Chapter 7: Weapons Cache

Sleep? Am I kidding myself? How can I possibly sleep when I have Sam on my mind?

Joe was in his darkened apartment after a hard day at his work. To get any rest is a big job for him, especially when he had something important on his mind. Or someone. Whenever he would have a night like this, he felt like he wanted to shoot himself in the temple because he could not go to sleep. The reason, being his constant thinking.

That blue orb…Joe remembered, it seemed to appear when I grabbed that emerald, but… What happened after I passed out? Joe had been pondering this unanswerable question for days now, even after they were shipped home and debriefed.

Joe reminisced that debriefing. The council was perplexed at how the pair ended up in that area, forty miles south of their targeted pickup point. The transport sent to retrieve them said they waited six minutes with no sign of the two returning. The officials announced them accounted for being prisoners of war, or killed in action.

The next morning, Sam phoned the agency for a pickup. Everyone was very confused why Joe and Sam were so far away. Therefore, Joe just told them they didn't know how they got there either, and after Joe related their side of the story, the council agreed to an understanding that no one knew how Joe and Sam wound up where they did.

That was last Tuesday. Joe and Sam went out, again, last Friday. Tomorrow is Monday, the other thing Joe had on his mind.

The next mission.

Six o'five, he was late. Five minutes is an eternity for the officials. Joe was not a morning person, and as a result, nobody is happy. He was walking down the narrow corridor to the briefing room where he was to receive his instructions. The hall was dimly lit fitting only single file passage, and at the end of it, a hallway sized door opening automatic, sliding vertically from the center with a diagonal median. The general build was quite industrial and bunker-like.

Joe came to the door and with a hissing it quickly slid open. Inside, the lead council leader, a brown hawk codenamed Black Raptor, said, "Good morning, Mr. Porc. Glad to see that you could make it… finally."

The inside of the room was dark and metallic. There was a place for nine attendees at a doughnut shaped table, each featuring their own blue, backlit panels. Two other, nameless, council members flanked the leader, and Sam occupied one of the seats opposite the three authorities.

"Now," Joe sat himself at his friend's right as Black Raptor continued, "we recently sent operatives Deskrette and Tim to retrieve intel on the overlander's weapons research. We have news of very devastating hand weapons that cannot be allowed left in control of our enemies."

The hawk punched a button on his panel. A large holographic image displayed a fairly large building, "The weapons are being held for further field testing in this structure, once home to Dr. Robotnik's robot maintenance services," the large bird continued, "we urge you to take caution. The overlanders are much more up-tight about their security as of late–don't let your guard down!"

The hawk pushed another button on his console. Building schematics and plans littered the image, and the display zoomed toward the base of the building, "Your goal is to place timed charges on each of the crates which hold these weapons, and escape before they go off. Remember: these bombs have enough explosive power to destroy the entire building.

"Be quick, be merciless, and stay alert!" With that, blue lights faded brighter and the trio came into detail more fully.

"You agents are top-notch," the one on the right said in a matter of fact way, "this is your job. Do not fail and you will be rewarded."

Sam and Joe rode an ISOO transport towards old Robotropolis outskirts, and it dropped them off.

Joe hurried to a heap of metallic waste about three yards away from drop zone with Sam following, and peering above the top of the pile, whipped out a pair of binoculars. The binoculars had a zoom function, infrared vision, and featured a camera system for saving onto a small memory card. About a half-mile away was the border of old Robotropolis city, where everything living ceases and everything mineral and metallic begin. The binoculars had a mission-based heads-up display, which digitally printed information onto the lenses of the binoculars. The HUD made an outline of the specific building they were to penetrate cueing Joe to zoom in to it with a lever he operated on the top of the binoc's.

"Theeeere you are…" Joe said to himself in a low tone. Physical statistics lined up on the screen in a green, phosphorescent fashion, relaying the height, distance, and structural type about the construct.

