insectoid creature, curled up in one corner of the room, a man's body close by. She had seen these things once before, she didn't think Ito was taking them as seriously as he should.
"I think it will be busy with our visitors for a while, and in the process will be hurt sufficiently for us to deal with it afterwards. Even if it loses, it should reduce the numbers of your friends that we will face. Either way, we will win, Miss McCullough." She shook her head in angry denial, but before she could say anything the bald headed man came up beside Ito and cleared his throat.
"Yes?" Ito demanded, turning towards his man.
"I believe we have found the one you were asking about, sir" he replied impassively. Ito's face brightened, and he gestured for the man to show him.
On the monitor they were taken to they could see clearly that the figure, although clad in similar gray armor to the others attacking them, was human and female. Ito turned at Kylie's shocked gasp.
"I take it that is indeed your 'bitch in black', Miss McCullough?" She could only stare as the monitor showed them the woman crouched down on a stairwell, manipulating something mounted on her thigh. The angle was too acute for them to get a better image of what she was doing, and as she stood and moved back down the stairs they lost sight of her.
"Yeah, I guess that's her. How many other bitches do you think they have running with them?" she replied acidly. He chuckled.
"That would depend, I would imagine, on how well endowed they are, perhaps?" Kylie gagged at the idea, even if the suggestion sent an odd tingle through her. Ito turned to the bald man and gestured to the monitor displaying the captive alien.
"It's time to release our friend. Make sure it only has one path it can take." The bald man nodded, then left, taking one of the others in the control room with him. Ito turned back to the bank of monitors on the wall, and they settled to watch as the aliens made their way through the defenders. After a few minutes of observing the carnage on the levels below, she turned to him.
"You know, it looks a lot like none of the people getting massacred down there are yours." He smiled tightly.
"All of my people are on the top two levels, Miss McCullough. There is really no need for them to be down there, it would be such a waste when they will be needed later." She looked at him curiously.
"Needed later?" He nodded, and the cold way he replied raised the hairs on the back of her neck.
"Of course. Someone will need to fill the vacancies."
-
He had chosen the level his Penetrator capsule would reach, his privilege as Elder to claim a level as his own. He would allow the others to hunt the higher levels, the pyode amedha huntress to search for those she had indicated to them as they prepared for the drop, but the ground level was all his. He looked on the opportunity to hunt the humans chosen to defend the building itself as the best challenge available, assuming the humans would have selected their best for such important responsibilities.
It had also meant his ride into the building was the most jarring, the retarding vanes having been jettisoned just after his Penetrator capsule pierced the roof of the building, allowing it to fall freely and unrestrained until it came to a bone crunching halt. They had planned the insertion point to coincide with what the ship's scans had shown to be the most heavily reinforced portions of the building, relying on the additional resistance the structure would provide to slow the Penetrator to a halt at the correct spot.
He clicked a laugh to himself as the outside of his capsule blew away from its surrounding hull, flying across the room to impact the wall opposite with a spray of red mist from the hapless human unlucky to be in its path, crushed against the wall into a pulp. He hadn't even left the capsule, and he already had a kill. He stepped out of the capsule, not bothering to cloak as he scanned the room using the multiple vision modes his mask provided him. Quickly he spotted two other humans, rapidly recovering from the shock of his arrival and bringing their weapons to bear on him.
As they triggered long bursts from their projectile weapons, the hot metal bullets visible to his heat-sensitive vision mode as bars of glowing orange curving in wide arcs towards him, he sprinted towards them, unclipping the spear from its mounting on the backpiece of his armor and bringing it around in front of him. The arc of bullets from one of the humans tracked around fast enough to bring their path intersecting with his own, and he felt the burning stinging pain as several bullets hit him in the side, but as he closed fast on the two pyode amedha the majority of their bullets began to spang harmlessly from the gray metal protecting his chest and shoulders.
The weapons the humans held clicked empty just as he came up on them and he gripped the spear to extend it to its full deadly length before he thrust it towards one of the men, impaling him through the stomach. At the same time, he raised his other arm and swung a hammer blow punch towards the other human, but growled in annoyance as the human barely managed to avoid the blow, stumbling backwards and trying to reload his primitive weapon. The Elder switched his attention to this human, the other slumping to the ground groaning in pain from the length of Yautja spear running through his guts.
He stalked slowly towards the human, watching as he fumbled the metallic container holding more ammunition for his weapon. As the container dropped to the floor, the human straightened and in desperation swung the weapon itself towards him like a club. He raised his left arm, blocking the impact with the vambrace shielding his computer, and as the vibration shock from the impact traveled back to the man's hands, numbing them, he dropped the weapon.
The Elder growled in appreciation as the human tried instead to kick him.
"You do not run, but stand and fight. Your skull will be a fine trophy" he commented, but the human only heard the growls and clicks of the Yautja language. It was unlikely he'd have appreciated the compliment he'd been paid even if he'd understood the words, though. The Elder became even more excited when the human spun around in a move that reminded him of the huntress' style and drove a short knife blade deep into the Elder's side, just below the armor. He roared from the pain, bringing his arm around and slamming his clawed fist into the human's chest, sending him backwards several feet to land in a heap amongst the rubble strewn around the room from the capsule's entry.