Joe lowered the mint condition binoculars from his eyes, "It's about two-hundred fifty meters in our current heading from here," he put the binoculars in its case and stashed it among the junk, turning to Sam, "we'll set a waypoint on our wrist communicators for this location. If we consequently become separated we'll meet back here at ten-hundred hours."

"Understood," Sam replied, tuning her vocal based communication to mission-mode. She followed her comrade at a light jog towards their goal.

Other than the random encounters of junk heaps, ranging from trashcan-size to dump-truck size, the land was empty. No plants, no trees, no forests, rivers, or meadows; all things of the past.

They eventually found themselves crisscrossing the avenues of the old, dark city of metal and concrete making their way towards the targeted building. The dead, ghost city held such a silenced air, that the two furry's jogging footsteps were amplified to an uncomfortable level as they slapped against the concrete roads.

Coming about a sniper's distance from the main entrance the pair stopped behind the corner of a building separate from the Weapons Research Building. A makeshift chain link fence sporting barbed wire circled the perimeter of the building. Beyond, two guards flanked the double-doored entrance to the construct.

Joe took out his pistol and screwed in the silencer. He raised it, aiming at the guards, but Sam put a hand on his arm, "I've got a better idea," she said, "I'll go around to the other side of this building and come up from the right. You sneak over to the building to the left and snipe any surveillance cameras you see before taking out the guards. I'll have them distracted by climbing up the fence."

Joe replaced his pistol, "Good idea, let's do it."

There weren't any windows on the building to see, so the two had confidence that no one else would be able to witness their entrance. Joe made is way over to the large, lifeless building that stood across the street making sure to stay in the shadows and make hardly any noise. Cracking pipes and nameless boxes of metal were placed in no particular strategy across the scenery, making for good cover.

Joe crouched and hid behind a large pipe. He took out his gun again along with a scope. Snapping on the scope, Joe sighted his targets: two cameras and two guards, and waited for Sam.

After two minutes, Sam darted out from behind the building, leaping onto the chain-link. Steadying the barrel by the silencer with thumb and forefinger, Joe took out the two cameras. One guard noticed Sam and alerted the other, raising their automatic plasma weapons. Joe didn't get a chance to successfully kill one of them before they fired, but after one miss, the two men fell, bullets in their heads.

Joe used his scope to check his friend's safety. He found her standing on the ground next to the fence, which had a hole with a one-and-a-half feet radius through it made by the blasts. The circumference of the hole was red with heat as an effect of the plasma weapons. He saw the raccoon waving him over.

"We can get through this," Sam said as Joe came up to her. The red had dulled and finally disappeared while Joe was on his way over, "the metal is still hot, I bet," she said.

"Maybe…" Joe paused, walking closer. Sam had taken a few paces back, "it's possible to jump through­­–"

He stopped his speaking as Sam's body flew passed him through the hole, in a diving position horizontally. She caught her fall by rolling on her side and reversing her direction, ending up in a kneeling stance.

"Well," Sam righted herself, folding her arms, "I'm sure it would be no problem for you to just lift the whole fence with your impossible strength," she said, sarcastically.

"Do I sense jealousy?" Joe responded, turning his back to ready himself for his jump.

"Pff," Sam turned.

Heh Joe thought it's jealosy. But just then, Joe heard a clicking and knew he had to act fast. Whirling around, the porcupine used a burst of muscles, shooting through the hole at Sam's back. Time slowed. He withdrew his pistol at break-neck speed, barrel rolling toward the sound. Joe found the enemy behind a stationary, mini-gun and heard it begin shooting. Keeping his aim, Joe flew into Sam's unsuspecting back and they both skidded to the ground. Joe fired his gun, its projectile found the forehead of his opposition, and the man slumped onto the gun.

"Grrrrrrah!" Sam pushed Joe and herself off the ground, "what the hell was that?!" she inquired, furiously.

"Just saving your life," Joe responded, flatly and picked himself off the ground, "you should be a little more grateful. Besides we should get into this building and work on our mission."

Sam eased her emotions, "Your right, c'mon."

The two reached the entrance of the building. Joe eased open the large, steel-plated doors and peaked inside. Finding no welcome party, Joe motioned Sam to follow, covering his six. Inside was a hallway leading to an elevator. It was about thirty feet long with office and maintenance doors along it.

Reaching the elevator, Joe looked to the doors to the left and right. The door on his left lead to stairs, and the door to his right, beyond Sam, was a door marked Storage Chambers 1-4, "Let's take the stairs."

"Why," Sam protested, "what's so wrong about elevators?" However, before she could say anything more, the elevator made a dinging sound, "stairs it is," she hastily agreed and they quickly closed the door behind them before the elevator could open.

Back in the hall, the door to the left had just closed shut, and the elevator's thick, double-sliding doors obliviously, glided open.

"These elevator doors are on our side," a soldier who came out of the elevator said, "it's too bad they cannot tell us about everything they see," he said as his two comrades followed.

Another lower ranking, soldier was detached, "Yeah, I'm sure it would tell us everything about the one-hundred mice with bastard swords on their way down the stairs," he commented sarcastically.

"Shut-up, James," the first man replied, "I have had enough of you and your humor," he grunted, "however, that is most likely where our intruders went.

"James, you come with me and head downstairs, and you," he indicated the other, shorter, woman soldier, "search storage one through four, just in case. Afterwards, search these other rooms, and contact us on radio if you find anything."

"Understood!" the woman said, and was off.

The senior officer turned to the other door and ventured through with James trailing behind. The soldiers wore a full-body uniform in boots, and wore helmets that had a heads up display and a radio inlayed into them. In their hands, each carried super-heated, high density, photon compression-discharging rifles. In normal conversation, soldiers referred to them as just "the plasmas". The H.U.D. on the helmet relayed information such as waypoint directions, weapon battery percent, and other useful statistics.

Making their way down the stairs, the two men readied their rifles as they prepared to enter the main storage facility. The large, underground room was big enough to fit a basketball court in it and it was normally lit dimly when not in use. There were usually enough crates in the room to make a small labyrinth in it.

They reached the door, which they found to have been forced open.

"Sir," James commented, "it doesn't look like the door could have been breached by a machine."

"I know, Klighton," the officer addressed him by his family name, "I've heard rumors of one of those furries having –unnatural– abilities: lifting huge oak tables, bending prison bar steel, busting in sliding, metal doors… These unwelcome guests invited themselves in manually."

A force pulled the door open while the metal locking bolt was still in. It had ripped the bolt out of the doorframe with the door still on its hinges; metal was twisted and distorted in abnormal, uneven ways.

"A timed detonation is the most reliable," Sam commented softly to her partner. She applied another wad of explosive paste to a crate, "Whichever crates those guns are in are gonna get a hell-of-a burning."

"And," Joe added, "we shouldn't use all of our bombs in one place," he said, counting the four blobs of explosive substance on the side of the crate Sam worked at.

Sam giggled to herself, "Don't worry, I have lots more to use," the female raccoon grabbed another handful of explosives before the pair prepared to move to another crate.

"Stay where you are, scum!" they froze. Joe eyed two pieces of extra company at the entrance to the storage room, both well armed, "We have you both in our sights and are ready to fire if you cannot cooperate."

Joe cursed in his mind, but made up a new strategy. Still crouching, he reached inside his pocket that charged the bombs. He quickly dialed in ten minutes countdown time, and armed them, watching ten turn to nine and the zeroes counting back.

"Let me see your hands!" the soldier ordered, "put them on your heads, stand up straight, and face us!"

Joe and Sam had to do what the soldier said. Joe saw both men in direct view, now. One was taller than the other with black facial hair and cold, dark eyes. The other was probably around the same age as Joe, with brown hair and wearing eyeglasses. The two were advancing on their position mid-way across the room, snaking around boxes and crates.