He reached down and withdrew the knife, looking at it briefly then tossing it back towards the groaning human, neon green alien blood coating the blade leaving a bright smear on the ground as the knife skidded to a halt close by the man. The Elder lowered into a crouch and held his arms out wide before roaring a challenge to the human.
"Try again."
-
She looked cautiously through the grille-work in the bottom of the duct space and saw a man pacing back and forwards, surrounded by heavy plastic bags stacked on top of each other containing powders and pills. As far as she could tell, the only way in was a heavily reinforced door at one end, she assumed this was some kind of secure storage for drugs. An evil thought came to her, and thinking quickly she crouched, her feet either side of the grille, and lifted it gently on one edge until there was a slight gap between it and the floor of the duct space.. She pressed against the side of her armor until a short length of the thin black alien cord had run out, then stopped it without using the cutter, before fashioning a loop with a simple slip knot.
Her original intention to make her way to the upper floors of the building had been thwarted before she got very far up the stairwell, it had been blocked off by thick layers of concrete and steel. She had kicked herself for not realizing they might close off all but a limited set of ways to reach the upper levels, where she assumed the mob leaders would make their final redoubt. She had spent several minutes examining the schematics, trying to figure out where she had gone wrong and how to get around the blockage, hopefully able to bypass whatever defenses the prey had erected around the ways to reach them.
It hadn't taken her long to realize that there was a maze of smaller accessways – crawl spaces, venting ducts, false floors and ceilings, throughout the entire building. She didn't know the building's original purpose, but when it had been designed for use as a data center, such things were considered essential in the planning to allow for good ventilation and access to electrics, electronics, and the huge amount of power cabling the building would have needed. She didn't care, either – All she knew was someone had given her the perfect tools to reach her objective, and it had been child's play for her to make her way into the vents that ran beside the false ceilings throughout the fortress.
She had been heading towards a shaft that seemed to run vertically through the building, she'd make her way up that way, then surprise her prey, when she'd come across the opening she was crouched beside, and couldn't pass up the opportunity.
She timed the man's pacing, and as he went beneath the grille she started deploying more of the cord, dropping her makeshift noose through the gap between the grille and duct floor quickly. Her timing was exquisite - the cord was nearly invisible in the light of the storeroom and dropped over the guard's head just as he walked underneath her. She pressed hard against her armor on the other side of the port in her armor the cord was extruded from, and one of her new toys came into play – the power pack that normally energized the plasma weapon on her shoulder instead directed its energies to a small winch attached to the cord spool inside her backpiece.
The loop tightened around the guard's neck before he even realized it had dropped over his head, and as she braced her feet against the ducting floor as the weight came onto her armor - he was lifted rapidly into the air, his legs flailing as he dropped his weapon and tried to reach under the cord digging into his skin. Asphyxiation was the least of his worries though, for as he was drawn to the vent, his head hit the grill pushing it upwards and clear of its mounting, and as his face cleared the edge far enough that he could see into the shaft, all he had time to see was a flash of silver.
As the weight suddenly left the cord, she reflexively jerked upwards, and almost banging her own head against the ceiling of the duct space, but she was ready for the sudden departure of most of the dead weight and caught herself in time. She looked down through the hole in the ducting and gave herself a mental pat on the back, before replacing the grille over the gap, covering her tracks. She allowed the cutter in her armor to detach the end of the cord, and placed her new trophy in the net bag slung over her back. The memory of taking this one made it worth keeping.
She tried to straighten up a little. Although the crawl space was reasonably spacious, she was still reduced to stooping as she traveled through it, trying to avoid knocking into the metal sides with her armor and making noise, and it was taking a toll on her back and thighs. If she remembered correctly, she was getting closer to one of the main vertical shafts, close by the elevators, and she hoped she could stretch when she reached it. With a last look at the headless body lying in the room below in large puddle of dark blood, she moved off again.
She could feel the cooler air blowing on the exposed portions of her skin, before the mesh undergarment that provided the environmental control for her armor adjusted, and as she came up on the shaft she peered down into the darkness below, so far down that she had to switch her vision mode just to see the bottom. She craned her neck around to look upwards, and decided the shaft was too wide for her to climb it the way she'd originally planned – pressing her feet against one side and her back against the other.
That would mean climbing using the serrated backs of her wristblades, something she hadn't enjoyed the few times she'd done it during her training. She was grateful that considering its size and bulk, her Yautja armor was light, it would make it less of a strain on her arms. She clenched her fists and turned them, the twinned death on each forearm extending then rotating and bringing the backwards-slanted teeth on the reverse side into place to be jammed into the metal vent sides, piercing then holding. She reached up and was about to start when she felt something cold and sticky on the vent wall with her fingertips.
She brought her hand back in and looked at her hand, switching vision modes to get a better look at whatever it was she had touched. When she finally saw it, her heart leaped in her chest.
"How the ..." She tried to remember the lessons Blade had taught her about determining how long ago this might have been left here, and didn't like the answer, it was way too recent. She withdrew back into the shaft a little way, straining with all her senses to make sure there was nothing nearby. Other than the faint screams of humans, and the challenge and victory roars of the Yautja that carried through the ventwork, there was nothing. No hissing. No scrabbling. No indication at all.
That scared her the most. There was kainde amedha in the building – and they had no way of knowing where.