The older man stopped directly in front of Joe, putting a meter of distance between them. The other overlander halted on the older man's right, giving himself quick access to cover behind a crate on his right.

The first soldier started, "You are both arrested on behalf of the Overlander Army and are declared prisoners of wa–"

Joe's foot cut his declaration short, kicking the man in the sternum and sending him into a crate behind him. The other soldier whipped behind the crate he had stuck next too, before Joe's already primed pistol. Joe held his aim toward the crate, "Yeah, and stay back there!"

Sam came to Joe's side, "We better make ourselves scarce before he sounds any alarm. And, we should leave before three minutes to put some distance between us and the building before it goes off," she said with a hushed haste.

"Right, let's make our way to the door," Joe kept his aim held at the general direction of the remaining foe while Sam took her pistol out and headed for the door. Joe followed her walking backwards, and soon they were back at the stairwell.

Sam checked her watch, thirty minutes plus mission time, she read, much too long for my taste.

When they reached the top of the stairs, Sam removed her one-handed, sub-machine gun from her belt and checked the clip to be sure. Seeing as it was all full, she cocked the gun, loading a round into the barrel. She also took out a tlood from a pocket on her uniform's vest. Readying both defensive and offensive weapons, she instructed, "You take out any near the elevator and doors. When my tlood overloads, I say 'switch' and you take out yours and we make a dash for the exit's door."

"Right," Joe replied.

"On silent three, ready. One…two…"

They burst out into the hallway, and simultaneously Joe totaled two elevator sentries while Sam was firing into a crowd at the exit through her tlood's shield. Walking towards half of the crowd, Sam's tlood was about to over-heat under the onslaught of rapid, plasma fire.

"Switch!"

Joe activated his in front of Sam's just as hers over-heated, while the barrage of super-heated weaponry continued its pour. What came next caught both Joe and Sam off guard. A fragmentation grenade was flying through the air towards them, and Joe reacted the best way he could think of.

"Run!" he grabbed Sam's arm and ran towards his offenders, leaving the grenade to sail passed behind them. With an explosion to his back, and with the tlood still in his hand, Joe let go of Sam and whipped out his sword, slicing one man in the process. Then, just as his tlood overloaded, he struck a second man with the butt of his tlood in the head to unconsciousness. The last overlander hastily fired his rifle at Joe's protected abdomen, only to be retaliated with decapitation.

Joe checked the rest of the hallway as Sam crouched by the door to reload her SMG, "That was pretty impressive," she slammed a fresh cartridge into the handle of her gun and cocked a bullet into the hot barrel, "you think we're home-free yet?"

Joe wiped the blood off of his sword's blade on the cloth of a fallen soldier, giving Sam a raised eyebrow, "Not by a long shot," he said, " and I bet whatever is on the other side of this door is gonna give us a load of shit." When he had finished cleaning his blade, the button on the handle easily retracted the metal back into its home.

"And it's too bad there are no windows on this door to give us an idea of what to expect," she commented, "how much time do we have left?"

Joe took out the display, "six minutes, seventeen seconds," he stuck it back into the pocket, "in any case, we better get out of this building pretty fast."

"Very true," she said, "whatever we find out there, we need to keep moving forward, or whichever direction we need in order to avoid destruction… Let's inch the doors open slightly, before we decide to leave, to see if there is any force.

"Good idea," Joe agreed, "Let's do it at the same time, to about five inches."

Using extreme caution, they pushed the doors open to approximately five inches and had a look through the crack they produced. Joe couldn't believe his eyes, for there didn't appear to be any force that he could see to oppose them.

Joe stashed his sword and took out his pistol, "Ready?"

Sam stood up and raised her gun and tlood in each hand, "Whenever you are."

"On silent one. Three … two …"

They pushed the doors open fully and made a sweeping scan of the whole front yard for enemies. Sam heard Joe scream her name and she jerked her head in his direction. Her last image was of Joe looking up behind her in terror, and she was unconscious before she hit the ground.